This beautiful book of haiku poems is just what I needed in these current strange times! Maybe you need it, too?
The poems in this book are all originals by Japanese haiku masters. The fully bilingual book actually prints the Japanese in characters and in Romanized script, as well as in English of course. Since they are in translation, the English versions do not always follow the “5 syllables – 7 syllables – 5 syllables” rule that we probably all remember imitating in elementary school, but they are none the less beautiful and touching for that.
A poem like this one: Just being alive the poppy flower and I. seems especially appropriate in this season, as spring bursts to life by the day and the human activity normally seen at this time is muted. But that stillness also brings some opportunity for reflection that we might otherwise miss. Perhaps you can find the same satisfaction and even joy as the poet suggests, just in being alive with a flower in your backyard?
Since it’s rather difficult for any of our readers to browse through the lovely images which are half the appeal of a book like this one, check out the publisher’s page for a peek at some of the fantastical, magical illustrations that accompany the text. And remember, while the library’s closed, you can still request to check out this or any other item! Use the Drive-Up Library Pick Up link on the library home page.
My first book of haiku poems: A picture, a poem, and a dream
translated by Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, illustrated by Tracy Gallup
New Arrivals Island, 2nd Floor E My
“A door had opened. The land had folded like fabric.
Conduction, Conduction, Conduction.” To read The Water Dancer, you must unleash your ability to be tethered. You
have to escape former notions of the Underground Railroad and Harriett Tubman
and move into the realm of the magical, mystical, and the macabre. You can no
longer be shackled to a forgone conclusion and must simply give into
conduction. “That is conduction. The many stories, the many bridges, the way
over the river.”
Hiram Walker, the main character, begins the tale as his
mother is taken away and he has to find another home in which to live. Hiram is
a slave with nothing more than a memory mostly of his mother as a beautiful
woman doing a water-dance with a jug propped upon her head. His mother was the
mistress of the master and Hiram is the master’s son. With a resemblance of the master, he is
brought into the main house as the caretaker of his half-brother, the
legitimate, White, heir of the Virginian Lockless Plantation.
Hiram is notably intelligent, has a savant-type memory of
the mundane, but little memory of his own history which is the key to a power
that he does not entirely understand. As he learns to use this power, he will
escape, be abducted, transplanted, and transformed as he journeys across
America. It will also force him to confront his memories and truths about
slavery and his life.
Through harrowing experiences and the tutelage from the magical and mythical Harriet Tubman, Hiram is taught to understand his power of conduction. Conduction is the power to teleport through memory and water connectivity groups of people from one place to another. As Hiram conjures his powers, he reflects, “I just sat there watching her in this silence. I felt that she looked different as though the very texture of her story had somehow been etched into her face. The summoning of a story, the water, and the object that made memory real as brick: that was Conduction.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates is exceptional at reimaging the Antebellum South from that of the history books. He categorized his characters as the:
The Tasked – The slaves who are tasked to work
the land either in the fields or in the house.
The Quality – The slave owners or gentry that
live the quality life of pomp, pageantry, and puffery.
The Lows – The Whites who oversee the slaves.
They have no financial power, but simply positional power over the slaves and
much disenfranchised resentment toward the Quality.
The Freedmen – Those slaves who have been
granted freedom that still live in the South.
In some cases they are better-off than the Lows and are vehemently hated
by the Lows.
Ryland Men – A posse of Lows that capture
runaway Tasked, harass the Freedmen, and are the Quality’s hired whipping men
(punishment providers for the Tasked).
The Coffin – Natchez, Mississippi is the deep
South where slaves are sold into hard labor and is view as a death sentence. There is little hope of escape, conduction,
or reunion after being sent to the Coffin.
Only the most powerful and skillful conductors can extract a slave from
the Coffin.
