How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?

 Rachel Aviv, "How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?", New York Times, October 16, 2022, pSR4-5.

Ms. Gaines-Young ended up incarcerated for a crime she committed when she was psychotic, and she became close with a prison librarian with whom she discussed the books she was reading each week. She felt grounded by a deep connection to another person, and when she was sick, she trusted the librarian's assessment of her state of mind.  When, after going off psychotic drugs, the librarian told her, "I don't fully recognize you," Ms. Gaines-Young decided to start taking medications again.  "She knew me intellectually, philosophically, and even on some level spiritually," she said.  "She was a huge barometer to judge my wellness and non-wellness. Ms. Gaines-Young went on "She wasn't treating me like a problem to be fixed only with medication.  She understood the language I was speaking."

COMMENT

The non-judgmental practice of librarianship becomes a helpful approach for a woman with mental health problems.  The connection is established by talking about books and ideas, not focusing on a medical diagnosis. 

Factor Separation Into the Divorce Equation

 Emily O. Gravett, "Factor Separation Into the Divorce Equation," [Modern Love] New York Times,  Oct. 16, 2022 p. ST6. 

Monomaniacal in that way children can be, she knows all about polar bears, and now, I guess, so do I.  Over time, I have checked out every book from the library with a polar bear on the cover....
In the book we have checked out most recently, "The Ice Bear," a polar bear cub is separated from his mother, transformed onto a boy, and raised for many years by human parents.  The mother bear cries over the loss of her cub and the tears etch scars onto her face.  I almost can't read this part aloud. 

COMMENT

The public library is an endless source of reading for children's obsessions.   In this case, a particular children's picture book also provides a metaphor for a parent's pain of divorce.  

Forget the Book on Impractical Boundaries

 Sophia Ortega.  "Forget the Book on Impractical Boundaries"  (Modern Love], New York Times, October 2, 2022 p. ST6.

Around this time my therapist assigned my homework, a book with a mortifying title: "Boundary Boss." I placed a hold at the library and was relieved to learn there would be a six-week wait, giving me plenty of time to bask in romantic recklessness.

COMMENT

The author checks out the book, but never reads it.  This made me laugh.  I use the library the same way, to borrow books I'm not 100% sure I'm really interested in reading. 

Windswept

 Annabel Abbs, Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women, Tin House, 2021.

I started exploring onine, prowling around second-hand booshops, investigating library catalogues.  Women remained elusive.  As Rebecca Solnit, one of the few female writers on the subject of waling, wrote "Througout the history of walking...the principal figures...have been men." 

Every now and then, Virginia Woolf's name appeared.  I'd spent my teenage years in the shadow of the South Downs, where Woolf had lived and walked for much of her adult life.  My parents were still there, so whenever I got the chance I plotted a Woof route and began tracing her footsteps over the South Downs. [xxi] 

.

COMMENT 

After noticing that her colleciton of nature book is largely by and about mean,  Abbs began to research accounts of women  walking.  She notes that the absence of literature is a self-reinforcing loop:  "Many more have disappeared, the casualties of a self-referencing male canon of walking and nature literature, of men-only hiking and climbing clubs, of publishing firms historically run by men, of miguided concerns for female safety." [xxiii] 
      

How to Recommend a Book

 Malia Wallan, "How to Recommend a Book," New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2021, p. 15.

"Recommending books you love is the hardest thing of all," says Joyce Saricks, 72, who worked for nearly 30 years as a reference librarying in suburban Chicago.  Saricks has written several textbooks on so-called "readers' advisory," which largely disappeared from libraries after World War II and is credited with helping spark a national revival in the practice of librarians' suggesting books to patrons.

...

When Saricks was stumped, she often led patrons into the library stacks, where book spines would spur ideas and conversation.  "My colleague used to say, 'The books know when you're desperate,'" she says.  

