Latina/o transfer students’ selective integration and spatial awareness of university spaces

 Andrade, Luis M. "Latina/o transfer students’ selective integration and spatial awareness of university spaces." Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 17, no. 4 (2018): 347-374.

The most prevalent theme that emerged was that students navigated toward spaces where they could connect with other Latina/os. The most common place they visited to meet other Latina/os was the library. In total, nine students identified the library and areas within the library, such as the Chicana/o Resource Center 

...

The second consistent emergent theme was that students navigated to areas on their campus to be alone. They sought quiet spaces to escape the academic life and to rest. Unsurprisingly, the library was the most cited area where students visited to be alone. 

... 

The third most prevalent emergent theme was that students navigated toward spaces where they could benefit from others—students or faculty—in their majors. Five students indicated that they preferred to visit the buildings that housed their majors, such as the business, biology, or science buildings.

Create a Digital Commonplace Book

 J.D. Biersdorfer. "Create a Digital Commonplace Book," New York Times, February 10, 2021, p. 

If you’ve never made a commonplace book before, first learn how others have used them. Academic libraries, along with museums, are home to many commonplace books, and you can see them without leaving the couch. John Milton’s commonplace book is on the British Library site, and the personal notebooks of other writers and thinkers pop up easily with a web search. The Yale University Library has scanned pages of historical commonplace books in its holdings, and the Harvard Library has a few in its own online collection, as well as images of a version of John Locke’s 17th-century guide to making commonplace books, which was originally published in French. And the Internet Archive has hundreds of digitized commonplace books for browsing or borrowing, including one from Sir Alec Guinness.

When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong

Miller, Wayne. "When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong," LItHub.com,  february 8, 2021. https://lithub.com/when-talking-about-poetry-online-goes-very-wrong/?fbclid=IwAR3szGGqqwbNcxj2B8nGEbv0oa4tJ9GNp0KQ3C2FZFMXmgRIsjORjin0NVw

For three years of college I organized my schedule so that each day after lunch I could go to the library for an hour and read one new book of poetry pulled more or less at random off the poetry section shelf. The world I entered there (and never really left) was a “small back room” inside the library, inside the university, inside the town, inside the country. It was occupied by me and a bunch of poets—some famous—that no one really knew about, and it hummed for me with invisible promise.

COMMENT

Nowadays, Miller edits the poetry journal "Copper Nickel."   The article is a defense of poetry journals over self-publication on social media platforms.  The essence of his argument is, a publication with a small, self-selected niche audience is a better place for writers to experiment than the sometimes vicious  public platform of the Internet. Here's how Miller describes the role of literary journals:

I’ve been editing literary magazines for twenty years, and something that strikes me when I’m reading through submissions is how often really good poets submit work that’s not (or not yet) successful. All poets treat submitting to literary journals with different levels of provisionality, but it’s consistently true that as a magazine editor I get to read failing poems by excellent poets—poems that will never make their way into the poets’ books. Some poems published in magazines—even high-profile ones—don’t make their ways into poets’ books; or if the poems do, they appear in significantly revised versions.

My point is that the work of literary magazines is simultaneously appreciative, critical, collaborative, and provisional. When a new issue of a magazine is out in the world, we often say: “Did you see what So-and-So is working on? I can’t wait to see the book!”

 

On Moral Injury

Janine di Giovanni, "On Moral Injury," Harper's Magazine, August 2020, pp. 65-69.

     He knew that soldiers returning from active combat suffered from PTSD, but he'd never heard of a conflict reporter suffering similar symptoms. He asked his research team to compile studies that might provide precedents, but they came back empty-handed.

     They told me there was nothing published on the topic," Feinstein recalled  "I didn't believe them. Because in medicine there is always something that comes before you."

     But the University of Toronto's medical library did not have a single study on the subject.  Feinstein was baffled: there was extensive scientific data on firefighters, police officers, soldiers, and victims of sexual assault, but a void when it came to reporters. 

COMMENT

    Psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein is looking for studies that link war journalism to PTSD.  The search turns up a void which guides his research into "moral injury" caused by witnessing a situation where people are in trouble and failing to help. It seems like a failure when there is nothing the library because patrons want to find an answer, but librarians know that a gap in research is also an opportunity for a PhD or scholarly publication.   The trick is to be good enough at searching to feel confident that the knowledge gap is real and not an artifact of sloppy information research. 

