The Invisible Library

This review is full of spoilers. Just so you know.

Mel Gibson heard tell their were people called Mayans who lived in South America once, before the Spanish arrived and saved them all from idolatry and their own barbarism. So, he made himself a movie, so we too would know all the bloody, cliched details.

Jaguar Paw, our Apocalypto-istic hero, is out huntin’ with pa and the boys, making lame jokes about his buddy, Smoke Frog, who can’t impregnate his wife. JP’s tribe is as obsessed with women having as many babies as those creepy Quiverfull Evangelicals. It’s kinda weird. Anyway, they meet another tribe of people who have been run out of their village and amazingly, can speak the same language. In fact, everyone in pre-Columbian South America speaks the same Mayan dialect, which translates neatly into idiomatic English subtitles. More wacky sexual hijacks ensue when they get back to the village. There’s a party, and we meet JP’s pregnant wife and young son (You can tell he’s our hero because he doesn’t shoot blanks). Oh, and we also meet Smoke Frog’s annoying mother-in-law. For future reference, Mr. Gibson (because I know you’re reading this), the annoying mother-in-law joke was old even then.

In the morning their village is raided and all the women and men are hauled off by scary dude with jawbones on his armor and his warriors. The kids are left behind. I’m sure they’ll be fine. Alone. In the jungle.

During the forced march across the jungle, we meet Little Oracle Annie, who has generic movie pestilence type B and delivers the obligatory prophetic message. JP and the gang arrive in Las Vegas, where they are press ganged into the Blue Man Group. JP narrowly avoids being sacrificed when the world’s fastest eclipse sneaks up on the Mayans. Who invented astronomy. These people devised one of the most intricate and accurate calendars and they’re all surprised by a solar eclipse. or maybe just by the fact that it happens in about a minute and a half.

The king of the dirty, filthy Mayans (who in real life, surprised the hell out of the Spanish by having a large, well organized, clean city) tells Jawbone to take JP and his boys out back and off them, since they don’t need any more heads to roll down steps (sorry guys, bowling league filled up fast this year). The worst game of Football ensues, during which JP escapes with only a minor arrow through the gut. So naturally, Jawbone and his dudes chase after.

The rest of the movie alternates between the standard hunters-become-the-hunted plot (complete with the totally debunked quicksand, angry panther that only our hero can outrun and a slide into home base) and scenes of JP’s wife and son in a hole in the ground where he hid them from the bad guys. Monkeys fall out of they sky and then it starts raining. Mrs. JP struggles not to drown and then gives birth underwater. Seriously, like a little baby rocket, he just launches from betwixt her loincloth. Because labor pains are apparently a Spanish invention. JP manages to kill everyone gruesomely and according to Prophecy Girl’s ramblings. Then the Spanish arrive.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t know all kinds of accurate and anthropologically sound things about the Mayans, or else this film would have really sucked. But at least in Gibsonland, we don’t, so he can just make shit up to stuff his silly Christian ideology into. Apocalypto wasn’t as bad a film as The Passion, because that is physically impossible. But hay, it’s really bloody, so I’m sure Christians will love it.

Lori Bowen Ayre over at Mentat asks the good questions:

What if the Library Worked Like Netflix?

NetFlix is easy, personal, fast, and convenient. It assists users in finding titles they will not only enjoy but titles that they are probably very excited to find because they are surprised that they could be found or they’ve never heard of them before. Their choices are not limited to the blockbusters of the day. NetFlix makes it very easy for customers to borrow and return titles. NetFlix is to movies as libraries should be to books.

She lays out a solid argument that I agree with a hundred percent. Too bad it’ll never work.

Some of the institutionalized policies that we librarians deal with are holdovers from the analog days of card catalogs and physical browsers (people looking at shelves) rather than OPACs and web browsers. But there are still enough old school librarians around who remember how things used to work and never wanted them to change to begin with and don’t want them to change too much, at least while they are still around.

A colleague from grad school was telling me about this recently. She had a great idea to streamline her library’s ILL procedures, and all it would have cost was a piece of software that was less than the cost of one month’s ILL shipping expenses. But the ILL Librarian there didn’t want to hear it. She had her paperwork and her forms and her filing system and her two to six week turn around time and that was that. Didn’t matter if the new system would save time and money and help people better. The Netflix model of patron service probably has merit. And public librarians could save thousands of dollars switching to Open Source, and maybe one day we’ll ditch Dewey and LoC and catalog with tag clouds. But not today. Or tomorrow.

We new school librarians can’t change the world It’s going to take time. Time to either convince admin to take a chance on new technology (regardless of how well it’s proved itself in other fields) or time to wait for the dinosaurs to die off.

I really want Hillary to run in ‘08. Not because I like her politics ( I don’t. I think she embodies everything the Right says a Liberal is but isn’t: a waffling flip flopper, a triangulator who doesn’t stand for anything but getting more power and a pseudo-centrist appeaser of thugs— Right Wing ones, not swarthy Arab ones). I want her to run as a decoy. She will be the shit magnet for the Democratic party (weather they tell her this is the plan or not is up to Dean. either way, it’ll work). The Wingers will froth at the mouth and waste time, energy and money smearing her into the ground. Then, the DNC can pull a gotcha by nominating Gore/Clark.

We give the GOP the ol’ sucker punch of Environmentalism and credible Warrior Democrat.

Either that, or nominate Vilsack and a potato.

Library of America to Publish Philip K. Dick volume:

NEW YORK (AP) — One of the world’s favorite cult writers, Philip K. Dick, is being canonized.

The Library of America, which releases hardcover editions of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and other literary masters, will publish four of Dick’s futuristic novels next summer, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?— the basis for the classic film, Blade Runner.

“He is someone, like Raymond Chandler, who took the conventions of a pulp genre and made very adventurous literary use of them,” Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Jonathan Lethem, whose novels include Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, is editing the Dick volume. News of the project first surfaced earlier this week when Lethem was interviewed by the literary blog, The Elegant Variation.

Beyond literary merit, Rudin cited a couple of factors in choosing Dick — the 25th anniversary next summer of Blade Runner, which will be marked by director Ridley Scott’s remastered “final cut,” and the positive response to the Library of America’s volume of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, published in 2005.

“There were a lot of people who felt their reading tastes were validated by including Lovecraft in the library,” Rudin said. “We had been thinking for a long time about Philip K. Dick and other genre writers, and because of the success of the Lovecraft book, and because of Blade Runner coming out, it seemed like a good time to go ahead with this.”