Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight

 David Gessner, Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the age of Crisis. Torrey House Press, 2021.

If  you look at Emerson's journals, which I have held in my hands at Houghton Library, the thoughts are so fully formed, and the script so neat, that they  intimidate.  Not mine.  Early on I started calling my journals "swill bins," where anything goes including snippets of weather, Dear Diary bad moods, caricatures and cartoons, early drafts of essays and books and sketches of birds. [p. 28]

The next morning, before driving to a radio interview, I visited the Houghton Library at Harvard, where, after applying for an inter-library permit and filling out my special request form, I was handed two of Emerson's journals.  It was starting to see Emerson's actual works on the actual pages and I just sat there for a moment staring at the scrawled longhand and relishing the fact that these were the same books in which he had kept the ledger of his life.  [p.36]

COMMENT

     Here, library red tape seems to create a sense of ceremony as an author pays a visit to the journal of a writer he deeply admires.  Gessner compares his own scattered thoughts to Emerson and find's his own to be sloppy by comparrison.

 

Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire

 Zak Podmore, "Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire" Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2021,  https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/06/16/ken-sleight-an/

Not a scrap of paper from Sleight’s boxes survived the blaze. Metal filing cabinets melted in the heat and the roof of the steel hut warped. The lettering was peeling from road signs in the ranch named after Abbey’s work — Desert Solitaire, Seldom Seen, Abbey Road — and great swaths of trees were burned. Four homes in Pack Creek Ranch were destroyed, and five others were damaged. Six outbuildings, including Sleight’s hut, were lost, according to Utah Wildfire Info.

Sleight’s nearby home and the rental cabins scattered throughout the ranch, which he bought with his wife, Jane, in the mid-1980s, were spared from the fire. But the loss of other homes in the neighborhood and the historical material that Sleight hoped to use for a book project and to donate to a university archives is devastating.

COMMENT

 A wildfire sparked by a campfire destroyed the historical archive collected by Ken Slight, a long-time environmental activist in southern Utah.   Slight, who was working on a book, had intended to donate the material to a University archives, but instead, due to a careless camper a valuable trove of regional memory went up in smoke.   Librarians could never assemble such a collections of records, letters and photographs associated with a person who is deeply involved in his community.  The archive would have been utterly unique. 

Cool zones: Salt Lake County offers facilities to those seeking relief from the heat

Alyssa Roberts, "Cool zones: Salt Lake County offers facilities to those seeking relief from the heat", 2KUTV,  June 13, 2021. https://kutv.com/news/local/cool-zones-salt-lake-county-offers-facilities-to-those-seeking-relief-from-the-heat?fbclid=IwAR24Yy-uP5DL7_PCQ4TaoQe8KTE3b80DH28S9sp4JJ9_d_bsRGsmSB-Wswc

SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — With record-breaking high temperatures in the Salt Lake Valley this summer, Salt Lake County is reminding the public that its senior centers, libraries, and recreational facilities are open to anyone seeking relief from the heat.

COMMENT

Global climate change means that people will be exposed to extreme heat.  Libraries are a place to go for a cool zone.  Use of libraries as a cold shelter was a plot point in the movie "The Public" (2018).

He Made Affection Feel Simple

 Denny Agassi, "He Made Affection Feel Simple" (Modern Love) New York Times June 13, 2021, p.ST6

Although my interest was piqued by Jack's picture, it was his gentleness that drew me in.  Our sporadic small talk was harmless, spanning two months.  I brushed him off, but as I commuted to school and spent hours in the library, he was persistent.

COMMENT

For a commuter student, the library is a place of refuge during the day.  The Modern Love column has been a surprisingly rich source of library stories since safe spaces  are important for initiating  romantic encounters. In this love story, the contemplative library space is where a young trans woman  fantasizes about a man she met on Tinder.  

For a Romance Novelist, a Love Worth Writing About

 Alix Strauss, "For a Romance Novelist, a Love Worth Writing About," (Vows) New York Times, June 6, 2021, p. ST10. 

In March 201, during a visit to the Major Hillard Library in Chesapeake, Va., Kimberlee Stevenson  picked up a copy of "Until I Saw You Smile" by J.J. Murray, a romance writer known for his multiracial story lines and characters.

"I finished the novel in three days," said Ms. Stevenson, 38, the owner of a literary website where she blogs about romance novels and a youth contractor specialist for the Hampton Roads Workforce Council, which offers employment services.  "I thought it was great and I like to meet the authors, so I  sent him a friend request on Facebook."

COMMENT

Reader, she married him.  

Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?

 Jess deCourcy Hinds, "Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?" (Modern Love) New York Times, June 6, 2021, p.ST5.

I was busy starting a new library from scratch for a public school in Queens. Wondering is Stefan would support my career, I joked to him that my weekends were "booked."  He smiled and offered to help.  Our first excursion took us to a deceased professor's estate in western Massachusetts, where we spent 14 hours loading 3,000 dusty books into a fleet of U-hauls to bring to the new library. 

...

My school library grew, and I cataloged thousands of volumes in Dewey.  Melvil Dewey, creator of the  1876 classification system, was no hero, having withdrawn from the American Library Association after numerous accusations of sexual harassment. He was forced out of the New York State Library for racism and anti-Semitism. 

