Luminaries
for the Friends of the GTCC Library 
On display in front of the Library and Medlin Campus Center
4 p.m. Monday, January 12.
There will be free hot chocolate to enjoy during the lighting.
If you have any questions concerning these luminaries, please contact Margot at mlhorney@gtcc.edu
Full text of articles from nearly 2,300 publications, many of them peer-reviewed.
Article abstracts and indexing from over 4,000 publications.
Monday - Thursday, 7:30am-6:00pm
Friday, 8:00am-12:00pm
Monday - Thursday, 8:00am-12:00pm, 1:00pm-6:00pm
Friday, CLOSED
Monday - Thursday, 8:00am-12:00pm, 1:00pm-6:00pm
Friday, CLOSED
Check out our new Service Desk and Flat Screens!
And our 3rd floor Group-Study Areas.
When: Wednesday, 3/19 at 12:00 PM.
Where: Learning Resource Center, Rm. 202.
What: Citations: Easy and Fast!
Professional Development Credit available for this workshop.
Learn about the latest tools for creating APA and MLA citations faster, easier, and more accurately than you ever thought possible. This 30 minute session will cover:
- citing with Word 2007 - the good and the bad
- using citation machines
- creating pre-formatted citations in periodical databases
- different interpretations of how to cite electronic resources
Presenter: Ms. Kristen Moore
The next LRC Lunch-n-Learn session will be March 19th in the LRC (H4, room 216) from noon to 12:30 p.m. Participants will receive Staff Development credit for their involvement. Session participants must provide his or her own lunch.
The topic is Learning Express: Online Practice Tests and Tutorial Courses. Learning Express is a comprehensive, interactive online database of practice tests and tutorial courses designed to help students and adult learners succeed on academic or licensing tests. Users receive immediate scoring, complete answer explanations, and an individualized analysis of their results.
During this 30 minute session, Anders Selhorst, the HP Campus Librarian, will cover:
• How to access LearningExpress via the library Web site and remotely
• How to set up a username and password
• An overview of the topics/subjects covered in the database, including TOEFL, GED, SAT, and others
For further information please contact Anders Selhorst:
• LRC hours: 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
• Email: abselhorst@gtcc.edu
• Phone: ext. 4112
Lunch and Learn Opportunity-First ever at the Greensboro Campus!
What: Proquest Career and Technical Education Database
What is a database, and why would I care? In library land, and for the purpose of this Lunch'N'Learn, it means a large collection of trade, academic, and general magazines with copyrighted articles in their complete form, unavailable via the general Internet (unless you pay) but available to you free through your library.
Where-Greensboro Campus, Technical Education Building (TEC), Room 123, for the presentation, followed by lunch in TEC 130 :)
When-Friday, 3/14-Program to start at 11:30, followed by lunch
What will be covered - This Lunch and Learn Opportunity will cover use of the ProQuest Career and Technical Education Database, a database designed with community college students and faculty in mind, especially those working in a trade field.
Topics to be covered include:
*Accessing the database.
*Conducting Basic, Advanced, Subject Browse, and Publications Searches.
*Use of the Set-Up Alert feature.
*Use of the Cite This feature.
*Use of the Email Results feature.
Presenter-Keith Burkhead, Greensboro Campus Librarian
Sponsored by Learning Resources/and your GTCC library
- Faculty Requests
Our efforts to encourage faculty to submit requests for needed library resources are paying off, especially the 2006-2007 fund allocation whereby we allotted $700 of book budget funds to each dept. Each of the most recent years has seen steady increases in the number of faculty requests, specifically:
2006-2007 - 135 requests (as of only Feb. 2007)
2005-2006 - 101 requests
2004-2005 - 75 requests
2003-2004 - 30 requests
- The time between placing an order for an item and when that item is processed and ready averages about 11 days (this includes a time lapse for back-ordered items, so in daily practice it's actually faster than that).
Not bad considering that in 2002 the average was 74 days (of course this was before we started using CatExpress for copy cataloging). That means we now process items 84% faster than five years ago!
Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is first and foremost, a big novel-big on character, big on language, big in time span, and big in length, 614 pages to be exact. It is has been criticized for not being so big on plot. That’s a valid criticism of the book, but it may also be one that misses the point-this novel begs to be experienced in a non-linear, dreamlike fashion. Indeed, like so much about the Vietnam War, where most of it takes place, the novel is less intent on time and place than it is on a state of mind, and changes in state of mind.
The central character is one William “Skip” Sands, a budding CIA officer whom we meet not long after JFK’s assassination at his first post in the Philippines, assisting in the fight against the Huk insurrection. Skip is wide-eyed, in country for the first time, and in love with his vision of America, which he knows will prevail against the godless Communists at this mid-point in the chronology of the Cold War. He is drawn into the orbit of his uncle, the “Colonel”, a WWII hero and something of a legend in intelligence circles. The “Colonel” is larger than life in Skip’s eyes and in his own eyes as well. After the Huk insurrection is quelled the Colonel moves on to Vietnam, and at Skip’s insistence, arranges for Skip to join him there. While in the Philippines we also meet Sgt. Jimmy Storm, who serves as the Colonel’s right hand, and Kathy Jones, a missionary nurse whose husband is kidnapped by the rebels and probably killed. Skip has a brief affair with her after her husband’s death is confirmed as she seeks relief from her grief and he from the beginnings of the disillusionment which starts to seep in after the CIA arranges the killing of a Roman Catholic priest wrongly thought to be smuggling guns to the Huks.
