Calling all SFF fans! It’s time to add more nerdy fun to your TBRs with four exciting SFF recommendations. I have two more of this week’s releases and two upcoming titles I have read and enjoyed!

Bookish Goods

New Releases

Hello from Denali! The weather is cold and the mountains are gorgeous. But I’m going to briefly dive back into the library world for you lovely folks, so here we go.

Libraries & Librarians

News Updates

The Digital Public Library of America and the Independent Publishers Group have teamed up to offer libraries an ebook ownership option.

York County Libraries (PA) may have to reduce operating hours next year as a result of budgetary constraints and inflation.

Cool Library Updates

Indianapolis’ first library for Black residents reopens through a school librarian’s leadership.

How Iowa libraries serve communities in the digital age.

Recently, I found myself at the Tate Modern in London, accompanied by my youngest daughter, to see Music of the Mind, a retrospective of the work of Yoko Ono: her drawings, postcards, films, and musical scores. Accompanied is perhaps too easy a word. When told my daughter I wanted to go, she said, “Really?” “Yes,” I said. “Really.”  

A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an art collector and philanthropist. Ono attended a progressive nursery school where the emphasis was on music: the children were taught perfect pitch and encouraged to listen to everyday sounds and translate them into musical notes. In 1943, she and her brother were evacuated to the countryside. Basic provisions were scarce. For hours, they lay on their backs looking at the sky. They said to each other: “Imagine good things to eat. Imagine the war is over.” She returned to Tokyo in 1945. She was president of her high school drama club; in a photo taken at the time, her hair is bobbed and she is wearing what looks like a cashmere sweater set. At Gakushuin University, she was the first female student to major in philosophy. Her family relocated to Scarsdale, in Westchester County; she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied music. After three years, she dropped out and moved to New York, supporting herself by teaching traditional crafts at the Japan Society. In 1960, she rents a loft downtown, at 112 Chambers Street, and begins to host musical performances.

Word gets around. John Cage plays. Marcel Duchamp is in the audience. Peggy Guggenheim drops by. Ono is twenty-six, twenty-seven years old—a member of a loose band of international artists who operate under the name Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik. She rejects the term performance art; instead her works are often a series of instructions, by which the viewer can construct or imagine or catalog their own perceptions: art as collaboration. At the Tate, a series of postcards was tacked to the wall, printed with multiple-choice statements such as these:

1) I like to draw circles.
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The US national anthem, performed by The Chicks at the DNC, has a colourful past

Roll up, roll up, the Man United Circus is coming to town! Grab your trapeze and juggling balls, Marcus, Luke and Andy are here to preview the weekend's football.

Speaking of circuses, Performing monkey Luke questions whether Chelsea's 2-0 first-leg lead is enough for the return trip to Servette. Elsewhere, we get excited for a tasty tea-time treat as Arsenal travel to Aston Villa and Ringmaster Marcus tells us all why David Moyes is the Scottish Carlo Ancelotti.

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We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month, with 15% off annual subscriptions until the end of August: https://www.patreon.com/footballramble.

Why the legendary US desert event could be in trouble

May 25 – August 25, 2024

July 19 – August 24, 2024

There was an air of subdued anticipation at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine as we waited for Philippe Petit to take the stage. A clarinetist roved through the church improvising variations on Gershwin in spurts, making it hard to tell if the event, which was being held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, had begun. Eventually, the lights dimmed and we were told to turn off our phones, as even a single lit screen in the audience might cause Petit to fall from his tightrope. Music started, but so quietly that it seemed like it was being played from a phone, while a candlelit procession made its way down the nave. Large boards were set up, on which footage of the Twin Towers being constructed was projected. A group of child dancers imitated Petit’s walk along the ground, and were followed by a professional whistler. After we were shuffled through this sequence that felt like a performed version of ADHD, Petit finally appeared and began walking, first meekly, then quickly, to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” wearing a white jacket laced with gold.

The original Twin Towers walk took place on the morning of August 7, 1974, after Petit and a group of conspirators broke into the World Trade Center while it was still partially under construction, and used a bow and arrow to span a tightrope between the towers. Petit walked, ran, lay down, and knelt on the wire, a quarter of a mile in the air, as the city looked on from below. It had taken more than eight months of meticulous planning to carry out the performance, including creating a mock-up of the distance between the Towers on a field in France, studying their engineering, and using various disguises and fake IDs to gain access to them. These heist-like aspects (it is referred to as “the coup”) have made it ripe material for movies including Man on Wire and The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit and featuring CGI Twin Towers.

***

Three weeks before the performance, Petit held a reception in anticipation of the event on the eightieth floor of 3 World Trade Center. I exited the elevator into a space with perhaps the most impressive view of New York I’d ever seen. Under the influence of the height and temperature change (it was a hundred degrees outside that day), the vista was so impressive that it was almost addictive; it was hard to pull myself away from the windows, as though the space were designed to keep me there, like the interior of a casino.

The fluffy, fashion-filled Netflix shows has introduced a surprising plotline