Mythical Dangers of Democratic Socialism

Tom Huckin, "Mythical Dangers of Democratic Socialism," Salt Lake Tribune, February 26, 2019, p,. A11.

     Sometimes we go to the downtown library to enjoy an art exhibit, hear a public lecture, borrow books and videos, etc. Oddly enough, the only thing we pay for is parking.
     I belong to a civic group called Move to Amend that aims to get Big Money out of our corrupt political system and thereby have real democracy in this country.  Guess where we hold our monthly meetings. Yep, in that same (socialist) library!

COMMENT

   Huckin is not quite accurate when he writes that he doesn't pay for the library.  I use the same public library system he does and there is a line item in my property taxes,  It costs me less than $100/year.  Still, Huckin makes his point that all the services he gets from the library are a terrific bargain.

     One of those services is a meeting room.  There is nice symmetry in the fact that the tax-supported library in turn supports civic engagement and a democratic system.   Huckin's description of library use is exactly the kind of social infrastructure that sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes about in Palaces for the People (2018), which are essential to the civic life and resilience of communities.  Nonetheless, politicians often look upon libraries as luxuries.  Klinenberg asks,

Why have so many public officials and civic leaders failed to recognize the value of libraries and their role in our social infrastructure?  Perhaps it's because the founding principle behind the library -- that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage, which they can use to any end they see fit -- is out of sync with the market logic that dominates our time. (If, today, the library didn't already exist, it's hard to imagine our society's leaders inventing it).  [p.37]

     Indeed, on the same op-ed page as Huckin's editorial, Congressman Chris Stewart (R-UT-2) announces that he has organized an Anti-Socialist Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Stewart's editorial is pure nonsense, making an utterly absurd claim that offering a few government services to citizens will inevitably end in mass graves, mass emigration and starvation (Pay no attention to those socialist Nordic countries).
 
    But Stewart's nonsense shows that Klinenberg is probably right.  If libraries did not exist, dogmatic anti-tax zealots like Stewart would never allow them to exit.  No doubt they would gripe about the unfairness of  being forced to buy books, and support art and meeting spaces that harm "individual liberty" for people who choose not to read, look at art, educate themselves or vote. It's hard to say, though, what kind of freedom is actually represented by social, cultural and political isolation. As Huckin points out, the republic that Stewart claims to admire can't hold together without supporting the public infrastructure that Stewart claims to despise.

   

There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves, Too.

Milton Esterow. There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves, Too: Art Gets More Attention, but Millions of Stolen Books Have Yet to be Returned. New York Times,  Jan. 15, 2019, C1, 3.

    "People have looked away for so long," said Anders Rydell, author of "The Book Theives: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance," "but I don't think they can any more."
...

     In the last 10 years, for example, libraries in Germany and Austria have returned about 30,0000 books to 600 owners, heirs and institutions, according to researchers.

..... 

     Ms. Grimsted's work in tracking the lost volumes has advanced considerably since 1990, when she discovered 10 lists of items looted from libraries in France by the Einsatzastab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a task force headed by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.  The task force plundered more than 6,000 libraries and archives all over Europe but left behind detailed recoreds that have proved invaluable in tracing what was stolen.
...
     The Nazi targets were mainly the families, libraries and institutions of Jews but also included the Masons, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Slavs and critics of the Nazi regime. Though libraries were destroyed and some books were burned by the Nazis early on, they later came to transfer many of the worlds to libraries and to the Institute for  Study of the Jewish Question, which was established by the task force in Frankfurt in 1941.
     "They hoped to utilize the books after the war was won to study their enemies and their culture so as to protect future Nazis from the Jews who were their enemies," Ms. Grimsted said. 

COMMENT

    Everyone associates Nazis with art-theft and book burning, so it's a bit surprising to learn that they were also building libraries of stolen books, albeit with nefarious purpose.  The intent to weaponize cultural information is a truly dark side of diverse collections.  In other library anecdotes, collection diversity is is a purely good thing, essential for library patrons seeking self-knowledge and a sense of identity.

