Genevive Oswald [Obituary]

Marina Harss, "Genevivie Oswald, Innovative and Eclectic Dance Archivist, Dies at 97," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p. 25.

      In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Me. Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
     Ms Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library's main building on 42nd Street.
     She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library's ground floor.  In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center.  This year it celebrates there 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which had grown to more than 41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
.....
     Sometimes those records become a vital  link to a tradition in peril.  As the dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Ms. Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at there Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.

COMMENT
     An obituary for a New York Public Library archivist shows how the methodical, longitudinal work of librarians and archivists can have a profound impact on community.  A small archival collection started 75 years ago has become one of the world's major dance archives through years of collecting and preservation.  It strikes me that it would be difficult to sell this kind of specialized project to contemporary library administrators who would no doubt find it too expensive, too specialized, too space-intensive and insufficiently "cutting edge" (i.e. technological). Yet I've used this collection myself to write about dance for  Catalyst magazine  in Salt Lake City, Utah.

     The deep cultural importance of the dance archive is captured in the story of how the collection facilitated cultural restoration in Cambodia after a horrific genocide.  It's hard to overstate how important it must have been for survivors to know that these dances had survived. It's an extreme instance of how library collections can serve to support community resilience by preserving a record of how things were before the disaster.

    The obituary describes the problems of preserving the ephemeral art of dance which depends on years of specialized training and disappears into the moment.  Gegi Oswald said that she was "collecting around the absence of the dance itself."[1]   Perhaps in a way, that is not so different from other library and archival collecting where the historical moment recedes into memory leaving only traces behind.

    I have long thought that libraries should give all librarians at least a little money and space to collect their own obsessions.  Who knows what one person might be seeing that everyone else has missed?

[1]See, An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

 
   

.  

       

He's Caught On With Voters

Trip Gabriel, "He's Caught On With Voters, However They Say His Name," New York Times, March 29, 2019, p. A1.

"This was supposed to be a little meet-and-greet Q. and A.," he told hundreds of people in a college gym in Rock Hill, after his event was bumped from the library to accommodate a wave of RSVPs. 

COMMENT

     Pete Buttigieg who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana is running for president. He scheduled a small meeting room at the library to launch his campaign, but an unexpectedly enthusiastic response meant he had to change the venue.  Nonetheless, the library offered space for citizens to meet a candidate in person.  This kind of space is essential for the democratic process, especially for state and local politics where there is not a lot of money. 

The Stack

Katherine Schulz, “The Stack”, New Yorker, March 25, 2019, pp. 28-31.

It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure.  I do know that when he was nineteen he let Michigan for Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had so impressed him when he first arrived in America.  Instead, he found penury on the Bowery.  To save money, he walked each day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library.  Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he found there.

COMMENT

Here’s another version of the same story Frank McCourt told [1]— an immigrant finding the American   at the public library.  When the father has a bit more money and his own house he becomes a bit of a book hoarder, saving everything he has read in a large, sorted stack in his bedroom. 

In the essay, his daughter says that she keeps two photos of her father on her desk— one that is an image of him and another image of his stack of books.  Of the book photo she writes, “I can’t imagine a better image of the kinds of things that normally. Defy a camera.”  As in other library stories,  the reading list is described as a reflection of a person’s soul. From stories like this it seems clear that one of the reasons that people love libraries is that the books they have read are in the stacks.  The collection reflects a little reflection of the true self of each and every library borrower.  

Reading is a reflection of both true self and an aspirational self. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile is a haunting graphic novel in which a reading list comes to seem more representative than real life.  [2]

[1] New in Town

[2] Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010.

Sustainability: A Love Story

 

Nicole Walker, Sustainability: A Love Story, Ohio State University Press, 2018.

     Jill and her husband, Chuck, were Flagstaff icons.  Jill delivered half of the people's babies.  Chuck played music for those babies when they grew up and attended sing-alongs at the library.  He played guitar at the Hullaballoo and guitar at the Concert in the Park. He hosted sing-alongs and bonfires and they both were featured at the Viola Awards in 2013.  I saw them there. They told me they were moving to Portland.
... 

They moved to Portland because Jill would have whole days off. Whole lives without on-call shifts. Chuck could move beyond the local festivals and libraries, play big shows in the bit city.  [131-132].

