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(02/21/19 10:54am)
The Middlebury College Libraries have recently acquired dozens of new audiobooks on the Overdrive platform, which is compatible with a variety of devices: iPods, MP3 players, Androids, Nooks, Ereaders, Chromebooks and many more! Try them out at go/overdrive/. To read how a variety of users have enjoyed these resources, see below. And for instructions, on how to use them, check out this graphic to the left.
Name: Katrina Spencer
Title: Literatures & Cultures Librarian
Major: Library Literacy
Titles You’ve Listened to On Overdrive: “The Hunger Games” trilogy, “The Silent Wife,” “The Wife Between Us,” “Things Fall Apart,” “The Underground Railroad,” “Heads of the Colored People,” “Sister Outsider,” “I’m Afraid of Men,” “Becoming,” “Hunger: A Memoir of My Body,” “Less,” “Between the World and Me.”
What first drew you to this platform?
I actually resisted investigating audiobooks for awhile. While I’m technically a “millennial,” I didn’t want to engage with my smartphone any more than I already do. But when I started hitting the gym — an overdue undertaking — I still wanted to have time for books. Audiobooks allowed me to be mobile and engaged with literature at the same time.
Advantages of Audiobooks: I can stretch at the gym, cook or drive while listening to them.
Disadvantages of Audiobooks: I can’t underline or highlight text while listening and skipping ahead or back to a passage with accuracy isn’t as easy as turning the pages in a print book.
To whom would you recommend audiobooks on Overdrive and why?
I recommend Overdrive to people who are busy and love literature, best sellers and classics. Audio books allow me to consume texts with a speed I’ve never encountered before. I can stay abreast of the latest releases without having to give up or negotiate other activities like exercise.
What else should users know and why?
I would not recommend this platform for people who want to deeply study works of literature, their plots, their constructions, their word play, etc. It seems this platform is best for a more cursory understanding of texts. It provides quick, surface access. But for me, if I want to be deep, analytical and ponderous, I need a print work, stillness, to be able to take notes, to rewind, re-visit and re-examine passages.
The books currently on Overdrive tend to be geared towards leisurely consumption and extracurricular works rather than representative of the “great works” of literature from “the” canon. It’s unlikely that you’ll find your textbooks in this format within this collection. Also, these works are read/performed by voice actors. So it’s interesting when there is more than one actor, as in A.S.A. Harrison’s “The Silent Wife” or when the actor performs foreign accents as is the case with Oyinkan Braithwaite’s “My Sister, the Serial Killer.”
Name: Marcos Rohena-Madrazo
Title: Associate Professor
Department: Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies / Linguistics Program
Titles You’ve Listened to On Overdrive: “La casa de los espíritus,” “Song of Ice & Fire” Saga, “The Hunger Games” Trilogy, The “Harry Potter” Series, “Brave New World,” “Dune,” Tina Fey’s “Bossypants,” Amy Poehler’s “Yes, Please,” etc. (I’ve listened to many others on Audible; out of those some notable reads are “Americanah,” “Lolita,” “Cryptonomicon,” “The Color Purple,” “Call Me By Your Name,” “A Little Life,” and some amazing author-read memoirs that I mention below.)
What first drew you to this platform?
The fact that I can borrow audiobooks for free from the Middlebury College Library or from the local library. I am an Audible subscriber, but I always check whether my libraries have the book before buying it on Audible. Also, Overdrive is good for multi-volume series, since you don’t have to commit to buying the five books in a series (one or two might not be that good, wink wink).
Advantages of Audiobooks: Multitasking! I love listening to audiobooks while I’m doing chores or doing exercise or driving long distances. Also, I particularly like listening to memoirs that are read by the author; it’s their story in their own voice, as they meant you to hear it. (“Dreams of My Father,” written and read by Barack Obama, or “Redefining Realness,” written and read by Janet Mock, or “Born a Crime,” written and read by Trevor Noah...wow, so incredibly powerful!). This is an experience that you cannot have with a traditional print book.
Disadvantages of Audiobooks:
You can’t tell when a chapter or a book is about to end, the way that you can with a print book. It’s happened to me while I’m driving that I’m really into the audiobook and suddenly the book ends and I’m left feeling, “Wait, what? That was the end!? I wasn’t ready!” But this is a relatively small drawback. Oh, it’s much harder to use “bookmarks” and take notes, so I wouldn’t recommend audiobooks for academic readings for class or research.
