The Testaments

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, (2019)

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent suites have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat.  The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data— coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against oppressive digital surveillance in many countries— means the it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must are assumed.  Within that range, however we are as confident as any historian can usually be (Laughter.) [p.409].

COMMENT

Libraries appear in Margaret Atwood’s fiction fairly often and she has strong, well-informed opinions about them.  This satirical paragraph is a good example.  At the end of the story, historians of the future try to piece together the evidence to figure out what really happened.   In Atwood's informaiton dystopia, digital material has utterly vanished,  vulnerable to war and misused to prop up a surveillance state.  In this story many of the words that do survive survive on paper.  Aunt Lydia records her own testimony using a antique-style pen and ink meant for teaching drawing.  

The Library Book

Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 2018.

The story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the 1986 fire required years of research and scores of interviews with current and past library staff, deep dives into the Fire Department’s archives and the City of Los Angeles’s court records, and a lot of digging through the musty boxes of material stashed in the Library’s Rare Books Room. There I found a trove of information, including newspaper clippings about the library from the twenties; book lists from the thirties; paraphernalia from every decade; and countless, fascinating odds and ends left behind by the hundreds of librarians who passed through Central Library at some point in their careers. This material was essential to the writing of this book.  I also found a great deal of valuable material in the many books and published papers about California and library history.  [p. 315].

COMMENT

The notes on the author's research process mention those d/musty boxes again.  This time they contain ephemera of a kind that might strike some people as especially useless.   Who would consider old library book lists worth keeping? And yet here they are informing a bestseller. Interviews, government information and published books and articles are also cited as part of the research strategy.   The resulting book is the story of a community told through the lens of its public library, quite literally putting the library at the center of community and community resilience. 

Better Buses Better Cities

Steven Higashide, Better Buses Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (2019).

Agencies have to do better than "open houses" that draw eight people at the library and instead think seriously about how to get public input that equitably represents bus riders and activates allies throughout the planning process. They have to discard ponderous project development  processes that result in 5-year timelines for bus lane projects and try tactical approaches that change streets overnight instead.

COMMENT

Library open houses are portrayed here as an ineffective way to gather citizen input for transit improvements.  Many transit riders can't come either because such meetings conflict with work, of the bus stops running at night.   In order to get stakeholder input, it's essential to try to get a representative sample, not just respond to a few people who manage to show up in person. 

Face it, Mom and Dad: I'm Not Special

Jenny Dolan, "Face it Mom and Dad: I'm Not Special," (Modern Love) New York Times, November 24, 2019, ST6.

     My parents owned a book called "You Can Heal Your Life" by Louise Hay along with a matching set of affirmation cards, which my mother kept in her nightstand. Hay claims all illnesses result from fear and anger.
     I went to the library and checked it out, wondering what am I afraid of?
     Confident I could solve the problem with mind power, I visualized myself as healthy.

COMMENT

     Of course, the writer is not healthy. She is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, an incurable lung disease.  Her parents, however, are so committed to positive thinking that they are unable to offer helpful emotional support for their daughter who is facing a lifetime of chronic illness and the probability of dying young.   The self help book is worse than useless.

     The irony is that libraries are a public institution that stands against the current onslaught of fake news propaganda coming out of Washington D.C.  But library shelves offer plenty of fake news -- fake self-help, fake diet advice, fake politics.  A library would probably not buy a book by say, a Holocaust denier, but right there on the shelves was a book of science denial that places the blame for illness on the person who is sick.

    Yet even this fact-free book serves a function.  The author's parents own the book and believe it offers helpful advice.  Because the library has a copy she is able to  understand why her parents seem so dismissive of her worries. Later the parents give the author more self-help books for a Christmas present and because of what she learned from the library book her reaction to these books triggers the conversation that parents and child should have had much sooner.  

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986). 

I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves.  We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours.  After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me.  I liked the feel or them and the look.  Luke said I had he mind of an antiquarian.  He liked that, he liked old things himself. 

COMMENT

     It seems that before the repressive Gilead theocracy took over Offred had a job at a library.  Notwithstanding her prowess at Scrabble, she was para-professional staff, not a  librarian. The detail of the library job shows Atwood as a master satirist.  Offred herself has been an  book-burner, albeit an inadvertent one.  Now the book burners are in charge and the world is a total nightmare.  The digitized books did not survive regime change, and this, along with the lack of paper money and elimination of newspapers has helped  fanatics suspend the Constitution. Libraries have been burned, there are no computer connections and women are forbidden to read.

    In the afterword a group of historians discuss Offred's narrative and describe how it had been recorded orally using an already obsolete technology of musical tape cassettes.   In order to transcribe them, the historians-of-the-future have to reconstruct a tape player.  

   Atwood's awareness of library preservation formats is extraordinary and prescient.   Oppression of women has left a gap in the historical record for Gilead scholars, but so has the use of non-archival digital technologies.

    

Here to Help

Tik Root, "Here to Help: One Thing You can do to Slay the Energy Vampires," New York Times, November 1, 2019, p. A3.

Another option is a Kill-a-Watt meter, which measures how much energy individual appliances are using.  they're available at most hardware stores and can sometimes be borrowed at public libraries.

COMMENT

   The library is not just for books any more! It's also a place where you could possibly borrow a  single-use tool in order to help cut energy consumption.