Local Programs Fire Up Readers

Scott D. Pierce and Sheila McCann. Local Programs Fire Up Readers, Salt Lake Tribune, May 31, 2019, p. D1-

     Schools are wrapping up, the weather is warming up, and June is a day away.  Another clear sign of summer: Libraries, businesses and others are gearing up to engage and reward summer readers.…     The theme of this year’s challenge is “A Universe of Stories,” honoring the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.     Last year, almost 28,000 kids from infants to age 12 sing up along with 7,500 teens and more than 23,000 adults, said Liz Sollis, communications manager for the [Salt Lake] county library system. “We’ve actually seen a huge increase in adult participation over the last few years, “ she said.

…    

Four reading trackers for its summer reading program are available: Babies & Toddlers, Kids, Teens, and Adults, each with suggested activities.  The [Salt Lake City] system also suggests going paperless by using its Beanstack site online or by downloading the Beanstack app. 

COMMENT

This article is a local tie-in to one reprinted from the Washington Post.[1]  It lists summer reading programs at local libraries, businesses and other organizations that offer prizes and rewards for reading.  

   As an avid reader, I feel somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of rewards.  I mean, to me getting time to sit and concentrate on reading already seems like a pretty big reward. However, it’s clear that the programs are popular and they serve a purpose if they make reading fun again. Museum and sports events tickets, free books, and food rewards might work for some people. Choosing what to read may also be the first step in developing self-directed lifelong learning skills that aren’t dependent on classroom teaching.

    The Salt Lake Public Library system is pushing a digital book subscription, which also seems questionable.  Unless kids are using a dedicated e-reader, anything on screens offers far too many distractions that interrupt reading.  Use of ebooks probably also means fewer trips to the library and consequently less immersion in the possibilities such as audio books or graphic novels.  In many library stories, a profound coming-of-age experience happens when kids first move from the juvenile section to the regular stacks.  That transition simply can’t happen online. 

   Digital reading seems even more dubious when it comes from an overtly commercial source.  Scholastic Read-a-Palooza, described in the article,  is an online summer reading program that logs the number of minutes kids read and unlocks digital rewards.  This is beginning to sound a lot less like pleasure and a lot more like the usual schoolwork drudgery, specially if parents can spy on reading minutes. Personally, I would not suggest going paperless. I’d suggest that the long, lazy days of summer are the perfect time to immerse oneself in the kind of absorbing deep reading experience that only print can offer.  The real purpose of summer reading, after all, is not to do better on standardized tests but to rediscover the joy of reading books that are not homework. 

[1] How to Draw ‘em In.

Rear

Let's Party Like it's 1994! (Sigh, Well, Perhaps Not.)

Caity Weaver, “Let’s Party Like It’s 1994! (Sigh, Well, Perhaps Not,) New York Times, May 29, 2019, ST1.

     By the fourth of fifth day of 1994, I’d stopped impulsively grabbing at empty spaces on my desk for my cellphone.  But my reflex to quickly Google things never deteriorated. I began compiling my questions — a list of itches to be scratched at a later time — and spent the finals day of my week at the Brooklyn Public Library, to see what percentage of answers I could find in books. About 17 percent, it turned out.  While I was not able to learn the location of the nearest FedEx, the best-selling compact mirror of all time or the name of a green Chanel nail polish I had recently seen in a discount store, I did learn the ingredients in Coca-Cola cake where Josephine Baker was born (St. Louis) and what happened to Joan Lunden after 1994.

 ...

     I copied down the Dewey Decimal number for her 2015 book “Had I Known,” and located it on a shelf. The subtitle took the wind out of my sails— “A Memoir of Survival.”  In the first pages, I learned that Joan had gotten a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2014.  The news made my silly assignment feel stupid.  Impudent, even.  Joan had seemed to delight in her health on the tape in 1994.  Twenty-five years later, it was a success to be surviving. 

COMMENT

     The conceit of this article is that the 21-year old author is attempting to re-inhabit the pre-Internet Gen X past where,without Google at her fingertips, the library has to do. In 1994 the library would have had a shelf of phone books including Yellow Pages and it would have been easy for librarians to find the nearest FedEx. There would have been glossy women's magazines with ads for fashionable nail-polish colors. Nowadays, the Internet is the only way to find information about businesses and ephemeral fashion trends.  The problem is, without the phone books and magazines there will be no record of these things.  25 years in the future, it will be much harder to tell what people in 2019 wore or ate because there is no time-stamped record.

     The writer doesn’t say, but I imagine that the Coca-Cola cake recipe was in some kind of Southern cookbook along with cultural context for why anybody would make such an awful-sounding desert.  Food history is an important kind of cultural history-- in order to re-create the past the author reports on trying flavorless “diet” recipes from a 1994 cookbook called Cooking Light.  On the Internet recipes are disassociated.  there's no sense of foodways. Knowing what people ate in the past may seem fairly trivial, but in 2019 the Lancet EAT Project has identified the food system as an existential threat to human existence.[1]  

   The "silly" assignment leads Weaver to two unexpectedly profound experiences. One is a confrontation with the passage of time, thhe other a quiet state of mind that emerges when the “mental screaming” induced by technological stimuli begins to calm.  Perhaps instead of boasting that libraries aren’t quiet places any more, librarians in 2019 might do better to  promote the advantages of mindfulness that are  inherently connected with deep reading and the library experience. 

