The Things I Would Never Do

Cailin Flanagin, "The Things I Would Never Do" Atlantic Dec 23, 2021 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/cancer-teeth-loss/621103/ 

I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated high school. I wanted to read, but they wanted me to sit at a desk and talk about “side, angle, side.” I found Joan Didion’s novel electric, bleak, ravishing. More than that: essential.

There I was, on the cusp of womanhood, of being a sexual creature—and in the nick of time, I had stumbled across this invaluable guidebook. In the girls’ magazines, all you ever read about was “boys who only wanted one thing” and how you should be grateful for strict parents, because imagine what would happen to you if they didn’t care enough to give you a curfew? But Play It as It Lays introduced me to what were obviously the real perils, the important ones that the adults were keeping from us. Bad, terrible, unspeakable things that I’d never even considered. Balling at parties! S-M! Yorkshire terriers!

I can remember whole passages from the book, but more than anything that series of she-would-nevers. Over the years, I have come up with my own list, ​​as square and tame as I am.

COMMENT

A work of fiction not only helps a teen shape her own adult identity, the experience of reading it has such a lasting impact that she uses it as the theme for an article  written many, many years later.  This narrative illustrates the long-term impacts of libraries.  Would Caitlin Flanagan have found Joan Didion if the school library didn't have it?

 

The Stranger I Become

 Katherine Coles, "The Stranger I Become: on Walking, Looking and Writing",  Turtle Point Press, 2021.

The author gratefully acknowledges the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open source website though which a number of libraries and institutions have made many of Dickinson's original handwritten poems and other materials available in facsimile for the use of scholars.  Having access to this material changed my relationship to and understanding of Dickinson's work.  [p.140]

COMMENT

There are many more articles about creating digital archives than a about using them, but I expect that this kind of acknowledgement to digitized archives will become increasingly common. 

A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives

 Jennifer Schuessler, "A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives", New York Times, December 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/arts/television/emily-dickinson-archive-harvard.html

Now, a show that emerged from the archives is returning whence it came, for — as Dickinson might have put it — all Eternity.

The series, whose three-season run will come to an end on Dec. 24, is donating dozens of costumes, period furnishings and props to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass., where they will be used to flesh out the sense of her daily life at the Dickinson homestead.

And in a twist, it is donating its production archive of scripts, costume and set designs, and paper props to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Included in the haul: the show’s painstaking re-creations of Dickinson manuscripts, which will be housed alongside more than 1,000 of the Real Thing.

...

The donation to Harvard’s Houghton Library is the library’s first acquisition from a television show, according to Christine Jacobson, an assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts.

Jacobson first started following Smith on Twitter in 2018, after she got wind of the show when the production requested permission to reproduce a portrait owned by Harvard. They struck up a virtual friendship (bonding over a side passion for Russian literature), and last summer, when Smith asked if Houghton wanted materials from the show, she jumped.

 COMMENT

The show used archival materials for it's creation, and returns the fruits of that creative effort back to the library.   The library was able to aquire the materials due to a personal relationship between an astute librarian and the shows creators. 

Chloe Kim Is Grown Up and Ready for the Olympic Spotlight

 

John Branch, "Chloe Kim Is Grown Up and Ready for the Olympic Spotlight," New York Times, 

Kezia Dickson, a student from New York, vaguely knew who Kim was. She saw people stare at Kim in the dining hall. She heard them whisper, “Oh, my God, that’s Chloe Kim,” as Kim played pool.

Dickson sensed how uncomfortable it must be. She introduced herself and, at some point, mentioned that she was struggling in French, a language familiar to Kim.

“Chloe gave me her phone number and was like, ‘I really like chatting with you, and if you ever need help in French, just reach out to me,’” Dickson recalled. “I did, and she actually answered the phone. And then we went to the library and she tutored me for three hours. And she would do it every other week.”

COMMENT

The library offers study space that also serves as a place of refuge for an Olympic gold medalist to establish a friendship. 

A Place Built By Poets for Poets

 Jessica Kassiwabara. A Place Built by Poets for Poets. Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2022, p. 15-17.

In 2013, Sims noticed a disconnect between the community of active poets he knew from ope mics and the staff of small presses who told him they didn't know of and weren't recieving submissions from these poets. "I met all these fantastic poets, none of whom had books," says Sims.  That's when he started the Community Literature Initiative (CLI), a nonprofit organization though which he offered classes supported by his alma mater, the University of Southern California, on the process of book production, completing a manuscript and finding a publisher.  In the fourth year of running the program, Sims asked students to read one book of poetry a week, but a roadblock emerged: they couldn't find poetry books at the library.  "I didn't believe them, and then I went to the local library and there was no poetry section," says Sims. To help his students, Sims gathered eighty poetry books of his own and put them into a rolling suitcase to take to class. 