COMMENT

     This is both a library success and a library failure told in practically the same breath. Sing-alongs at the library are  part of building a resilient community, but Chuck, the musician, can't make a living doing it. His ambition to have a musical career is incompatible with volunteering time at local festivals and libraries. When he decides to move away, the community resiliency of Flagstaff is eroded in order to fortify an already vibrant musical scene in Portlandia.

    Several other library stories view the library similarly as a second-rate stop-gap for things like Internet access, [1] government assistance, [2] or a social support network. [3]   It's a downside to the the library's model of sharing-- things seem to be free that are not really free. Deserving artists don't always get paid. Compromises and inconveniences necessitated by sharing space and resources come to seem like deal-breakers.

     One lesson from this story is that librarians should be mindful to support local artists and performers by hosting readings and performances that give them a chance to sell books and recordings. The Salt Lake Public Library, which has long had a local music collection,. has set up a website called Hear Utah Music (HUM) that streams a curated collection of  songs by Utah artists in order to help support the local music scene.  Maybe this collection will help draw bigger audiences which the bands play a gig so the musicians don't have to move to Portland to live their dream.

 

[1] The Gap in Broadband Access

[2] At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length

[3] Baby Center

Like This or Die

Christian Lorentzen, "Like This or Die: The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm," Harper's, April 2019, p 25-33.

To be interested in literature all you need is a library card. Literature is any writing that rewards critical attention.  It's writing that you want to read and read about. It's something different from entertainment. It involves aesthetic and political judgments and it's not easily quantifiable.  Negativity is part of this equation because without it positivity is meaningless. 

... 

The past two decades have been a phase of upheaval, panic, and collapse.  The crisis of closures that has struck America's regional newspapers hit their books pages first.... But as these losses piled up, it was difficult to feel that something wonderful had been lost, even if it had real value in swaths of the country that were losing many things all at once.  What mattered most were the big city papers, especially the New York Times and, as [Elizabeth] Hardwick wrote, "All those high school English Teachers, those faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe in the judgment of the Times and who need its direction."

COMMENT

      This view of libraries is contradictory.  All you need is a library card, and yet the librarians are lumped in with those poor provincial souls dependent on Times reviews to know what to read.  The writer, a book critic, wants people to read and appreciate capital "L" Literature and engage with some national community of readers and writers. He pooh-poohs the idea that regional writing matters compared to the 750 or so books reviewed annually in the New York Times Book Review. 

  And yet he knows what's going on in publishing-- "An ever consolidating set of big houses in New York and an ever expanding array of small presses across the country."  Personally,  I find myself  gravitating increasingly towards small publishers such as Milkweed Editions or Torrey House Press, and spending more time with literary journals (I especially like Bicycle Almanac, Dark Mountain,  Orion, saltfront, Sugarhouse Review, and Terrain.org).

     I am a librarian who also writes book reviews but reading this essay I get a sense that I am probably the type of "anti-intellectual" reviewer that Mr. Lorentzen despises.  I got my start writing capsule reviews for Library Journal -- 100 words to let you know whether or not to buy the book.  Nowadays my interests have shifted to poetry and more broadly, environmental humanities.  I read reviews to decide what to read.  I write them becasue I'm convinced that they are an essential part building of a local literary culture, supporting writers and poets whom you can hear at readings and meet at book signing events.  Since small press publications are unlikely to appear in the Times, it's up to us regional  librarians to nurture regional literature.

     Lorentzen sneers a the new Match Book column in the NYTBR that is essentially a readers' advisory -- "The world is full of desperate people." he writes. "Who know they were so desperate for book recommendations? Aren't those easy to come by in any bookstore or on Amazon?"  Well, sure.  Or at the library for that matter. But if people are going to discover literature at the library then the library has to collect literature, and approval plans are not very helpful.  There is a need for librarians to become acquainted with the expanding array of small presses across the country and someone (librarians?) needs to review the books published by them.  Lorentzen is right that the model of a few fancy critics writing for the NYTBR no longer works, but I think he's dead wrong about the irrelevancy of regional and local book reviews.  All those faithful librarians have a gap to fill reviewing, purchasing and collecting literature that's not covered by the NYTBR. 

     

   

Children's Books / Graphic Novels

Victoria Jamieson, “Children’s Books/ Graphic Novels,” New York Times Book Review, March 10, 2019 p. 18.