    It's not entirely clear from the article whether the primary value of returning the stolen books lies in their rarity, their information content, or in symbolic restorative justice.   According to researcher Patricia Grimsted,  Nazis looted the books specifically because of the way the information represented the specific communities they came from.  One of the books returned to heirs is described as "an important 16th century volume," but another is a "children's activity book."  Whatever their monetary value, it's clear that both books had deep value to the people who received them.

   So it seems that the sense of identity is still represented in the looted collections, even when they represent identities lost to war and genocide.  There is a conundrum that the libraries should have copies of these works, but at the same time, the way these particular copies came into the library collections is monstrous and unacceptable.  The article does not say if there is any effort for libraries to purchase replacement copies of the returned books.  However, it seems like after the books are returned, building collections to tell the history of those Jews, Masons, Catholics, Communists, Slavs and political activists would be another form of restorative justice.

   

Can't. Just. Stop.

 

Sharon Begley, Can't. Just. Stop.: An Investigation of Compulsions, Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Although I mercilessly cull old clothing, papers and even books (donating them to the local library), I keep these things, and a few others, because they connect me to people and times I will never see again. They are little tiles in the mosaic of personal identity. Our stuff expands that identity, deepens the meaning of our lives, provides security, and attaches us to our own past as well as to a world beyond ourselves. [p. 203]

COMMENT

   This library anecdote comes from a chapter on Compulsive Hoarding.  The word "bibliomania" specifically refers to book hoarding.  Hoarding is driven not so much by greed for stuff as by an ability to imagine something potentially useful in each hoarded object.  Begley describes one Victorian bibliomaniac, Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), who was driven by anxiety at seeing the destruction of books dismantled for their gold inlays.  In his old age, Phillipps wanted to sell his collection to the British national library, but the librarians were not interested. Ironically, the immense hoarded collection did, in fact, save books that would otherwise have been lost or destroyed.  Some of these books eventually ended up in libraries and archives.

    The emotional value of books is something some librarians refuse to take seriously.  Begley describes how she hangs on to certain sentimental objects from the past, but is able to let go books go since they are going to support a good cause (the library).  In Carbon Ideologies Vol. II, William Vollmann writes "Of all things I owned I valued most my books.  I hoped that someone would use them after me." [p. 629]

   In another blog post (What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home) I talk about a library administrator who thought the library booksale was "inefficient."  This man openly mocked the emotional and sentimental attachment that people have to books, and fairly often the literature of librarianship similarly ridicules love of books, particularly when people object to weeding projects.  These librarians are surprised and offended when their patrons oppose throwing out books of little value in order to make space for things that are likely to be used more often.  They accuse patrons who oppose weeding of being, essentially, hoarders.  Yet the fact that something has seen little use in the past says nothing at all about its value in the future.  One recurring library anecdote tells of discovering hidden treasure in dusty stacks.  When the dusty stacks are thrown away, the hidden treasure goes with them.

     The problem as I see it is that typical library weeding policies define only what is bad and valueless, but not what is good and worth keeping. Denigrating whole shelves of books as worthless actually is offensive to anyone who values literacy, scholarship and education.  On the other hand, a policy that described how to find and save hidden treasures would go a long way towards reassuring people that librarians are making honest and well-considered decisions about how to clear out the clutter.

A Night at the Museum

Jane Halpern, " A Night at the Museum: How a French Cat Burglar Pulled Off he Biggest Art Heist in Decades," New Yorker, Jan 14, 2019, p. 30-39.

At the age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. He broke into a library in Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street level.  He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred years old.  (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and returned Tomic's plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures, "It was intuitive. Nobody ever taught me anything." 

COMMENT

     Not one, but two stories about criminal careers that began at the library!  (see: Lee Israel).  Perhaps the temptation is that library patrons are invited to touch and use objects that are rare and valuable.  They seem to belong to nobody.

    Many years ago a graduate student friend admitted to me that he had stolen library books that were relevant to his PhD thesis.  The books were so specialized he could not imagine another person ever wanting to borrow them.   Sometimes you encounter stories of people who, like the friend's older brother, develop guilt over unreturned library books.  Sometimes people return stolen books  many years later, occasionally together with an appropriate fine.