   In fact, researches have found that mental capability improves though electronic disconnection and contact with nature. [2] “The commotion” induced by technology began in 1998 when Microsoft started to bundle a web browser with its software.  Doing the math, that's the same year the author was born. 

[1] The EAT Lancet Commission on Food, Planet & Health
[2] Atchley, Ruth Ann, David L. Strayer, and Paul Atchley. "Creativity in the wild: Improving creative reasoning through immersion in natural settings." PloS one 7, no. 12 (2012): e51474.

Lessons in Printing

 

Klancy Clark de Nevers, Lessons in Printing,  Scattered Leaves Press, 2018.

      She was a reader. She read all the time. The Seattle Post Intelligencer accompanied her breakfast of coffee with sugar and cream skimmed off the top of the milk bottle. The evenings Aberdeen Daily World enlivened cocktail hour. Magazines like Time, Saturday Evening Post, or Life engaged her as she sat in her chair to the right of the fireplace. Stretching out on the couch after the housework was done, she devoured novels from the library, mysteries, the latest arrival from the Book-of-the-Month Club. She often reread her favorite book, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. My sisters and I also reread it often, recognizing the heroine, Cassandra Mortmain and our mother as kindred spirits. Cassandra also was sensible, outgoing and a doer. 

...

     I wonder whether he kept a dry eye as he tried to comfort his readers: "There is no need to shed tears for a vanished institution..." and promised to preserve the Post's Morgue as a valuable historical reference.  He knew that morgue would be cared for.  The fifty-seven volumes of news and features are still accessible, in large part because of the newspaper's glossy book stock holds up and displays photographs well.  The full collection is maintained by the Aberdeen Timberland Library, on microfilm by the state of Washington, and in both forms in my guestroom closet.

COMMENT

     Here’s a recurring library theme— reading habits as a reflection of a person’s true self.[1]  In this instance, the mother’s personality is reflected in the heroine of her favorite book.  Her daughters love the book, too, in part because it reminds them of  mom. 

     Mom's reading habits are a combination of subscriptions and library books. The description is from the days when libraries didn't usually circulate periodicals.  If you wanted to read them you had to sit in the library reading room.  

  The defunct newspaper was the Gray's Harbor Post which ceased publication in 1961.  The paper recorded a history of small-town life.  The demise of the paper was related to a declining economy related to resource extraction.  Once the newspaper was gone, there was no longer anyone to tell the story.

[1]See: He Didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It; The Stack; Taking Notes on How Bibliophiles Flirt.

Prescribed Reading

Abigail Zuger, "Prescribed Reading: A Doctor's Guide to Books," New York Times Book Review, May 12, 2019, p. 11. 

     Experts have been tackling the worldwide resurgence of measles for decades no, and it was only a matter of time before the scattershot outbreaks of years past turned into the year's newsworthy explosions.
     Readers curious about this infection rising phoenix like for its own ashes will find both less and more in the library than they may want.  Aside from a few textbooks an pamphlets, I couldn't find a whole book devoted to measles-- not since the 10th century A. D., the is, when the Persian physician Al-Razi write "The Smallpox and Measles" to differentiate the two.

COMMENT

     The passage comes from a bibliographic essay about vaccinations. The author assumes that you would probably not need to buy your own collection of such books, so naturally you'd look for them in a library collection.

     The problem is, it's not a straightforward reference question.  Looking up the word "measles" turns up medical information that is radically out-of-date and unhelpful.  You could look online, but then you'd find medical sites, not a history of the disease or the development of vaccinations against it.  Worse, the Internet is a prime source of misleading anti-vax propaganda that is responsible for recent measles outbreaks in the first place.  If anti-vexers had started with better information research strategies, they might have made better medical decisions.

     These research pitfalls are familiar to reference librarians.  Biased websites, fake news, ads masquerading as "news," websites that are too specific with no context -- some medical libraries have set up websites to try to point people towards relatively more reliable medical information online.  But in this instance seems like the library is not much better with its one historic reference.  The author does what any good reference librarian would do and tries different vocabulary, re-focusing on the question of vaccination rather than the etiology of the disease. A spate of recent popular science books turn up, which tell a compelling tale of medical history although at least one has "some real bloopers" as far as medical science.  The author comments, "that's why some wise educator long ago created textbooks."

   

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.

    

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder, "By the Book," New York Times Book Review, April 28, 2019, p. 8.

   

Did you read poetry as a child? What books made you fall in love with poetry?
As a western Washington State '30s family we had few books.  My mother was a reader, though, and every Saturday we drove into north Seattle to check out the university district library and the thrift stores.  It seems I heard Whitman, Robert Frost, Poe and Robert Burns before I could read. 