Craft invites us into the world of Jordan Banks, one of the few African-American students at a fancy private school. As a realistic graphic novel starring a kid of color, “New Kid” is a desperately needed addition to middle-grade library collections everywhere. This funny, heartwarming and sometimes cringe-inducing take on middle school is sure to resonate deeply with its young audience. 

COMMENT

    The reviewer, who is described in a note as “the author and illustrator of several graphic novels for young readers,” imagines this book about a middle-schooler in a middle school library where it could be discovered by kids who would see themselves in the story. This suggestion shows a canny understanding of how library collections facilitate both diversity and self-discovery.  If an adult handed this book to a kid it might be taken as a heavy-handed message.  If kids find it themselves it may seem like it was written just for them.  A savvy librarian might put a book like this on display  in the school library and simply wait for the right kids to find it. 

     

     

Donna Leon [Interview]

“Donna Leon" (By the Book) [interview], New York Times Book Review, March 10, 2019, p. 7.

What kind of reader were you as a child?I loved books about animals (and still do: Sy Montgomery’s “The Soul of an Octopus” [1] is a dream)  and about ancient history. When I was about 7, I complained to my mother that I had nothing to do. She did not hesitate but drove me immediately to the local library and took me to the children’s room and told me I could take home five books. The first was a book about Egypt, with pictures. I remember realizing that the whole world was there, in that small room.

COMMENT

Here’s yet another coming-of-age-at-the-library story — that memorable moment when a child is allowed for the first time to chose her own library books and take them home. Leon's memory of the event is so clear she remembers the details right down to the number of books she was allowed to take and what those books were about.

Leon describes a feeing of awe to think that books contain the whole world. Perhaps it’s not just the knowledge and stories inside of books, but also a newfound sense of responsibility that creates such indelible childhood library memories.  Children given the freedom to choose books are also asked to take care of them and return them on time. In a sense,  the rules of the library make them into guardians of the whole world.

[1] Sy Montgomery, The soul of an octopus: A surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness. Simon and Schuster, 2015.

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

Jenifer Senior, “Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture,” New York Times, March 10, 2019, p. SF5.

     If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways. Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it— or worse, ignored it.
     It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never giver the chance. The mob got to it first.

COMMENT

     The librarian role in this editorial is somewhere between censor and anti-censor— a type of objective reader able to judge the book by literary standards and/or market potential, not a knee-jerk reaction to identity politics. The proposed  antidote to rabid crowd-sourced Internet mobs is a professional class of critics to help sort out literary dross. As a librarian and book reviewer I appreciate the vote of confidence!

     The editorial describes a Twitter mob attack on a YA novel by Kosoko Jackson by people who had never read the book but who objected to the way a particular ethnic group was portrayed. Ironically, Jackson had seen himself as a defender against cultural appropriation, even developing “rules” for writers that claimed fiction must, for some reason, reflect the identity of its author (isn’t that autobiographical non-fiction?):“Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

     It’s so hard to get because it is not just wrong but absurdly wrong. Who has authority to declare which contemporary identity groups own which parts of history? Not only does the idea of identity censorship undermine the artistic possibilities of fiction, striving to avoid stereotypes at any cost has the unfortunate side effect of erasing authentic diversity.[1]  If authors were only allowed to write autobiographical fiction about people just like  themselves, we’d just get nothing but segregated books.

     Jackson seems to have fallen into the identity politics trap by assuming that cis-gendered white people are value-neutral regardless of ethnic, national or religious identity. Perhaps that false idea led him all unawares to write about the complicated and violent identity politics of the Balkans, seemingly without po0ndering the meaning of the word “Balkanization.”

[1] See: Autism as Metaphor.  Which is worse? To find people like you in books reduced to caricature or metaphor? or not to find people like you in books at all? 

How to Tap Your Inner Reader

Gregory Cowles, “How to Tap Your Inner Reader,” (Here to Help), New York Times, March 3, 2019, p3.

     In early high school, my authentic self read a lot of Stephen King. I had always been an avid reader — my mother worked at the local library when I was growing up, so I spent hours there after school, making why way methodically and indiscriminately from shelf to shelf and section to section inhaling it all.
     So when my English teacher asked me during a conversation what I liked to read outside of school, I answered honesty and enthusiastically. And he sneered.
     “I mean, Stephen King is a good story-teller, I suppose,” he said or something like it. “But you’re not going to learn anything about writing from him. Don’t you think you should read more serious authors?”

