Four, four, four, four

Well, teetering beween a liking for lists and a po-faced disinclination to be frivolous I am leaning to lists. In response to the FreeRangeLibrarian … here is a tentative enumeration of things in fours.
4 novels for re-reading

• Persuasion – Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion are the favourite novels of real JA fans, he claimed 😉
• The Volunteers – Raymond Williams
• The Leopard – Giuseppe di Lampedusa
• The heather blazing – Colm Toibin

4 films for re-viewing

• The Sunshine State
• Gumshoe (Marvellous Billie Whitelaw and Albert Finney in a film with the tagline “the sleuth, the whole sleuth and nothing but the sleuth”)
• I went down
• Atlantic City (David Thomson on Burt Lancaster: “He is one of the great stars. Maybe the last.”)

4 songs

• In the garden – Van Morrison
• Bonny light horseman – Dolores Keane and John Faulkner
• Since Maggy went away – John Kavanagh/Paul Brady
• The Lakes of Pontchartrain – Paul Brady (I was listening to this again after Hurricane Katrina)

4 covers

• One – Cowboy Junkies (U2)
• Tupelo Honey – Cassandra Wilson (Van Morrison)
• Cypress Avenue Madam George – Energy Orchard (Van Morrison)
• I’m so lonesome I could cry – Cowboy Junkies (Hank Williams)

4 books that have changed the way I look at work

• The rise of the network society – Manuel Castells (a loose baggy monster)
• The consequences of modernity – Anthony Giddens
• A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts 1850-1914 – Alistair Black
• Community, collaboration, and collections: the writings of Ross Atkinson. (I have only just got this but have found Atkinson the most consistently interesting writer about libraries over the last few years.)

4 places I have lived

• Grew up in Templeogue, Dublin, Ireland
• Lived for many years in Southville in Bristol, England, where our children were born
• Lived for a while in Camberwell in wonderful South East London
• Now live in Clintonville, Columbus, USA

4 places to eat (with children)

• Pizza Express – a reliable UK chain (when we were moving to London we knew that we could not afford to live anywhere with Pizza Express or Starbucks 😉
• The Starliner Diner, Hilliard, Ohio
• La Cafe Provencale, Herne Hill, London
• The Avoca Woollen Mills, Avoca, Ireland

4 jobs I have had

• Eight months as a factory worker in Kontinental Gummiwerke, Korbach, Germany. Interesting experience as a ‘gastarbeiter’.
• Neary four years as a library assistant in (what is now) Dublin City Public Libraries. Stumbled into libraries in my mid twenties and stayed.
• Moved to England to work as Research Officer, Centre for Bibliographic Management, University of Bath.
• Director, DNER, JISC, London.

4 television programs

• The Rockford Files (Reviewing the volume of James Garner’s television output, David Thomson says: “That is the equivalent of well over one hundred movies – and if any actor could claim one hundred movies made with the wit, narrative speed, and good-natured ease of Maverick and Rockford Files he would be … Cary Grant?”)
• As time goes by
• Tutti Frutti
• Later – with Jools Holland

4 websites visited daily

• The Guardian
• The BBC
• Digg
• Technorati

I’ll have to think about passing it on … Oh why not?….: Weibel lines, Dilettante’s Ball, Merilee, Qu�dam cuiusdam.