An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

Walter Terry, “An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance.” Smithsonian, Oct. 1980, p. 61-69.

     The procedure for mounting each of the historic dances in “early Years” varied.  Rehearsals went on in company studios or in the University of Utah’s old Kingsbury Hall. But coaching sessions and practice also took place wherever and whenever there was time; individuals sought out advice from from New York to Hollywood. They sat in screening rooms at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, the greatest dance archives in the world, or they huddled by screens at home to see movies, whole and fragmentary, of the dances they were preparing. They sprawled on studio floors while listening to reminiscences and they rehearsed and sweated on those floors as they strove to capture the past 

     On occasion, someone from he Dance Notation Bureau in New York City would come to them with the score of a dance recorded in Labanotation, a highly accurate and detailed system. (It is named after Rudolf von Laban, pioneer, along with Mary Wigman of Germany’s modern dance, and it can record the position of thumb and the flicker of an eyelid as well as vast patterns by a huge company.  After notation set the dances, “live” experts would come to place final touches because, says Chmelar, commenting on one weakness of the notation system, “the breath of life is missing.”

COMMNET

     Here's a truly amazing story of extreme library research. The Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) re-constructed a program of early modern dance performances from the 1920s-50s from evidence left behind.  The problem is, of course, that dance happens in the moment.  The traces it leaves are in the memory of the people who did it or saw it.  Other than that, the movement has been translated into words or images.

     But what about movies?  What about the that Labanotation?  The problem is, says  Robin Chmelar who performed Isadora Duncan choreography in the show, "the breath of life is missing."

     Walter Terry, the dance critic who wrote the article, hated this project. “In theory, the multiple-source procedure used by the RDT to stage its fist program of historic dances was admirable.  But there were pitfalls," he wrote.  Terry believed that the movements of modern dance are inextricably connected to the original style of the original dances, and that the dances could only be properly transmitted by a teacher/guru who had learned the original.  Linda C. Smith, who was Executive/Artistic co-director of RDT felt differently.  If the dance had validity, she responded, then it had validity on her dancing body.    

       In library terms these two are arguing over preservation issues.  In Terry's view, the recorded traces in the archive are memory aids, but not living documents.  Smith, by contrast, views the archives as preserving a form of memory that can be re-activated in a meaningful way. 

     I actually saw this program back in the 1980s, and it made a big impression on me.  It was not merely danced, but was accompanied by a lecture on dance history.  The audience left knowing who the original artists were and why they were important.  Seeing these dancers with the "breath of life" was an entirely different experience from watching films or looking at still photos in books.  I think Terry was wrong to think that the reproductions were "tampering with history".  We recreate fictionalized history in all kind of ways with novels, movies, and plays and other art.  Why not  use what's in the  library archives to re-create an experience of seeing early modern dance?  As Linda C. Smith pointed out, she never claimed to impersonate Isadora Duncan.  Rather, she was dancing her own interpretation of dances that Duncan made, taking the inspiration of the dances into the future. 

Hidden Traces

Sam Knight, "Hidden Traces: How Historical Manuscripts are Giving Up Their Secrets" (Annals of Science), New Yorker,  November 26, 2018, pp. 38-45.

Melloni is the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences, an institute in Bologna dedicated to the history of the Church.  He had heard of the Marco Polo Bible, but he was unaware of its poor condition until a colleague spotted the crumbling book at an exhibition at the library in 2008, and pitched a project to restore it a find out more about its past.  "It was like a sort of Cinderella among the beautiful sisters," Melloni said.  Like other people accustomed to handling old texts or precious historical objects, Melloni has a special regard for what Walter Benjamin called their aura; "a strange weave of space and time" that allows for an intimation of the world in which they  were made.  "You have in your hand the manuscript,: Melloni said, "But also the stories that the manuscript is carrying.

....

Collins cautioned that historical proteomic techniques are still in their infancy.  "We still need to learn what these things mean," he said. But when you realize that the surface of any old object might be bearing newly discernible biological information -- that you are holding a manuscript and you are also holding the stories that the manuscript is carrying-- it makes you look again at the world's libraries and archives, and wonder what secrets they contain.  

Comment

     Books as physical objects are of the subject of  this article which describes scientific investigation of  the traces of protein left behind by people handling books and manuscripts.  Rather than using textual information, the researchers are looking for chemical clues about past authors and readers.  In the case of the Marco Polo bible, there were questions of whether the artifact was really the right age?  Did it really travel to China? "A manuscript's text is only part of it's story," Knight writes

     In order to test books, proteomic researchers need to get permission from librarians and archivists.  In some cases they use "destructive testing" which requires taking a small sample, a definite no-no for rare and valuable books.  Some libraries like the Bodleian Library and British Library have refused to permit even nondestructive testing which takes molecular samples.

