This week I’m joined by an exceptional arts educator, Marta Cabral of Teachers College at New York’s Columbia University. Marta supports young children in creating art which is then exhibited in a gallery space, allowing her students to experience the roles of artist, curator, and exhibition guide. Her passion for student-directed learning and supporting the artistic expression of even the very youngest children is exceptional.
Here’s Marta on “Being in Wonder (Wonderings and Wanderings of an Early Childhood Studio Teacher)”:
As Man of Steel hits our screens and offers us a pretty brutal take on the boy from Krypton, Carol finds new and exciting ways to affectionately explore gender identity in…“Loving the Alien”.
This is my final piece looking at bromance in the context of Auckland Libraries’ Dark Night festival exploring sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen.
The first time we hung out together, he pissed me off and I threw my bike at a tree.
The last time I saw him, we went out for my birthday, overindulged, and I ended up passing out at some godawful steampunk gig in Oxford.
I started writing about that awful word “bromance” after the launch of Auckland Libraries’ Dark Night festival exploring sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen. Our guest speaker, Dr. Pani Farvid, introduced the movie Shame by pointing out that it many ways it wasn’t about sex at all. Its topic was addiction, and more broadly than that, the ways in which society disciplines all of our feelings, not just our sexuality; telling us that these are the permissible ways in which to have and express emotions.
In the pub afterwards, we talked about how heterosexual men define themselves as much through their relationships with other men as those with women. And after that, I knew I would spend this week of Dark Nights writing about Mike, and Jules, and J. That, if I could write about sexual relationships of varying intensity and duration, I could do the same for three varieties of “bromance”. Read more →
As we finally reach the opening of Dark Night, Auckland Libraries’ guerrilla season of events exploring sex and sexuality, I’m blogging on the way that films and literature shape the way we think about relationships.
It’s a different take on the arguments I’ve been making in recent weeks, that libraries offer a place for us to immerse ourselves in culture and participate in a way unique from any other space.
The books we read and the movies we watch can have drastic effects on the lives we lead: in this third Dark Night post, I look at the way films skewed my take on romance and led to me poisoning myself for love at a London railway station. Read more →
I’m also offering you a different take on the arguments I’ve been making in recent weeks, that libraries offer a place for us to immerse ourselves in culture and participate in a way unique from any other space. Libraries as a place of imagination, learning, and connection applies to everyone, from the guy who wants an auto repair manual to the devotee of erotic fan fiction. As I argued last time on this blog, in a world where Fifty Shades of Grey sells 70 million copies world wide, libraries need to be part of the conversation around contemporary erotica.
Here, I wanted to connect our most intimate relationships with two kinds of text – the movies and literature we consume, but also the wider discourse of city life.As Auckland’s Dark Night opens with the New York-set movie Shame, I figured the time was ripe to contemplate “Sex and the Super City”.
21st June sees the launch of Auckland Libraries’ Dark Night, a guerrilla festival of burlesque, literary, and cinematic events that question, celebrate, and challenge sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen.
Opening with a screening of Steve McQueen’s Shame, a harrowing portrait of sex addiction starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, the season includes library services in Auckland bars, author talks, and a cabaret evening including the sultry, saucy stars of Auckland Fringe Festival, Oh! Is For Opera. Read more →
I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space.
Nabokov is writing about a fictional character, but I’ve been arguing that all of us, living and dead, real and fictional, leave these kind of impressions in the world through words, images, deeds, artefacts – the kind of things which it’s a library’s job to help members of the public find and use as they see fit.
In my previous post, ‘The Mission of the Librarian’, I used an essay by the philosopher Ortega y Gasset to suggest that librarianship itself was, like the other professions, one of these puddly spaces, slowly etched by our peers and predecessors, which we get to fill with our own daily life and action.
Usually I’m more excited by librarians than libraries. Politicians like cutting the ribbons on big new builds of steel and glass, but what interests me is what services you can provide when there’s zero budget, zero resources, the politicians disapprove, and all you really have is your own imagination and initiative. I really like that R. David Lankes sometimes asks if librarianship has a future separate from libraries themselves – and I pushed pretty hard for Auckland’s librarians to go off-site and offer their services in other spaces, like comic book stores and even bars.
Distinctively geeky, distinctively Kiwi – Auckland Libraries staff in a comic book store for Star Wars Day
BUT…I have been thinking about library spaces too, since I last wrote.
I’m currently working on a couple of projects that provoked this.
This is a standalone blog post, but also the second part of some larger thoughts around archives, libraries, and how words shape who we are. Click to read the first part.
When I first started working with libraries, I downloaded and read a copy of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s ‘The Mission of the Librarian’ (PDF download). It was written in 1934, but I hoped there would be some lingering insights about libraries or – let’s be frank – cool, glib quotes that I could share in speeches or workshops to make myself look smart and erudite.
As a coda to 
I started writing about that awful word “bromance”
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 