COMMENT

The librarian in this story is an author of a book for librarians that, according to this author, helped restore a culture of reading and literacy to contemporary libraries.   The story includes a plug for physical browsing, which can lead to finding something unexpected.   The Internet most definitely does not know when you're desperate. 

Desert Vision

 Helen Macdonald, "Desert Vision," New York Times Magazine,  Oct. 17, 2021 pp. 55-

Villeneuve was 14 when he first saw the book, an edition with an arresting cover in the small library near his school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec: The face of a dark-skinned man with piercing blue eyes against a remote desert background.  It was beautiful, he told me, lifting a copy with the same cover from his desk.  He has kept it though the years and is using it to write the second movie ("Done" is a famously complex novel, and Villeneuve only agreed to adapt it if it could be broken into two films).  Looking at it even now evokes the same emotions he felt back then" "mystery, isolation, loneliness."  Billeneuve has dreamed of making "Dune" since he was a teenager; he tried to make his move as "close to the dream as possibel, and it was very difficult, becaus the dreams of a teenager are very totalitarian.  I was not expecting would be so difficult to please that guy!

COMMENT

Denis Villeneuve says that he has dreamed of making Frank Herbert's novel "Dune" into a movie since he was a teenager.  The cover art of the edition at the public library evoked an aesthetic for the movie of his imagination.  The inspiration of the life-changing book is explicitly tied to the book as a physical object.  Villeneuve bought his own  copy of the same edition to keep as as a kind of  talisman.

Finding the Mother Tree

 Suzanne Simard, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 

I spent the day writing up my planting reports before mailing my envelope of yellow needles to the government lab to have the nutrition levels analyzed and checking the office for reference volumes about mushrooms.  There were plenty of resources about logging, but books on biology were scarce as hen's teeth.  I called the town library, glad to learn that there was a mushroom reference guide on their shelves.  [p. 24]

...

I collected the mushroom book and filed my report on the plantation but vowed to keep my observations quiet and do my homework.  I often feared I'd been hired into the men's club as a token of changing times, and my goose would be cooked if I came up with a half-baked idea about how mushrooms or pink or yellow quilts of fungus on roots affected seedling growth. [p.24]

...

Then I discovered what I was looking for.  After days of searching journals in the university library, I happened upon a new article by a young Swedish researcher, Kristina Arnebrant, who'd just found that shared mycorrhizal fungal species could link alder with pine, delivering nitrogen directly.  I sped through the pages, stunned. [p.121]

...

I dashed out of the stacks and called Robyn from a phone in the foyer.  [p.121]

COMMENT

Simard describes instances where library materials offered answers to her forest observations.  The book is an excellent account of the progress of scientific research, describing a process of observation, literature research  and review and experimental design.  However, by the last chapter Simard says that the scientific method is too limited to fully understand the complexity of the world.  She writes

 I'd been taught in the university to take apart the ecosystem, to reduce it into its parts, to study the trees and plants and soils in isolation, so that I could look at the forest objectively.  This dissection, this control and categorization and cauterization were supposed to bring clarity, credibility, and validation to any findings.  When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print. [p. 283]

Simard finds that her "discoveries" were already part of indigenous knowledge, but of course there was no published record of this knowledge and even if there had been, forresters wouldn't have read it.   

 

 

 

Alice McDermott

 Alice McDermott, "By the Boo", New York Times Book Review,  August 1, 2021, p. 6.

I've also always loved to read in some quiet corner of a university library -- all the books I'll never get to standing by, lending their fragrance to the place.  An occasion I'm sorely missing of late.

...

My father gave me a brand-new hard-cover edition of W.B Yeat's "Collected Poems" when I was in my mid-20's.  I think it must have been the most expensive book he'd ever purchased (he and my mother both were advocates of the public library), and it signaled to me that he had resigned himself to my troubling ambition to write.

COMMENT

The library is a place of refuge, nd a place to share books (and save money).  It represents aspirational future reading.

Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison

 Emily Bazelon, "Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison?", New York Times Magazine, July 4, 2021, pp 27-33, 47, 49.

It started with an email I received from a retired librarian in Oregon  "Dear Ms Bazelon, Karen Oehler write in July 2019.  "I correspond with an inmate, Yutico Briley, at Dixon," a prison in Jackson, La.  For a couple of years, Oehler and Briley had been writing to each other through a support program for incarcerated people. 

...

Briley mentioned that one of his favorite books was "Exodus,' the 1950's novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel, which he borrowed from the prison library cart.  I remembered the paperback copy I checked out from the library when I was growing up.  "One of my faviore things to read about is history," he wrote,. "The book I read is old, and the pages crch when you flip them."

...

I went to law school and passed the bar, but I've never practiced law.  I decided, though I had never intervened like this before, to call a few innocence lawyers on Briley's behalf.  I wasn't sure why -- he was one prisoner among millions.  Was it because I wasn't really planning on writing about him?  Because Briley saw himself in the young men in my book?  Because he mentioned the novel "Exodus"?  I didn't know.  But hen that's often true of relationships and of stories.  One spark catches.  Maybe others follow

COMMENT

What a great library story!  Yes, there are lawyers involved, but Briley's innocence wouldn't have been  established without libraries --first, because of a retired librarian who is still involved in social justice work, and secondly, by his choice of reading that happened to establish a bond with Bazelon.  At age 19, Briley was sentenced to 60 years without possibility of parole.   He spent eight and a half years in prison before a new D.A. was elected in New Orleans who campaigned on a promise to re-examine wrongful convictions.

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"?

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.  

Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo

Elizabeth A. Harris,  "Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo." New York Times May 17, 2021, p. C2. 

The Book Show, which will be held virtually May 25-27, is aimed at librarians, independent booksellers and book buyers from major chain stores. It is intended to help publishers push their biggest fall titles, which is when many of the biggest books of the year are released in advance of the crucial holiday shopping season.

COMMENT

    Librarians are part of the target audience for a Book Show held by the publishing industry.   The article implies that librarians have a role in helping sell predicted best sellers, but they also have a role in promoting "sleepers" that deserve more promotion than they got. 

Rereading Lolita

 Ian Frazier, "Rereading Lolita" New Yorker, December 14, 2020 pp. 30-35.

As an unformed kid, I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain. I tried to imitate the style, dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases (“I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette”). Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I’ve met has heard of. It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find. Published in 1947, the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev—with Nabokov’s translations, accompanied by introductions in which he explains each poet to an American audience. In the introduction to Pushkin, he describes the poet’s end, when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the alleged lover of his wife. About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia’s greatest poet, Nabokov adds that d’Anthès went back to France, got elected to some office or other, “and lived to the incredible and unnecessary age of 90."

COMMENT

     It seems that Ian Frazier learned to write by imitating Nabokov.   While searching the library for all things Nabokov he finds a neglected volume of translated poems and actually reads the introduction (something not everyone does).  There he finds a perfect putdown for a historical nobody -- Hidden Treasure luring in plain sight. 

Shelf Lives

 Min Jin Lee, "Shelf Lives", New York Times Book Review,  April 18, 2021 p. 1, 20-21.

     On a day off, Uncle John went to the New York Public Library to check the classifieds.  He noticed that computer programmers had high starting salaries, so he borrowed books on programming.  the former history graduate student read library books on computer science.  Not long after, he got a job at an insurance company, then, later, I.B.M. hired him as a programmer, where he worked for most of his life.

     In 1975, Uncle John, now an I.B.M. company man sponsored his younger sister's family to immigrate from South Korea.  A year later, we came to Elmhurst, Queens, where Uncle John, his wife and their two American-born daughters lived.  I was 7.

     In our first year in America, Uncle John took my tow sisters and me to the library in Elmhurst and got us cards.   We could borrow as many books as we liked, he said.  We loaded up our metal grocery cart with its tilted black wheels and white plastic hubs.  It creaked all the way home.  