    One college librarian I worked with used to buy books on sexual health and deliberately fail to install protective magnetic strips that would set off the anti-theft gates.  He thought there was a need to put such books in the hands of students too embarrassed to check them out.  When the books inevitably disappeared he'd simply replace them, deliberately stocking the library shelves with books meant to be stolen.

What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home

Rhonda Kaysan, "What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home," New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 2019, p BU9.

Charities that will take specific donations:...
Books and other Media

• Libraries: Call first to find out their policy for taking gently used books.  Even libraries that do not generally take donations often have a collection day for annual book sales. 

COMMENT

   Some years ago I worked with an especially arrogant male library administrator who foolishly believed that libraries should be run "more like a business."  This man used his administrative power to eliminate the library book sale which was breaking although not making much money.  He claimed it was "inefficient," but I suspect that he actually just hated print books.  He strongly believed in the mythological "death of print" and thought his own advocacy to replace print libraries with ebooks was "cutting edge."

    Fast forward to now.  That same library has re-instated the book sale as a popular periodic event.  What that administrator never grasped was that library book sales are an important public service whether or not the library makes money.  People who buy books need a way to get rid of the ones they don't want to keep.  The New York Times article points out that "used bookstores buy books," but "some stores can be quite selective."  The library becomes a place to re-distribute books in order to support a culture of reading.  Unsold books may still end up in the recycle bin, but not until they have been thoroughly picked over by people who might want to read or re-sell them.

   That same administrator, by the way, failed to grasp that non-ownership is actually one of the biggest benefits of libraries.   He believed if information were cheap enough people would always prefer to store electronic files on  their computers instead of using libraries.  It's not at all clear where he got the idea that organizing digital files is a simple, pleasant or convenient task.  It's actually a great service to be able read zillions of books without having to keep and organize them.  At the library, I can always take a chance on something that I may not end up liking well enough to read all the way through.

 

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke (By the Book), New York Times Book Review, December 30, 2018, p.7.

What kind of reader were you as a child?I loved the bookmobile. My favorite books were the Hardy Boys. When I was growing up, people did not have a lot of discretionary income, and on Thursday afternoons the arrival of the bookmobile on our dead-end street sent kids running down to the cul-de-sac to be first in line for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  In many ways it was a grand time to be around. 

COMMENT

     The Hardy Boys is hardly great literature, but in the context of the miraculous bookmobile it became life-changing reading for Burke who grew up to become a mystery writer. It's hard to imagine the Internet having any kind of similar effect to foster a love of reading within a whole neighborhood of kids.

     Burke mentions that his family didn't have a lot of money to spend on books. One way that libraries can promote their service is by reminding people how much value their library card offers. Recently, the Salt Lake Public Library and other libraries have started to print receipts that estimate how much money you saved by borrowing library materials instead of buying them.  In 2018, my teenage daughter borrowed over $1000 worth, and I borrowed at least as much. My property taxes for the library are less than $100/year.  Offering a visible metric also has the psychological effect of making me want to borrow even more stuff so that I can feel virtuous for getting such a good bargain.

     Nonetheless, I have been at meetings with librarians who have pooh-poohed the importance of cost savings through shared resource use (these people tend to be administrators who earn about double the local median income). Their argument is that digital information has become so cheap that people will inevitably prefer the convenience of purchasing what they want over the inconvenience of using shared library resources.  Yet even among the rich, who would want all those Hardy Boys books cluttering ups their McMansions?  Kids (and adults, but especially kids) go through reading stages. There may be a few "keepers" but it's a feature, not a bug to be able to give books back once you have read them.  It also solves the problem of books you liked too well to simply toss but will probably never read again. 

   Another library solution to the problem of book clutter, of course, is to host periodic book collection and book sales events.  It's a mistake to think of book sales as simply library fund raising.  They are actually an essential public service for many library patrons.

No Good Alternative (Carbon Ideologies v. 2)

William T. Vollmann. No Good Alternative, (Carbon Ideologies v. II), Viking, 2018 p. 217.