COMMENT

     I'm happy to know that Gary Snyder's mom read him poetry.   

     If anyone asked me this question the answer would be Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats  / T.S. Eliot,  The Bat Poet / Randell Jarrell,  The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Moral Alphabet / Hillaire Belloc, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse / ed. By Stephen Dunning and Edward Leuders, and Edward Lear's nonsense poems. Also those unlikely poetic parodies that used to appear in Mad Magazine at a time when there was an assumption that everyone was familiar with certain poems. (Once upon a final inning/ with the other ball team winning/ and my Mudville teammates trailing/ by a score of 2 to 4... If Edgar Allen Poe wrote Casey at the Bat).

   It's not quite  fair to say that youngsters these days don't read poetry, though. The strikingly passive-aggressive lines of William Carlos Williams' poem This is Just to Say have become an Internet meme (as I recall, the poem was included in the Reflections anthology).  My daughter appreciates This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin.


     



   

  

It's Not You, It's Men

Justin Chen, "It's Not You, It's Men" (Modern Love), New York Times, April 28, 2019, p. ST6.

     Several months ago, a co-worker asked me for the name of my celebrity crush.
     "Carrie Brownstein," I said.
     I didn't really have a celebrity crush, but Carrie's name jumped out. On "Portlandia," she was smart, whimsical and tough. I had checked out her memoir from the library the previous week and had just begun reading it.

COMMENT 

     Librarians like serious talk about education and life-long learning, but the library is also the perfect place to get light reading, like a celebrity memoir that you wouldn't want to actually spend money on or need to keep on your home bookshelves forever.   It's the Readers' Bill of Rights again with the right to escapism.[1]  

     There is great value to being able to borrow any library book that seems appealing.  Yet in this Modern Love essays, even this fluffiest of books got the reader thinking about the nature of his own romantic relationships (and also a publication credit in the New York Times, which is nothing to sneeze at.)

[1]See, How to Tap Your Inner Reader

The Stack

Katherine Schulz, “The Stack”, New Yorker, March 25, 2019, pp. 28-31.

It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure.  I do know that when he was nineteen he let Michigan for Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had so impressed him when he first arrived in America.  Instead, he found penury on the Bowery.  To save money, he walked each day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library.  Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he found there.

COMMENT

Here’s another version of the same story Frank McCourt told [1]— an immigrant finding the American   at the public library.  When the father has a bit more money and his own house he becomes a bit of a book hoarder, saving everything he has read in a large, sorted stack in his bedroom. 

In the essay, his daughter says that she keeps two photos of her father on her desk— one that is an image of him and another image of his stack of books.  Of the book photo she writes, “I can’t imagine a better image of the kinds of things that normally. Defy a camera.”  As in other library stories,  the reading list is described as a reflection of a person’s soul. From stories like this it seems clear that one of the reasons that people love libraries is that the books they have read are in the stacks.  The collection reflects a little reflection of the true self of each and every library borrower.  

Reading is a reflection of both true self and an aspirational self. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile is a haunting graphic novel in which a reading list comes to seem more representative than real life.  [2]

[1] New in Town

[2] Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010.

Taking Notes on How Bibliophiles Flirt

Karla Marie-Rose Derus, “Taking Notes on How Bibliophiles Flirt” (Modern Love), New York Times, February 24, 2019, pl. ST6.

During six years of singlehood in my 20s, I became a person I did not know. Before, I had always been a reader. I walked to the library several times a week as a child and stayed up late into the night reading under my blankets with a flashlight. I checked out so many books and returned them so quickly the librarian once snapped, “Don’t take home so many books if you’re not going to read them all.” “But I did read them all,” I said, unloading them into her arms. I was an English major in college and went on t get a master’s in literature. But shortly after the spiral-bound thesis took its place on my shelf next to the degree, I stopped reading. It happened gradually, the way one heals or dies.

… 

On our seventh date, David and I visited the Central Library downtown.,
“I have a game,” he said, pulling two pens and pads of sticky notes out of his bag. “Let’s find books we’ve read and leave reviews in them for he next person.”
We wandered through the aisles for over an hour. In the end, we say on the floor among the poetry, and I read him some of Linda Pastan’s verse. 

… 

The Japanese language has a word for this: tsundoku. The act of acquiring books that go unread.

COMMENT


     Shame on the librarian. The writer describes herself as “a 5-foot-3-inch black woman born to a Caribbean mother.” It troubles me to think that the librarian was judging her appearance, not her borrowing habits. What’s more, the librarian is deeply wrong to think that taking out unread books is somehow wrong. A library is an antidote to tshundoku. Unlike the bookstore which clutters your home shelves, you can take a chance with a library book that may not turn out to be worth reading.  (See: What to Do With all the Stuff That's Cluttering your Home; Can't. Just. Stop).

     As other library stories relate, the books that people read and/or buy become deeply personal markers of who they are. Even after Karla stops reading, she considers the books she has read essential to her self perception. Her online dating profile is listed under the screen name “missbibliophile” and her taste in literature speaks for her personality. David, the boyfriend reads history and nonfiction; Karla prefers writers of color and immigrant narratives (writers on her list like  Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy and Edward P. Jones indicate the importance of diversity to her self-image) Can they overcome their differences to combine their bookshelves?