To whom would you recommend audiobooks on Overdrive and why?
I would recommend audiobooks on Overdrive to anyone who is “too busy” to read. In my youth I was a voracious reader, but with the responsibilities of grad school and academia, I felt guilty if I read for pleasure. Audiobooks have allowed me to rekindle my love of literature and reading for fun!
What else should users know and why?
I find it really fun to set up a rotation system, e.g. traditional novel, sci-fi/fantasy novel, non-fiction/memoir, and then start back with another novel. That keeps the listening experience interesting and diverse. Enjoy!
Name: Tré Stephens
Year: 2021
Major: Education and Theater
Titles You’ve Listened to On Overdrive: “The Hunger Games”
What first drew you to this platform?
As a person with a learning disability I have always disliked grabbing a book from the shelf and just reading it. I have a very short attention span and often lose my place in the book I was reading. This platform has made it so easy to listen to my favorite stories, and the best part is I don’t even have to strain myself reading them, I can just listen to the book and it reads itself to me.
Advantages of Audiobooks:
I can’t speak for everyone, but I definitely think this is a tool that can help challenged readers. Also it’s a very nice way to listen to your favorite stories while multitasking.
Disadvantages of Audiobooks: I do think that as we move forward in this day and age, we sometimes forget about what came before. I hope people actually still use the library and learn how to use the library. With audiobooks, the library is in the palm of your hand, but it’s definitely a skill people should still be learning to master.
To whom would you recommend audiobooks on Overdrive and why?
As I said before, I think everyone should use Overdrive. Honestly, this has been a great way for me to view books that may be too expensive on other platforms such as Amazon, Google Books, and Apple. It’s literally a free way to release books, who doesn’t love that?
What else should users know and why?
The interface is a bit tricky at first, but after some playing around with it, you will get used to it.
(02/14/19 10:59am)
“Becoming” is everything you’d expect from the former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. It is a thoughtful, conscientious and well-crafted memoir that studies the first years of her life in Chicago, her arrival to undergrad at Princeton University in New Jersey, the ways she navigated her early career as a lawyer and her marriage to Barack Obama. For me, after so many news outlets reported on and promoted the book, there were very few surprises left to discover.
The “previews” I encountered gave away most of the “secrets” I would have not otherwise anticipated, for example [spoiler alert!] the fact that the couple conceived their children through in vitro fertilization.
On the other hand, it was no real surprise to me that that Mrs. Obama was deeply conflicted when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. If there was any “surprise,” I suppose it was the consistent and familiar question Mrs. Obama posed to herself over years and decades of her life, “Am I good enough?” Speaking personally, it seems to be a question many, if not all, high achievers ask ourselves over and over again. Two Ivy League degrees, in her case, did not silence that query.
All in all, readers get an even more intimate look at Mrs. Obama’s personal life and upbringing. For someone who has been so open with the public over the past 15 years, there was little to begin with that was kept under wraps. I didn’t know that she studied piano as a child, that her father lived with multiple sclerosis or that her guidance counselor discouraged her application to Princeton. Much of the rest, however, was already transparent and on the table.
For me, one of the book’s strengths is Mrs. Obama’s ability to look back and acknowledge that specific policies and advocacies, or lack thereof, shaped the environment in which she was raised. That is, the work suggests that the South Side of Chicago, for years, if not decades, known for gun violence, is no more inherently dangerous or virtuous than any other locale in the United States.
However, the ways communities are maintained and/or neglected impact the ways they thrive or deteriorate. And the same is true of its residents, marginalized populations therein and elsewhere. I think it’s easy, in our youth, to equate a place or a “type” of people with a set of behaviors or tendencies when offered no evidence to the contrary or not being provided with a context that explains the catalysts for the decay of a community. Having now sat at many a table where policies are made, Mrs. Obama intimately conveys how the power of legislation can be very far from the hands of the people it most impacts.
I’d recommend this work to people who experience regular moments of self-doubt concerning their competency, irrespective of their high and multiple achievements, as it demonstrates that there is room for insecurity and forward movement simultaneously.