     

Secrets Hidden in the Stacks

Adrienne Raphel. "Secrets Hidden in the Stacks." Poets & Writers, July/August 2020, pp. 14-17. https://www.pw.org/content/secrets_hidden_in_the_stacks

When University of Virginia (UVA) professor Andrew Stauffer sent his class to the library in the fall of 2009, he expected them to focus on the printed text of the books they brought back.  But Stauffer and his students soon realized that was just one story being told in these volumes.  While looking at nineteenth-century copies of work by Felicia Hemens, a poet widely beloved at the time for her sentimental verse, the students were immediately drawn to everything else happening in these books; not just the expected underlining and dog-ears, but bookplates, diary entries, letters, quotes, pressed flowers, and readers own poetic flights of fancy.

...

In this way,  Book Traces celebrates what Stauffer calls bibliodiversity; appreciating each book as its own object with its own life and history.  "We're fighting against the idea that once you've digitized a single copy, then you don't need others,: says Stauffer.

COMMENT

    The Book Traces project is not anti-digitization, but it it does show the limitations of treating books as merely texts. The article describes how the kinds of books that the Book Traces project seeks are specifically targeted for weeing because they are old, beat up and not rare.

     

The Love Song of T.S. Eliot

Maria Cramer, "The Love Song of T.S. Eliot," New York Times, January 6, 2020, p. C3.

   As planned, his estate released the statement on Thursday, coinciding with Princeton University Library's announcement the more than 1,100 letters the poet had written to Hale were finally available for public viewing.

     Hale gave the letters to Princeton in 1956 with the instructions that they be opened 50 years after both she and Eliot had died. ([Emily] Hale died in 1969, four years after Eliot).
     The relationship between the two has long been a source of speculation among literary scholars, who have known for decades of the letters' existence.  the letters were freed in October from wooden boxes bound with copper straps and ties before a small group of Princeton professors at the university's Firestone Library.
...
     The letters in the collection, which also includes photographs, ephemera and a brief narrative in which Hale describes her relationship with Eliot, are available for viewing only at the Firestone Library and will not be published online until at least 2035 when they are no longer under copyright.

COMMENT

     These days it's astonishing to think of someone writing 1,100 letters on paper and mailing them to someone.  Hale knew the letters had value since Eliot was famous in his own time.  Scholars have been waiting for 50 years to open those boxes and start the search for hidden treasure. 

    The library made a small ceremony of the opening, and also made the New York Times.  Having famous, mysterious materials is good publicity for a library.  Nonetheless, copyright prevents digitization.  If you want to read them, you'll have to go to Princeton. 

Educated

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir, 2018.

Sometimes, when she was delivering herbs, if we’d finished our chores, Mother would  drop us at the Carnegie library in the center of town.  The basement had a room full of children’s books, which we read.  Richard even took books from upstairs, books for adults, with heavy titles about history and science.    Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.  Some of us were more disciplined than others. I was one of the least disciplined, so by the time I was ten, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code because Dad insisted that I learn it.  [p.46-47]

...

     I stared at them as if they were behind glass. I’d never heard anyone e use the word “feminism” as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the argument.  It also signaled that I had lost.
     I left the café and went to the library.  After five minutes online and a few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers — Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir.  I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut.  I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud.
     I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first— Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill.  I read though the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood. [pp. 258-259].

COMMENT

   The first story from Westover’s childhood describes using the children’s collection as a kind of babysitter.  The kids were inconsistently homeschooled, and the shelf of library books didn’t compensate for a lack of educational direction.

    In the second library story Westover is enrolled in college and realizing how many things she doesn’t know about.  This time the library reveals its secrets. The books offer a vocabulary to talk about feminism that was not available in small town Idaho nor at a Mormon religious university. 

Sad Buildings in Brooklyn

Adam Gopnik, "Sad Buildings in Brooklyn: Scenes from the Life of Roz Chast," New Yorker, December 30, 2019, p, 32-

     "My mother didn't let me read comics growing up. She thought comics were morally low rent, for morons.  Superheroes, cartoons, animation-- didn't matter.  I had to go to a friend's house to look at comic books."  She points to two sources as essential to turning her love of drawing into there vocation as a cartoonist. One was Addams' work (from this magazine), which she first encountered as a child in the nineteen-sixties. "'Black Maria,' 'The Goaning Board,' 'Monster Rally,' 'Drawn & Quartered,'" she says rapturously reciting titles of Addams collections.  "These are books that I discovered at the browsing library at Cornell.  My parents used to go to Ithaca in the summer-- they lived in student quarters and it was cheap.  There were other Brooklyn school-teachers, mostly Jewish, mostly without children.  When my parents took me, they let me hang out."

COMMENT 

     This is the tale of the life-changing book, but also a coming of age when the unsupervised child discovers the books her parents won't let her read.   The library is also a refuge where a teenager with no friends can hang out.  