Like the writer, I experienced a period of non-reading, but I don’t think it was related to romantic disappointment or intellectual fatigue. I believe I lost my ability to concentrate due to too much screen time. I decided it was a big problem that I had stopped reading books and I cured myself by sitting down with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace until I had read it all the way through. A distraction-free long distance Amtrak trip was helpful to the project of becoming re-literate.

The library game the two lovers play is charming. It reminds me of students who leave paper money in their dissertation to reward anyone who bothers to read their work. Other library stories feature ephemera found in books (See: Lee Israel) or marginalia (See: When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered). In academic libraries one sometimes finds texts marked up with notes or highlighting from previous readers. Sometimes this seems like annoying defacement, but it’s also an insight into what impressed another reader. I shouldn't admit it, but I don't always mind if library books are marked up if it's done in pencil and not fluorescent-yellow ink.

The library in this story is also a meaningful place.  The two lovers go there on a date.  When David proposes he does it by tucking a note into the pages of a book.

There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves, Too.

Milton Esterow. There's Nazi Loot on the Shelves, Too: Art Gets More Attention, but Millions of Stolen Books Have Yet to be Returned. New York Times,  Jan. 15, 2019, C1, 3.

    "People have looked away for so long," said Anders Rydell, author of "The Book Theives: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance," "but I don't think they can any more."
...

     In the last 10 years, for example, libraries in Germany and Austria have returned about 30,0000 books to 600 owners, heirs and institutions, according to researchers.

..... 

     Ms. Grimsted's work in tracking the lost volumes has advanced considerably since 1990, when she discovered 10 lists of items looted from libraries in France by the Einsatzastab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a task force headed by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.  The task force plundered more than 6,000 libraries and archives all over Europe but left behind detailed recoreds that have proved invaluable in tracing what was stolen.
...
     The Nazi targets were mainly the families, libraries and institutions of Jews but also included the Masons, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Slavs and critics of the Nazi regime. Though libraries were destroyed and some books were burned by the Nazis early on, they later came to transfer many of the worlds to libraries and to the Institute for  Study of the Jewish Question, which was established by the task force in Frankfurt in 1941.
     "They hoped to utilize the books after the war was won to study their enemies and their culture so as to protect future Nazis from the Jews who were their enemies," Ms. Grimsted said. 

COMMENT

    Everyone associates Nazis with art-theft and book burning, so it's a bit surprising to learn that they were also building libraries of stolen books, albeit with nefarious purpose.  The intent to weaponize cultural information is a truly dark side of diverse collections.  In other library anecdotes, collection diversity is is a purely good thing, essential for library patrons seeking self-knowledge and a sense of identity.

    It's not entirely clear from the article whether the primary value of returning the stolen books lies in their rarity, their information content, or in symbolic restorative justice.   According to researcher Patricia Grimsted,  Nazis looted the books specifically because of the way the information represented the specific communities they came from.  One of the books returned to heirs is described as "an important 16th century volume," but another is a "children's activity book."  Whatever their monetary value, it's clear that both books had deep value to the people who received them.

   So it seems that the sense of identity is still represented in the looted collections, even when they represent identities lost to war and genocide.  There is a conundrum that the libraries should have copies of these works, but at the same time, the way these particular copies came into the library collections is monstrous and unacceptable.  The article does not say if there is any effort for libraries to purchase replacement copies of the returned books.  However, it seems like after the books are returned, building collections to tell the history of those Jews, Masons, Catholics, Communists, Slavs and political activists would be another form of restorative justice.

   

Autism as Metaphor

Marie Myung-Ok-Lee, "Autism as Metaphor," New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2019, pp. 12-13.

     I ask myself why using autism the way these books do feels wrong. As a child who was disappointed to find the only Asian Characters in any book in the library to be the Japanese-American family in "Farewell to Manzaner," I am acutely aware of the importance of feeling represented in literature.  And yet, when it comes to autism appearing in literary fiction, I instinctively feel a need to protect my son from these portrayals.  He's not an Ojibwe curse, a savant or an alien.  Nor is he an emotionless cipher with no inner life.
     As a writer, I understand the absurdity of trying to place restrictions on what can and can't be written about. Keats defined negative capability as an artist's ability to transmute an experience or idea into art even if she hasn't experienced it herself; without it we'd have no historical fiction, no "Madame Bovary," no "Martian Chronicles."
     The crux of the issue is that with autism there is often, not metaphorically but literally, a lack of voice, which renders the person a tabula rasa on which a wrier can inscribe and project almost anything; Autism is a gift, a curse, super intelligence, mental retardation, mystical, repellent, morally edifying, a parent's worst nightmare.
   As a writer, I say go ahead and write what you want.  As a parent, I find this terrifying given the way neurotypical people project false motives and feelings onto the actions of others every day. 