COMMENT

    The library as an after-school refuge; coming of age through unfiltered reading; discovery of beloved books through browsing; the disapproving (and deeply wrong) adult censorship of childhood reading -- this story has it all!

     Several other writers have related memories of clueless adults criticizing their juvenile reading choices [1] and it's obvious to any reader that these adults were dishing out terrible advice.  Who wouldn't want to write like Stephen King? He literally wrote the book On Writing. [2]

     "It's totally fine to read for pleasure," Cowles advises and he's perfectly right.

    The American Library Association has a Library Bill of Rights  that says, "Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves." It's an uplifting though,  but the language treats reading as a very serious pursuit and glosses over reading for fun.

   Author Daniel Pennac [3] rectified that with a Reader's Bill of Rights that includes "the right to read anything" (#5), "the right to escapism" (#6), "the right to browse" (#8) and "the right not to defend your tastes" (#10).  Go ahead and enjoy Stephen King, and while you're at it you might even learn to be a better writer.

 
[1] What are we Teaching Boys when we Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls? (librarian says Shannon Hale is not for boys) ; Well Read, Well Known (Teacher says Maya Angelou is not a good writer)...

[2] Stephen King. On writing. Simon and Schuster, 2002.

[3] Daniel Pennac. The rights of the reader. London: Walker, 2006.

A Seat at the Head of the Table

Emily Bazelon, “A Seat at the Head of the Table,” (The Future of Work), New York Times Magazine, Feb 24, 2019, pl. 38-.

BAZELON: Kathy, [Katherine W. Phillips] can we talk about another study you did, showing that black women may be less subject than white women to traditional expectations about femininity. 

PHILLIPS: In this study, we asked people taking an online survey to rate Asian, black and white men and women for their hireability for two jobs: security guard, a traditionally masculine position, and librarian, a traditionally feminine one.  Among other things, we found that black men and women, like white men, were perceived to be good fits for the security-guard position because they’re seen as more traditionally masculine.

COMMENT

      Here a stereotype of librarianship is employed in psychological research. This passage raised so many questions in my mind that I had to look up the article to see what Phillips’ research methodology really was. [1] Why would a highly intellectual (albeit feminized) profession like librarianship be presented as a gender equivalent of being a security guard? Did respondents really view black women as more masculine? Or did they actually stereotype black women as less educated?

    The original article says "We selected positions that exemplified femininity or masculinity, but that steered clear of strong stereotypes that are associated with the stereotypes geared to Asians (e.g., mathematical) and Blacks (e.g., athletic)." The researchers used a Princeton-Trilogy-based scale to identify traits associated with the two professions but there's no list of what those traits were for librarians. The study does acknowledge that "the librarian position may be perceived to be a higher-status position than the security patrol position. Thus, it is plausible that Asians were matched to the higher-status position due to their relatively high socioeconomic status in society."

     This is the job description the study invented for librarians: 

"Librarian. The librarian will work in the campus library. He or she will assist students in finding books and strive to maintain a quiet and serene atmosphere for the comfort of the student body."

     Good grief!

      The notion that librarians enforce silence is especially ironic. Back in the 1980s, librarianship was sold to me as a refuge for smart women who had been shut out of other options due to gender discrimination. For a time, I had wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician, and I was not surprised to find reference in this article to another study that found women with prominent math credentials on their resume are actually less likely to get a job interview.  One might expect that a pink-collar profession would be more female-friendly but I have not found that to be the case in librarianship.  Rather men are disproportionately promoted, and women are criticized for being "uncollegial" if they are assertive.  In librarianship I have encountered mommy-tracking, glass ceilings, sexual harassment, gender bias and policies that actively discourage diversity.  Questions are shut down with calls for "civility."  It's clear that I'm not the only person who has encountered this. After an incident of racist harassment at the 2019 Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association, April Hathcock wrote in her blog,

I know there are members of our profession—mostly white, though not all—who do not like me, do not like that I write and talk about race, do not like the direct and unapologetic way in which I call out systems of racial oppression. They find my work “divisive,” “uncivil,” and “unprofessional.” Some of them are leaders in our profession. Some of them were there sitting quietly as I was being harassed. When they talk about having conversations about “civility and professionalism,” they’re not talking about the inexcusable behavior that happened to me; they’re talking about tone-policing and silencing me.