...

Before I moved in with Stefan, I donated books that reminded me of my exes to my school library.  I donated film books from my filmmaker and actress girlfriend of almost four years, and the nautical books from my boatbuilder boyfriend who lived in a lighthouse.  I let go of old heartbreak by setting my exes books free among thousands of other volumes in my library to circulate.  Every few years, I bump into them like old friends and reflect on how loving this man and woman prepared me to love Stefan, who knew my story from the beginning and always accepted me.  

COMMENT

This tale of Modern Love is by a bisexual woman who wonders where she fits into "queer"  after marrying a man.  She describes building and cataloging a school library based on book donations.  This used to be a common way to build libraries, but in the digital age, many libraries decided that older print books weren't worth the trouble.  This particular librarian, however, finds personal value in donations that represent memories of past lovers.  Since her home bookshelves are no longer an appropriate place to preserve such memories, she keeps the memories safe in the library.  This access to books that are part of one's past is an important function of library collections.   You never know when it might be time to revisit something you thought you'd never read again. 

User Manuals

 Louis Menand, "User Manuals: Charting a  Nation's Soul through its Best Sellers," New Yorker, June 7, 2021 pp. 76-81.

These sales figures are way beyond the range of even the most acclaimed fiction  Some of the books, such as "The Old Farmer's Almanac" and Emily Post's "Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home," which was first published in 1922, are continually updated and reissued, and still maintain market share.  McHugh says that "Etiquette" used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible  which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments). 

COMMENT 

Perhaps it's a stretch to say that stealing books is a use for libraries, but theft of library books is pretty frequently mentioned in library stories. However, it's not clear whether or not Jess McHugh (author of "Americanon") fact-checked this claim since online sources say that after the Bible it's the Guinness Book of World Records and books about conspiracy theories and the occult.  At one college library where I worked we deliberately left the magnetic anti-theft strip out of copies of a guide about sexual wellness and replaced it as needed. 

I'm not sure how to categorize this one.  Maybe "Life Changing Book"?

Guiding Stars

 Rachel Syme, "Guiding Stars: How "Who? Wekkly" Explains the New celebrity," New Yorker, June 7, 2021, pp. 80-81. 

The exchange was a case study in the limits of girl-boss culture, and in order to get to the heart of the scandal, Finger and Weber close-read excerpts from Hollis's audiobook and pored over her subsequent apology,  "I haven't read the book," Finger said, with a grin in his voce  "But I can search in the book on google Books and then find the accompanying passage on my audiobook from the library, so I just searched to see if she's ever talked about being relatable, and guess what, she has.  This obsessive rabbit-hole quality can make the show feel almost manic, but it also provides something of  a public service.  If fame can seem like a mystery, Finger and Weber operate like Columbo, casually collecting clues and weighing evidence until they crack the case. 

COMMENT

Here it is!  The first example I've run across that describes an authentic  contemporary Google-based research strategy that interacts with library resources.   The podcasters have a show that features people who are not exactly famous.  in the article they describe researching a mommy blogger (Rachel Hollis) who alienated fans when she admitted to having a housekeeper, and then said that she had never claimed to be relatable.  The podcasters use Google Books and an audiobook from the library to fact-check her claim.  

Woman in the Woods

 

Sandra Steingraber, "Woman in the Woods, Orion Summer 2021, pp. 54-63.

She finds in the woods a fully intact 2.5-acre deer exclosure constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1937.  There are sapling and understory pine trees growing inside the fence.  In the biological station library, she finds a cache of old species inventories that researchers and students conducted within and around the enclosure with data going back over several decades.  She learns the techniques of dendrochronology and reconstructs the history of the forest the forest thought tree ring analysis.
....

Off to the right, a truck with an official state license plate drives away down a rutted lane.  It seems that the park naturalist, cleaning out his office at the end of the season, unearthed some correspondence from years past and thought the grad student from Michigan might find something of interest, so he threw the boxes n the back of the pickup and drove them over to her campsite.
...

There is a small library cart of paperbacks.  Only one book per cell.  [Washtenaw County Jail]....
There is ransacking and chaos.  All around the women, bedding , books, letters, bars of soap, pencils, toothbrushes fly though the air.  Who has it?  Who has the blue makeup?  No makeup is ever found, But tucked inside the pages of a library book in the cart one of the men in blue gloves finds the shard of a mirror.  The library cart is removed.  No more books. Everybody back in their cells. Clean up the mess. 

COMMENT

A PhD student finds that The Park library has one version of landscape history; the hidden correspondence contains an entirely different and far more frightening story revealing that the study are was a testing area for Agent Orange and that ecological data was falsified in order to promote use of the herbicide. 

Steingraber becomes a reporter for the student newspaper.  She is singled out for police harassment, apparently for writing editorials against military testing,  and ends up spending 12 days in jail.  In jail  the guards again misuse authority as a tactic of intimidation.  As a punishment for having (or not having) forbidden makeup, the library books are taken away. 

The jail cell is described as a "bookless room" -- the suppression of information whether through secrecy or violence is a crime against humanity.