I’d also recommend it to anyone who is interested in entering the world of public service, as it engages conversations about the legacies of policymaking, including commentary on how discrimination can affect families for generations.
For other works like this one, see memoirs written by politicians, including Barack Obama’s “Dreams of My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope,” or “What Happened” by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
FYI: While the libraries own a print copy of “Becoming,” there are two holds on it.
For the audiobook found at go/overdrive/, there’s a six-month wait for its availability.
Have you spoken to a librarian about using interlibrary loan? See go/ill/.
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer is liaison to the Anderson Freeman Center, the Arabic Department, the Comparative Literature Program, the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies (GSFS) Program, the Language Schools, the Linguistics Program and the Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies.
(02/14/19 10:57am)
Thibault Lannoy, a member of the class of 2020 and resident of Atwater Commons, died on Jan. 31 at his parents’ home in Hong Kong. He was 21.
Prior to his time at Middlebury, Thibault attended the French International School of Hong Kong and the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass. He was a member of the varsity soccer teams at both schools and a delegate at the Model United Nations in Singapore in 2014.
At Middlebury, Lannoy majored in physics, studied Chinese and was an event coordinator at the Mittelman Observatory in McCardell Bicentennial Hall. In the summer of 2018, he worked as an intern at The Knoll. That fall, he became a member of Tavern Social House.
In an email, sent Feb. 1, President Laurie L. Patton highlighted the college’s availability as a resource for students affected by the news.
“Our residential life team, counseling staff, and chaplains at the Scott Center stand by ready to help any community member who would like support at this difficult time,” she said. “Please do take care and stay connected with each other. Feel free to reach out to any of us.”
Messages sent out by various commons, including Lannoy’s own Atwater Commons, similarly emphasized the importance of turning to communities to heal.
Lannoy is survived by his father, mother and older sister. His family will hold a funeral in France, which will coincide with a memorial service at the college on or around the same day.
In an upcoming issue, The Campus will publish a full-page article about Thibault featuring stories and photographs about his life and his time at Middlebury. If you would like to contribute to the piece, please email campus@middlebury.edu.
(01/17/19 11:24am)
Sarah Fagan
(01/17/19 10:58am)
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]The New York Times’ “Book of the Dead: 320 Print and 10,000 Digital Obituaries of Extraordinary People” Edited by William McDonald [/pullquote]
As the title suggests, this massive work is a collection of over 10,000 obituaries that cover the lives of entertainers, politicians, justice seekers (“Champions of the Cause”) and more. Divided into 16 chapters and accompanied by an index ordered by name, the print portion of this text groups people by the industries they served while living and the causes they took up. Businesspeople like industrialist Henry Ford and tech visionary Steve Jobs are grouped together, for example, as are writers like poet Walt Whitman and Harper Lee, author of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Each chapter is ordered by the chronological date of the featured person’s death, earliest to latest. So, track and field Olympian Jesse Owens (1913- 1980) appears before boxer and political activist Muhammad Ali (1942- 2016).
Black Dog & Leventhal
An unique feature of this book is that 320 historical figures are featured in print and 10,000 (!) are included on a web key (a pen/USB/thumb drive) found within the front cover of the book. Once the drive is plugged into a USB port on a computer, the user is prompted to register an email address to access the thousands of obituaries (“obits”) that are available in digital format. They can be browsed, too, within 40 categories like “Architects,” “Explorers,” “Fashion,” Food” and “Nobility.” When I searched “Julia Child,” a world renowned culinary figure and author of “My Life In France,” I found that she didn’t like grilled vegetables or think much of Mexican food. We would not have been friends.
While flipping through the pages of the print text, I first visited profiles like Harriet Tubman’s and Malcolm X’s, two prominent figures in the fights for racial freedoms in the United States. Then I went to the stars of the small and big screens like Lucille Ball and Marlon Brando. “I Love Lucy” was one of the first sitcoms I ever watched and it introduced me to countless themes of gender and an expert comedienne whose skill remains hard to match. I was curious about Brando because whispers and murmurs of his sex appeal still linger in conversations about Hollywood and I wanted to know what the hype was all about. I read of Dred Scott whose freedom was argued at the Supreme Court; Thomas Gallaudet who founded a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C.; and of Althea Gibson, a figure of whom I’d never heard before, who was “Serena Williams” before there was a Serena Williams.
