Posts from Jefferson Market Library

At Jefferson Market Library, our 10 week drawing course for adults 55+ is drawing to a close, and we are gearing up to host an event celebrating the artists who have participated.

We will be showcasing all of the work that the students have created, on Friday May 17th from 2 p.m.-4 p.m. in our first floor auditorium. Please join us to see what has been created by the class, and have some refreshments! Additionally, we will be exhibiting some of the artwork from the course in the library's second floor reading room throughout the month of June.

The newest film version of The Great Gatsby is opening in theaters on May 10th. This is the fifth time this story has been filmed, I believe. This version boasts a modern soundtrack and promises to deliver on the fashion and visual excesses of the "Jazz Age," if director Baz Luhrmann's signature style is to be expected. Here are some titles that give a more substantial background to the time period in which "Gatsby" is set and to biographical details of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's lives. Also, I've included some links that hint at the hype and flash that the film promises to bring.

The Gilded Stage: A Social History of the Opera by Daniel Snowman promises to do what few nonfiction books about opera have done thus far: describe the evolution of opera from everyman's entertainment to one, believed by many, to be reserved for those of a select social sphere.

Many have heard about slow food, but fewer still about slow looking. This Wall Street Journal article from 2011 coined the term, referring to LSU's Hill Memorial Library and the way in which they presented their collection of John James Audubon's four-volume Birds of America (1827-38): slowing turning the pages for a rapt audience.

This Friday, teaching artist Josh Millis will begin his 10 session drawing class for adults 55+ at Jefferson Market Library. (This class is full, but check out the Creative Aging classes being held at other branches.)

Below is a list of artists whose work Josh will be showing to the program's participants over the course of the sessions. Take a look at some of the artists that the class will be using as inspiration, and please join us on May 17th for a culminating gallery show!

NYPL's small business website, smallbiz.nypl.org, can link you to hundreds of free and low-cost assistance programs through its Services Directory. New York City is one of the best places to start a business, and a wealth of small business services is available to entrepreneurs through local & state government, non-profit organizations, economic development corporations and neighborhood community groups. There are hundreds of programs, funded separately, not connected to each other, so it's hard to know how exactly what type of assistance is available.

This is a view of Broadway, in Oakland, California from NYPL's Digital Gallery. Although it's not Telegraph Avenue where Oakland and Berkeley intersect, I think it still contributes to envisioning the setting of the novel. How do you envision the area where Telegraph Avenue takes place? Do you think that this picture fits with that idea? That time frame?

If you're enjoying Telegraph Avenue, here are some suggestions on what to check out next:

If you'd like to know all about Michael Chabon's prolific publishing history, Contemporary Authors Online has an exhaustive biography of him in our online databases. As I already noted, comics have been a big influence on his work and I surprized to learn that he worked on the screenplay of Edgar Rice Burrough's A Princess of Mars (novelized by Stuart Moore as John Carter: The Movie Novelization).

Welcome back to the Reader's Den! Today we take a slight detour from our focus on New York City to the sunny climes of Northern California. Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue is a fictional place that the NYT book review calls, "a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland — historically an African-American city — aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, 'liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.' (page 287)" Unlike The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which takes place in a New York that 

Thanks to Lifetime Arts for securing funding and inviting our library system to participate, NYPL is once again able to offer free sustained art courses, taught by professional teaching artists, for adults age 55 and over. Seventeen branch libraries have received funding that enables them to host these classes, which will take place from February-November 2013, and which cover a wide variety of arts including: painting, sculpting, collage, memoir-writing/performance, drawing, and quilt-making.

Thank you for joining us for our final week of Edith Wharton short stories in The Reader's Den!

Like "The Other Two" and "Autres Temps," Wharton's 1934 story, "Roman Fever" deals with its characters' perceptions of themselves and others, and their attitudes towards the past.

At the start of Autres Temps, Mrs. Lidcote is arriving in New York on a steamer ship from Italy, after a long, self-imposed exile. Having fled New York's society years ago, when she became an outcast following her divorce, she is returning only after receiving news of her daughter's divorce and remarriage.

As Edith Wharton's 1904 story, The Other Two, opens, Waythorn has just returned from his honeymoon with his new wife, Alice. This is his first marriage, but her third. Although it seems a bit scandalous, he has gone in to the marriage fully aware of, and fairly unconcerned with, how Alice is viewed in society: she is well liked, but with reservation.

Happy New Year and welcome to 2013 in The Reader's Den!

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born in Greenwich Village into the wealthy New York Society that she would be famous for depicting in The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Although she spent much of her life living in Newport, RI, Lenox, MA, and Europe, especially France, where she spent years in her later life, she is best known for her treatment of the stiff, conformist, aristocratic world of New York that she knew so well.

This week, we are wrapping up our second semester of French classes at Jefferson Market. After Saturday's class, we caught up with Shauna, one of the students.

The Jefferson Market Library continues to offer multi-session courses in subjects taught by college professors — just like you'd take in an adult continuing education program at a university. Recently we offered a free six-session Introduction to Western Philosophy course. Here's what two participants in that course, Carlos and Shaan, had to say:

In recent decades, much has been said about the demographic changes that New York City shares with the rest of the world. Yes, we are getting older!

One widespread response has been a surge of programs to promote creativity in mid- and later life. NYPL has happily participated in these efforts, especially since 2010 when we started partnering with Lifetime Arts Inc. to offer our first Creative Aging courses, which took place in six branch libraries. Each course was taught by a professional teaching artist and lasted a minimum of eight 90-minute classes so that the two goals of the project — mastery of the basics of the art, and social engagement of the participants 

Last month at Jefferson Market, our new romance book club had its first meeting. There were cupcakes, giveaways, a great discussion of Thea Harrison's Dragon Bound, and a lot of laughter.