     By 1980, world coal production totaled 71.2 quadrillion BTUs.  By 2011 it had more than doubled to 152.5 quads. It had to, to accomplish all the thermodynamic work we commanded. After all, given (as I keep repeating) that our power plants needed to burn three pounds of it in order to utilize one pound's energy, coal didn't stretch terribly far.  As the following table shows, keeping the lights on for a single hour in the reading room of one of those Western Virginia libraries that I frequented while writing Carbon Ideologies might take 20 pounds of that good old brownish-black stuff-- which meanwhile released 49 pounds of carbon dioxide....

COMMENT

     Vollmann was on the road investigating the worldview that defends burning fossil fuels despite the existential threat of climate change.  His book is framed as an apologia to people of the future, now living on a hot, miserable and resource depleted planet.  

     As he was writing, Vollmann used public libraries for temporary office space and  information research.  The availability of fast Internet, lighting, office furniture and research sources enables him to work remotely.  The network of libraries means that people can check in to work from remote locations.  It's especially great for writers who may need to do a little fact-checking. 

As he often does throughout the book, Vollmann  muses about the energy use of his ordinary life.  In this instance, though, he doesn't point out that the 49 pounds/hour of carbon are at least shared between many library users instead of squandered by a single individual. The table he cites is from American Electricians Handbook  (2002) --  "Cutting, inspecting, sewing dark colored cloth; Also: Library reading rooms" clocks in at 60 watts per square foot,  where 1 watt = 3.413 BTUs per hour when lit by incandescent filament lamps, so the library could also save energy by using energy-efficient fluorescent or LED bulbs,  or for that matter, lighting the reading room with sunlight from windows.

It's a Dog's World in the Lab

James Gorman. “It’s a Dog’s World in the Lab: When it Comes to Research, Scientists Favor Canines Over Cats by a Large Margin.” New York Times, December 30, 2018 p.F14 [Originally Published Feb. 26]

And now the numbers: A search of Pub Med, a database that include most biomedical journals, yielded 139,858 results for cats and 2,850,000 for dogs.  These are sample searches, of course, and don't say much about the kind of research that was undertaken. As for journalism, my searches on the news database Nexis for dogs and cats kept returning more than 3,000 hits, which my screen warned my would take a long time to retrieve.  So I settled for searches of “dog genome” and “cat genome.” The result, 20 for dogs, 6 for cats.  The dog genome was sequenced before the cat genome.      I would caution against concluding anything based on this haphazard browsing other than the results do back up the researchers’ sense that there’s more research on dogs. 

COMMENT

      Journal databases provide a quick and dirty estimate of the relative number of scientific studies.  The researcher used Pub Med for scholarly journals and Nexis for news, two databases that most librarians would be familiar with. One assumes that the author was a savvy enough searcher to realize that the letters "CAT" and "DOG" don't always mean felines and canines.

   The author does not actually say whether these databases were from a library or not.  Pub Med is a service of the National Library of Medicine, though, so it's technically a library regardless. Nexis is an expensive subscription so a library is the most likely point of access.

     When people search online databases they often miss the fact that they are a library service.  Scholars at universities sometimes claim that they never use the library because they can find all the articles they need online.  These researchers don't realize that the library has paid for their access or that convenient links to articles from Google Scholar are thanks to library software that integrates database subscriptions into the search.

A more formal version of this kind of citation analysis is frequently used in bibliometric studies to trace the development of scholarship-- say the use of the word "Sustainability" after the publication of the Brundtland Report, [1] or the rise of the word "Anthopocene" as a metaphor for human influence on the Earth. [2]
   
   [1] Schubert, András, and István Láng. "The literature aftermath of the Brundtland report ‘Our Common Future’. A scientometric study based on citations in science and social science journals." Environment, Development and Sustainability 7, no. 1 (2005): 1-8.

[2] Belli, Simone. "Mapping a Controversy of our Time: The Anthropocene." inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225-248.

Brondizio, Eduardo S., Karen O’brien, Xuemei Bai, Frank Biermann, Will Steffen, Frans Berkhout, Christophe Cudennec et al. "Re-conceptualizing the Anthropocene: A call for collaboration." Global Environmental Change 39 (2016): 318-327.

Autism as Metaphor

Marie Myung-Ok-Lee, "Autism as Metaphor," New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2019, pp. 12-13.