This “Book of the Dead” can serve as a trivia tool that provides quick information on major figures from the past, particularly those from the 20th century, and as a potential research tool for those seeking brief profiles on the famous or how to write a posthumous account of a deceased person’s life. However, the work is as interesting for what it does include as for what it doesn’t. For example, of the 320 people appearing in print, about 43 represent women. That’s less than 15 percent. Moreover, I don’t think one of the 320, male, female or trans, is Asian American. Why might that be? Also, there’s no chapter dedicated to scientists. The likes of these are perhaps found under the sections entitled “American Leaders” and “Thinkers.” Why? This sort of lens, one that allows for questioning what is there and what isn’t tells users of the text what the United States and the New York Times (NYT) has historically considered “noteworthy” and “remarkable.” It makes one ask the question, “How many people whose lives were especially meaningful never made it to the NYT obits? What were the criteria for determining which figures would appear in print? How come so many are male? As an information worker who is constantly at the task of treating issues of representation, the text is rather compelling.
Let me share an appropriately self-aware excerpt from the introduction: “One will notice that most of the people who appear in these pages are white and male… the bias is undeniable, and it, too, is historical: It reflects the prejudices and injustices of an early era…one must inevitably draw from those who controlled the levers of power, and that group, as we know, was composed mostly of white men.” Moreover, some important figures never made it to the NYT obits because they gained their fame posthumously.
So, if you’re looking for an exhaustively comprehensive text, it’s not this one. But if you’re into “Old Hollywood,” I recommend you take a gander. For other works that study yesteryear, check out the Davis Family Library’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” by James W. Loewen; “A People’s History of the United States”-by Howard Zinn; “An African American and Latinx History of the United States” by Paul Ortiz, none of which I have read — yet.
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer is liaison to the Anderson Freeman Center, the Arabic Department, the Comparative Literature Program, the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies (GSFS) Program, the Language Schools, the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
(01/17/19 10:54am)
PRESIDENT MAKES NEW ADMINISTRATIVE APPOINTMENTS
President Patton announced the transition of four administrators from interim roles to permanent positions in an email to the community on Dec. 19. Jeff Cason, Baishakhi Taylor, Steve Snyder and Carlos Velez have continued their duties in an official capacity since Jan. 1.
Jeff Cason, who is now executive vice president and provost, previously served as a faculty leader, vice president for academic affairs for the Language Schools and interim provost. In his provisional role, Cason collaborated with the Institute and led the Envisioning Middlebury initiative.
Baishakhi Taylor continues her previous work, now as the vice president for student affairs and dean of students. Taylor previously led the Community Council and helped direct the “How We Live Together” initiative, an assessment of the residential and commons system currently in progress.
Steve Snyder, dean of Language Schools, received an additional title of vice president for academic affairs for the language schools. In addition to his work with the Language Schools, Snyder will also serve on the School’s Board of Overseers.
Carlos Velez has become dean of international programs. In this capacity, he oversees the Schools Abroad, the Study Abroad Program and International Student and Scholar Services. Previously a faculty member in the Psychology department, Velez began his administrative career serving in faculty leadership positions.
- Bochu Ding
ATWATER CRD STEPS DOWN
Students in Atwater Commons were notified last Thursday that the Atwater Common Residence Director (CRD), Doug Desrochers, is resigning his role. Desrochers’ last day at Middlebury will be Jan. 21.
Desrochers resumed his role of CRD at Middlebury last Fall with the creation of the position. In his email to Atwater students, Desrochers thanked students for the opportunity to serve as a CRD and all the positive memories he will have of his time in the role.
While acknowledging the immense stress that can be prevalent at Middlebury, Desrochers encouraged students to fight this standard. “No, Middlebury won’t turn into an amusement park overnight, but changing the culture not only starts with you - it is you,” he advised students in his email. “Appreciate the little things that make this community really special.”
Desrochers was known for greeting students while strolling campus with his dog, Fesik, chatting with residents in the Allen common room and taking the time to build relationships with students on an individual level.