      The author of the article realizes that his own notebook will forever carry traces of the fish he ate for lunch, but so what? Is that information important enough to be worth saving the physical object?  Probably not for the notebook, but for other paper objects proteomics can determine provenance or prove that certain conditions (like bubonic plague) were epidemic.  The information in libraries is not limited to what is recorded in text.

   

   

Shale Play

Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

     I grew up in Westmoreland County during the 1970s, when steel mills started closing along the rivers of Pittsburgh. Surface mining operations and slag heaps, abandoned coke ovens, and coal patch towns were just familiar parts of the industrialized, rural landscape I called home.
     With this project, I returned to those places with purpose, opened my laptop in the Pennsylvania Rooms of public libraries and in the Coal and Coke Heritage Center on Penn State’s Fayette campus. I talked to people in diners, attended public meetings and scribbled a lot in my notebooks. Jim Rosenberg and the Fayette Marcellus Watch group welcomed me to their monthly meetings at chain restaurants on the strip outside Uniontown, and I visited the homes of some of the group’s members. Typically, I told people I wanted to write about fracking and asked if I could transcribe their experience in their own words.  [pxxiii]

COMMENT

     You wouldn’t guess it from the research methods, but this writer was working on a book of poetry. 

     The Environmental Humanities have created a new clientele for special collections and archives that focus on local history. Writers and  artists are making use of place-based collections to inform work about the relationships between people and places. Library collections like the Pennsylvania Rooms and academic special collections hold a key to interpreting place-based identity that in turn informs community resilience and the possibility of sustainable change.

      Not that fracking is sustainable. The stories in Shale Play are unbearably sad ones about people trading their forests, farms, rivers, animals, good health, dignity and sense of community for a pocketful of money. Even so, the poems attest that the wounded land and damaged communities are still there despite the overlay of colonial industrialization. Perhaps in some form they will manage to outlast the bastards. 

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.

Dance With Us

 Ann Dils & Rosalind Pierson. "Dance With Us: Virginia Tanner, Mormonism, and Humphrey's Utah Legacy." Dance Research Journal 32, no. 2 (2000): 7-13. 

Pierson and I both seek to explain the magic of and produced by Tanner's teaching, but our texts--a memoir and a research paper--are distinct. Pierson writes from the warmth and certainty of her own experience, her memories perhaps stimulated or affirmed by research (see pp 14-16). Her account makes it clear that a memory is not just a mental picture but a remembering (derived from the Latin membrum, rather than memor) of experience, a calling up and inner restatement of sensory, somatic, and emotional experience. I write from the more distanced perspective of a researcher struggling with several kinds of documentation. I include more voices in my text, especially those of the Tanner students I interviewed or whose words are preserved in letters to her, now housed in the Virginia Tanner Papers, 1945-1979, in the Special Collections of the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

COMMENT

     Scholarly articles seldom  mention library interactions even though scholars are heavy library users judging from the typical extensive, well-researched reference lists. The erasure of personal experience is intended  to keep scholarly research objective.  I've noticed, though,  that when scholarly authors write for popular news media they love to relate their library adventures and the thrilling discovery of hidden treasure in the archives. 

     This is a rare scholarly article that does  mention the library. It's because the co-authors used an uncommon research strategy that combines personal memory with historical library research. This proved to be so confusing to whomever constructed the JSTOR online database where I found the article that they misinterpreted it as two separate articles. The digital copy of the article cut me off in the middle.  I had to locate a link to the entire scanned issue in order to read the whole article.

 

   

   
     

Baby Center

Jennifer Case, “Baby Center: An Essay on Place,” Orion, 35 (4&5), 2016.

BabyCenter was easy to participate in: all I had to do was log in. In-person gatherings were harder to devise. And yet I craved those, too, which is why I attended the local La Leche League meeting.  Some nights I hardly said anything at all. I just sat there in the basement of the library, nodding, nursing my daughter, comforted by the presence of others, other women with children, who talked about what they struggled with, what they loved, what they feared about having more children— if the tongue tie would cause latch issues again or if they’d ever sleep through the night. 

...

I haven't been on BabyCenter much lately. I've spent entire afternoons reading academic research about social networking sites and motherhood, yet I haven't returned to those sites.  

