American Gods

Neil Gaiman, American Gods. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Author's preferred text. 2011.

     "Hinzelmann, have you heard of eagle stones?"
     "Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that's Eagle River. Can't say I have."
     "How about Thunderbirds?"
     "Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down.  I'm not helping, am I?"
     "Tell you what, why don't you go look at the library.  Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn't I?"
     Shadow nodded and said so long.  He wished he'd thought of the library himself.  [p.372]

COMMENT

      The entire library episode actually extends from p. 372-377 -- too long for me to type out.  What does Shadow do at the library?  He requests a library card,  has a discussion with a librarian about a man who stole rare library books, researches Native American traditions, talks to a neighbor and purchases weeded library books at the library book sale.  
     Two of these book sale books are probably perfectly appropriate to weed, but one of them should certainly have been kept in the collection unless it was a duplicate-- Minutes of the Lakeside City Council, 1872-1884.  If this was indeed the only copy of local history it was completely irresponsible for librarians to send it to the book sale.  However, the contents of this imaginary book turn out to be a plot point since is contains evidence about children killed by a resident demon.  In real life Gaiman is an outspoken supporter of libraries. As a writer, he had to to betray the librarians and send this particular  book to the book sale in order to give his character  more time to read it.  

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, (2019)

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent suites have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat.  The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data— coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against oppressive digital surveillance in many countries— means the it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must are assumed.  Within that range, however we are as confident as any historian can usually be (Laughter.) [p.409].

COMMENT

Libraries appear in Margaret Atwood’s fiction fairly often and she has strong, well-informed opinions about them.  This satirical paragraph is a good example.  At the end of the story, historians of the future try to piece together the evidence to figure out what really happened.   In Atwood's informaiton dystopia, digital material has utterly vanished,  vulnerable to war and misused to prop up a surveillance state.  In this story many of the words that do survive survive on paper.  Aunt Lydia records her own testimony using a antique-style pen and ink meant for teaching drawing.  

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986). 

I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves.  We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours.  After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me.  I liked the feel or them and the look.  Luke said I had he mind of an antiquarian.  He liked that, he liked old things himself. 

COMMENT

     It seems that before the repressive Gilead theocracy took over Offred had a job at a library.  Notwithstanding her prowess at Scrabble, she was para-professional staff, not a  librarian. The detail of the library job shows Atwood as a master satirist.  Offred herself has been an  book-burner, albeit an inadvertent one.  Now the book burners are in charge and the world is a total nightmare.  The digitized books did not survive regime change, and this, along with the lack of paper money and elimination of newspapers has helped  fanatics suspend the Constitution. Libraries have been burned, there are no computer connections and women are forbidden to read.

    In the afterword a group of historians discuss Offred's narrative and describe how it had been recorded orally using an already obsolete technology of musical tape cassettes.   In order to transcribe them, the historians-of-the-future have to reconstruct a tape player.  

   Atwood's awareness of library preservation formats is extraordinary and prescient.   Oppression of women has left a gap in the historical record for Gilead scholars, but so has the use of non-archival digital technologies.

    

The Presentation on Egypt

Camille Bordas, "The Presentation on Egypt," New Yorker, May 20, 2019, 69-75.

     Punishment, at Peters Elementary, meant going to the school library during lunch break and reflecting on your behavior. Danielle had her habits at the library, a favorite spot.  At this point, she knew where everything was, so she went straight to the wildlife section and picked out a book about sharks. She wanted to know if they build houses, like she'd told her mother they did. She was pretty sure they didn't, but maybe they did something else that was impressive. 

COMMENT

      In this fictional short story Danielle is nine years old.  She is being punished because she brought a cigarette lighter to school.  The library establishes Danielle as the kind of friendless kid who prefers the library to the playground.  The story centers on withholding information and keeping secrets.  Earlier in the story, Danielle's surgeon father has persuaded the wife of a dying man to pull the plug by suggesting that even if the man is "asleep" he might be suffering. "Aren't most of your dreams horrifying?" the father asks, talking about himself, of course.

The Overstory

Richard Powers, The Overstory, WW Norton & Company, 2018.