It is not yet known whether the role of Atwater CRD will be filled after Desrochers’s departure next week. However, if someone does fill the position, Desrochers encouraged students to treat the replacement with respect.
- Cali Kapp
WORK ON MCCULLOUGH MURAL EXPANDS
Students received a campus-wide email last Tuesday from David Kloepfer, Assistant Director of Programming & Events for Student Activities, announcing the expansion of the community mural in the McCullough Student Center. The mural was started last spring when four professional artists collaborated with students to transform the walls near the mailroom and box office.
This year’s workshop is a continuation of the work initiated by Jennifer Herrera Condry, associate director of the Anderson Freeman Resource Center, along with her husband, Will Kasso Condry, one of the artists involved.
The project will continue on Sunday, Jan. 13 with a workshop led by Dr. Meagan Corrado. Corrado is a clinical social worker and mosaic artist.
“Participants will reflect on their past experiences, process current experiences, and identify their future vision,” the email explained. The workshop will culminate with students generating a small piece, either written or visual, representing their experiences and identities.
The student’s pieces will then be used by Kasso Condry, a community muralist and educator, as well as Isaias Crow, an international muralist, both as inspiration and collaged into design for a 40-foot mural. Students will have opportunities to assist the artists throughout the process.
“The continuation of the McCullough Mural Project is to further deepen student expression on campus and community connection,” Kloepfer explained in the email.
- Cali Kapp
(01/17/19 10:51am)
(12/06/18 11:16am)
Pia Contreras
(12/06/18 10:59am)
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Akissi: Attaque de Chats, by Marguerite Abouet and illustrated by Sapin, 2010[/pullquote]
Akissi is a fictional West African girl from Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast), a former colony of France, that, like many former African colonies, has retained use of its colonizer’s European language. Akissi is old enough to dip into unexpected adventures in her neighborhood but not yet wise enough to fully understand their outcomes or how she got into her misadventures in the first place. Like many kid-based adventures, this work of graphic literature explores the discrepancies between what Akissi expects from her environment and the people in it, and the local, social mores she has yet to master. She is not yet 10 years of age and is still learning to navigate what it means to be obedient and respectful, how to manage her friendships and what it means to be a girl when there are established gender norms.
The style of the full-color illustrations reminds me of those seen in the 2002, French-language publication of “Le chat du rabbin”: they’re gritty with hard, uneven black lines. The approach appears simple and juvenile, which ultimately reflects the youthful activity within the tome’s pages. Author Abouet is better known for her series “Aya,” which features a college-aged woman and the soap opera-worthy drama that surrounds her family. Abouet reached international success with this publication.
One unique feature that Abouet includes in both works is a petite cultural glossary at the end of the work. She is eager to lovingly share additional information that further contextualizes her cultural products that appear in dialogue, images and food practices within the panels. For example, in this text, she explains “faire gate-gate,” or what we in the U.S. call “playing the dozens,” a verbal game that involves the exchanging of insults. She also provides a recipe for sweet “crottes de bique au coco,” coconut drops, which appear to be akin to the Brazilian brigadeiro, the French bonbon or the truffle.
Abouet’s work also reminds me so much of René Goscinny’s in “Le Petit Nicolas” as both of the lead characters, Akissi and Nicolas, approach a world with a pure innocence as so much is novel to them. I recommend both of these works to novice learners of French and/or anyone interested in the French School. Another French-language work worthy of consideration is Banana Girl: jaune à l’extérieur, blanche à l’intérieur by Kei Lam: the title reads as “Banana Girl: Yellow On the Outside, White On the Inside.” I’m just starting it at the time of this writing but I suspect it has to do with the author’s ethnic and racial identities being tied to East Asia and her cultural upbringing occuring in France.
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer is liaison to the Anderson Freeman Center, the Arabic Department, the Comparative Literature Program, the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies (GSFS) Program, the Language Schools, the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
(12/06/18 10:55am)
A sunny day signaled the end of the Storm Café. The restaurant, located in the Old Stone Mill building on the banks of Otter Creek, had been a staple in the Middlebury food scene for years. Last year, their American cuisine made from local ingredients won the café a spot in Visiting New England’s “12 Favorite Places for Breakfast” list.