COMMENT

    Borrowing a title from Susan Sontag's famous essay, Myung-Ok-Lee is distressed by the way fictional characters with autism become a fill-in-the-blank plot device, not people but a metaphorical illness.  She argues that this blank spot constitutes a form of erasure similar to the way that diversity blank spots in library collections render Asian people invisible.   

    For a more authentic view of people with autism, Myung-Ok-Lee suggests The Reason I Jump (2013)  by Naoki Higashida, a non-verbal Japanese man with autism whose mother assisted his writing.   Other autistic authors do have a voice to explain themselves such as scientist Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, 1995; The Autistic Brain, 2013), or photographer Rosalie Winard (Wild Birds of the American Wetland, 2008).  As for fiction, there is a fully-realized autistic character  in The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) (biologist Patricia Westerford) who seems to be modeled on someone like Grandin.  

   So the problem is not just a problem of diversity, but one of avoiding stereotypes.  The story of Asians in America is much broader than just Japanese internment camps; the story of Autism is not limited to the reaction of neurotypical people.   

     

     

     

     

The Light Under the Bushel

Chigozie Obioma, "The Light Under the Bushel: A Father Ignites a Passion for Reading, " New York Times Book Review, Dec 9, 2018, P20.

     By the fifth month I had read every book my father owned.  One Saturday, he returned home and asked me to get in the car.
     "I have a surprise for you."
We drove through streets clotted with people until we got to a newly painted building with an arch over the gate that read, Ondo State Library. We walked through the arch into the building, the likes of which I had never seen. There were books everywhere, on shelves, on tables, on the floor.
     "I want to register you here and bring you every Saturday here to read, "my father said.
     I wanted breathlessly as he completed the registration at the counter with an elderly, bespectacled woman who seemed in awe of the idea of a child coming in alone to read.  My father, proud, agreed and said that it was all I wanted to do.
     "That is good," I herd the woman say. "Very, very good.  Reading is like finding light, you know.  Jesus said a light cannot be hidden under a bushel"
     "That is true," my father said, nodding as the woman wrote my name on a small, square yellow card.
     "Your son has found the light under the bushel."
     She handed me the card and my father said he would pick me up at noon.  I waved him goodbye and disappeared among the crowded shelves.

COMMENT

     The author tells the story of how he got his first library card at the Ondo State Library in Nigeria when he was eight years old. He receives the treasured card along with a literal blessing from the librarian and from his father.

     Obioma relates how his mother told folktales in Igbo language, but his father's stories, told in English, seemed far more complex and interesting. One day Obioma finds out that his father has been re-telling stories he read in books, He begins reading obsessively himself. Looking back from the perspective of an adult, he realizes that his mother had no Igbo literature to draw from.  English language books were the pathway to education, but also a way to escape the limits of his own culture. He writes, "it struck me that if I could read well, I could be like my father. I too could become a repository of stories and live in their beautiful worlds away from the dust and ululations of Akure."

     Concealed in this triumphant story of education is a sadder tale about the Igbo stories that were never written down and never added to any library. Literature written in English comes to seem more important simply because there is so much more of it.

But a library card is a blessing nonetheless. I got my first library card when I was 5. The school librarian didn't believe a kindergartener could read so she asked me to read aloud from a book which had the word "orphanage" in it. I read the whole book pronouncing the unfamiliar word as four distinct syllables, or-pa-ha-nage. She did not correct my pronunciation until I had read through the entire book.  I was absolutely furious at her for letting me humiliate myself like that. But still, I got the library card and after that could take home all the books I wanted from the school library.  I never asked the librarian for any suggestions.     

New in Town

Frank McCourt, "New in Town: The Initiation of a Young Irishman," New Yorker,  Dec. 3, 2018, p. 20-24 [reprinted from Feb. 33 & March 1, 1999].

     It's a warm October day and I have nothing else to do but what I'm told and what harm is there in wandering up to Fifth Avenue where the lions are. The librarians are friendly.  Of course I can have a library card, and it's so nice to see young immigrants using the library. I can borrow four books if I like as long as they're back on the due date. I ask if they have a book called "The Lives of the Poets" by Samuel Johnson, and they say, My, my, my, you're reading Johnson.  I want to tell them I've never read Johnson before, but I don't want them to stop admiring me. They tell me feel free to walk around, take a look at the Main Reading Room, on the third floor. They're not a bit like the librarians in Ireland, who stood guard and protected the books against the likes of me.
      The sight of the Main Reading Room, North and South, makes me go weak at the knees. I don't know if it's the two beers I had or the excitement of my second day in New York, but I'm near tears when I look at the miles of shelves and know I'll never be able to read all those books if I live till the end of the century.  There are acres of shiny tables where all sorts of people sit and read as long as they like, seven days a week, and no one bothers them unless they fall asleep and snore. There are sections with English, Irish, American books, literature, history, religion and it makes me shiver to think I can come here anytime I like and read anything as long as I like if I don't snore. 