The are many aspects
of the book that I enjoyed, the most moving part of The Water Dancer was
not Hiram’s escape, return to the South, or escape of the people he loves, but the
revisionist history or better yet the reimagined history. How Coates weaves in
the legendary story of Harriett Tubman and her spiritual powers of conduction
gives testament to why she was also called Moses. Like the parting of the Red Sea, Coates captures
Harriett Tubman as a water weaver that blend story, prayer, and hope into a tele-portable
passage to freedom. The Water Dancer consists of the shared, remembered, and the retold
stories of “heroes who did not live in books, but in our talk; an entire
world of our own, hidden away in memory.” This collective memory is also
part of the power needed to achieve conduction (Quinn, 2019).
A massive river of information about the novel coronavirus flows through social media and the internet. Some days I almost feel swamped by it. And it isn’t slowing down. It can be hard to tell what story is accurate and what is full of baloney (fish?). It could take hours or even days to wade through enough information to figure out the truth about a particular story. Checking with a reliable website like CNN or NPR is a good start news and also for double-checking what you’ve read or watched elsewhere. Following guidelines for evaluating internet resources will help you analyze news stories. Luckily, there are websites out there that have already done some evaluating and fact checking for you. Check out this guide for How to Avoid Misinformation about COVID- 19/Coronavirus. It includes a list of known sources of misinformation on the coronavirus and COVID-19, as well as a list of specific sources of good information. Lastly, don’t miss the column of misinformation trackers, where you can type in or browse for your “fact” and see how real it is.
The Wisconsin Capitol: Stories of a Monument and Its People by Michael Edmonds New Arrivals Island, 2nd Floor F589 .M18 E46 2017
When I first moved to Wisconsin I noticed that the State Capitol building in Madison offered free tours. We had family visiting from out-of-state so it was the perfect time to do something touristy. The tour was a lot more fascinating than I had expected – and the building itself was impressive. The docent shared fascinating facts about the architecture and materials (the marble comes from all over the world). Since the legislature was not in session, we got to sit in both chambers.
Michael Edmonds delves into the history of our state along with the history of the building. He’s an expert in Wisconsin lore and has written several other books about Wisconsin history and folklore.
If you haven’t visited Wisconsin’s first state capitol, it is worth a trip out to Belmont. Although the building is rustic, it is an important piece of Wisconsin’s past. And its setting in southwest Wisconsin is lovely.
We miss you, Warhawks! But the Library staff is still available to help you with your research. You may reach us by phone, live chat or email — or schedule an appointment with a librarian on the Library web site.
The Libraries are also offering a pick-up service for equipment (including laptops), books and media.
Looking for something a bit different? Try a little armchair nature appreciation via Explore.org‘s streaming nature cams! There’s quite a variety from which to choose, including farm sanctuaries (sheep barn!), ocean/underwater views, cats, dogs, bird cams, and even a “zen cam” category. Some of these might be perfect for meditation, although I wouldn’t choose the honey bee or alligator feeds for that! Many are live feeds, but there also are some highlights from live feeds.
In response to library across the world closing their physical locations, The Internet Archive is making available 1.4 million books to meet people’s needs. The bulk of this collection was already available through the Internet Archive. What is unique is they are removing waitlists in order to provide access to everyone without wait. This collection will be available worldwide until the end of June or when the United States declares the covid-19 emergency is over. According to Internet Archive, this collection “supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.”
As a former elementary teacher, I truly enjoyed teaching reading. My dissertation was a study about bibliotherapy which is how to help students choose and read books to help them heal. I so enjoyed children’s literature that my work as an elementary teacher educator focused on literacy development and the use of children’s literature to increase self-esteem, reading achievement, and reading attitude. I had many successes with reluctant readers if I could find the right book for the right person.
The New Kid is the right book that would be ideal for reluctant readers since it is a graphic novel written and illustrated by the main character, Jordan Banks. This unique approach to storytelling will captivate reluctant readers especially if they are middle-school aged males of color, but also anyone else who would enjoy a celebratory adolescent adventure. The New Kid also won the 2020 Newbery Award, the most prestigious award for children’s literature, and the 2020 Coretta Scott King Award, the most outstanding book written by African-American authors for children and young adults.
The New Kid is the first graphic novel to be chosen as a Newbery Award winner and vividly illustrates the tale of Jordan Banks. As Jordan enters middle school, a Black boy from Washington Heights, he takes his readers through the day-to-day reality of his mostly White prep school in this heartbreakingly accurate tale of race, class, micro-aggressions, and the quest for self-identity.