     I ask myself why using autism the way these books do feels wrong. As a child who was disappointed to find the only Asian Characters in any book in the library to be the Japanese-American family in "Farewell to Manzaner," I am acutely aware of the importance of feeling represented in literature.  And yet, when it comes to autism appearing in literary fiction, I instinctively feel a need to protect my son from these portrayals.  He's not an Ojibwe curse, a savant or an alien.  Nor is he an emotionless cipher with no inner life.
     As a writer, I understand the absurdity of trying to place restrictions on what can and can't be written about. Keats defined negative capability as an artist's ability to transmute an experience or idea into art even if she hasn't experienced it herself; without it we'd have no historical fiction, no "Madame Bovary," no "Martian Chronicles."
     The crux of the issue is that with autism there is often, not metaphorically but literally, a lack of voice, which renders the person a tabula rasa on which a wrier can inscribe and project almost anything; Autism is a gift, a curse, super intelligence, mental retardation, mystical, repellent, morally edifying, a parent's worst nightmare.
   As a writer, I say go ahead and write what you want.  As a parent, I find this terrifying given the way neurotypical people project false motives and feelings onto the actions of others every day. 

COMMENT

    Borrowing a title from Susan Sontag's famous essay, Myung-Ok-Lee is distressed by the way fictional characters with autism become a fill-in-the-blank plot device, not people but a metaphorical illness.  She argues that this blank spot constitutes a form of erasure similar to the way that diversity blank spots in library collections render Asian people invisible.   

    For a more authentic view of people with autism, Myung-Ok-Lee suggests The Reason I Jump (2013)  by Naoki Higashida, a non-verbal Japanese man with autism whose mother assisted his writing.   Other autistic authors do have a voice to explain themselves such as scientist Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, 1995; The Autistic Brain, 2013), or photographer Rosalie Winard (Wild Birds of the American Wetland, 2008).  As for fiction, there is a fully-realized autistic character  in The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) (biologist Patricia Westerford) who seems to be modeled on someone like Grandin.  

   So the problem is not just a problem of diversity, but one of avoiding stereotypes.  The story of Asians in America is much broader than just Japanese internment camps; the story of Autism is not limited to the reaction of neurotypical people.   

     

     

     

     

The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate

Alexandra Alter. "The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith, Poet. " New York Times, January 27, 2019, p. BU4.

Monday
9:15 A.M. Get to Lewis Library on campus where the broadcast center is.  In a couple of hours, I'm scheduled to record a brief interview for an "on the Media" segment about my libretto for "A Marvelous Order." 

 COMMENT 

     It seems the life of a poet is not as relaxing as one might think!  As the poet laureate of the U.S., Smith is described as "an evangelist for her medium."  She is also a professor of creative writing at Princeton and on this particular day she is using a studio at the library to record a radio broadcast.

     These days, when a lot of poetry is often published on the Internet poets are often asked for a recording to go with the text version of a poem.  I've used the campus library for that purpose myself in order to get high-quality sound (For example, see: Can Opener by Amy Brunvand in Terrain.org)

    The library is a good place for a shared public recording studio because it's a neutral campus space, not controlled by a single department.  One department might use it to record educational podcasts, while another might use it to read poetry, and another for student projects.  Having the expertise and equipment in neutral library space means that the priorities can be set by users telling the library what they need.      

     

   

The Overstory

Richard Powers, The Overstory, WW Norton & Company, 2018.

NEELAY MEHTA

     He works for months on a role-playing space opera slated to be his greatest giveaway yet. The graphics are sixteen-bit high-res sprites, come to life in sixty-four glorious colors.  He heads out on a hunt for surreal bestiaries to populate his planets.  Late one spring evening he winds up in the Stanford main library, poring over the covers of golden age pulp sci-fi magazines and flipping through the pages of Dr. Seuss. The pictures resemble the mad vegetation in those cheap Vishnu and Krishna comics from his childhood. [108]