COMMENT

     To this new immigrant, the freedom of America is represented by a public library where anyone can come in to sit and read as long as they like.  After an Irish bartender chides nineteen-year-old McCourt for drinking instead of educating himself he heads for the New York Public Library to find a copy of Lives of the Poets.  In the baffling big city, the library is the one place where his literary ambitions don't seem laughable.

   
   

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, Penguin Random House, 2015.

     I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grandfather once worked.  Moorland held archives, papers, collections and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works.  I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention.  I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling Brown. [p.46]
...

     The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, their right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.  I was made for the library, not the classroom.  The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.  Slowly, I was discovering myself. [p.48]

COMMENT

     "The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. " It's a statement so beautiful I'd like to engrave it on the marble facade of a library, if libraries still had marble facades.

     Ta-Nehisi Coates was destined to grow up to be a bookish, well-read person. His father, W. Paul Coates, worked as African American Studies reference and acquisition librarian at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center; He also owned a bookstore and founded Black Classic Press.

     The "jail of other people's interests" is Coates fils' rationale for his idiosyncratic research method but it also gets to the core what libraries are all about. Education has done its job when students are able break free from lectures, classroom assignments and the pursuit of grades. All that schoolwork is a foundation, but the library is the place where students truly become independent thinkers and complete their transformation into scholars.

Deep in Time

Holly Haworth. “Deep in Time: Standing Still in the Age of Oil.” Orion. 37(2), 2018, pp. 36-47.

Along the trail I bend and squint to look at the fossils. I am carrying the Guide to the Permian Reef Geology Trail that I picked up in the park library. The book’s authors, who represent the oil companies ARCO, Marathon, Texaco and Chevron, have documented the types of rocks and fossils within the reef at several stops on the trail. I match the shapes that I see with the photos in the guide. [p.42]

COMMENT

     A few years ago I did a quick-and-dirty citation analysis in order to see what kind of materials students in our new Environmental Humanities program were using for their Masters theses. I found that their citations fit a normal humanities research profile (lots of books, relatively fewer journal articles) with the notable addition of some unusual types of research materials -- local newspaper articles, government land use plans, photographs, maps and guidebooks.  It made sense because Environmental Humanities explores the relationship between people and place. These types of resources are all ways to associate information with a particular geography.

    Conventional instruction for information literacy tends to ignore place-based research. Librarians focus on a universal kind of knowledge that's contained in books and scholarly journal articles. However, the old style of inquiry is  not working out as well in an age when sustainable change requires engagement with place. One way librarians can help build resilient communities is by developing place-based information literacy courses.  Environmental Humanities research provides a  model for what place-based research could look like.

     Popular guidebooks don't just report on what's there; they can generate a kind of feedback loop that in a way creates a sense of place.  Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to the Birds (1934), for example, or the Powell Expedition reports that inadvertently became the first recreational guidebook to the Colorado River. Some guidebooks become controversial when they draw crowds into formerly peaceful areas, for example, or reveal the location of fragile archaeological sites. One author of Utah hiking guidebooks became notorious for overambitious agendas that lure ill-prepared novices into trouble. Guidebooks like Atlas Obscura expose undiscovered places and are accused of contributing to overtourism. One hazard for library copies of guidebooks is that patrons are likely to take them out into the field.  I’ve done it myself, most recently with a library copy of  Guide to the Green and Yampa Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument. 

     Librarians should keep an eye out for unique local guidebooks that record  a sense of place. One of my favorites is a guidebook to the trees growing by the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. [1].  With the guidebook in hand, the trees appear in a whole new light. Another recently published treasure is Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path by Elliott R. Mott [2]who hopes his guide to a neglected urban river will help create change. He writes, "It is hoped this book will accelerate the transformation and pave the way to developing a first class pollution free, wildlife rich, urban water trail." 

[1] Jenifer Baguley, Trees, Spirituality and Science: A Guide to the Trees of the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City, U of U Center for Science and Mathematics Education, 2013.

[2] Elliott R. Mott, Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path, Roosevelt & Torrey LLC, 2018. 

God is Going to Have to Forgive Me

Elizabeth Dias. “‘God is Going to Have to Forgive Me’: Young Evangelicals Speak Out,” (Election 2018 The Voters),  New York Times, November 2, 2018, P. A13.

     I was pulled out of Smith College in 2015 when I told my parents that I was rethinking the legitimacy of anti-gay theology. I thought, “God is going to have to forgive me. I am not going to die in this culture war.” I was Republican like them. Before, I supported whatever my church told me about candidates and issues. I never questioned or read outside material on these subjects. I secretly started borrowing books from the library. I gave a communion message in 2016— it was, “Our God chooses to die the death of all these marginalized people. He dies like Matthew Shepard, like a kid at the hand of the state. He was a refugee.” My church reprimanded me for “abusing he pulpit.” Other members used it to openly stump for Trump and say hateful things about Muslims and L.G.B.T. citizens.