COMMENT

The author describes compulsively logging into an online discussion board to read about pregnancy, babies and motherhood. Despite this obsession, she never admits to using a library to find books with information about these topics. Rather, she craves to learn directly from other women who are going through similar experiences. In a transitory American college town, she lacks a real-life community of moms and the La Leche League is one of the few organizations around that invites honest discussion about the experience of becoming a mother.

While the author claims that social networking was emotionally supportive, it is clear that it also made her feel isolated and sort of crazy.  Once she makes some real friends she quits using the website.  She also doing actual library research, this time not to find out about babies and parenting but trying to understand her own uncharacteristic behavior. 

The essay contrasts social interaction in physical and virtual space. Meeting strangers at the library is a not-quite-adequate substitute for sisters, aunts, grandmothers and neighbors.  However, it's clear that a virtual library with just access to information would not not have done the trick. The library meeting room works as a stopgap until the real thing comes along. 

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Sceintific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

To be heard you must speak the language of the one you want to listen. So, back at school I proposed the idea of a thesis project to my graduate student Laurie. Not content with purely academic questions, she had been looking for a research project that would, as she said, “mean something to someone” instead of just sitting on the shelf. [158]

COMMENT

The shelf is of course a library shelf. Grad students have to produce original research so they gravitate towards narrow, hyper-specialized ideas. Academic libraries collect student theses and dissertations which are seldom heavily used. They are listed in the library catalog and in specialized databases, which is to say, if you want to read them you have to go looking. Student work is usually considered a fairly marginal contribution to scholarship. I have heard of grad students slipping money into their dissertation as a reward for anyone who actually bothers to read it.  In fact, I recently helped a friend get an M.S. Thesis through Interlibrary Loan and when he opened it he found a ten dollar bill tucked into the pages. 

     Laurie decides to investigate Indigenous knowledge about picking sweetgrass. [1]  Members of one tribe say that you must pluck each blade and leave the roots.  Another tradition says you must pull up the whole bunch, but not take every bunch.  A white male dean calls the research “a waste of time” because everyone knows that if you disturb a plant it will damage the population.  

     Nevertheless, she persisted, pursuing the Indigenous idea that, “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.”  When she presented the resaerch to a committee of white, male scientists, Laurie rephrased this idea as “if we remove 50 percent of the plant biomass, the stems are released from resource competition. The stimulus of compensatory growth causes an increase in population density and plant vigor.”  The scientists applaud.  

     As a librarian, I find that theses and dissertations are often useful sources for hyperlocal research.  One way to make  your research original is by deep focus on a very specific geographic place within the globalized geography of knowledge. 

[1] Laurie A. Reid. The Effects of Traditional Harvesting Practices on Restored Sweetgrass Populations. Thesis (M.S.), State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2005. 

Draft No. 4

John McPhee, "Checkpoints," in Draft No.4: John McPhee on the Writing Process, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 201,  pp. 129-155.

     Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it "will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed... silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata." With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge. It is in part, why the job exists and why, in Sara's words, a publication will believe in "turning a pack of professional skeptics loose on its own galley proofs." [136]
...
     Today's fact-checkers always start with the Internet, they tell me, and them ramify through the New York Public Library and beyond-- a pilgrimage from the errant to the trustworthy. [146]
...
    [On searching for the source of a Henry Moore quote] The Internet was no help, but Josh, searching through the catalogues of the New York Public Library, learned that collections of Moore's commentaries on sculptural art were in a midtown branch, across Fifth Avenue from the library main building.  After an hour or two there, he found an essay by Moore from a 1937 issue of the BBC's The Listener.  In the next-to-last paragraph were the words that Lynn Fracker had rattled off to me. [p.152-153]
...
     [On verifying a date of birth] When Mather died, on February 13, 1728, Seccocmbe was either twenty-one or twenty-two.  Which?  The Internet failed me. Libraries failed me. The complete works of Joseph Seccombe and Fluviatulis Piscator failed me. I called Kingston New Hampshire, where he had served as minister for more than twenty years. The person I reached there generously said she would look through town and church records and call me back, which she did, two or three days later. She was sorry. She had looked long and hard, but in Kingston evidently the exact date of Seccombe's birth was nowhere to be found. I was about to give up and insert "in his early twenties" when a crimson lightbulb lit up in my head. If Joseph Seccombe was a minister in 1737 (the year he arrived in Kingston) he had been educated somewhere, and in those days in advanced education in the Province of Massachusetts Bay there was one game in town. I called Harvard.
     By the main switchboard I was put through to someone who listened to my question and said right back, within a few seconds, "June 14, 1706."[p. 155]

COMMENT

     What wonderful reference stories these are! Note that in the extreme sport of New Yorker fact checking, the library is only the second line of defense.  McPhee gives the same advice I would give to student researchers -- try the quickest, easiest thing first. However, if that fails, the true fact-checker will be willing to go to great lengths to verify the truth of information.  