NEELAY MEHTA

     He works for months on a role-playing space opera slated to be his greatest giveaway yet. The graphics are sixteen-bit high-res sprites, come to life in sixty-four glorious colors.  He heads out on a hunt for surreal bestiaries to populate his planets.  Late one spring evening he winds up in the Stanford main library, poring over the covers of golden age pulp sci-fi magazines and flipping through the pages of Dr. Seuss. The pictures resemble the mad vegetation in those cheap Vishnu and Krishna comics from his childhood. [108]

DOUGLAS PAVLICEK

     He's missed the complimentary continental breakfast by four hours.  But the clerk sells him an orange, a chocolate bar, and a cup of coffee, three priceless tree treasures that get him to the public library.  There he finds a librarian to help him research. The man pulls several volumes of policy and code off the shelf, and together they search. The answer isn't good.  Thing Two, that loud bastard, was right. Planting seedlings has done nothing but green-light more colossal clear-cuts. It's dinnertime when Douggie accepts this fact beyond all doubt.  He has eaten nothing all day since his three tree gifts. But the idea of eating again-- ever-- nauseates him. [187]

    He doesn't leave Portland right away.  He heads back to the public library, to read up on guerrilla forestry.  His old librarian friend there continues to be more than helpful.  The man seems to have a little thing for Douggie, despite his aroma. Or maybe because. Some people get off on the loam.  A news story of an action near the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness gets his attention-- an outfit training people how to blockade logging roads.  [206]

PATRICIA WESTERFORD

     Journal articles have always been hard enough.  Her years as an outcast come back to her each time she writes one, even when she's only one of a dozen coauthors. She feels even more anxiety when others are on board.  She'd sooner retire again than inflict on those beloved colleagues anything like what she once suffered. Yet even journal articles are a walk in the woods compared to writing for the public.  Scientific papers sit in archives, matters of indifference to almost everyone.  But this millstone book; She's sure to be mocked and misunderstood in the press.  And she'll never earn out what her publisher has already paid. [219]

ADAM APPICH

     He squeezed through a channel in the milling crowd, alongside the People's Library.  He can't help grazing the shelves and bins. There's Milgram's Obedience to Authority, marked up with a  million tiny marginal words. There's a collection of Tagore. Lots of Thoreau, and even more copies of You vs. Wall Street.  Free circulation, on the honor system.  Smells like democracy to him.
      Six thousand books, and out of all of them all, one small volume floats up to the surface of its heap like a fossil coughed out of a peat bog. The Golden Guide to Insects.  Bright yellow-- the only real edition that classic ever had.  In shock, Adam picks it up and opens to the title page, ready to see his own name gouged there in smudgy no.2 all-caps balloons.  But the name is someone else's, inked in Palmer Method cursive: Raymond B. [427]

DOROTHY CAZALY

     The knock gets faster and louder.  She crosses through the living room, reviewing in her head the defense of their property rights that Ray has helped her prepare.  She has spent days at the public library and the municipal building learning how to read local ordinances, legal precedent, and municipal code.  She has brought back copies to her husband for explanation, one stunted syllable at a time.  She has pored through books, compiling stats on just how criminal mowing, watering, and fertilizing are, just how much good a reforested area and a half can do. All the arguments of sanity and sense are on her side. [468]

COMMENT

      The nine main characters in this novel use libraries in various ways that turn out to be pivotal to their life stories. The Dr. Suess book used by Neelay, the computer game designer, is pretty clearly The Lorax; Two of the characters use the library for civic engagement to investigate laws and policies, leading to acts of civil disobedience in defense of trees; The small-town librarian is portrayed as helpful, and maybe even a bit  conspiratorial in support of environmental activism; At the Occupy Wall Street library, an explicit metaphor for Democracy, one character reconnects with his childhood innocence, which leads him to an act of noble self-sacrifice.

     In her evaluation of the academic library Patricia, a field biologist, describes the contrast between unreadable scientific information and the stories that people tell to actually make sense of the world understand (another character, a psychologist named Adam Appich,  makes the same point from a different perspective), and a third storyteller is not a library user but a mystic who hears the voice of the trees directly without the filter of  science or human interpretation.

     These libraries are not just incidental plot devices.   In the narrative they offer enlightenment. The the library is almost like an oracle, offering up a book or new article that shows the next step.  This book is not anti-science, but one of the themes is about information--  laws and policies can be wrongheaded and scientific prejudices can prevent people from connecting with the mysteries of the world around them.  Nonetheless, the truth is there for people who take time to do their library research.

      

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake. Doubleday, 2003.

