Hard Times

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854.  (Pocket Books ed., Supplementary Material written by Kathleen Heal, 2007).

There was a library in Coketown to which general access was easy.  Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library — a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance but a melancholy fact that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths, of common men and women! They sometimes after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own. They took Defore to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker. Mr. Gradrgrind was forever working in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product. (Chapter VIII).

COMMENT

The "Enriched Classics" edition has a note to say that the British Parliament passed the Public Libraries Act in 1850 which created the British public library system. Dickens didn't think the public library was primarily a means of education or job training. Rather, he imagines it as a form of escapism, a way to improve the dreary lives of oppressed factory workers in the Industrial Revolution.  The hilarious opening chapters lampoon the notion of education based solely on facts and practicality. The aptly named teacher Mr. McChoakumchild instructs his pupils that it is illogical to use wallpaper with horses printed on it since they would never glue actual horses to their living room walls. Dickens indicates the high high moral character of certain working-class characters through their reading habits. Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus clown, reads Arabian Nights tales to her illiterate father. Stephen Blackpool, a scrupulously honest factory worker, has a room with little in it besides a bed and a few books. To Dickens the fiction writer, reading fiction develops what we might  these days call “emotional intelligence."  Evidence bears Dickens out. Researchers have found that reading literature actually does engender higher levels of empathy and tolerance. [1]

[1] Julianne Chiaet. "Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy," Scientific American, October 4, 2013. 

Moby Dick

Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale  1851.

EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

      It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
      So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! 

COMMENT

Melville seems to be making fun of his own book by starting out with a librarian, a sad, unadventurous person who "belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm."  Yet the librarian is acknowledged to be good company and has helpfully compiled a bibliography of whales. He will reappear in the narrative (Chapter 32: Cetology) speaking in the first person in order to catalog actual whales.  Personally, I was so pleased by the presence of the librarian in Moby Dick, that I wrote a poem about him. [1]

Cetology 

Sometimes on days when work is slow
I take my lunchbox and I go
Down by the People’s Freeway
To the Garden of Modest Bureaucrats

Where I breathe the intoxicating patchouli
Narcissus scent of paperwhites
Planted in the Grove of Inferiority
Complex with Attitude near the statue

Inscribed, “To that sallow Sub Sub Librarian
Whom Melville mentioned in his book
Which is mostly about people chasing whales”
The Librarian, too, was hunting Leviathan

And met with notable success
Finding him swimming though Genesis, Psalms,
Job, Milton, Shakespeare’s plays;
The Marine Mammal Protection Act

Had not yet been written; Whales were prey
To Quakers and cannibals, but soon the bureaucrats
Would arrive armed with regulations; the whales
Would be saved from pagan harpooneers;

Melville, or at least his doppelganger Ishmael,
Was misguided when he wrote that chapter
Overstating the eternal, unbreachable
Future of those immensely vulnerable creatures,

Now even the oceans have become too small
To absorb the wrath of those damned whalers
Who must forever blame something
For whatever limb it was they lost at sea

While the Librarian sat calmly compiling
Folio, octavo, duodecimo, of cetology
Steadfastly refusing to be drowned
When all hands on the ship went down.


[1] Amy Brunvand,  Pink Birds and Beasts of Land and Sea, Journal of Wild Culture, 7/15/2016.

Transported

Ruth Franklin. Transported: How should children’s books deal with the Holocaust? New Yorker, July 23, 2018, 64-69. 

I was fourteen when “the Devil’s Arithmetic” was published. Although it won numerous awards, no teacher or librarian ever gave it to me.  I wish someone had, because the book speaks in a profound way to the painful paradox I felt then and still feel now: how to be an adequate witness to something I haven’t myself experienced.[p. 66]

COMMENT

In this anecdote the librarian has failed, probably without ever knowing that this student needed to learn about the Holocaust.

Franklin writes that as a child  she had relatives with tattoos on their arms who had survived the Holocaust, but she had little information to understand exactly what it was they had survived. She was given “The Diary of Anne Frank," an excellent book, but one that stops at a confusing place. An adult would know the implication of the Frank family being sent off to Nazi death camps. To a child the ending conceals the true atrocity.

Children are often aware of horrifying world events, but lack vocabulary or background knowledge to really understand the truth of what happened. Adults want to protect not only kids but also themselves from facing the full horror. They end up either refusing to talk about it or offering information so thoroughly sanitized that it doesn't really make sense. 

 “The Devil’s Arithmetic” uses fantasy as a frame to help children cope with emotionally difficult information. Some adults didn't like the use of fantasy for such a serious subject, but Franklin thinks it would have worked well for her 14-year-old self.  In the documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” Fred Rogers uses hand puppets to address children’s fears after the assassination of President Kennedy. Through the voice of Daniel Striped Tiger, Rogers timidly asks Lady Aberlin, “What does “assassination” mean?”

Probably Franklin never asked for book suggestions. If so, what could a librarian have done? It might have been hard to guess at this particular information need. An astute librarian who knew that there were Jewish families in the community might have made a selected list of Holocaust books for kids-- something that a kid could pick up without having to ask a scary adult. [1]  But often, kids find the kind of books that adults don't quite like through word of mouth. 

[1] A letter to the editor in the August 6 & 13  issue of the New Yorker says that quite a lot of Children's literature about the Holocaust was written in Yiddish but for the most part it was never translated.

Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects

"Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects," [poem] in Heid E. Erdrich. National Monuments. Michigan State University Press, 2008.

Guidelines for the treatment of sacred objects
That appear or disappear at will
Or that appear larger in rearview mirrors,
Include calling in spiritual leaders such as librarians,
Wellness-circuit speakers and financial aide officers.