On Nov. 11, Beth and John Hughes, who ran the restaurant for the past 13 years, said goodbye to regular customers, many of whom had been coming there since it opened in the lowest floor of the Old Stone Mill 25 years ago.
“It’s bittersweet,” John told Seven Days.
“This was our dream—to own our own business together,” Beth said in an interview with the Addison Independent. In a statement on the Storm Café’s website, they both thanked the Middlebury community for their patronage and promised they would miss all those who dined with them over the years. The Storm Café will be missed by many in the Middlebury community. John estimated that roughly 80 percent of the café’s customers came from the college. “The Storm’s cozy atmosphere, the sounds of the waterfall and [the] delicious food never failed to provide happy meals for me and my family,” Sophie Hiland ’22 said.
The café joins a long list of recently-closed local businesses, but the decision to close was not made solely by the business owners. Middlebury College, which owns the Old Stone Mill building the Storm Café called home, informed the Hughes this past summer that their lease would not be renewed.
However, there is a rainbow after the storm for the Hughes family. Both Beth and John are now working as a paraprofessional and a cafeteria chef, respectively, at Salisbury Community School. And, to sweeten the deal, their twin daughters Molly and Lilly are both students at the school. “For the first time in 20 years, I’ll have my weekends off,” John added.
As the Hughes move on to other things, Middlebury College announced an end to its search for a new partner to move into 3 Mill Street. The lucky tenants? Community Barn Ventures, a group based in town that, in the words of co-founder Stacey Rainey, helps businesses “solve whatever problems they have, getting them from where they are to where they want to be.”
The group started work just over a year ago and already has about 15 clients. It has been looking to expand beyond just its current advisory role, and found the perfect opportunity on the banks of Otter Creek.
Middlebury College bought the Old Stone Mill building in 2008 for $2.1 million. Since then, the college has used the space above the Storm Café as an incubator for student creativity and innovation. The building has been home to students and locals alike, fostering specifically non-academic, self-designed projects ranging from art exhibitions to band practices. However, Bill Burger, vice president for communications and chief marketing officers, explains, “the building needs such investment that it didn’t make sense to go ahead with the same use of the building.”
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]The objective: to create “a daily destination” for students and residents.[/pullquote]
Community Barn Ventures will close the deal on purchasing the building for $500,000 in early January. The group has already contracted local firm McLeod Kredell Architects to help bring its vision for the historic building to life, opening up to the public in summer 2019. The Middlebury-based modern architecture firm emphasizes a “search for appropriate local expressions of universal qualities and ideals,” according to its website. John McLeod is a visiting professor of architecture at the college, while Steve Kredell teaches at Norwich University’s School of Architecture and Art.
Stacey Rainey and Mary Cullinane, co-founders and partners at Community Barn Ventures, are Middlebury residents who stepped away from corporate jobs and now focus on making their work “have a positive impact on our community,” Cullinane explained. Their plans for the four-and-a-half story, 9,000-square-foot space reflect this desire for community engagement and support for local business.
The top floor and a half will become five Airbnb units, each with its own bathroom and secure access but with a shared living room and kitchenette, intended for parents, visiting professors, or tourists. Just below the mini-hotel will be the Community Barn Network, a shared workspace divided into seating for people working on personal laptops or without a need for private space, dedicated offices and a shared conference room, and telephone booths for those who need to make private calls. The second floor will house a public market with eight to 10 permanent vendor stalls, half of them food-based and half for hard goods, as well as a stall for coffee and a general watering hole.
The objective is to create a “daily destination,” a place where students and town residents can go for a variety of functions. This deliberate attempt to engage with the community was instrumental in the college’s decision to sell to Community Barn Ventures.
“There were a number of different groups interested in the building,” Burger said. “But we wanted to find the right partner who would do something that we felt was best for Middlebury and that would create opportunity for Middlebury College students.”
The iconic space at 3 Mill Street is being brought into a new age by Community Barn Ventures, but the new plans include a nod to the building’s past: the first floor will remain a restaurant, though Community Barn Ventures is still looking for the perfect partner to take over the space. No matter who ends up taking over the first floor at 3 Mill Street, they will have big shoes to fill with the Storm Café’s departure.