      The life-changing book is a classic, but at the Cornell Library it was in the browsing collection-- labeled as something just for fun.  Still, it works its magic, starting a girl down her career path. 
     

How To Do Nothing

Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019

     I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly the opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online.  When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn't immediately present itself.  You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons.  The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a non-commercial and non"productive" space so often under threat of closure, allows for growing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information-- provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it's even about-- are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment.  Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it's me who's being researched.  [p.175]

COMMENT

    This is a beautiful description of library research as a practice of close attention--  the opposite of the endlessly distracting information deluge online.  By "non-productive" Odell doesn't mean that library time is worthless, but that library time is not economically optimized for money-making.  The book argues that such economically unproductive time is not  just a good thing but essential for a good life.

   

Struggling with College Tuition after Excelling in High School

Elisha Brown, “Struggling with College Tuition After Excelling in High School,” New York Times, December 4, 2019, A23 

     Ms. McNair received $27,000 in scholarships for the current academic year in addition to $9,500 in federal student loans. She also received nearly $6,500 in grants, including a $6,195 federal Pell grant A job at the campus library is paying her $2,000 for the school year through the federal work-study program.  But she still owed a few thousand dollars each semester to cover the $57,000 annual cost of attendance, including tuition, fees, room and board. 

COMMENT

     Ms. McNair, who is from Harlem, studies Health Science at New England College in New Hampshire.  She wants to go to medical school, but if the student loans keep piling up it’s hard to see how that will ever happen.  A student job at the library is part of her aid package, but the article says she is planning to work at a grocery store after the work-study money is gone.

     There are many fewer student jobs at the library than there were before so much information was online -- no longer the need for so many people to shelve and check out books, file periodical subscriptions, and catalog cards or order books.  The result is that many fewer students get to experience library work.  That's a problem both because student jobs were a way to attract people into the profession and because people who have worked in a library have more knowledge of and respect for information systems.  The student jobs vanished unnoticed, except perhaps as a cost savings the annual budget. Few librarians considered what might be lost along with all those student jobs.  I have thought that academic libraries should make student jobs part of their mission, creating paid internships that let students work with librarian mentors.  If we truly believe that libraries are centers for creativity and innovation, these library internships would be the best jobs on campus. 

Original Man

Michael Schulman, "Original Man Why Do So Many Directors Want to Work With Adam Driver?" New Yorker,  October 28, 2019, pp 54-63.

"One time he snapped so sharply at a student who had used his yoga mat that he reduced the guy to tears. "I was, like, I gotta be better at communicating," he said.  He holed up at the performing-arts library and read plays by David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley, and found that drama helped him express his roiling emotions."

COMMENT 

The library as refuge and self-directed learning for a student destined to become a well-known actor. The library provides a foundation for an unlikely career. 

Woman of the River

Richard E. Westwood, Woman of the River: Georgie White Clark, White-Water Pioneer, Utah State University Press, 1997.

I have had the generous help and cooperation of many people in getting this book together.  Karen Underhill and the staff at Cline Library, Arizona University, got me started and helped along the way by guiding me through the Georgie Clark collection and putting me in touch with Rosalyn J. (Roz) Jirge. This book would have been incomplete without the input and help from Roz.  She not only told me of her own experiences, but collected others' diaries, did interviews, transcribed taps of my interviews and supplied me with names and address of passengers and boatmen that were invaluable in my research. 

COMMENT

It's not uncommon to find a librarian listed in the acknowledgments of a book. This one has a nice description of a research strategy as well,  that includes tracking down people for interviews.  Sometimes the answer to a research question is not in the library collection but in knowing the right person to ask. This librarian happened to know that Roz Jirge was the right person. This kind of reference help is only possible when librarians have local knowledge.  Librarian training is focused on generic strategies to find published or archived information, but researchers are often focused on information gaps-- the biography that has not yet been written, the history that has not yet been told.  A recurring library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty stacks or archival boxes -- the material that nobody has noticed and nobody has thought to use.

Thanks to this researcher, the historical memory of Roz Jirge has been written in a book that is now available in the library collection, and anyone can read the story of a river running pioneer.  Not so long ago, I took a river trip through Westwater Canyon at high water (30,000 cfs).  The river guides lashed the rafts together in "double rigging" that they said was invented by Georgie White Clark to run the big rapids in the Grand Canyon.  I'm glad those guides knew their river history!

Student of the Game Aced Final

Julia Jacobs, "Student of the Game Aced Final: Emma Boettche, a Librarian from Chicago, wrote a mater's paper on 'Jeopardy!' Clues, New York Times, June 4, 2019, p. C6.