COMMENT

Erdrich's poem refers to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990). It's not only delightful to see a poetic interpretation of a government publication, I also appreciate the tongue-in-cheek appearance of librarians in the role of spiritual leaders.  Libraries, wellness and financial aid are indeed useful support services, though let's be honest, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Much of Erdrich's poetic work references the role of cultural heritage organizations -- libraries, archives and museums-- and their treatment of Indigenous knowledge and artifacts. In National Monuments the theme is human remains presented as spectacle, as if there were no longer any living relatives of those mummies and bones, as if certain kinds of dead people weren't really people at all. 

I also recommend Erdrich's latest book of poems* for librarians who would like a poetic introduction to issues surrounding the collection of Indigenous knowledge. There are a lot of good scholarly articles, too, but they won't have the same emotional punch to the gut.

*Erdrich, Heid E. Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. MSU Press, 2017.

Earth and the Librarian

"Earth and the Librarian," in Jean Valentine, Break the Glass. Copper Canyon Press, 2010, p.25.

COMMENT

I love this poem so much.  Delicious little books of baked earth pretty much describes what I hope to give people who come to the library. 

American Eclipse

David Baron, American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018.

During long days at the James Madison Memorial Building, across from the U.S. Capitol, I requested box after dusty box from storage and discovered a priceless lode; faded, handwritten letters; dog-eared news clippings, telegrams and train tickets, photographs and drawings; and fragile, yellowing diaries that retained the observations, dreams and desires of people who, like me, found magic in the shade of the moon. As I read these aging documents in the sterile glow of fluorescent lights, I grew immersed in a narrative far richer than any I had imagined.  Those relics revealed a tale not just about eclipses, but about how the United States came to be the nation that it is today. [p.xii] 

COMMENT

     Libraries often measure the value of collections with use statistics. The word "dusty" typically indicates that something has not been recently moved and therefore it is obsolete and unneeded— a target for weeding in order to free up valuable space for “better” uses than “book storage” ("storage" being another word that indicates an item not actively circulating even though it is on an open shelf). By contrast, in the context of this historical archive dusty boxes are a priceless resource precisely because they have not been used. These stored boxes contained history that had been waiting unread since 1878.  Disconcertingly, the fact that an item has gathered dust might indicate a lack of value (at least within the specific community served by the library), or it might indicate an exceptional opportunity for a researcher.Librarians generally deal with this cognitive dissonance by dividing libraries into "stacks" that value usage above all and "special collections" that specifically value rare and unique items regardless of use.

      The problem is, librarians can make mistakes when they decide how to interpret dust. In one book-weeding dust-up [1] librarians tossed a set of rarely-used Chinese language books. The librarians defended their action because "the recycled volumes were not rare" and "only one or two professors... were able to read the classical language in which they were written."  Of course, all foreign language material has an inherently limited audience. The fact that the librarians couldn't read the language probably should have prompted them to defer to someone who could. Instead, they deemed classical Chinese scholarship old-and-in-the-way of a new Center for Student Life, re-purposing dusty stacks for academic offices, multi-purpose rooms and a cafeteria.While a cafeteria probably will get more use than Chinese books (everybody eats), it also replaces an opportunity for scholarship with a far less educational opportunity for lunch.

      Some librarians (I'm one) believe that in the age of the internet when many books are fairly easy to get stacks should become more like special collections. The dusty books that lack immediate value could be cleared away in order to make space for dusty boxes full of hidden treasure. The only obstacle is, in order to do that librarians would need to write an active collection policy to use in tandem with their weeding guidelines. Due to bureaucratic divisions between stacks and special collections as well as pressure from space-hungry outsiders who want to colonize library space they typically don't.  Most libraries engaged in massive weeding projects have a policy that says what to get rid of, but no policy for what is essential to keep. 

[1] Bluemle, Stefanie R., and Carla B. Tracy. "The lives of books: Legacy print collections and the learning-centered library." College & Research Libraries News 75, no. 10 (2014): 560-581.

Seeing My Son Read is a Bittersweet Joy

Viet Than Nguyen. Seeing My Son Read is a Bittersweet Joy. New York Times, August 5, 2018. p.4SR.

Books were not a priority for my parents, so we never had them in the house. I would go to the public library every week and stuff my backpack full of books, which were barely enough for a week. I never owned my own until high school. My son has a bigger library than I ever had.  While my parents showed me they loved me by making sure that I always had enough to eat, I show my love for my son by making sure that he always has enough to read (as well as to eat). For me, the library was a second home, and I want my son to have his own home

By 11 or 12, I knew how to get to my second home by myself, on foot or on the bus.  But in remembering that childhood library, what I also know is that libraries are potentially dangerous places because there are no borders. There are countries called children’s literature and young adult literature and adult fiction, but no border guards, or in my case, parents to police the borders and protect me. A reader could go wherever he or she wanted. So, at 12 or 13 I read Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and Larry Heinemann’s “Close Quarters."

COMMENT

     We may not normally think of letting kids get inappropriate books as a desirable function of the library, but considering how often reading the “wrong” book influences the course of someone's life it strikes me as a particularly valuable service. There is a kind of coming-of-age that happens when a child starts reading books that reveal  truly shocking adult knowledge. Reading these books becomes a formative experience precisely because the reader was so ill prepared. Some kids can find such transformational books on their parents’ shelves, but Nguyen’s refugee parents didn’t have any books at all. The library had to facilitate his coming-of-age.  Luckily, the librarians provided guidance for curious kids by dividing books into shelves for children, young adults and adults. Any child who wanted to sneak a peek at adult secrets would know exactly where to look. Nguyen, now a protective parent himself, is absolutely right that by learning to read his son is “one step further on his own road to independence, to being a border-crosser, someone who makes his own decisions, including about what he reads and what he believes.” I like to think that Banned Books Week helps this coming-of-age process along.