Monday, February 25, 2013

to moodle

I love to moodle.  I knew it as an activity long before I knew it by the name Brenda Ueland gave it in the 1930s.  It means "long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering."  It is an activity used by artists, writers, and other creative people to give the conscious mind time to shut up so the unconscious mind can send up, for purposeful use, all the marvelous ideas it has been weaving together out of what has been seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched.  Sometimes it takes years for the mind to moodle on a given subject.  From amid the poetry I wrote in my twenties a single line stuck with me. Twenty years later I discovered it was actually a painting.  Without moodling I would never have found that out.  But now another thing has floated to the surface of my mind.  Moodle.  It wafts across the internet as I look for things.  It is not the verb to moodle, not the act of moodling, but, oh the glories of the poetry of our modern tongue:  Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.  Barblefark.  It's an online education tool. Doubtless a decent one, but modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment?  Could you have made that more anal or static if you'd tried?  The most interesting thing about that is that you can pluck the first letters and form moodling, an activity of beauty and power.  Not to mention you can often get the laundry folded while doing it.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Today's Count

My yellow spring/fall jacket, a pink grey sky with a pale yellow glow, and amid the degas and snakes, frogs and fish, about thirty little small creatures in bright orange t-shirts two sizes too large for them, so focused on their observations that the sudden influx of a couple hundred students changing classes through the museum area makes no impression on them at all.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

clicking through a train of thought

 745.5 F66 1987  
Just helped a student locate Plants of the Bible (who knew!) BS (as all good religion related books are) 665.M71.  Being keen to be helpful even as she charged off, I dropped my eyes to the subject link: Nature in the Bible. Click.  I think there was something about nature, but, calligrapher and illuminator such as I am, my eyes fell on: Decoration and Ornament. Click.  I am offered the option of 59 subsections:  Click.  And what do I find? Felt Marker Decoration!  A train of thought leading to the joys of the Curriculum Collection of the Education Library.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

favourite title of the day

So, as I shelf read (making sure all the call numbers bounce along in the order they should), or arrange books at the shelving point ready to pack, or packing them, onto a shelving truck, my eyes run over the titles and now and then my eye is caught.

Today:  An Idiot's Fugitive Essays on Science*,  with a two page errata no less.

*Q 126.8.T78 1984.  And don't get any ideas the common denominator is any brighter thirty years on.

Monday, February 4, 2013

Today's count

February and last week it was ski pants and extra mitts.  Today the sky is blue with passing clouds and it is sweaters and fall jackets.  Scraped snow has dissolved into wet patches on the pavement, and more people are looking upward than usual.  It seems at least for today, those rodents didn't see their shadows on Saturday.