     Before Emma Boettcher arrived at the "Jeopardy!" studio in California on a Tuesday in Mach she hadn't heard of James Hozhauer.
     Boettcher, a 27-year old librarian at the University of Chicago, did not know that the contestant she would soon face had already won 32 games, amasses $2.46 million and established himself as one of the game sho's greatest players of all time.  Games are prerecorded, usually five in one day; Holzhauer's first win would not air until April 4.
...
     As a book and theater lover growing up outside Philadelphia, Boettcher first tried out for "Jeopardy!" in high school.  As she continued to chase her goal, her father, Kevin Boettcher, bought her books on topics that she needed to bone up on, such as sports.
After finishing college at Princeton, she went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where she studied information science.  While there, Boettcher decided to write her master's paper on her longtime obsession with a certain game show.
     In her 70-page final paper, Boettcher explored whether certain characteristics of a "Jeopardy!" clue could predict its difficulty level.  She said she wanted to determine if a computer could predict whether a clue was easy or difficulty based on the words it was using or the length of the clue.  In essence, she was asking if there was a material difference between a $200 clue and a $1,000 clue. 

COMMENT

   OK, maybe librarians deserve a little of that vocational awe.  A Master's theses on Jeopardy! clues sounds like a candidate for an Ig Noble Prize, but it seems to have been a useful piece of scholarship. Hozhaur is a professional sports bettor who was using a sophisticated statistical strategy to successfully beat the TV trivia game. He was zeroing in on Ken Jenning's record when the librarian beat him.

     This is the first story I've encountered that contains any description of professional education for librarianship. Although the reporter seems dubious that anyone would bother to study the difficulty of questions, in fact, I have co-authored such a paper myself. [1]  Unfortunately, librarians have spent a fair amount of ink trying to prove that most reference questions aren't all that hard.  The goal is to replace trained reference librarians with cheaper part-time student help. In most such studies, shabby research methodology is based on circular logic that pre-defines certain types of questions as "easy/directional" without ever evaluating whether such questions are actually easy to answer. 

  In any case, if I wanted information help, I'd far rather ask someone like Emma Boettcher with a passion for information than an under-paid part-timer.
 
[1] LeMire, Sarah, Lorelei Rutledge, and Amy Brunvand. "Taking a Fresh Look: Reviewing and Classifying Reference Statistics for Data-Driven Decision Making." Reference & User Services Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2016): 230-238.

Shelf Life

Meryl Gordon, "Shelf Life: The Story of One of the Rarest Books in the World." New York Times Book Review, May 5, 2019, p.18.

     The Gutenberg Bible, purchased n 1950, was the jewel of her collection which she left to St. John's Seminary upon her death in 1958.
     In her bequest, she insisted the nothing be sold for 25 years, in the belief that future librarians should have flexibility but would keep the collection intact.  It was a tragic mistake.  The Los Angeles Archdiocese, unable to resist monetizing the valuable assets, put the entire Doheny book collection on sale in 1987.  The Maruzen Co. Ltd of Tokyo snapped up the Gutenberg for $4.4 million.  It is now the property of Keio University, where it has been digitized and locked away from public view. 

 COMMENT

    The quote comes from a book review about a biography of a rare Gutenberg Bible[1]. The collector, as in other library stories, [2] imagines that her rare book collection has enough value to be guarded intact by librarians.  In fact, the librarians sell the collection for money.

     What's most interesting to me is the comment that the digitized book is "locked away."  Librarians like to imagine that digitization makes rare and valuable things more available, not less available.  But an online picture of a Gutenberg Bible is not really the same thing as a Gutenberg Bible even though the text is the same. The spooky sense of history is lost in the format transition.

[1] Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey, Tarcher Perigee, 2019. 
[2] Can't. Just. Stop. 

Imagine Resetting Your Digital Life

Cal Newport, "Imagine Resetting Your Digital Life," New York Times, April 29, 2019, p. B8.

    Inspired by Mr. Bennett, I encouraged them to aggressively reintroduce high-value leisure activities that had nothing to do with glowing screens-- even if those activities required more energy and commitment than clicking "next episode" or scrolling a Twitter feed. Many embraced my advice. 
     A graduate student named Unaiza replaced her habit of browsing Reddit at night with reading library books, finishing eight during her digital declutter.  
     "I could never have thought about doing that before,"she told me proudly.

 
COMMENT

     One of the trends identified by the Center for the Future of Libraries is "unplugged." CFL even suggests: "This may be a rebranding from "quiet reading spaces" to "unplug zones" or "digital escape spaces" that capitalize on the trend's language.