     Libraries figure in two of McPhee's fact-checking anecdotes. In the first the New York Public Library comes through with flying colors. Careful cataloging and a well-curated special collection focused on the artist Henry Moore eventually lead the dogged fact-checker to the source of the desired quote.  

     The second anecdote turns up one of those annoying failures of previous fact checkers  How on Earth did whoever edited the complete works of Joseph Seccombe (a.k.a. Fluviatulis Piscator) fail to learn his date of birth?  Though to be fair, it takes even the superhuman brainpower of McPhee more than a day to think of a strategy to find the answer.  

     In the scholarly literature of librarianship there are articles [1] that advocate replacing low-paid reference librarians with part-time staff hired from among the working poor. The primary argument for this money-saving strategy is that a category of question that used to be called "ready reference" (essentially fact-checking) has largely vanished due to the ease of Internet searching.  In theory, most of the questions that still come in are too "easy" to require expert assistance.  The problem is, there is actually no way to pre-determine whether a particular question is "easy" or "difficult."  The question about Seccombe's birth date sounds pretty easy, but in practice it was a stumper.  It turns out that regardless of various query-difficulty scales, the best proxy to measure difficulty is is, how much time it took to answer a question. [2]  Many libraries keep reference statistics, but treat "extended" questions as anything over about 15 minutes. A question that takes days or weeks to answer is not that unusual, but this type of question is barely even on the reference service radar. 

     The best librarians will take the time to follow the really difficult questions all the way through. It's good a way to keep in practice and develop a sixth-sense about how to approach questions.  The worst librarians "instruct" patrons how to do the research and then abandon them because they imagine that there is really no skill involved in tackling reference questions, or that they somehow think that skill can be acquired in a 15-minute consultation. On more than one occasion, I've observed  desk staff (librarians and non-librarians) give out information that is just plain wrong. There has to be some spark of passion for the importance of fact-checking.  If you don't have it, you should probably not present yourself as a reference librarian. 

     These days, weaponization of information has made Internet fact-checking into a minefield.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has identified disinformation as a danger that is moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock closer to Armageddon. [3] Unwary researchers are are likely to encounter unfiltered lies in disinformation generated by corporate-financed think-tanks, Russian trolls and hyper-partisan news stations. It seems urgent for librarians to re-focus information literacy instruction so that it's less about constructing scholarly bibliographies and more about fact-checking. 

[1] Susan M. Ryan, "Reference transactions analysis: The cost-effectiveness of staffing a traditional academic reference desk." The Journal of Academic Librarianship;34, no. 5 (2008): 389-399. This frequently-cited article invalidates itself when the author admits that she couldn't find a method for coding the queries so she made one up. I, too, can get any result I want by jiggering the coding system. 
[2] Sarah LeMire, 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.
[3]Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement. 

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. 

The Best American Poetry, 2018

David Lehman series ed., Dana Gioia, guest ed., The Best American Poetry, 2018, (Best American Poetry Series) Scribner Poetry, 2018.

     My editorial method was simple and unoriginal.  For twelve months (starting October 2016) I spent two or three hours each day reading new poetry. I read through every journal I could find as well as dozens of online journals. I bought piles of unfamiliar small magazines and subscribed to new journals. I read every issue of every literary magazine in my university's large periodical room.  When I traveled, I brought along a separate bag of journals to read on the plane or in the hotel room.  Meanwhile the series editor sent me weekly packets of poems that had caught his attention.  I initially wondered if David Lehman might want to press his suggestions. He is a persuasive advocate for the poetry he loves.  Lehman, however, gave me complete editorial autonomy.  I told no one outside my family that I had taken on the assignment. I didn't want to be lobbied by poet friends and acquaintances.
    I'm not sure how many thousands of poems I read. I surely broke the five-digit mark. Every time a poem grabbed my attention, I earmarked it or printed it out for rereading. My studio became a mountain range of periodicals, printouts, and photocopies. The most interesting part of the process was rereading and comparing the hundreds of poems that had made the first cut. Week after week I read and sorted the poems into three scientific categories -- Yes, No, Maybe.  After much agonizing, I made the final selections. 

