Fen, Bog & Swamp

 Annie Proulx, "Fen, Bog & Swamp", Scribner, 2022. pp. 100-101

I learned to read from recognizing the skeleton letters of words as my mother read me bedtime stories.  It fastened my life to books and long years of endless reading.  When I was in second grade I was excited to discover that the school had a library and every chance I got I rushed there to read and read until I was dragged or pushed out to the hatful recess playground.  One day I discovered a startling book, the tan cover showing a rocky bluff and a cave opening.  First published in 1904 it was The Early Cave Men by Katharine Dopp, one of America's early educators.  I looked long and hard at the sophisticated illustrations by Howard V. Brown, later famous for his early sci-fi covers.  I could not get enough of a drawing of two barefoot women clad in ankle-length skin dresses and fighting a bear at close quarters.  One slashed with a stone dagger, the other stabbed the bear with a spear.  Their expressions were intensely fierce.  You can't imagine what that picture meant to an eight-year-old girl who had already noticed that in books women were always pictured holding babies, crouching over a fire or handing food to someone.  Fighting a bear!  The book was wonderful too because it featured a map of the cave people's country.  It was the first map I had seen and it literally shaped the story.  The impression of Paleolithic life that book made on me has lasted a lifetime as I observed how the general population absorbed pronouncements from archaeologists,  historians and artists that emphasized the Eurocentric vision of male-dominated progressive technology.  Thinking of the women and the bear I knew the questions were not all answered.  

Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots

 

Euan Ward, "Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots, Uncovered by Amateur Code Breakers,"  New York Times, Feb. 8, 2023.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/europe/mary-queen-of-scots-letters.html

Deep in the archives of France’s national library, an assortment of coded letters listed as Italian texts lay untouched for more than 400 years. But when three code breakers — a German pianist, an Israeli computer scientist and a Japanese physicist — stumbled upon them, they discovered something remarkable.

They were, they found, not Italian texts at all.

Instead, they were part of the secret prison correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose tragic life and tangled role in the lethal dynastic and religious politics of 16th-century Europe have long fascinated writers and historians. One leading biographer of Mary described the discovery as the most significant in the study of her life for more than a century.

“We found treasure lying in plain sight,” said George Lasry, the Israeli computer scientist who led the yearlong project, which was released to the public on Wednesday, the 436th anniversary of Mary’s death.

COMMENT
A classic tale of finding hidden treasure, with the twist that a library cataloging error made the letters invisible. 

 

H-1B visa lottery starts next week.

Palak Jayswal, "The H-1B visa lottery starts next week. Here’s why some experts say the process makes it hard to hire international talent." Salt Lake Tribune, Feb. 28, 2023.  https://www.sltrib.com/news/2023/02/28/utah-works-recruit-international/

Bashir lived through the struggles of the immigration process for the next decade of his life, he said. Some of that involved his religious background, he said, without providing details. Eventually, after a law firm filed for a H-1B visa for him, he got his green card 10 years later.

“Pretty much lived in libraries, slept in my car, anything that you can see from that textbook immigrant struggle,” Bashir said, looking back. “[I was] making sure my family didn’t know what I was going through.”

COMMENT

International Students in the US can only work on campus, which means that they may be struggling financially. This student was actually homeless, but trying to hide his struggles. 

 

Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians

 

Taylor Brorby, "The Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians" New York Times, Feb. 24, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/opinion/libraries-sex-books-north-dakota.html

Last fall, I was the keynote speaker at the North Dakota Library Association’s annual conference. The theme was “Libraries: The Place For Everyone.” There were rainbow flags, paper-link chains and multicolored glitter scattered across tables. It was the safest I have ever felt back home as an out, gay man. When I was a young person, libraries were where I went to find stories that made me feel I could fit in, not only in North Dakota, but in the wider world.

...

Growing up in the closet in North Dakota in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I found sanctuary in libraries that I couldn’t find anywhere else. I ate breakfast every morning in Bismarck High School, combing the stacks and reading books by authors like James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Willa Cather. When some of the school’s football players circulated a petition to have the one openly gay boy in my class change in the girls’ locker room, I went deeper into the library shelves, tried to keep quiet and hide who I was.

COMMENT

This op-ed is technically about libraries, but it contains a library story about a place of refuge and finding identity.  

Democracy's Data

 Dan Bouk. Democracy's Data the Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them.  Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

I had read about this conference and seen it mentioned in many places as I began studying the 1940 Census.  In the context of later controversies, particularly over a question about income, this conference was frequently invoked to justify the census's decisions, to show that they had been made by expert, responsible men.  Yet for the first couple of years of my research, I found no detailed records from the conference.  I dug through file after file, box after box in the National Archives, to no avail.  I did not think I would ever discover what actually happened in that room.  Then, in what would be my final trip to that archives, in the summer of 2019, I was working my way through Director Austin's papers, and there it was, the summary minutes of the meeting, one that (although it was not a complete transcript) would allow me to reconstruct, more or less, how the Question Men built the data's frame.   pp. 33-39

One day in the National Archives, I stumbled upon  a silence in Price's paper itself.  Working through a box of bureau records, I found a folder titled "Negro Enumeration of 1920" containing a typed reply to a scholar who had, in 1922, made a reasoned case for a significant undercount of African Americans.  This surprised me.  I had never heard of serious scientific estimates of such undercounting before Price, and Price's paper hadn't said anything about Black researchers who had previously uncovered this.  Price's paper hadn't prepared me for Kelly Miller. 131

 

COMMENT

Imagine the astonishment and joy at finding the missing document after years of searching!  One thing that stands out in this story is, the meeting was well known, and known to be important.  It just wasn't well documented. 

The second story illustrates the way that information errors propagate through time.  Price's paper is frequently cited as the first research about undercounting Black people in the census.  It turned out that Miller, a Black mathematician, had already detected Census undercounts and explored the underlying causes, but since Price hadn't cited Miller's research that scholarship had been neglected. 

Transgender or Devoutly Christian?

"Transgender or devoutly Christian? An Iowa teen refuses to choose." by Casey Parks Washington Post, December 23, 2022.

Theirs was a God steeped in love and acceptance, and in the months after they left church, Sid decided he wanted to help others find the same safe space he had at home. That June, he helped organize his town’s first-ever Pride celebration.

He was 15, so he planned what he considered a family-friendly event. He booked the library for a few hours late morning, and he arranged to have face-painting and button-making booths. He invited two speakers: a state lawmaker to give the opening address, and a drag queen to read a princess book to kids.

Comment

Elsewhere in the article it mentions that Sid volunteers at the library.  After the event, people in the community called the library to complain and threatened to boycott the library.  About 100 people attended the event, and a few stood outside to protest.

How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?

 Rachel Aviv, "How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?", New York Times, October 16, 2022, pSR4-5.

Ms. Gaines-Young ended up incarcerated for a crime she committed when she was psychotic, and she became close with a prison librarian with whom she discussed the books she was reading each week. She felt grounded by a deep connection to another person, and when she was sick, she trusted the librarian's assessment of her state of mind.  When, after going off psychotic drugs, the librarian told her, "I don't fully recognize you," Ms. Gaines-Young decided to start taking medications again.  "She knew me intellectually, philosophically, and even on some level spiritually," she said.  "She was a huge barometer to judge my wellness and non-wellness. Ms. Gaines-Young went on "She wasn't treating me like a problem to be fixed only with medication.  She understood the language I was speaking."

COMMENT

The non-judgmental practice of librarianship becomes a helpful approach for a woman with mental health problems.  The connection is established by talking about books and ideas, not focusing on a medical diagnosis.