We also briefly meet the Houston brothers, one just leaving the Navy and one enlisting in the army, lying about his age to escape the dead-end nature of life in his small Arizona hometown, and who ends up assigned to the recon unit the Colonel arranges through Byzantine manipulation of the military beaucracy to become his personal unit for his various and often outside-the-chain-of-command operations. There is also Trung, a North Vietnamese agent who is a turncoat to his cause, and Hao, a life long friend of Trung’s who arranges his contact with the Americans, culminating in Trung connecting with the Colonel.
The Colonel becomes increasingly convinced that America will lose the war or lacks the will to do what is necessary to win, and operates more and more outside the chain-of-command. This progression reaches it’s apex in a campaign of misinformation he designs using Trung to plant the idea among the North Vietnamese that the United States is contemplating using nuclear weapons as the tide of war continues to shift in favor of the North Vietnamese. Skip, now fully caught up in his uncle’s illusions even while his Star-Spangled naiveté dissipates, is a full partner in this plan along with Storm.
The story is told from multiple points-of-view-Skips, the Colonel, Storm, the Vietnamese, Kathy, the Houston brothers, and even their mother, whose counsels are laced with ever increasing religious fervor. The frequent shifts in point-of-view seem are jarring, but this seem deliberate as we leap from one time and place to another-the jungle outpost of Jimmy Houston and his buddies, Saigon and it’s environs, the Tet offensive, a small boarding house where an assassin awaits his victim. No one is ever sure who is on whose side, and allegiances keep changing. Then the military and CIA become aware of the Colonel’s off-the-book activities, and what has been at best an unstable situation quickly disintegrates for all concerned. The Colonel disappears, maybe dead, maybe not. Hao informs on his former friend Trung to the “official” intelligence apparatus, and Trung’s death is planned. Storm, never all that stable, begins to come apart at the seams, and the younger Houston, his unit pulled from its lazy existence working for the Colonel into real combat operations, realizes to late that signing up for another tour may be the end of him.
“You don’t understand,” Nash said. “I’m not ready for this at all. I’ve only been here three days!”
“I just took a second tour, “James said. “I don’t which of us is the stupider #$%^.”
Skip quickly grows out his immaturity and blind patriotism, but has become eroded morally and spiritually by the endless ethical grey zone where he lives, works, and breathes. So jaded has he become that even acquiesces to the Colonel’s request to stay at a critical time for Operation Tree of Smoke rather than attend his mother’s funeral upon her sudden death.
Skip’s fate, set in Southeast Asia some years after the end of the war, is probably inescapable. The war makes him what he becomes, and he is so dead of soul and weary of will that he cannot make the choices needed to become something other than what he is. The other characters, especially Jimmy Houston, live post-war lives that cannot escape the scarring of a war that started out so clearly and ended in a mist of incomprehension and national self-doubt.
As mentioned earlier the plot is rather secondary to this novel. It is there, but the thread is easy to lose in the vastness of the setting, the multitude of characters, and the richness of the dialogue. At times the conversations are so strange and dreamlike that the characters seem outside the weirdness of the landscape and the situation in which they find themselves. The cast of Tree of Smoke often does not seem to know who they are anymore, and they wander among the paths of the jungle and the streets of Saigon looking for something, anything, to assure them that somewhere is a center that is still holding as the surreal hell of war continues to envelop them.
The dialouge is fast, furious, fun, and profane. Here is a sample:
One of the grunts from the LZ came into the clearing, and said “God#$%^! God@#$%!”
James realized he himself probably looked liked that-sweaty, dirty, wild in the eyes. “S@#$! s@#$!” the boy said. He ran to the clearing’s edge and faced the purple distance, the shadows of other mountains. “S@#$!”
One of his friends said, “S@#$ what?”
The boy came back and sat down shaking his head. He took both his friend’s hands in his won as if in some foreign style of heartfelt greeting.
“S@#$. I killed a guy.”
“I guess. S@#$.”
The boy said, “It ain’t no different than shooting a deer.”
“When did you ever shoot a deer?”
“I guess I had it mixed up with the movies. But this was just-bing. And now it’s over.”
“It don’t sound like it’s over, Tommy.”
“Hey. Half his skull flew up in the air. Is that over enough for you?”
“Lay it down. You’re losing control of yourself.”
“Yea, okay,” Tommy said. “I gotta lay it down.”
“Hey, let go of my hand, you fruit.”
Dark humor, death, and loss of innocence-the essence of war in a few sparse lines.
I enjoyed this novel on its own, but I suppose comparisons to the war in Iraq and the run-up, especially the faulty intelligence (I’m still wondering where the WMDs are, myself) are inevitable. They can be made, but I found Tree of Smoke to be much more about its own era.
Tree of Smoke is not a novel for everyone. But if you are looking for a knowing and compassionate interpretation of the human consequences of the Vietnamese war, then this is the novel for you.
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The Library is excited to introduce a new literature database: Literary Reference Center from EBSCO. Use it to find biographical information on authors, literary criticism, reviews and more. This full-text database combines information from major reference works, books, and literary journals as well as original content from EBSCO Publishing.