As Jordan navigates his new life in the school that is several bus rides away from his current school, he must learn to adapt and adopt to practices that are foreign to him such as playing soccer, friends who actually travel on Spring Break, and teachers as well as classmates who say things that are micro-aggressive and unconsciously biased. One such incident is when a teacher constantly calls Jordan’s friend who is a Black young man by his wrong name because the teacher was remembering another Black young man from a class she had before. Another incident is when everyone just assumes Jordan is good at sports when all he really enjoys doing is writing and drawing in his sketch pad. Other incidents include White administrators mistaking a veteran Black teacher for the football coach, and White classmates parroting African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) to make themselves sound cool. This school story stands out as a robust, contemporary depiction of a preteen navigating sometimes hostile spaces yet staying true to himself thanks to friends, family, and art.
One reviewer stated, “Jerry Craft, the author, skillfully employs the graphic-novel format to its full advantage, giving his readers a delightful and authentic cast of characters who, along with New York itself, pop off the page with vibrancy and nuance. Shrinking Jordan to ant-sized proportions upon his entering the school cafeteria, for instance, transforms the lunchroom into a grotesque Wonderland in which his lack of social standing becomes visually arresting and viscerally uncomfortable” (Kirkus Reviews, 2018)
The story does a nice job of having readers question the relationships between characters, no matter their race or ethnicity, and inspires thoughts about equity, diversity, and inclusion. Jordan learns how to adapt, adopt, and assert as he makes a variety of friends from different races, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds. The story, as a graphic novel, showcases the themes and issues in a way that mere words would not have captured. The images propel the story along in ways that highlights the nuances and amplifies the instances.
Reference: New Kid. (2018). Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jerry-craft/new-kid-craft/
Suddenly find yourself needing to read everything online? Learn how to take notes on PDFs or other files.
Google Drive:
You can use the commenting feature in Google Drive to highlight and comment on Microsoft Word documents and on PDFs. You can also share these files with others who can comment on them as well.
When you leave a comment on Microsoft Office files, the comments will still appear when you open the file in Microsoft Office. Comments you make on PDFs will show up in some PDF reader apps, but not all.
1. Make sure you have uploaded the file to your Google Drive.
2. Double-click the PDF or Microsoft Office file you want to comment on.
3. At the top right, click Add comment (the conversation bubble with the plus sign inside).
4. Highlight the section of the PDF or click the text, cell, or section of the Office file you want to comment on.
5. Enter your comment and click Comment.
Adobe Acrobat:
Use this program to comment on PDFs. You can view a video from LinkedIn Learning about how to do this in three different Adobe Acrobat versions.
This past summer the Archives & Area Research Center received a package in the mail along with a letter addressed “To Whom It May Concern.” UW-Whitewater has a collection of General George Custer materials. The letter writer thought we would be an appropriate place for a manuscript they had found while remodeling their home in Sacramento, CA.
The document is a typed transcript of a diary written by Sergeant G.P. Harrington in 1876 that describes his experience serving with the 2nd Cavalry during the time of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
An accompanying letter from A.W. Sibley, Colonel of the Cavalry, serves as a reference for Harrington’s credibility and briefly outlines the contents of the manuscript:
“He was with me as Acting 1st Serg. of a scouting party of thirty picked men which I commanded, on the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th of July, 1876. This detachment sent from camp on Goose Creek, Montana, by order of General Crook, along the base of the Big Horn Mountains was to obtain information if possible as to the whereabouts of the renegade Sioux and Cheyenne Indians, who were constantly annoying us at night, threatening our communications with Fort Fetterman, and trying to burn us out of camp and stampede our stock. On this scout we ran into what proved later to be the entire hostil force of Indians which was fresh from the slaughter of Custer and his command.”
Come to the Archives to view the manuscript and learn more about General George Custer.
On the Trail of the Sioux manuscript
by G.P. Harrington
Archives & Area Research Center, 1st floor