(11/29/18 10:57am)
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Best of Enemies: A History of U.S. and Middle East Relations, Part I, by Jean-Pierre Filiu and illustrated by David B., 2012[/pullquote]
This book is a mess. Or as the young people say, “It’s messy.” It’s a graphic novel, published in a series. It comes in three parts and attempts to explain the historical relationship(s) between the United States and the broadly defined Middle Eastern region. As might be expected of any publication attempting to encapsulate 170 years of history through sequenced and paneled illustrations, the text’s narrative arch is weak. It’s difficult to map out where the climax occurs, who the most definitive characters are and who is an antagonist at any given point in time.
However, in these respects, the work is rather likely to be giving a more or less “accurate” representation of history. That is, who is a hero(ine) and who is a villain often (always) depends on who is telling the story — and when, and why, and on what platform, and to whom and for what purpose.
I picked up this book because conflict and antagonism between the United States, its “allies” and the Middle East has been a constant backdrop for the entirety of my life. (I’m 33 at the time of this writing.) And I’ve always been dazed and confused in attempting to find an entry point to answer the question of “Why?” I want to know how it all began and and why it continues. This work sheds more light but does not offer clear-cut answers. I suspect that most international, armed conflicts are about securing access to resources and maintaining or demanding sovereignty.
In this work, however, knowing who’s in charge and when is dizzying. As suggested, I’m not as versed on the cultures of this region as I’d like to be. When reading the text, I encountered titles of rank, esteem and power like “shah,” “pasha” and “bey” knowing little, if any, difference between them.
The clearest information I got on this text came from the presumably American Good Reads reviewer, Robert Boyd: “It is a brief retelling of U.S./Middle east (sic) relations, starting with our early wars with the Barbary pirate states, our inability to prevent France and Britain from carving up the Ottoman empire after World War I, our establishment of friendly relations with the Saudis during World War II (as a guarantee of oil supplies for the war effort), and finally our involvement in the Iranian coup that set the Shah up as dictator. The book stops in 1953.”
I wanted the author to do more to educate me, but his intended audience may not have needed that. Given that the text was originally published in French, I wonder who the target audience is and whether those readers already have this information well sorted out.
On another note, the tale(s) within this tome almost exclusively feature male perspectives, voices and characters. If I didn’t know any better, I could assume that women were an aberrational occurrence once every 60 years or so in the region. So, in the first book of the series, their presence and participation in the evolution of 18 countries comprising the Middle Eastern region is largely capital-E Erased. I realize the author is male and so is the illustrator. However, it seems they felt virtually no pressure in representing 50 percent of the population impacted by the U.S.-Middle Eastern relations. “How, Sway?”
This work is likely best for people who already have some general or specific knowledge and timeframe regarding Middle Eastern politics and enjoy the idea of seeing it drawn in graphic-novel form. The less educated on this theme, like myself, will likely need to familiarize themselves with the greatest highlights from the broad region first in order to best appreciate its content, structure and visuals.
It is a work that necessitates that the reader bring knowledge to the text. For other graphic novels that touch on the Middle East and the Near East, I recommend “juifs arabes” by Farid Boudjellal and the acclaimed “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi, which I have yet to read.
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer is liaison to the Anderson Freeman Center, the Arabic Department, the Comparative Literature Program, the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies (GSFS) Program, the Language Schools, the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
(11/29/18 10:54am)
(11/15/18 11:00am)
Back in Spring 2018 when I carried out an oral history interview with Madu Udeh for the In Your Own Words project, he recommended that listeners wanting to know more about Nigerian history read the novel “Half of A Yellow Sun.” Having written this column for over a year now, I knew that it would be faster to watch the film adaptation, so after requesting the library purchase the cinematic work (go/requests/), I did.
Shall I say more about the author first?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is becoming a household name within the black community, with a clip from her speech “We Should All Be Feminists,” being featured on Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” album. Even before the album dropped, academics (myself included) lost it/had wet dreams (and rightfully so) over her TED talk “The Danger of A Single Story.”
And controversy, too, followed Adichie when she made comments suggesting that women and trans women’s lived experiences may be different. So, all this is to say, she is no stranger to the limelight. And when we think of African women making it big in the United States, she, Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira are at the top of the list.
