In case anyone out there thinks I was anything less than scrupulous, I made a point of emphasizing that it’s el-eye-eye, and in the last email to me, just five days ago, my contact carefully noted (because I had raised the point so often she probably thought it was a verbal tic), “L-I-I dot org.”

Now, don’t even get me started about the challenge of promoting a website with a nine-syllable three-word name of faintly fustian flavor. Please, just do not go there or I will implode. I do not want to implode. I want to Keep It Together. Mildly kludgy name and all, I really was psyched about these radio spots on behalf of dear ol’ MPOW, and now I’m half tempted to drive forty miles into the city, right this minute, and hold up signs that say O.K., YOU DON’T ANSWER YOUR PHONES AFTER “BUSINESS HOURS” BUT PLEASE STOP READING THE WRONG URL? PLEASE? PLEASE???

I think I’m entitled to an on-air correction and a credit for the spots read wrong. Come to that, I’m also entitled to a soft pink blanky, a large order of fries from In-N-Out, and a bottle of Drambuie with a straw. But I’ll take the correction and the credit.

Of course, I have a board meeting in the morning. I plan to rip out my liver with a pair of pliers so I will be conveniently inconvenienced. “Karen cannot be disturbed right now. She’s in ICU.” The very words comfort me.

Intelligent design? Oh ho, I think not.

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Meanwhile, it’s Clean My Office Night, and I can’t tell you how much fun that is! So much that I’ve procrastinated for two hours. I’ll play some podcasts and get to work!

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I thought about that today when I read that the Smoking Gun has accused James Frey of greatly exaggerating (some would call it lying) about some of the more vivid details in A Million Little Pieces. It’s a book Sandy thought was awful, and I thought at best mediocre, and perhaps now we know why.

Some writers can lie and get away with it, but most of us end up betraying our writing voices when we prevaricate. Our writing voice gets that oily, shifty feeling that comes when we’ve fibbed to a family member–I didn’t eat that last cupcake!–or tried to reuse a postage stamp. (Though with that, I may simply be betraying my Camp Fire Girl background–not that I’m ashamed of it.)

It’s too bad Frey didn’t just tell it as it was, within the reasonable parameters of artistic recreation. I don’t care if his shirt was red or green, or if he buffs off the edges of someone’s sentences; I do care if a quick overnighter in jail gets spun into a three-month stay, or if he inserts himself into a train accident he wasn’t involved in so “he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim.” That’s fiction–and not very good fiction.

I can see a good memoir beginning with a few hours spent in the pokey. There are plenty of us who would be scared enough to find ourselves in jail, or even threatened with the smallest legal reprimand. For some time I’ve wanted to find a place for a vignette from my days stationed in Germany, when I had one more drink than one should have when driving, slid into a snowbank, was helped out by a policeman (who if he noticed anything said nothing), and, properly terrified, never mixed drinking and driving again. For that matter, Proust ate a cookie and wrote about it; E.B. White gave an enema to a pig; Nabokov devoted pages to a small boy hiding under a couch. What good writing has is voice. What good nonfiction writing has is voice, and a commitment to the truth.

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Forgive the eschatological bent of this item’s category (“lastentries”); I found a technique for exporting entries in a specific category, and I’ll use it to update the test blog before blowing away the old blog.

I created a custom 404 file but am scratching my head over the redirect to it. I made a .htaccess file (I’m not using dynamic publishing so no, I didn’t overwrite an existing .htaccess :> ), created 404.php, uploaded both into the freerangelibrarian.testblog directory, and chmod’ed the files to the correct permissions. The custom 404 has a .php extension because that’s what I am using with all my files, and it looks fine. The .htaccess file has this line in it:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

But that’s not what shows up if I intentionally mangle the directory or post path; I get a generic Movable Type error:

The requested page could not be found.
Page not found – /testblog/2006/02/

I don’t even know what’s generating that.

I will be using the same .htaccess for my RSS file redirects, so I suppose I’m glad I hit this problem right now. Is this a path issue?

I based the custom error message on a tutorial from Learning Movable Type on elise.com … I greatly appreciate this site, but I notice another person had posted an unanswered question with my problem, and wonder if it’s a 3.2 issue or related to Dreamhost paths. I’ll try poking around the MT discussion groups, and will also change the path from relative to absolute.

And now off to a discussion about Poverty and Social Justice.

Good news: my new crontab works just fine, so I can continue to schedule posts.

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I cannot tell you how many times I have been told that a “compromise” that involves locking up gay-themed books so teens can’t get to them is a “victory” because the library’s core funding hasn’t been decimated. I assume that means that we can write off gay teens and their needs and interests, and that when it comes to library bonds, millages, and other requests for support, we don’t need or want support from gay taxpayers–or those who agree with them that a censored library is no library at all.

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I like a fully-imagined world with its own rules and logic, which is why I like ideas such as Library 2.0. Sometimes a framework is liberating. Others may not agree; but opinions are like noses*–everybody has one.

* When I was in the armed forces, we used another organ for this simile

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The voice was that of Marvin Scilken, a beloved librarian pioneer who for forty years ran his own “Library 2.0″ campaign. I can hear Marvin’s voice rasping over the phone, “The bottom line is public service. You hear me, Karen? A library, it doesn’t have a book that suddenly shows up on the best-seller list, that director should run to the nearest bookstore and buy two copies. Karen, you hear me?”

I hear you, Marvin. Like Michael Golrick, Marvin was a non-techy administrator. Marvin didn’t even grok email, let alone the Web. But Marvin believed in many principles of service that I see reiterated in a new framework in the ideas proposed in Library 2.0.

I have a longer piece I’m working on about L2, probably not for this blog, but I felt such a moment of warmth, remembering Marvin, that I just had to share.

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Responding to a private question: in Movable Type, if you use StyleCatcher, these files are kept in a “themes” directory and are called by the main stylesheet. It took me several tries to get the paths and permissions correct, so if you’re getting errors, feel free to send them to me, on the blog or privately, and I’ll help you out.

I’m also trying to create a set of links to the About page, etc. the “right” way, not just linking to the URL. If you have this template tag down pat, let me know. I’m using MTEntry tags in 3.17, but seems to work differently in MT 3.2.

I also plan to trim down the number of categories, changing some to subcategories.

Back to MPOW!

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For you who read FRL through feeds without ever visiting the site itself, I strongly encourage you to check the website for Free Range Librarian next Monday to see if you are missing any posts. Things should be smoothed out by then.

Also, if you are all interested in an act of mercy, I have a Movable Type CSS template with dimensions in absolutes, and I would like it to be relative. I have no design sense. Movable Type doesn’t offer stylesheets in relative measurements, though the Style Generator offers a “liquid design” option. I tried creating a stylesheet through the Style Generator and it was uglier than King Kong. I plan to go to a three-column approach; if you’re using RSS, you won’t care, and if you’re following the website, you’ll see the features that now fall below the fold, such as Comments and On This Day. Anyway, if you like changing pixels to percentages, Help Wanted.

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