Fabrication des colliers à la bibliothèque de Koho #Burkina

Dans le cadre de ses activités d’animations dans les bibliothèques, l’animateur de l’ABVBF Boué Alidou a reçu le 11 mars 2023, 07 élèves du primaire pour une séance d’apprentissage de fabrication des colliers en papier. C’est une activité qui se fait avec les feuilles des journaux et de la colle liquide. Après avoir donné les différentes explications, j’ai annoncé le premier pas sous le regard des participants en fabricant deux colliers. Il faut noter que c’est avec joie que les participants ont chacun fabriqué son collier. Ils sont partis avec leurs colliers tout en espérant partager leur création avec des amis et des frères.

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Séance de dessin à la bibliothèque de Dohoun #Burkina

Lors de sa visite à la bibliothèque de Dohoun, le jeudi 02 mars 2023, l’animateur de ABVBF, Alidou BOUÉ, a organisé une séance de dessin au profit de plusieurs enfants. Pour la réalisation de cette tâche, il a été aidé par le gérant de la bibliothèque, Kahoun Sibiri. Avant de débuter, ils se sont entretenus avec les enfants pour savoir ce que chacun allait dessiner. À l’issue de l’entretien, le choix des enfants s’est porté sur un canari. Pour ce faire, l’animateur leur a d’abord donné des explications sur ce que c’est qu’un potier et comment il procède pour fabriquer des canaris. Par la suite, il a posé des questions aux enfants sur les explications qu’il leur avait données. C’est après avoir bien répondu aux questions posées que les enfants ont commencé à dessiner le canari. À la fin de la séance, chacun a pu réaliser son dessin avec l’aide de l’animateur et du gérant. La joie se lisait sur les visages des participants.

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Séance d’activités à la bibliothèque de Humanitas

Dans le souci de promouvoir l’éducation en motivant les collectivités à davantage fréquenter la bibliothèque, le gérant de la bibliothèque de Humanitas s’évertue à organiser des activités au bénéfice des usagers. Ainsi, au cours du mois de mars, il a réalisé deux activités. D’abord, le 07 mars, une séance de lecture libre a eu lieu en faveur de cinq élèves composés de trois filles et de deux garçons, tous du primaire. Avant de débuter, le gérant a permis à chaque enfant de choisir son livre. Au regard de leur âge et de leur niveau scolaire, ils ont préféré les Bandes Dessinées. Au cours de la lecture, le gérant a remarqué des difficultés chez certains enfants. C’est ainsi qu’il a décidé de lire le livre Le 20ème de cavalerie avec eux. L’objectif a été de renforcer la capacité des enfants dans la lecture des Bandes Dessinées. Par la suite, le 10 mars, quatre élèves ont bénéficié d’une séance de dessin. En effet, chaque enfant a eu le privilège de choisir le dessin qu’il voulait réaliser. Cependant, il leur était interdit de dessiner des armes à feu, des armes blanches et les personnes nues. À travers ces deux activités, les participants ont beaucoup appris et ils ont été sainement occupés.

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Production de livres du au Centre Multimédia de Houndé (CMH) #Burkina

La production de livres au Centre Multimédia de Houndé (CMH) a repris son cours. En effet, à ce jour, c’est huit cents (800) copies de quatre (4) nouveaux titres qui ont été imprimées, à raison de deux cents (200) copies par livres. Cette phase d’impression est l’aboutissement d’une longue période de traitement desdits livres par l’équipe de l’association Amis des Bibliothèques de Villages du Burkina Faso (ABVBF) appuyée par le directeur de Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL) afin d’améliorer leur qualité. Le traitement a consisté à lire à maintes reprises les livres, à relever les fautes et à les corriger, à s’assurer une bonne mise en forme des textes et des dessins d’illustration. Ce sont donc des livres de qualité qui seront bientôt mis à la disposition des lecteurs, pour leur bonheur. Pour rappel, les livres produits au CMH sont des livres écrits par de jeunes scolaires du premier et second cycle et qui traitent de réalités locales.