All that said, “Half of A Yellow Sun” treats Nigeria’s Civil or “Biafran” War. I don’t want to pretend to be an expert on this — I’m not. But I’ll tell you what I think I know. Following colonization by the British, Nigerians are ushered towards a self-identification that is not indigenous to their mores. There are the the Hausas, the Igbos, the Yorubas and, not to mention, the Muslims, the Catholics, the animists and those who embrace more than one of these tribal and religious identities. When the country achieves its independence, it must revisit systems of self-identification: Are they Britain’s former colony of Nigeria? Or something else? It is within this space of cultural turmoil that one party decides to secede from the union, preferring to identify as “Biafra,” but, as history teaches us about civil war in the United States in the mid-19th century, secession is a polarizing act and leads to much instability. (Please feel free to write in and correct me where I’m wrong with any of the details.)
I don’t think the movie is great. *shrug*
I do think it’s educational. And I support most anything in our collection that will further humanize African peoples to Western readers, viewers, educators and learners. I also don’t mind watching beautiful black people do most anything. ;)
I’d say check out this work if you plan on studying abroad in Nigeria or England; if you’re interested in the legacy of European colonialism on the African continent; if you want to know more about literary productions beyond the classic Western canon.
For works that treat similar themes, see Equatorial Guinean author Donato Ndongo’s “Tinieblas de tu memoria negra” (The Shadows of Your Black Memory), which follows a young African man’s preparation for Catholic priesthood, or Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” which I have yet to read.
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer is liaison to the Anderson Freeman Center, the Arabic Department, the Comparative Literature Program, the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies (GSFS) Program, the Language Schools, the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
(11/08/18 11:27am)
Sarah Fagan
(11/08/18 10:59am)
As with “Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story,” Peter Bagge has taken a powerful character from the past and prepared her biography in graphic novel form. With “Woman Rebel,” (reviewed for the March 7, 2018 issue of “The Librarian is In”) Bagge explored the evolving education surrounding birth control when the topic was even more taboo in our country and around the globe.
This time he follows Zora Neale Hurston’s life. Hurston was an African American author and anthropologist who came to be known as a pioneer in representing Southern black voices in writings that did not cater to white readership or the hegemonic, literary lens. She is also associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a period in the 1920s that began to acknowledge the talent and literary productions of black artists including figures like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.
[pullquote speaker="Peter Bagge, 2017" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]“Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story,”[/pullquote]
This biographical work, as is characteristic of Bagge’s work, is a rich, full-color display of panels that span multiple decades of Hurston’s life. The readership learns that representing all-black communities in her prose was not a “stretch” for Hurston as she was raised in one in Eatonville, Fla. She collected folklore from the region and traveled throughout many parts of the world including Costa Rica, Haiti and Honduras.
Bagge’s representation of Hurston characterizes her as an eccentric whose unconventional values challenged the institutions she attempted to navigate. For example, Hurston’s relationship with Howard University became strained because she didn’t behave like other women of her time who were expected to be compliant, docile and, perhaps above all, sexually conservative. Her relationship with her white benefactor, too, was an uneasy one as she recognized Hurston’s talent but perhaps exercised excessive control over her literary production.
Hurston found herself in many a financial bind as she attempted to balance the expectations of those who held the purse strings to her livelihood and her own ambitions in pursuing interests like writing for the stage. The book also explores Hurston’s friendship with poet Langston Hughes.
Ultimately, Hurston’s story is one of a search for her voice in a world in which black people and, doubly, black women are subjugated by a suffocating ideology of white supremacy and the strictures of patriarchy. I recommend the work to anyone who admires early resisters of the patriarchy.
Four other works in our collection that champion strong women, see Chelsea Clinton’s “She Persisted” or “She Persisted Around the World” or Dan Jones’ “50 Queers Who Changed the World.” Searches for “Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz,” “Frida Kahlo” or “Malala Yousafzai” will also render desirable results.
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer is liaison to the Anderson Freeman Center, the Arabic Department, the Comparative Literature Program, the Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies (GSFS) Program, the Language Schools, the Linguistics Program and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
(11/08/18 10:55am)
On Nov. 3, Evolution used dance to express themes of social inequality in their show.
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(11/01/18 9:55pm)
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