Jimmy had a couple of term papers to finish before the holidays. He could have bought them off the Net, of course-- Martha Graham was notoriously lax about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there -- but he'd taken a position on that.  He'd write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed; a line that played well with the Martha Graham type of woman. They liked a dash of originality and risk-taking and intellectual rigor.
     For the same reason he’d taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks. Ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.
     Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered— at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power— an archaic waste of time.  Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete  book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.  [p195]

COMMENT

     Margaret Atwood’s razor-sharp wit skewers the "library of the future."  On the very first page of the Maddaddam trilogy human civilization has managed to destroy itself. Among the few (fully human) survivors is Snowman-the-Jimmy, now living among genetically-engineered Crakers, hyper-sexual blue demi-humans designed by asocially maladapted young man. The joke is that Jimmy’s education (at Martha Graham Academy, a school named to honor interpretive dance) is worse than useless. He has no survival skills. The remnant library offers no help since everything of value was converted into digital formats that can't be read now that the grid no longer exists.

   In an utterly sadistic twist typical of Atwood’s fearless writing, the actual print books that remain in the Martha Graham library are not only literally toxic, but  come from that most useless of genres— self-help books. In the end,  the remnants of useful human knowledge are transmitted by Toby, a middle-aged woman with practical knowledge of gardening, beekeeping and herbal medicine that she acquired by living with preppers in a doomsday cult. 

     Atwood's satire takes a dig at a kind of library futurism that was especially in vogue around 2003.  Futurists, predicting the imminent  Death of Print, were in a rush to digitize everything. In the process they attacked core values of librarianship and libraries as outdated and useless. The futurists did a lot of damage.  They convinced politicians to reduce library funding, and convinced librarians to reject collection and preservation as important activities.  The pushed people out of libraries into online space. If only those digital-futurist librarians had read Oryx and Crake perhaps they might have felt a bit less hubris about imposing their flawed vision on the actual future.  

The Portable Veblen

Elizabeth McKenzie, “The Portable Veblen, Penguin Press, 2016.

“Veb, did I ever tell you how I became interested in neurology?”

“Can’t say that you did,” she said stiffly. 

“Kind of painful,” Paul continued. “I was spending all my time in the library to get away from the freaks at home, and the librarian took me under her wing. Mrs. Brown. She was a stern old bag who pitied me, I think. I was all over the place. So one day she handed me the Life picture book called The Mind — up to that point I’d mostly been reading science fiction — but The Mind was even weirder.  I remember seeing this one page, ‘Isolate human.’ A Princeton student in a lightless chamber with no sound, his hands in gloves.  I think the guy went totally crazy after thirty or forty hours. [p.219]

COMMENT

This is an amusing fictional variation on the transformational book narrative, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading this actual book as a child, or at least one very much like it.[1] The joke is, the transformational book is both life-changing and self-delusional. Grownup Paul becomes a mad scientist. 
         Libraries, librarians and books occur frequently in this effervescent novel offering the characters ways to view the world and themselves (some more helpful than others). Mrs. Brown the Librarian turns up in another part of the story when young Paul is setting up a science fair experiment hoping to document the sound of screaming snails. She helps him find reference material in entirely made-up books called Invertebrates Around Us and Gastrapoda Today. When his experimental snails fail to scream young Paul, to his lasting shame, falsifies his data. Veblen, the protagonist, is named after the Norwegian-American philosopher Thorstein Veblen and she frequently channels her namesake. Her kind but self-effacing stepfather Linus, “had been an academic librarian at UC Berkeley, and a rare-book dealer.” He mentors his stepdaughter by offering her carefully selected books. As young Veblen is being sent on court-mandated visits to her insane biological father he supplies her with White Fang, Call of the Wild, and “a few other novels about ill-treated beasts.” 

[1] Wilson, John Rowan, The Mind,  Life Science Library, 1965.   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135687.The_Mind

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J.K. Rawlings. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Bloomsbury, 1997.

They had indeed been searching books for Flamel’s name ever since Hagrid had let it slip, because how else were they going to find out what Snape was trying to steal?  The trouble was, it was very hard to know where to begin, not knowing what Flamel might have done to get himself into a book.  He wasn’t in Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century, or Notable Magical Names of Our Time; he was missing, too, from Important Modern Magical Discoveries, and A Study of Recent Developments in Wizardry. And then, of course, there was the sheer size of the library; tens of thousands of books; thousands of shelves; hundreds of narrow rows.

Hermione took out a list of subjects and titles she had decided to search while Ron strode off down a row of books and started pulling them off at random. Harry wandered over to the Restricted Section.  He had been wondering for a while if Flamel wasn’t somewhere in there.  Unfortunately, you needed a specially signed note from one of the teachers to look in any of the restricted books and he knew he’d never get one.  These were the books containing powerful Dark Magic never taught at Hogwarts and only read by older students studying advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts. 