DOUGLAS PAVLICEK

     He's missed the complimentary continental breakfast by four hours.  But the clerk sells him an orange, a chocolate bar, and a cup of coffee, three priceless tree treasures that get him to the public library.  There he finds a librarian to help him research. The man pulls several volumes of policy and code off the shelf, and together they search. The answer isn't good.  Thing Two, that loud bastard, was right. Planting seedlings has done nothing but green-light more colossal clear-cuts. It's dinnertime when Douggie accepts this fact beyond all doubt.  He has eaten nothing all day since his three tree gifts. But the idea of eating again-- ever-- nauseates him. [187]

    He doesn't leave Portland right away.  He heads back to the public library, to read up on guerrilla forestry.  His old librarian friend there continues to be more than helpful.  The man seems to have a little thing for Douggie, despite his aroma. Or maybe because. Some people get off on the loam.  A news story of an action near the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness gets his attention-- an outfit training people how to blockade logging roads.  [206]

PATRICIA WESTERFORD

     Journal articles have always been hard enough.  Her years as an outcast come back to her each time she writes one, even when she's only one of a dozen coauthors. She feels even more anxiety when others are on board.  She'd sooner retire again than inflict on those beloved colleagues anything like what she once suffered. Yet even journal articles are a walk in the woods compared to writing for the public.  Scientific papers sit in archives, matters of indifference to almost everyone.  But this millstone book; She's sure to be mocked and misunderstood in the press.  And she'll never earn out what her publisher has already paid. [219]

ADAM APPICH

     He squeezed through a channel in the milling crowd, alongside the People's Library.  He can't help grazing the shelves and bins. There's Milgram's Obedience to Authority, marked up with a  million tiny marginal words. There's a collection of Tagore. Lots of Thoreau, and even more copies of You vs. Wall Street.  Free circulation, on the honor system.  Smells like democracy to him.
      Six thousand books, and out of all of them all, one small volume floats up to the surface of its heap like a fossil coughed out of a peat bog. The Golden Guide to Insects.  Bright yellow-- the only real edition that classic ever had.  In shock, Adam picks it up and opens to the title page, ready to see his own name gouged there in smudgy no.2 all-caps balloons.  But the name is someone else's, inked in Palmer Method cursive: Raymond B. [427]

DOROTHY CAZALY

     The knock gets faster and louder.  She crosses through the living room, reviewing in her head the defense of their property rights that Ray has helped her prepare.  She has spent days at the public library and the municipal building learning how to read local ordinances, legal precedent, and municipal code.  She has brought back copies to her husband for explanation, one stunted syllable at a time.  She has pored through books, compiling stats on just how criminal mowing, watering, and fertilizing are, just how much good a reforested area and a half can do. All the arguments of sanity and sense are on her side. [468]

COMMENT

      The nine main characters in this novel use libraries in various ways that turn out to be pivotal to their life stories. The Dr. Suess book used by Neelay, the computer game designer, is pretty clearly The Lorax; Two of the characters use the library for civic engagement to investigate laws and policies, leading to acts of civil disobedience in defense of trees; The small-town librarian is portrayed as helpful, and maybe even a bit  conspiratorial in support of environmental activism; At the Occupy Wall Street library, an explicit metaphor for Democracy, one character reconnects with his childhood innocence, which leads him to an act of noble self-sacrifice.

     In her evaluation of the academic library Patricia, a field biologist, describes the contrast between unreadable scientific information and the stories that people tell to actually make sense of the world understand (another character, a psychologist named Adam Appich,  makes the same point from a different perspective), and a third storyteller is not a library user but a mystic who hears the voice of the trees directly without the filter of  science or human interpretation.

     These libraries are not just incidental plot devices.   In the narrative they offer enlightenment. The the library is almost like an oracle, offering up a book or new article that shows the next step.  This book is not anti-science, but one of the themes is about information--  laws and policies can be wrongheaded and scientific prejudices can prevent people from connecting with the mysteries of the world around them.  Nonetheless, the truth is there for people who take time to do their library research.

      

An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

Walter Terry, “An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance.” Smithsonian, Oct. 1980, p. 61-69.