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Eleven+1 really good sci-fi or fantasy novels for spring break and summer reading

Since I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory (and will add Children of Time, but not Children of Ruin), I was thinking about what other sci-fi – fantasy novels I have enjoyed reading so much that I can see myself looking forward to reading again in 5 years (say)…. Here are the other 11, in no particular order:

*Bloodchild by Octavia Butler
*The Hainish novellas and stories, by Ursula Le Guin
*Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
*The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
*A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
*The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
*Station Eleven, by Emily St. James Mandel
*Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn
*Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
*The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
*China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh

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Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Gripping for the first 7/8, especially if you are familiar with the earlier novels of the trilogy. Tchaikovsky manages to join, in one novel, the space opera genre (new planets, new technologies, faster than light travel!), with the Ursula Le Guin careful anthropological detail about a small community, and a reader favorite, the looped story with slight variations generating the feeling in the characters and reader at the same time that “something is not right.” The corvids are a great innovation. The aliens are right here, if we take the proper time perspective and have a rich enough imagination (echos of Ted Chiang’s parrot short story?). But that last 1/8 was a hot mess in my opinion… maybe really careful reading would uncover what Tchaikovsky was doing, but I just found it poorly edited.

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My review of The Deep Blue Between, by Ayesha Harruna Attah, available on African Access


A well-written and interesting historical young adult novel about two survivors of slavery in early 1900s West Africa and Brazil.

Here is the link:

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Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson

The first half was excellent. Just the kind of involved, detailed, ordinary life scifi, about a sub-light-speed travel to colonize a world far away. But the second half spiraled out, for me… and so I skimmed it. And a very clunky ending.

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Mickey7, by Edward Ashton

Enjoyable action sci-fi about colonists on a new world. Sort of like the Murderbot series. I tend to prefer more literary and involved reading, but sometimes a light touch is enjoyable.

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Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann

A student passed this book on to me. Incredible story about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and the involvement of the nascent FBI. Early staff of FBI solved the case, but left many stones unturned. The facts of the story tell an unrelentingly grim history of how settlers, often in collusion with local officials and law-enforcement and judges, used violence and corruption to leave a trail of tears. Reading this 100 years after the events should still fill every American with shame. Libertarian types especially should be confronted, over and over, with this historical record. Their naive self-serving “clean slate” rhetoric is maddening.

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Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark

An interesting novella. Her typical sharp sentences. A complex theme. A disastrous ending. Africa? My question reading it: Apparently she wrote this aged 82…. so, is it just confused, slapdash, but it comes across (the repetition) as profound? Did her publisher just say, “Muriel, whatever, your readers will love it and it’s another vacation cottage for you (and me) so who cares if it makes sense?!” Or is incredibly dense, and if you were a PhD you could do text analysis of the repetitions and “see” underlying layers of complexity that are riffing on the simple story?

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Burn-In, by P.W. Singer and August Cole

Over the last few days I read Burn-In, by P.W. Singer and August Cole. The pretension is a “realistic”-likely sci-fi thriller of the U.S. around 2040, with lots of AI automation, and the social reaction to that displacement. The prose is clunky- an odd paradox that despite million-fold improvement in computing power, most humans still cannot write good literature! Anyway, while provocative, and probably good for teaching, I found it pretty humdrum as a thriller.

The blurbs from famous creatives on the front and back cover are so over the top, it is one reason to not buy this book. Pure marketing gimmickry. The book may be worth borrowing from the library.

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Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

I read about half of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs and then stopped. As usual, the writing is witty and insightful. But the story, of an undergraduate working as nanny for a flamboyant college-town chef with a handsome, elegant husband… well, I just lost interest.

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The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden is an involved, minute look at the lives of several characters in an English town on the eve of the coronation of the queen in 1953. The characters are connected, directly and indirectly, to a playwright and a play, about Elizabeth I. In is very erudite, very literary. Most of the characters are tightly bound by social and class constraints. Some yearn to be free, some yearn to be anything but what they are. Ultimately, after slogging halfway through it, I gave up. Apparently I am not the only one. Tough novel to “enjoy.”

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On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin

Another novel I could not finish. I had wanted to read some novels set in Wales, and this was first on many lists. To me, it started out interesting and complex, but then when the twins take over, with a little bit of magical realism and a lot of heavy-handed descent into tragedy (the auction scene in particular) I just gave up and read the Wikipedia summary of the plot (rather abbreviated). I wanted to like it, but something about the prose- is “florid” the right word?- put me off. I didn’t care to follow the trajectory of the twins, and the father (Amos) limitations I found a bit odd.

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Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot

Got about halfway through this and for some reason had a hard time continuing. The realism and alienation of Silas Marner’s early life was bracing, but the interaction between Godrey and Dunstan Cass I found clumsy. I think Trollope and Dickens did those kinds of “small gentry” better, maybe? Anyway, read the Wikipedia plot summary for the ending and don’t think I missed that much by not continuing.

