USF Book Club ~ Special Meeting

September 15th, 2011 by Kelci No comments »

Hello bookclubbers!

Media Studies Professor Vamsee Juluri is teaching a Davies Seminar this semester, which is called Making American Book Culture. He has invited Book Club to be part of the class!

I agreed to read Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart and visit the class on September 22, 2011 to join in the discussion. This is a bit late notice, but if anyone else from book club would like to join, I would be delighted. I have intensely enjoyed Super Sad True Love Story and look forward to discussing it with the class.

Making American Book Culture / Thursday Sept 22 / 6:30 p.m. – 9:15 / K-Hall 263

To get Super Sad True Love Story, request it through Link+, SF Public (they have e-copies, hardbacks, and books on tape), or check out our Kindle or one of our iPads, which have the book loaded on them.


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mid-term 1 study guide

September 15th, 2011 by david silver No comments »
Mid-term 1 for Intro to Media Studies covers all the assigned readings and all the lectures from August 25th to September 15th. The test includes approximately 30 multiple choice, true or false, and fill-in questions and one brief (1 page written) essay. You have the entire class period to take the test.

In preparing for mid-term 1, you should read (or listen to) and understand the following:

J. Charles Sterin, “Early American Newspaper Publishing,” from Mass Media Revolution, pp. 96-101.

Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos, “Magazines in the Age of Specialization,” Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, 7th edition, pp. 280-303.

Tom Standage, A special report on the news industry: Bulletins from the future (especially The people formerly known as the audience; and The Foxification of news), The Economist, July 7, 2011.

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Late Night "Thank You Notes" From Jimmy Fallon, NPR, May 23, 2011 (45 minutes).

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Covering "Tainted Justice" And Winning A Pulitzer, NPR, May 3, 2010 (38 minutes).

You should also review the syllabus and your class notes and be familiar with the following:

* 10 elements of new media
* early stages of US newspapers
* the relationships among the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, literacy, and newspapers
* the relationships between news and technologies
* why newsrooms matter
* journalism and justice ("tainted justice")
* magazines as mass media
* muckrakers
* jacob riis
* magazines and gender
* magazines and specialization
* magazines and visual culture
* magazines and consumer society
* the relationships between transportation and media

Also, review notes from class discussions of Adbusters and Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.

Friendly suggestion: consider studying and discussing this material with a classmate or small group.

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USF Book Club: Packing for Mars

September 14th, 2011 by Kelci No comments »

Howdy book lovers! The USF Book Club’s next meeting will be on Friday, October 7, 2011 from 12 noon – 1 pm in the USF Community Garden (located next to the School of Education Parking lot, entrance at Turk Blvd. and Tamalpais Terrace).

We will discuss Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.

Packing for Mars is the San Francisco One City One Book selection. Join us and all of San Francisco in reading this one, which I have heard a lot of good things about. You can read an interview with Ms. Roach that appeared in the SF Chronicle last year to get an overview of Packing for Mars. To get a copy, you can request it through SF Public, Link+, put a hold on Gleeson’s copy, or read it on one of our iPads or our Kindle.

from Amazon.com:

With her wry humor and inextinguishable curiosity, Mary Roach has crafted her own quirky niche in the somewhat staid world of science writing, showing no fear (or shame) in the face of cadavers, ectoplasm, or sex. In Packing for Mars, Roach tackles the strange science of space travel, and the psychology, technology, and politics that go into sending a crew into orbit. Roach is unfailingly inquisitive (Why is it impolite for astronauts to float upside down during conversations? Just how smelly does a spacecraft get after a two week mission?), and she eagerly seeks out the stories that don’t make it onto NASA’s website–from SPCA-certified space suits for chimps, to the trial-and-error approach to crafting menus during the space program’s early years (when the chefs are former livestock veterinarians, taste isn’t high on the priority list). Packing for Mars is a book for grownups who still secretly dream of being astronauts, and Roach lives it up on their behalf–weightless in a C-9 aircraft, she just can’t resist the opportunity to go “Supermanning” around the cabin. Her zeal for discovery, combined with her love of the absurd, amazing, and stranger-than-fiction, make Packing for Mars an uproarious trip into the world of space travel.

–Lynette Mong

Email kbaughmanmcdowell@usfca.edu to get on the mailing list. Hope to see you there!


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Messages on Library Postcards

September 9th, 2011 by Larry T. Nix No comments »
This is a magnificent building. I was telling them that it is not going to compare with ours.
We went all over this library yesterday. It is a fine building too, with a whole room just for the use of the children.
Some people who collect postcards want only those that haven't been used. I, on the other hand, value postcards that have been used more highly than unused cards. As a collector of library postcards, I especially like postcards that include a message that relates to the library pictured on the postcard or a message that indicates that the sender and/or recipient was a collector of library postcards.  For Norman D. Stevens' A Guide to Collecting Librariana (Scarecrow, 1986), Billy R. Wilkinson wrote an article based on his extensive research related to messages on library postcards.  In addition to examining his own extensive collection of postcards, he persuaded other library postcard collectors to do the same. Wilkinson found that the messages fell into four categories: 1) comments on the architecture; 2) comments on the book collection; 3) messages that proclaimed a version of "my library is bigger, newer, prettier, etc. than yours"; and 4) miscellaneous messages (the largest category).  My experience validates his results with the caveat that messages related to the collecting of library postcards would be included in the miscellaneous category. Wilkinson provided many examples of messages, but the one that struck me as the most interesting related to a postcard showing the general reading room of the Widener Library at Harvard. It read: "Here are a lot of greasy grinds I saw at 'HAHVAHD.' The aisle looks like a good place to run off the 100 yd. dash."  Up until 1907 the post office didn't allow written messages to appear on the address side of a postcard. So messages before that year were written on the picture side of the postcard. Some postcards in my collection which include messages from that era are included in this post. 
You could get books enough here to look at. It's full of them.



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Humongous Library Postcard Auction

September 7th, 2011 by Larry T. Nix No comments »
 
One of the largest privately held library postcard collections ever offered for sale is now up for auction on eBay. The collection includes 2,811US and international library postcards assembled by an architectural firm.  The starting auction price is $2,800 or about $1 per postcard. The auction has a 9 day bidding period starting today, but it could be bought without competitive bidding for $5,600 through eBay's "Buy it now" feature.  I won't be bidding because my library postcard collection is more focused on postcards that feature specific areas, but this is quite an opportunity for an individual collector or an institution to get a large library postcard collection in one fell swoop.

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