     The procedure for mounting each of the historic dances in “early Years” varied.  Rehearsals went on in company studios or in the University of Utah’s old Kingsbury Hall. But coaching sessions and practice also took place wherever and whenever there was time; individuals sought out advice from from New York to Hollywood. They sat in screening rooms at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, the greatest dance archives in the world, or they huddled by screens at home to see movies, whole and fragmentary, of the dances they were preparing. They sprawled on studio floors while listening to reminiscences and they rehearsed and sweated on those floors as they strove to capture the past 

     On occasion, someone from he Dance Notation Bureau in New York City would come to them with the score of a dance recorded in Labanotation, a highly accurate and detailed system. (It is named after Rudolf von Laban, pioneer, along with Mary Wigman of Germany’s modern dance, and it can record the position of thumb and the flicker of an eyelid as well as vast patterns by a huge company.  After notation set the dances, “live” experts would come to place final touches because, says Chmelar, commenting on one weakness of the notation system, “the breath of life is missing.”

COMMNET

     Here's a truly amazing story of extreme library research. The Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) re-constructed a program of early modern dance performances from the 1920s-50s from evidence left behind.  The problem is, of course, that dance happens in the moment.  The traces it leaves are in the memory of the people who did it or saw it.  Other than that, the movement has been translated into words or images.

     But what about movies?  What about the that Labanotation?  The problem is, says  Robin Chmelar who performed Isadora Duncan choreography in the show, "the breath of life is missing."

     Walter Terry, the dance critic who wrote the article, hated this project. “In theory, the multiple-source procedure used by the RDT to stage its fist program of historic dances was admirable.  But there were pitfalls," he wrote.  Terry believed that the movements of modern dance are inextricably connected to the original style of the original dances, and that the dances could only be properly transmitted by a teacher/guru who had learned the original.  Linda C. Smith, who was Executive/Artistic co-director of RDT felt differently.  If the dance had validity, she responded, then it had validity on her dancing body.    

       In library terms these two are arguing over preservation issues.  In Terry's view, the recorded traces in the archive are memory aids, but not living documents.  Smith, by contrast, views the archives as preserving a form of memory that can be re-activated in a meaningful way. 

     I actually saw this program back in the 1980s, and it made a big impression on me.  It was not merely danced, but was accompanied by a lecture on dance history.  The audience left knowing who the original artists were and why they were important.  Seeing these dancers with the "breath of life" was an entirely different experience from watching films or looking at still photos in books.  I think Terry was wrong to think that the reproductions were "tampering with history".  We recreate fictionalized history in all kind of ways with novels, movies, and plays and other art.  Why not  use what's in the  library archives to re-create an experience of seeing early modern dance?  As Linda C. Smith pointed out, she never claimed to impersonate Isadora Duncan.  Rather, she was dancing her own interpretation of dances that Duncan made, taking the inspiration of the dances into the future. 

One Elf's Path

Jenifer Schuessler, "One Elf's Path: Turning Satire Into a Legacy, New York Times, p. C1.

     Now [David] Sedaris has sold his archive to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, where his manuscripts, drafts, notebooks and other scraps will be part of the library's rich holdings relating to social satire from the likes of Gary Trudeau Saul Steinberg, David Rakoff and Mark Twain.
     The more than 150 volumes of Sedaris's complete diaries will be off limits during his lifetime. (A second volume of excerpts is in the works.) But the archive contains some three dozen other handmade books from his prefame years that hint at their visual and tactile richness.
      Timothy G. Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said the archive showed the years of exploration it took Sedaris to become an "overnight" sensation. 

COMMENT 

     Before I started to collect library stories I did not realize how newsworthy archival acquisition can be.  If I were not reading through the limited perspective of librarianship, I would have read this article as primarily a biographical story about the writer David Sedaris and  his career as a humorist.  In library terms, though, the story is about archiving, and the newspaper article itself becomes part of the biographical archive. 

  The particular collection includes juvenilia.  Apparently as a second grader Sedaris was already showing the talent that would lead to his future career.  Between 1984 and 1990, he made unpublished art books for his friends.  He didn't get famous until he  broadcast "The SantaLand Diaries" in 1992.