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Did The Day After change anything?

Listening to an 80,000 Hours podcast with Bear Braumoeller, a political scientist speaking about war and conflict. Braumoeller dropped an aside in the podcast, mentioning that there are many ways to reduce the probability of war, and especially of escalation, and giving as an example the television move The Day After. The movie aired in 1983 on ABC, and supposedly had an audience of 100 million. According to Braumoeller, “It really brought home the dangers of nuclear war. You could tell, for a while at least, it had an impact on society. It was all anybody talked about. If I remember correctly, it was even before social media, and it was clear that everybody was talking about it everywhere.” We all say things we regret in causal conversations, and maybe this one will haunt Braumoeller? I am speaking of: “If I remember correctly, it was even before social media…” Maybe he was an early user of The Well?

But let me get to the point. I was like, “huh?” How could one know whether the show had an impact? Admittedly, there was careful wording by Braumoeller: “You could tell, for a while at least, it had an impact on society.” If society is defined loosely, then the fact that maybe 100 million people watched at least some of the movie, meant it had an impact on how they allocated their time across channels? “It was all anybody talked about.” Again, 100 million people “talked” about what channel it was on, or should they change the channel, or the movie was good but now they wanted to go to sleep, perhaps? But Braumoeller presumably meant more! So I put it into Google Scholar. And WOW it turned out there were dozens of studies of before-after, and all kinds of stories. The TV movie produced a lot of academic and journalistic discussion about its impact, for sure (but is that the same thing as an impact?). After skimming abstracts for a dozen of the studies I gave up… not very convincing. Sure, the day after watching a movie about nuclear Armageddon, you might reply to a survey question that you were concerned about nuclear war. But three days after? Thirty? Isn’t that what we mean by impact?

One other problem with the argument is that, apparently, and rather glibly, one might observe that four years later a miniseries, Amerika, about a Russian takeover of the United States, was one of the biggest miniseries in television, reaching, also, an audience of 100 million! This show was the polar opposite, presumably inducing digging in of heels and escalation-itis…. “Our values are worth fighting for, no matter the sacrifice!”

Anyway, this kind of cultural event study or propaganda mass media event study is interesting and worth pursuing. Just thinking aloud, I recall the Birth of a Nation paper, the Father Coughlin paper, the Radio Milles Collines paper… Personally, I’ve always had a back burner interest in Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s tour influence, and also the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (“So you’re the little lady who started this great war,” Lincoln famously uttered). And the Trump rallies followed by greater arrests of Black motorists is a related example. One of these days.

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On the Steel Breeze, by Alastair Reynolds

Sometimes I have a small craving for science fiction, and it kicks in especially when reading regular fiction drama (in this case Lorrie Moore, in one of her slightly more serious novels, which I am 3/4 way through and was just getting depressed and not looking forward to reading, so I decided to switch). I randomly picked up On the Steel Breeze, by Alastair Reynolds, at Recycle Books in San Jose, our local used bookstore. My assessment: it definitely was a break, but frustrating. poorly written and poorly plotted, this space opera has a lot of interesting elements (3 clone central character, several levels of AI interacting with humans, super-advanced but silent “alien” intelligence). But the science, the character development, the plot, were all underwhelming, and I found myself engaged in reading drudgery that quickly leads to skipping. So, a decent airplane or resort sci-fi if expectations are low, but this is no Ted Chiang. The readers of Goodreads appear to have liked it more than I did.

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Un échec de Maigret, by Georges Simenon

Another nice police procedural. This one a bit more psychological as Maigret confronts someone from his childhood. As usual, great insights into 1950s France, at least one perspective. The descriptions of Paris in rainy/foggy weather, with everyone in the Palais de Justice sick from colds and flu, resonates! Also definitely next visit to Paris I am going to Parc Monceau. By today’s standards, the whodunit is pretty “blah” but it is good to see some of the origins of the genre. You could see this particular plot being recycled for any current detective series.

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The Female American: Unca Eliza Winkfield

The Female American: Unca Eliza Winkfield, is a re-edition of an anonymous proto-novel published in 1767, in a new edition edited by Michele Burnham. Super interesting novel about a “mixed” early American, daughter of native American princess and son of governor of Virginia (it is fiction). She ends up abandoned on a deserted island, Robinson Crusoe-style. hijinks and adventure. A bizarre mix by contemporary standards. But if Gulliver’s Travels was your model… Lots of great insights into social relations during those times.

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