COMMENT

I've actually been meaning to write an article on how clueless librarians are about collecting poetry.  I'm pretty sure there are librarian poets, but whenever I want a book of poetry, the library never has it and I have to request a purchase.  What seems to baffle librarians is, poetry communities are localized, so that different places have different influential poets.  In order to get their books, you have to buy from small presses.  Instead of supporting poetry, libraries seem to have eliminated subscriptions to literary journals, or they only get a few Big Names and not the local ones that matter.  For people who like to read and write poetry, it's very, very frustrating. 

Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, "Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic", Washington Post December 10, 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/12/10/tarot-cards-pandemic-trend/

The rise of contemporary artist-made tarot decks is being documented by MIT Libraries, describing the more than 400 decks as “unbound books” with narratives. MIT has purchased decks from crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter or directly from the artists on sites like Etsy with a particular interest in radical, feminist, queer, people of color, and spiritually and religiously diverse revisions. The idea for the MIT tarot library emerged after an MIT’s curator was staying in a hotel in Washington in 2018 when she saw a tarot deck for sale at the mini bar, according to Alex McGee, an archivist for MIT Libraries.

“That confirmed to us that tarot was having a moment,” McGee said. “If we’re arguing it’s an unbound book, how could we not create a space for it?”

COMMENT

I have often described Tarot cards as perhaps the only successful hypertext book. The librarians at MIT  agree. 

A Refugee's Story, Through Animation

 Lisa Abend. "A Refugee's Story, Through Animation", New York Times, November 28, 2021, p.AR10.

Rather than relying, as in typical documentary style, on talking heads' descriptions, Rasmussen could put Amin visibly badk in his own '80's Kabul.

Achieving that kind of narrative authenticity required a precise attention to detail, Nicholls said.  Each element in every frame had to be accurate to the time and location: the brand of pot on the stove, the quality of a sunset, even the height of the street curb.  Some of the research was conducted by Rasmussen on scouting trips, but Nichools and her team also spent a lot of time combing archives and libraries.  "Finding pre-Taliban footage of Kabul was really difficult," the said.  "I read a lot of books by Russian spies."

COMMENT

Since libraries tend to collect formally published English language material, the missing information that is not in libraries has charactaristic patterns.   In this instance, a filmmaker is trying to represent Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1980's and found almost no relevant information. Pretty much nobody bothered to document pre-Taliban Kabul, so that it is a place that exists only in inaccurate memories. 

'West Side Story': The Great Debate

 New York Times, "'West Side Story': The Great Debate", New York Times, pDecember 5, 2021, p. AR10.

CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKI
I  first saw "West Side Story" on a VHS tape my mom and I rented from the public library when I was maybe 9 or 10.  I grew up in California, away from my Puert Rican family in Washington Heights, so I thought I might find something about my culture that I didn't know before.  But nothing onscreen -- beyond the latticework of fire escapes -- reminded me of the people or neighborhood I new from frequent visits to New York.  I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean -- to me, and to the average American. 

COMMENT
     The identity (or lack of identity) portrayed in a popular musical by and for white people is a disappointment to a person who is a little homesick for Washington Heights.  However, the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's "In the Heights" was criticized for not having enough dark-skinned actors.  The library, of course, can provide both movies to anyone who wants to judge for themselves.

Why We Want Readers to Choose the Best Book of the Past 125 Years

 

Sarah Bahr, "Why We Want Readers to Choose the Best Book of the Past 125 Years", New York Times, December 5, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/insider/why-we-want-readers-to-choose-the-best-book-of-the-past-125-years.html

This isn’t the first time the Book Review has anointed a favorite title. In 1996, staff members asked critics and scholars to pick the best novel of the past 25 years. (The winner, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” is also a finalist this year.) 

But there was little transparency about the panel’s selection process, Ms. Jordan said, and she was left wondering what other books were in the mix.

So she decided the time had come to ask again — only this time, readers would nominate the books.To reach as many readers as possible, the Book Review enlisted the help of public libraries across the country. Rebecca Halleck, an editor for digital storytelling and training at The Times, and Urvashi Uberoy, a Times software engineer, helped compile a list of email addresses for nearly 5,000 libraries, hoping they would spread word of their contest to their members.The team sent each library a flyer, designed by Deanna Donegan, an art director for The Times, and Joumana Khatib, an editor on the Books desk, that included a QR code created by the Interactive News Technology desk. When scanned, it would take people to the nomination site.

COMMENT

     The New York Times newspaper took advantage of the geographic distribution of public libraries to gather a list of best novels from the past 125 years to celebrate 125 years of the NYT Book Review.  The responses were winnowed into a list of 25, which includes "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, named Best Novel of the past 25 years by the NYTBR in 1996, and currently a target of right-wing censorship.