   Fame, in other words, is what specifically attracted the archivists since the Beinecke is collecting around a theme of social satire.  It's not always obvious how or where to place limits on what libraries collect.   How do you know now what will be valuable to the future?   In different ways, journalists, librarians, and authors are all engaged in a process of  creating a historical  narrative.  The "manuscripts, drafts, notebooks, and other scraps" that were said in this collection would just be  debris in dusty boxes unless  someone thinks they are  interesting enough to put them into a story. 
     

The Light Under the Bushel

Chigozie Obioma, "The Light Under the Bushel: A Father Ignites a Passion for Reading, " New York Times Book Review, Dec 9, 2018, P20.

     By the fifth month I had read every book my father owned.  One Saturday, he returned home and asked me to get in the car.
     "I have a surprise for you."
We drove through streets clotted with people until we got to a newly painted building with an arch over the gate that read, Ondo State Library. We walked through the arch into the building, the likes of which I had never seen. There were books everywhere, on shelves, on tables, on the floor.
     "I want to register you here and bring you every Saturday here to read, "my father said.
     I wanted breathlessly as he completed the registration at the counter with an elderly, bespectacled woman who seemed in awe of the idea of a child coming in alone to read.  My father, proud, agreed and said that it was all I wanted to do.
     "That is good," I herd the woman say. "Very, very good.  Reading is like finding light, you know.  Jesus said a light cannot be hidden under a bushel"
     "That is true," my father said, nodding as the woman wrote my name on a small, square yellow card.
     "Your son has found the light under the bushel."
     She handed me the card and my father said he would pick me up at noon.  I waved him goodbye and disappeared among the crowded shelves.

COMMENT

     The author tells the story of how he got his first library card at the Ondo State Library in Nigeria when he was eight years old. He receives the treasured card along with a literal blessing from the librarian and from his father.

     Obioma relates how his mother told folktales in Igbo language, but his father's stories, told in English, seemed far more complex and interesting. One day Obioma finds out that his father has been re-telling stories he read in books, He begins reading obsessively himself. Looking back from the perspective of an adult, he realizes that his mother had no Igbo literature to draw from.  English language books were the pathway to education, but also a way to escape the limits of his own culture. He writes, "it struck me that if I could read well, I could be like my father. I too could become a repository of stories and live in their beautiful worlds away from the dust and ululations of Akure."

     Concealed in this triumphant story of education is a sadder tale about the Igbo stories that were never written down and never added to any library. Literature written in English comes to seem more important simply because there is so much more of it.

But a library card is a blessing nonetheless. I got my first library card when I was 5. The school librarian didn't believe a kindergartener could read so she asked me to read aloud from a book which had the word "orphanage" in it. I read the whole book pronouncing the unfamiliar word as four distinct syllables, or-pa-ha-nage. She did not correct my pronunciation until I had read through the entire book.  I was absolutely furious at her for letting me humiliate myself like that. But still, I got the library card and after that could take home all the books I wanted from the school library.  I never asked the librarian for any suggestions.     

Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75

Margalit Fox, "Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75," New York Times,  Jan 27, 2015, [online].

     Of her body of forgeries, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, “I still consider the letters to be my best work.”
     By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives — including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities — and leaving duplicates in their place.
     “She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”

COMMENT

    Obviously, Lee Israel (1939-2014) shouldn't have been stealing library books, but her inspiration to crime was remarkably similar to the motivation of other researchers who love to poke around in the manuscript archives. In the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) Lee Israel (played by Melissa McCarthy who deserves an Oscar) is shown in a library doing research for a biography of Fanny Brice when a letter signed by Brice herself falls out of a book. As she gawks at the letter, McCarthy perfectly captures that sense of spooky connection with history that so many researchers describe.  She shows the letter to a buyer who has the same awestruck reaction.  The star-struck reaction leads Israel into a life of crime, in part because she is so deeply pleased that her own writing is good enough to be mistaken for the words of other more famous writers.

     I have heard librarians claim that that format doesn't matter as long as the information content is the same.  Israel's facsimiles had the same textual content as the letters she stole, but clearly they aren't the same.  It's not just the chemistry of the physical object [1].  The objects that Israel stole were valuable specifically because they have that spooky connection to history, an intangible thing that  is mentioned again and again as a transformational library experience. It seems that it even transformed the library experience of literary forger Lee Israel.

[1] Hidden Traces.