COMMENT

     I used to teach an online course on how to do library research. My students had to select a topic for a final project bibliography.  Occasionally I would get a student who tried to challenge me by picking an overtly religious topic like “the truth of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”  They thought I’d tell them no and then they could complain about being persecuted by those godless liberals at the University

     But I always told them, yes, that’s a great topic. The only problem, I’d say, is it’s not focused. I advised them to imagine that they were writing a sermon. Perhaps they could focus on the meaning of some specific teaching of Jesus? Or on how Christian theology informs some particular moral issue? The students who proposed religious research were always surprised to find out that there is a vast body of scholarly literature about theology and the Bible.  They thought the people at their church were the only authority. 

  The 22 year old woman in the article describes growing up in a culture where disagreeing with church authority was actually dangerous.  She was pulled out of college for questioning a quasi-biblical teaching and shamed by other members who ignored her message of Christian compassion.  What does it mean that she used the library and  not the Internet to start questioning the politics of her church?  Perhaps in such an intellectually repressive environment her home didn’t have the Internet. Maybe she used the library because she didn’t want anyone looking over her shoulder during her secret reading. Or maybe the Internet just doesn’t work well for this kind of questioning because online information has a tendency to amplify what you already believe. In any case, the young woman in the interview says she is still a Christian but she has changed her party affiliation to Democrat. 

     

Well Read, Well Known

Concepcion De Leon, "Well Read, Well Known: Glory Edim's Well-Read Black Girl Community is Growing Beyond a Book Club," New York Times, Oct. 26, 2018, p. C15-

     She comes from a family of readers; her mother was a historian before emigrating to the United States and often took Edim and her younger brothers to the library, where they would stock up on books.  That's where she discovered Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."
     "I remember my first book report on Maya Angelou. I had an A.P. English teacher really critique her and be like, 'She's not a good writer,'" Edim recalled, "He was looking at syntax, he was looking at grammar, he was looking at her completely different structure." But these weren't the elements that appealed to Edim.  She was drawn in by Angelou's descriptions of her relationship with her brother, which reminded Edim of her own, and said Angelou "changed my thinking about literature, who can write and whose voice is important."

COMMENT

     Many years after finding Maya Angelou in the library, Glory Edim founded Well-Read Black Girl, a book club to read black women authors. If it had been up to her A.P. English teacher, though, she might never have discovered Angelou. In fact, the teacher's overt dislike of Angelou's writing demonstrates why diversity in collections is so important.These days there are MFA programs for people who want to be writers, in effect creating new rules about who can write and whose voice is important. Angelou never went to college. She made herself into a writer by using the language she heard in her community.

    Angelou's writing is notable for using patterns of African-American English, though she herself rejected the idea that Black vernacular (a.k.a. Ebonics) should be considered a separate language. Angelou saw language as a tool of power and believed that learning Standardized English was a way for Black people to get access to power.  Nonetheless, as Edim says, writers like Angelou change the rules of power by redefining who can be a writer.
 
     Librarians have a challenge to find up-and-coming writers who are outside of the approval-plan.  A few years ago I started hearing buzz about a young Somali-British poet named Warsan Shire. The humanities librarian refused to purchase her obscure books for the library collection, so I requested a purchase for my own use in order to sneak her books into the collection. Not long afterwords,  Beyoncé used Shire's poetry in her album Lemonade. We librarians like to talk about diversity, but we also need to pay attention to what diverse communities are reading and be ready to spend money on it.  In a way, it seems too bad that a well-read Black girl like Glory Edim is not a librarian.

Illiberal Values

Kirn, Walter. Easy Chair: Illiberal Values. Harper’s vol. 337, no 2019 (Aug. 2018). p5-7.

Paula was our town librarian. She used Ms. in front of her name and held opinions— on Nixon, the Vietnam War, and civil rights— that I’d heard on the news, from protest leaders and such, but hadn’t experienced up close.  Since the library was on the first floor of the town hall, an old wooden building with a bell on top and an air of venerable officialdom, I wondered whether she was endangering herself by sharing her views while on the job. To demonstrate my own courageous spirit and win her respect, I picked out books that struck me as controversial or sophisticated from the adult shelves, then plunked myself down to read them in an armchair that was visible from her desk. Though I was just eleven, I read Slaughterhouse Five and Future Shock this way. Sometimes we ended up talking about the books. Through gentle questioning, she would elicit from me opinions I wouldn’t have dared to share with others, such as my hope that humans would die out as punishment for harming whales and dolphins. [p. 5]

COMMENT: 

     I have a bit of a crush on Paula. She’s what I would like to be as a librarian. I especially love her willingness to discuss books with her callow young admirer.  

     I can remember doing this kind of reading when I was about eleven, but I didn't always rely on the library.  Slaughterhouse Five and Future Shock were on the bookshelves of my parents or my friends’ parents, as were the utterly fascinating Joy of Sex and Our Bodies Our Selves.  I don’t recall ever trying to discuss them with an adult. Even though I had a perfectly good library card, in Jr. High I loved Kurt Vonnegut so much that I spent my own money on paperback copies of his books so I could read and re-read them. I recently re-read Slaughterhouse Five because it was on my daughter’s high school reading list, and was pleased to find that it is still as good as ever. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”  It gives you chills, doesn't it?