     The traditional shushing isn't just an intimidation tactic used against noisy patrons.  Librarians use shushing against each other to enforce female stereotypes.

[1]Hall, Erika V., Adam D. Galinsky, and Katherine W. Phillips. "Gender profiling: A gendered race perspective on person–position fit." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41.6 (2015): 853-868.

Taking Notes on How Bibliophiles Flirt

Karla Marie-Rose Derus, “Taking Notes on How Bibliophiles Flirt” (Modern Love), New York Times, February 24, 2019, pl. ST6.

During six years of singlehood in my 20s, I became a person I did not know. Before, I had always been a reader. I walked to the library several times a week as a child and stayed up late into the night reading under my blankets with a flashlight. I checked out so many books and returned them so quickly the librarian once snapped, “Don’t take home so many books if you’re not going to read them all.” “But I did read them all,” I said, unloading them into her arms. I was an English major in college and went on t get a master’s in literature. But shortly after the spiral-bound thesis took its place on my shelf next to the degree, I stopped reading. It happened gradually, the way one heals or dies.

… 

On our seventh date, David and I visited the Central Library downtown.,
“I have a game,” he said, pulling two pens and pads of sticky notes out of his bag. “Let’s find books we’ve read and leave reviews in them for he next person.”
We wandered through the aisles for over an hour. In the end, we say on the floor among the poetry, and I read him some of Linda Pastan’s verse. 

… 

The Japanese language has a word for this: tsundoku. The act of acquiring books that go unread.

COMMENT


     Shame on the librarian. The writer describes herself as “a 5-foot-3-inch black woman born to a Caribbean mother.” It troubles me to think that the librarian was judging her appearance, not her borrowing habits. What’s more, the librarian is deeply wrong to think that taking out unread books is somehow wrong. A library is an antidote to tshundoku. Unlike the bookstore which clutters your home shelves, you can take a chance with a library book that may not turn out to be worth reading.  (See: What to Do With all the Stuff That's Cluttering your Home; Can't. Just. Stop).

     As other library stories relate, the books that people read and/or buy become deeply personal markers of who they are. Even after Karla stops reading, she considers the books she has read essential to her self perception. Her online dating profile is listed under the screen name “missbibliophile” and her taste in literature speaks for her personality. David, the boyfriend reads history and nonfiction; Karla prefers writers of color and immigrant narratives (writers on her list like  Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy and Edward P. Jones indicate the importance of diversity to her self-image) Can they overcome their differences to combine their bookshelves?

Like the writer, I experienced a period of non-reading, but I don’t think it was related to romantic disappointment or intellectual fatigue. I believe I lost my ability to concentrate due to too much screen time. I decided it was a big problem that I had stopped reading books and I cured myself by sitting down with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace until I had read it all the way through. A distraction-free long distance Amtrak trip was helpful to the project of becoming re-literate.

The library game the two lovers play is charming. It reminds me of students who leave paper money in their dissertation to reward anyone who bothers to read their work. Other library stories feature ephemera found in books (See: Lee Israel) or marginalia (See: When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered). In academic libraries one sometimes finds texts marked up with notes or highlighting from previous readers. Sometimes this seems like annoying defacement, but it’s also an insight into what impressed another reader. I shouldn't admit it, but I don't always mind if library books are marked up if it's done in pencil and not fluorescent-yellow ink.

The library in this story is also a meaningful place.  The two lovers go there on a date.  When David proposes he does it by tucking a note into the pages of a book.

All Over the Map

Betsy Mason and Greg Miller, All Over the Map: A Catrographic Odyssey," National Geographic, 2018.

Some of these maps come from museums, prestigious universities, and famous collections, but we've gone out of our way to also include maps from less vaunted sources. They've been buried in obscure government reports, long-forgotten scientific papers, private collections and dusty corders of libraries. Some are products of popular culture, such as one from the blockbuster television series Game of Thrones. Others are part of everyday life-- the kind you might expect to find in the seat-back pocket of an airplane or that you would tuck into your pocket before hitting the ski slopes. 