COMMENT 

     This tale of extreme research raises a question: Why didn't the university library's large periodical room have more poetry journals? Actually, I can answer that one myself.  Many years ago during a budget shortfall the library where I worked slashed periodical subscriptions. The poetry journals were the first to go.  They weren't expensive -- we could have bought all of them for less than the cost of one science journal subscription.  But library use statistics indicated that almost nobody ever read them. 
     One problem was, most literary journals weren't listed in any of our indexes. Nowadays, Project Muse indexes a few of the well-known poetry journals (most of them represented in this book according to an appended "List of Magazines where the Poems were First Published"). But there are also zillions of small-press poetry journals. In order to submit to them, the poet sends in a few poems with a small fee that presumably keeps the journal going. After a while, this process of fee-based submission becomes deeply discouraging. It feels like everyone submits poems but nobody reads. 
     Yet libraries are nonetheless doing a disservice by ignoring poetry.  The mistake, I think, is trying to focus on  "important" poetry. There are a few poets who are famous enough so that their books are likely to circulate (I'd say Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, etc...  I doubt that Gioia particularly likes any of them).  However, I'd argue that the  most important poetry for librarians to collect is localized, written by the local community of writers (including at local institutions of higher education) but also (don't laugh) nature poetry. Gioia identifies an emerging trend of politically charged place-based poetics.  He writes, "The nature poem had become the major vehicle for political meditation and protest.  The bright innocence of Walt Whitman's American Eden has been overtaken by Robinson Jeffers's dark prophesy of spacious modern civilization."
    While librarians were busy cutting poetry from our collections, the poetic form has re-emerged as an particularly  important voice responding to the slow emergency of the Anthropocene. The Dark Mountain Project explicitly makes the Robinson Jeffers connection, and in Uncivilised Poetics (Dark Mounain10) the editors write "What's the point of poetry when the streets of Syria have been bombed beyond recognition? What's the point of poetry when the permafrost is melting?  But poetry matters because it offers an alternative reality --it refuses the logical, reductionist, materialist aspects of industrial cult; aslant, it invites us to feel our way in the dark." If libraries want to capture this important voice, they are going to have to rediscover poetry. 
    
   
    
    
     

Discovery Interrupted

Jeffrey Friedman, “Discovery, Interrupted: How World War I Delayed a Treatment for Diabetes and Derailed one Man’s Chance for Immortality," Harper’s, vol 337, no.2022, Nov. 2018, pp. 45-54.

My research began as a browsing of letters and laboratory notes on the Rockefeller University archives, and later expanded to include study of the materials housed at Yale, Johns Hopikns, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, as well as conversations with members of Kleiner’s family. I published an earlier consideration of the scientific aspects of Kleiner’s story in Nature Medicine, a medical journal, in 2010. 

COMMENT

     This description of the research process is given in a footnote.  Perhaps Friedman is used to writing for journals and couldn’t bear to leave out the citations for a popular magazine. Or maybe he just found digging around in the archives to be such an interesting and delightful passtime that he wanted to tell us about it.            

     The article is about an obscure researcher named Israel Kleiner who almost discovered a cure for diabetes (the people who eventually did won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1923). Friedman writes, “I immediately wanted to know more about Kleiner and his story especially given my own interest in hormone research.”  

     The research problem— Kleiner was not at all famous. He worked alone in his lab. His few published journal articles, including one “masterpiece,” were written without co-authors. He later became a college administrator. What documentation of his life existed was in records from the places he had worked and in the memory of people who knew him. What Friedman discovered in the archives is a kind of bureaucratic tragedy. Even though Kleiner was on the verge of a major breakthrough, the director of the Rockefeller Institute fired him because he thought infectious disease research was more important than diabetes research. After all, in the era before antibiotics soldiers died from infections, not from diabetes.  (There may also have been anti-Semitism going on). Friedmam thinks the director lost sight of the value of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. He writes, “scientific inquiry is an arc of knowledge, a series of steps on a path toward a deeper understanding of the unknown, and the breakthroughs only come because of the body of knowledge that previous observations have built.”  Libraries store this body of knowledge in the form of scholarly journals. 
     All these years later, Friedman feels a sense of outrage on behalf of Kleiner. He writes, “I can say with certainty that under similar circumstances neither I nor most other ambitious scientist I know would have maintained Kleiner’s apparent sense of equanimity about his missed opportunity.” And yet it is still true that researchers can only do their work if they have funding and lab space.  No matter how objective science is, money is always political, and that means so is missing information in the scientific record.