Keep Back to Date on Library Gossip

Did you know that our first campus library was 20 by 30 feet in size, and the collection was made up entirely of donations?

Do you know the name of our first librarian?

Can you guess when we first hired a reference librarian?

I have no doubt that some of you do know this information, but for those of you who do not and are interested in our library’s history, I have created a blog chronicling our past based on the articles I have found while indexing our school newspaper, The Carolinian.

http://whatwasnewsatthelibrary.blogspot.com/

The articles start in late 1919 and will be updated continuously as I work on the project. Currently, articles and advertisements are scheduled to be posted during the work week at 8:00 a.m. Not only are these articles delightfully representative of the times in which they were printed, but you will find that many of the concerns and obstacles faced by our library presently are not new developments to this institution. As we progress through the 1920s and 1930s, you will find many of the pressing issues and student opinions sound amazingly similar to those of our current generation. I hope that you will enjoy learning about the library as much as I have over the past months.

"The Vagina Monologues" at UNCG

Last weekend I had the privilege of participating, for the second consecutive year, in the UNCG Womens and Gender Studies Department sponsored performance of The Vagina Monologues.

This play, by Eve Ensler, is based on a series of interviews with women about - you guessed it - vaginas. The play is designed to confront the audience with various difficult issues surrounding women's bodies and sexuality. By turns hilarious, shocking, tragic, and titillating, the play has become part of an annual "V-Day" event for many colleges and communities, serving as the focus for fund-raising and consciousness-raising to fight sexual violence against women. To help keep these performances both fresh and relevant, Ensler writes a new "spotlight" segment each year to highlight current issues. Last year, for instance, she focused on the plight of New Orleans after Katrina.

This year's edition, directed by Kaleigh Malloy with the assistance of Noelle Avina, was performed last Friday at 7:30 and Saturday at 2:00 and 7:30 by a talented and beautiful cast of UNCG students, staff, and faculty. Kaleigh chose to include two spotlight monologues: "Hey Miss Pat," a different one about New Orleans, and "Baptism," which confronts child rape in the Congo war. The shows went well -- except for the fire alarm going off in the middle of the Saturday afternoon run. Very disruptive. One of the most emotional pieces was interrupted, and the girl doing it was so stressed by being jerked out of character to leave the building, mill around aimlessly for ten minutes, and then resume where she had left off, that she dissolved into tears on completing her scene.

Attendance was quite respectable at all three shows, even the Saturday afternoon run that I had been a bit worried about. The audience was enthusiastic - the Saturday night crowd was definitely more responsive, laughing longer and more often at the funny bits. And we got a very nice write-up in the student paper The Carolinian.

I did the monologue about birth, "I was there in the room," as a dialogue with Noelle. It actually worked quite well as a dialogue. We imagined ourselves as mother and sister of the woman giving birth; we were in the hospital waiting room discussing the incredible event we had just witnessed. When our director saw me knitting at rehearsals she decided my character should knit. This was rather cool; however I was not very productive while in character because I was concentrating on my lines. For some reason actors in this play do not have to memorize their lines but read them from the script instead. I did memorize - for my own comfort level - but followed along in the script as backup.

Turning a monologue into a dialogue was one of Kaleigh's several directorial innovations. She also added a free-form movement piece as an introduction and used music to highlight transitions between monologues. Finally, instead of following the traditional red, pink, and black color scheme, performers were asked to choose costumes based on purple, brown, and dark blue and green. That's about as far away as you can get from red, pink, and black! I found it refreshing once I got over the shock.

Yes, the Vagina Monologues have come and gone. (Here I have to confess that all last week, I really wanted to go around saying "the vaginas are coming, the vaginas are coming." But that would have been unprofessional.)

Jenny's Winter Vacation in Germany

As most of you know, I visited Germany this January. Well, it was very cold and snowy, but absolutely wonderful and so I would like to share a little bit of the adventure with Jackson Leaks. Most of the time was spent in Berlin with family, of course, but I also rode the train through the former communist East Germany all the way to the north of Germany to visit the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, where my sister fortunately has a vacation house. This turned out to be the highlight of my vacation and is thus the topic for this post. The Baltic Sea is almost an inland sea, bordered by Sweden and Finland, etc., and thus much quieter than the Atlantic. The water at the edge of the shore therefore lapped gently over the firestones found there. The firestones arose from the chalks at the cliffs of Rügen, which were produced from the glaciers of the ice age covering the area for thousands of years. During our hike the sea was partially frozen and wild swans were swimming in the shallows along with some little black ducks. Behind the sandy beach tall reeds were growing, from which the locals make wonderful roofs for their houses. They are flammable, however, and during New Years Eve some fireworks went astray and one house actually burned up! Beyond the reeds there are steep cliffs in places and my sister Jutta and I hiked up a very tall cliff, from where the view was truly astonishing. The weather was grey and misty and on the beach there suddenly appeared two moving shadows in the distance. As they came closer they revealed themselves distinctly as a man with a horse. To our delight he was very sociable and told us all about his horse and his life on the island, many years of which were spent under communist rule. The horse's name is Janek and he is half Haflinger and half Norwegian. He was a very beautiful and gentle horse and the man, whose name is Siegfried Grutzmacher, helped each of us in turn onto it's bare back. Siegfried and I shared a cigarette and I almost fell in love. But then he and Janek slowly disappeared into the mist as mysteriously as they had appeared. It seemed like a dream, but I have pictures to prove it. All in all the sheer natural winter beauty of this island is a scene I will never forget. Although we did not actually visit the part with the chalk cliffs, you can catch a glimpse of this part by googling David Caspar Friedrich's "The Chalk Cliffs" of Rügen, a famous romantic painting. Other than that you'll have to make do with the few pictures attached below. Even so, you'll want to consider this island as your next vacation spot. If so, just let me know, as my sister's neighbor rents out some awesome apartments in a reed roof house near the beach!