COMMENT

    This single narrative tells a complete immigrant story.  The public library is the pathway to a better job, which enables Uncle John to sponsor other family members to come to America.  In the article Min Jin Lee, reminisces about the library books she read as a child and what they taught her about "the ethos of American rugged individualism and the Korean quest for knowledge.  Based on what she learned from years of reading, she is writing a series of novels about Korean Americans, so just as it did for Uncle John, the library also provided a vocation for the author.

Processed Meats

 Nicole Walker. Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster. Torrey House Press, 2021.

When I lived in Portland, I worked at a place called Orlo -- Raising Awareness about the Environment though the Creative Arts.  We published a literary magazine, performed Word on the Street where we stood on the steps of Pioneer Square and the Library and read volubly from Cadillac Desert and Silent Spring. We had an outfit for Vinnie the Fire Boy and one for a bear-looking creature so we could compete with Oregon's other mascots -- the Beavers and the Ducks.  Vinnie and Orlo the Bear walked along the Willamette River, handing out bumper stickers that read "YouENDanger" and "Cows Kill Salmon." [p. 28-29]

COMMENT

 Activists use public space on the library steps to read from life-changing books that inspired their own activism. The hope is that the readers going in and out of the building will be drawn to read influential environmental works and be likewise inspired.  The power of books to change the world is implicit. 

An Architects' Muted Triumph

 Brett Sokol. "An Architect's Muted Triumph" New York Times, March 18, 2021 pp. C1, C6.

[Maya]Lin appeared equally buoyed by touring the library.  She led the way to a rooftop terrace that offered stirring views of the surrounding mountains, pointing out meaningful details along the way.  Large upper-floor windows that were near treetops had been laced with an ultraviolet webbing pattern-- invisible to human eyes buy not to flying birds that might otherwise crash into the clear glass. Bird watchers had a comfy nesting spot too, with many of the window frames large enough to climb into.  "People are going to be sleeping in here," Lin said with a chuckle, flashing back on her won long days -- and longer nights -- studying at Yale, where, as a 21-year-old senior she beat out 1,420 competing proposals for the Vietman Veterans Memorial.  "I know because I was one of those people."

COMMENT

When Architect Maya Lin was hired to remodel the Neilson Library at Smith College she designed a place of refuge with window nooks to sit in.  My college library had with window nooks, but sadly, they   were lost to remodeling that created larger windows and overall brighter space.  Lin's design also highlights ink and paper books. "You're still in a house of books," Lin says, "Ultimately a library has to be about reading.  I don't read on an iPad and I never will.  Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm a dinosaur.  But I still feel the beauty of a book, I still believe in that beauty".

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!”

 

The Chekhov of Suburban Connecticut

Gal Beckerman, "The Chekhov of Suburban Connecticut," New York Times Book Review, July 12, 2020 p. 14.

     So deep is my remembered shame that men now, sitting at my keyboard at the age of 43, I'm blushing.  I know that times have changed, that today boys can like whatever they like, are even applauded for it.  But in the 1980's, when it seemed the only real option s for me were "The Hobbit" or the Hardy Boys or choose Your Own Adventure books, stories that as I recall all involved dragons and trap doors and motorcycle chases, sneaking home one of Ann Martin's books about a group of 12-year-old girls from fictional Stoneybrook, Conn., felt like a crime.  I mean, all of the covers were pastel. 

     It was a moment.  I think I read the first 15 books in the series over the course of fourth grade; whatever was in my school's library-- and I certainly didn't share my enthusiasm then with another soul.

 

 COMMENT

     The division between "boy books" and "girl books" is remembered as a shameful enthusiasm for books in "The Babysitters Club" series.  Luckily, these books were available from the school library.  How a 9-year-old boy worked up the nerve to check them out, the author does not say.