lower east side librarian

Tween Black Panther lit! Three kids travel to Oakland for the summer to stay with their estranged and unmotherly mother. She sends them out every day to Black Panther breakfast and summer camp while she stays home and writes poems for the revolution. The story is told from the oldest girl's point-of-view. At 11, and motherless for most of her life, she takes care of her younger sisters and is fearful about hanging out with the Panthers. Still, she takes in their message, and it makes her stronger. Not that she wasn't plenty strong already. Delphine is a nuanced and believable character, as are her sisters. I loved the tidbits defining African-American kids lives in the 60s/70s, them counting black people on television and how many lines they had, encountering white hippies in the Haight and Teutonic tourists in Chinatown, and most of all their getting to see the BPP as an aid organization.

I'm a little afraid to proclaim how much I enjoyed this middle class white lady prison memoir for fear that my prison justice activist friends will tell me everything that's wrong with it. Regardless, Orange Is the New Black is a really good read. In Smith alumna Piper Kerman tells of her experiences doing time for a drug crime committed over ten years before her incarceration. It's not a woe is me (or woe is I) story. She fully cops to her crime and in fact prison does educate her on just how deleterious drug trafficking is when she understands her fellow inmates' addictions and plights. She isn't uncritical, though, of the "war on drugs."

Issue #16 of her Syndicate Product series is A.j.'s spectacular 24-hour zine about her not particularly rational, but surprisingly powerful desire to live in California. LA, even. I can't believe how moved and awed I was at this work, created in 19.5 hours. A.j., an obvious perfectionist, regrets sleeping from 1-5:30 a.m., but I can't imagine the zine being any better with another 4.5 hours' worth of work.

I'd read DTWOF here and there, mostly on the interweb, like especially when the main character, Mo, decided to go to library school in 2001, and the link to that strip got forwarded around the bibliosphere like crazy. But without regular exposure, I had not realized just how brilliant the biweekly comic strip is. I can't believe (okay, I can believe but don't want to) that it isn't syndicated in every newspaper that carries Doonesbury, or at least Boondocks. I'm guessing it's the title? Which is unfortunate also because this comic is relevant to all people with radical left politics. Maybe even liberals!

I've read the book's prequel Rivington Street but hadn't revisited Union Square since I bought it in a used bookstore in Guatemala in 2001. RS is a historical novel, but US reads more like a fictional history. It's full of educational examinations of Jewish life in the 1920s-40s, covering issues like Palestine, Zionism, World War II, communism, and labor politics, but also tells the stories through the lenses of art, fashion, and psychiatry. Tax used oral histories for her research, and the voices sound authentic. To me the most interesting and informative bits are the characters internal and external struggles with the party line and the multi-faceted views on the conflicting Zionist movements. The author does a good job of revealing multiple truths in these contentious topics, but you still have an idea where she's at personally. The sometimes disastrous relationship between the Communist Party and American labor, not to mention the difficulties it creates between father and daughter is sometimes painful to read, but fascinating stuff!

Just when I'm getting jaded about zines, reading and cataloging 50 of them a week, it's nice to discover a new favorite zinester. I don't understand why Thara Harris isn't more of a zine superstar, not that "superstar" is really a concept that should be associated with zines. But you know what I mean, there are some zinesters that become widely known in our small community for producing well-made, thoughtful, creative, and visually appealing works. Ms. Harris, from West Virginia is one of those writer/artists. Or maybe she does have a rep, and I just didn't know about it for whatever reason? I can't really tell because she doesn't have that much of a web presence.

Johanna, one of my favorite zine publishers, hadn't made a zine since issue 4 of Sisu came out in May 2006. For some reason, although I acquired No History, No Self from StrangerDanger back in November, I didn't get around to reading it until just now. (I have a serious cataloging backlog problem, which I hope to clear up by the end of the year!) I'm a fool for letting it go so long, but at least I finally read it. Like all of Johanna's zines, NHNS has strong political content, particularly regarding race, mixed race identity, and identity politics. She has put in her time as an activist and has plenty of cred in that arena (also in feminist science-fiction and vegan communities), so what is particularly affecting to me in this new zines venture is how personal and open she is, about missing New York, trying to make friends, being depressed and contemplating therapy. She lists some great self-care suggestions for dealing with depression, the top three being sleep, cats, and tea, things I can totally get behind. That emphasis on self-care I think in this case extends to the rest of the world. NHNS is gentler than its predecessors. Johanna, who doesn't suffer fools lightly, is more inwardly focused this time around, maybe because repatriated to the UK she's missing her friends from home around whom she can actually be herself. Reading this zine I wanted to give Johanna a hug. I also want to know when issue 2 will be out.

An aspiring journalist ca. 1990 attending a high school journalism camp queried the keynote on what to do to become a foreign correspondent. He (I think it was a he) responded, "Learn Russian." So that is what the Tex-Mex teen set out to do, and that's how she ended up in Moscow for about a year. Hers is a coming-of-age political memoir of a lefty journalist trying to sort out Revolution and her own identity. Well, the identity part sort of came last. She had to visit lots of foreign countries before she realized there were some important things she needed to learn about her own culture.

Another zine by Celia that makes you adore zines despite that fact that you are reading and cataloging 50 of them per weekend! Well, maybe that's just me, but I would think that anyone would appreciate la C-Dog's birthday creation regardless of how immersed to the scalp they may or may not be in zines.

The second in librarian Barbara Fister's Anni Kosinken mystery series, Through the Cracks makes me sad. Sad because it's so good, that I think Barbara could ditch librarianship and be a full-time writer. She's a really good librarian, so it would be a serious loss to the profession.