COMMENT

 The book All Over the Map is not an atlas, but rather a picture book of curious and interesting maps.   It could conceivably be subtitled "why digital maps suck." The wide variety of geographic representation is a reminder of how GIS makes all maps look essentially the same. In the chapter on ski area maps, cartographer Jim Niehues frets that hand-draw ski area maps could become a lost art if he retires.  His technique involves creative distortion of the terrain, orienting the layout around peaks that serve as landmarks for skiers. 

   Yet again library dust is mentioned.  It doesn't indicate worthless unused objects suitable only for the dust bin.  Rather the dust has gathered on hidden treasures waiting to be uncovered, maybe even in some of those obscure government reports lurking in the Stygian library basement (See: Autobiography of Red).

     When the database Hathi Trust digitized government reports they did not bother to digitize map supplements or oversized foldouts.  The maps they did digitize were single-pagers, not in full color.  Cartographic information was sacrificed to expedite the digitization process, probably because whoever made the decision didn't think maps were are all that important since maps are seldom a heavily used part of any library collection.  Despite such sloppiness, some librarians base sloppy decisions about what to weed on digital libraries like Hathi Trust.  If the title is online, they conclude that it has been accurately reproduced and it's just fine to throw out the library's physical copy, regardless of map supplements.  This makes me particularly mad because I live in Utah where public lands politics have been driven for years by a poorly executed Utah Intensive Wilderness Inventory (BLM, 1980).  Without good maps, the text of that particular land use document and the many, many subsequent plans are meaningless.  Even if the maps were digitized, it's difficult to see them online.  For optimum viewing, they need to be spread out on a big table.

 

   

The Other Mozart

Kylee Ehmann, "The Other Mozart," (Entertainment Picks), Feb. 23-27, 2019). Salt Lake City Weekly, Feb. 21, 2019, p. 16.

Contained within an opulent dress that covers the entire stage and balancing a towering hairstyle, Milo recreates Nannerl's isolation world, in which her genius was devalued because of her gender.  "Most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries," Milo says.  "We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss."

COMMENT

    Again, the dusty library.  Sylvia Milo (playwright, actor and producer of a one-woman show about the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus), cites metaphorical library dust to say that music by women composers is not being performed, but the dust also offers a bit of hope. The article says, "we know she continued to create music, though none of it survives."  Imagine the excitement if someone actually were to discover Nannerl's music in some dusty library.

  Lost manuscripts by W.A. Mozart still turn up occasionally. In 2014, a lost manuscript of Mozart's Sonata in A Major turned up at the National Szechenyi Library in Budapest, Hungary. In 2008 librarians in Nantes, France found a Mozart manuscript while they were cataloging the archives.  There really are some treasures hidden away gathering dust!



 

CDT Plans Show to Celebrate 50th

Scott Iwasaki, "CDT Plans Show to Celebrate 50th" Deseret News, April 4, 1999 [online].

Children's Dance Theatre artistic director Mary Ann Lee has a special place in her heart for a performance called "The Dancing Man." [1]
Lee found the book on which the performance is based the same year that CDT founder Virginia Tanner died."I came across the book when I was living in New Jersey," Lee said. "It was 1979. I remember being in a library and looking up. I saw this book. The title was one I just couldn't refuse. So I reached up and opened it."
The Children's Dance Theatre, in celebration of its 50th anniversary will present an all new production of "The Dancing Man," along with Jayne Luke's "Dance Journeys . . . Life Journeys," Chara Huckins' "Flight" and Jacque Lynn Bell's "Go," Thursday through Saturday, April 8-10, in the Capitol Theatre.

 
COMMENT

 One common way that people find library books is through browsing and serendipity.  The Virginia Tanner dance program often uses storybooks as a way to teach children interpretative motion.  The teacher reads a story and encourages children to dance out the action or the mood of the story.  In this instance the book inspired the annual dance program of the Children's Dance Theatre, a professional company of child dancers.  "The Dancing Man" was chosen to celbrate both the 50th and 70th Anniversaries of the company.  Although Lee was probablin in the library looking for approprate
juvenile books to use for dance teaching, that's still a pretty amazing influence for a book picked up at random from a library shelf. 

[1] Ruth Lercher Bornstein, "The Dancing Man," Clarion Books, 1975.