Drumming at the Edge of Magic

 Mickey Hart, Jay Stevens, & Fredric Lieberman. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion,  HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.

     For a long time I thought I would walk into a bookstore and come out with a book explaining all of this.  I finally sought guidance from several of my more learned friends who suggested I try a good research library.  Have you ever been to a major research library, like Harvard’s Widener or Berkeley’s Doe? They’re imposing stone structures, every inch of which hammers home the message that this is a very serious building.  The first time I went into the library at Berkeley I felt as if I had entered a strange kind of church that was both very busy and very quiet – a kind of hushed, scurrying place.  Everywhere you looked, serious people were praying over piles of books.

      I couldn’t wait to get my pile.  I felt the same excitement that I remembered feeling when my grandfather took me to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History – this was where the answers were kept.

     My guide was a brisk, no-nonsense type with a Ph.D. Astonished that I’d never been inside a big library before, she was enough of a teacher to be moved by my sudden and naïve eagerness for knowledge. Leading me over to a computer terminal, she punched in the topic – percussion—and scrolled quickly through the entries, jotting down numbers.  I was captivated by the process, particularly by the fact that inside this immense medieval stone building pulsed a heart of high technology.  In a minute we were trotting toward the stacks, zipping past aisles, checking numbers as we went.

     We made a right turn down between two of the stacks and halted in front of a squared-off section of maybe two dozen books.  The mother lode? I gazed at the titles.  Blades was there, of course, along with Curt Sachs’s History of Musical Instruments and John Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility, but there were also a few volumes I had never seen before.  Eagerly I skimmed some of the tables of contents, my excitement fading as I went—there didn’t seem to be much here.

     Why were so many of the drum books so thin? And why, now that you mention it, were there so few? Why were there shelves full of books about the violin and walls full of books about the piano but only a dozen or so about drums, most of them monographs on obscurities like the gong in fourteenth-century Manchuria or gigantic tomes on narrow subjects like the mbira (the thumb piano in Zaire).

     I wheeled to question my guide, who nervously backed away murmuring something about there always being gaps in the scholarly record; if there weren’t gaps there’d be nothing for aspiring Ph.D.s to do.   [p. 29]

COMMENT

     This is my favorite library research story of all times.

     The drummer for the Grateful Dead walks into a library in Berkeley and... the librarian fails to recognize him. Then she gives him wrong advice.  Only in a moment of zen it turns out to be exactly the right advice.

     As things transpire, if you are Mickey Hart you have connections. Not long after this library incident, Hart's friends invited him to dinner with Joseph Campbell who literally wrote the book on The Power of Myth (1988). After chatting for a while about drums, Campbell (who like the librarian had also never heard of the Grateful Dead band, but knew the folktale)  offered the same advice  the librarian had given. He told Hart to write a book. 

   Micky Hart did what any respectable cult-band percussionist would do and hired a writer to help him write and a music professor to help with library research.  The book they wrote together is a marvel.

    It occurs to me that the reason that Hart failed to find books about shamanic drumming in the first place is because he was looking for indigenous knowledge.  The root problem is, most shamans don't write books.


 

Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale

Jennifer Schuessler, “Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 2018, p. C1-2.

Even when filing an essay spurred by a group of books, Mr. Finder of the New Yorker said, Professor Lepore will send in detailed footnotes that sometimes include primary source documents that seem to have never been cited before.  

“Her gravitation towards dust, towards opening boxes that haven't seen light for decades, as clearly never faded, “ he said. 

… 

She also vacuumed up secondary literature.

     “I wrote strictly chronologically, and for every chapter I would check out a gazillion books,” she said.  “The security guard at the library would always ask, ‘What year are you on?”

COMMENT

It’s those “dusty” boxes again. 

Professor Lepore has written a well-reviewed new history of the U.S. [1] and her attraction to dust is the specific thing that  makes her a great historian. (When librarians say "dust" they usually mean unused materials that are a target for weeding).  Mr. Finder’s comment also carries an implication  that most historians copy from each other when they cite sources. This copying can also be a side effect of keyword search engines that highlight the most popular links. Finding new primary source documents means not using the same research strategy as everyone else. 

I notice that Professor Lepore works from the print collection. Writing a book is information-intensive.  Many researchers find that reading from print is a quicker way to scan through a lot of text, slowing down to give more attention to the interesting parts. It's also a way to find things expressed in non-keyword vocabulary-- especially important since language changes over time. Online reading enforces equivalent attention to each page in a way that I, personally, dislike.  In my own research, I find that I often use ebooks for keyword searching and almost never actually read them. 

     It's interesting to me that Lepore who is clearly a library super-user mentions a relationship with the security guard but not with any librarians. Library support staff are often the ones on the front lines interacting with patrons, while librarians, hidden in their offices, miss making connections like this. I wonder how many librarians at the Widener Library knew that professor Lepore was making such heavy use of the U.S. History Collection?  I wonder if any of them cared what year she was on?

[1] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, W.W.Norton (2018).