      The fact that reading library books counts as a "high value leisure activity" shows why librarians have been mistaken to overvalue immediate digital access.  Actually reading a book takes hours to weeks. Getting the book right now is often not the most important consideration compared to selecting books that are worth the time commitment. Sometimes waiting is even preferable.  When you get in the queue for a current best-seller it  might not come for a month, but when it does arrive it's nice to be reminded of something that looked interesting. The public library has a wonderful "Lucky Day" shelf near the exit with popular books on it, and once in a while you get to jump to the head of the line by going to the actual library.

      In the digital age, libraries should spend less time trying to become part of the Internet and pay more attention the advantages of analog media and physical space.  Those are things that the Internet will never have, and they are things that are becoming more and more valuable as the drawbacks of virtual space become more and more apparent.

    

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.

      

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.
   

     

Even from Afar, Carol Channing Served up that Broadway Wow

Ben Brantley, "Even from Afar, Carol Channing Served up that Broadway Wow," New York Times, Jan. 15, 2019, p.A23

     When Ms. Channing, who died on Tuesday at 97, first appeared in the part with which she would forever be identified, I was only 9 years old and living in Winston-Salem, N.C.
     But as a boy in thrall to all things New York, and especially all things Broadway, I monitored whatever was happening on its stages as closely as long distance allowed in the pre-internet age. My parents subscribed to The New Yorker, so that was a help, and I could go to the Wake Forest College library, just a bike ride away, and check out the arts pages of The Times.

COMMENT

   Carol Channing first appeared as Dolly in 1964. At that time, a young musical theater fan had to bicycle to the library periodical room to read the New York Times.

   In the post-internet age, good arts reporting might actually be more difficult to find. Newspapers are laying off arts critics and drastically shrinking arts coverage [1]. It's easy enough to find celebrity gossip, but not so easy to find reviews, history or critiques.  That's a real loss to the community, not only because there  is no way for people to find out about arts events they might want to attend, but because there is no recorded history of the local arts community.
 
      Here in Utah, Artists of Utah 15 Bytes  and  LoveDanceMore  are examples of online publications that are trying to fill the niche for regional arts reporting. The arts reporting gap is also one that libraries could try to fill through community journalism.

    One obvious way librarians could promote local artist is by writing and collecting book reviews for local authors.  When the Portland Press Herald threatened to stop publishing book reviews a local author (Stephen King) launched a successful protest.  King argued that  the newspaper was taking away publicity that local writers depend on.  As newspapers downsize,  local arts is often replaced by generic news-wire stories about nationally famous authors or artists. Without regional arts reporters, people will probably still  see reviews of Stephen King's books, but may never even learn about new books by people who write about their part of the world.  These local books are essential to building a sense of place that is a foundation for resilient communities.

[1]  Jed Gottlieb, "Curtains Fall on Arts Critics at newspapers," Columbia Journalism Review, January 6, 2017.   "With their champions banished from papers, legitimate artistic endeavors start to recede from the mainstream consciousness in favor of fluffy celebrity-driven stories."
 

[[there.]]

Lance Olsen. [[there.]], Anti-Oedipus Press, 2014.

:::: My first excursion upon arriving in Iowa City to begin work on what would strike me in retrospect as nothing if not a fraught M.F.A. was into the corner of library stacks housing these by previous Workshop graduates.
     I touched the heavy spines protecting Flannery O'Connor's writing, John Irving's, T. Coraghessan Boyle's, hoping some of their prose would rub off on my hands.
     It's the same electric gratitude I feel walking the halls of the American Academy.
     Hello Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Jeff Eugenides. 

COMMENT

[[there.]] is a travel journal about displacement in time and space.  Olsen uses eccentric punctuation:

:::: for what cannot be articulated accurately.

[[ ]] for what must be removed from the chronic to be experienced.

The MFA theses in the library would have been signed by the now famous students who wrote them.  In this passage Olsen explicitly describes a physical experience, visiting books, powerful objects that might rub off some of their magic. He mentions touching the spines but not reading the text, though he might have and just didn't write about it.  In context it becomes clear that Olsen is conscious of visiting a  kind of book museum, a literary Wunderkammer.

Oslen writes:

     Travel removes us from clock time, from the capitalist insistence that minutes are money, our lives meant to be segmented, regulated, reified.  Travel serves as compelled dislocation and temporal smear. When that is no longer true, it is no longer travel: you have arrived somewhere.
      The same being the case with innovative writing practices.

By this definition, the library shelf of MFA theses is "somewhere," while the process of writing them involved a kind of dislocation.  Olsen is writing about an experience of library-as-place, not an interior facility of tables and chairs, but "somewhere" expressed in the collection of other writers who occupied the same place at different points in time.