Saw the Scorcese doc. on Bob Dylan last night. Fascinating stuff for us Dylanomanes, and will probably be of interest for fans of the folk revival as well, but I doubt it has any broader appeal. Contemporary interviews with Dylan, Baez, Von Ronk, Kooper, etc., are interspersed with plenty of concert footage and photos. The juxtaposition is startling proof of Sic transit gloria mundi; these 60s hipsters are transformed before our eyes into overweight potential members of AARP with creased faces and bad fashion sense. The theme of the narrative is Dylan's transition from folkie to rock star, but surprisingly "My Back Pages," a protest song against protest songs, isn't discussed, nor is the album from which it is taken, Another Side of Bob Dylan (the title of which hints at Dylan's increasing desire to been seen as more than a left-wing prophet). I dunno, perhaps Scorcese just wanted to make the contrast more stark for dramatic purposes. A- for fans. Useless trivia: my coworker J.E. was a fellow student of Dylan's at a fundamentalist Bible school in the 70s. J. didn't actually meet His Bobness, but did see him frequently.

My Library Thing catalog, very much in progress.

I'll be doing acquisitions as well as collection development until December. We hired a local school librarian to replace D.B., but the former has to finish up the semester in her current position. I've already been busy, placing orders for replacement copies of a bunch of Luther books lost in the mail en route to one of our satellite-campus students. (The postal system here is pretty bad--another compelling reason for us to start acquiring more e-books.)

Name That Author:
old ancestor, aged relative, old blood relation
greasy bird, funny fish, dying duck, stealing pigs, gathering frogs, stone the crows, silver cow, miserable worm
five quid, ten quid, fifty quid, thousand quid

I propose a new game for book geeks: Name That Author, based on the "statistically improbable phrases" taken from the amazon.com record of one of his or her books. Here we go:

curvilinear hieroglyphs, tarry stickiness, twilight abysses, sealed loft, sealed trapdoors, spiky image, twilit grotto, hill noises, fishy odour, domed hills, accursed house, slanting floor, slanting wall, elder world, blasted heath, captive minds, secondary personality, grocery boy (???).

Anyone?