‘What are you looking for, boy?’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry.

Madam Pince, the librarian brandished a feather duster at him.

‘You’d better get out, then.  Go on— out!’

Harry left the library.  He, Ron and Hermione had already agreed they’d better not ask Madam Pince where they could find Flamel. They were sure she’d be able to tell them, but they couldn’t risk Snape hearing what they were up to.  [p 145-146]

COMMENT 

     Madam Pince, the librarian, is neither friendly nor helpful.  She is the kind of librarian who is protective of books.  Her possessiveness reminds me a bit of an archivist I once encountered who kept his arms literally wrapped around a box of documents I wanted to use while lecturing me on how to treat the contents with respect. Despite her scariness (she is a "thin, irritable woman who looks like an underfed vulture,"), Madam Pince is a good librarian, though. She has assembled a truly excellent collection of magical information, a comprehensive treasure-trove that always seem to have whatever obscure information Harry and his friends need to find.

     As far as I recall, Madam Pince never teaches any kind of magical information literacy session. Hogwarts students are more or less on their own, though one in a while a professor allows them to look into the Restricted Section. The research styles of the three students  \match their characters.  Hermione is methodical with confidence in the cataloging system; Ron is haphazard; Harry is sure that the information has been hidden on purpose. The three fictional students are doing something that is often turns up in non-fiction narratives. They are seeking knowledge that they believe adults around them would not approve. It's a classic transition out of the children's section into the adult stacks.
     

Hard Times

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854.  (Pocket Books ed., Supplementary Material written by Kathleen Heal, 2007).

There was a library in Coketown to which general access was easy.  Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library — a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance but a melancholy fact that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths, of common men and women! They sometimes after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own. They took Defore to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker. Mr. Gradrgrind was forever working in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product. (Chapter VIII).

COMMENT

The "Enriched Classics" edition has a note to say that the British Parliament passed the Public Libraries Act in 1850 which created the British public library system. Dickens didn't think the public library was primarily a means of education or job training. Rather, he imagines it as a form of escapism, a way to improve the dreary lives of oppressed factory workers in the Industrial Revolution.  The hilarious opening chapters lampoon the notion of education based solely on facts and practicality. The aptly named teacher Mr. McChoakumchild instructs his pupils that it is illogical to use wallpaper with horses printed on it since they would never glue actual horses to their living room walls. Dickens indicates the high high moral character of certain working-class characters through their reading habits. Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus clown, reads Arabian Nights tales to her illiterate father. Stephen Blackpool, a scrupulously honest factory worker, has a room with little in it besides a bed and a few books. To Dickens the fiction writer, reading fiction develops what we might  these days call “emotional intelligence."  Evidence bears Dickens out. Researchers have found that reading literature actually does engender higher levels of empathy and tolerance. [1]

[1] Julianne Chiaet. "Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy," Scientific American, October 4, 2013. 

Moby Dick

Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale  1851.

EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

      It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
      So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! 

COMMENT

Melville seems to be making fun of his own book by starting out with a librarian, a sad, unadventurous person who "belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm."  Yet the librarian is acknowledged to be good company and has helpfully compiled a bibliography of whales. He will reappear in the narrative (Chapter 32: Cetology) speaking in the first person in order to catalog actual whales.  Personally, I was so pleased by the presence of the librarian in Moby Dick, that I wrote a poem about him. [1]

Cetology 

Sometimes on days when work is slow
I take my lunchbox and I go
Down by the People’s Freeway
To the Garden of Modest Bureaucrats

Where I breathe the intoxicating patchouli
Narcissus scent of paperwhites
Planted in the Grove of Inferiority
Complex with Attitude near the statue

Inscribed, “To that sallow Sub Sub Librarian
Whom Melville mentioned in his book
Which is mostly about people chasing whales”
The Librarian, too, was hunting Leviathan

And met with notable success
Finding him swimming though Genesis, Psalms,
Job, Milton, Shakespeare’s plays;
The Marine Mammal Protection Act

Had not yet been written; Whales were prey
To Quakers and cannibals, but soon the bureaucrats
Would arrive armed with regulations; the whales
Would be saved from pagan harpooneers;

Melville, or at least his doppelganger Ishmael,
Was misguided when he wrote that chapter
Overstating the eternal, unbreachable
Future of those immensely vulnerable creatures,

Now even the oceans have become too small
To absorb the wrath of those damned whalers
Who must forever blame something
For whatever limb it was they lost at sea

While the Librarian sat calmly compiling
Folio, octavo, duodecimo, of cetology
Steadfastly refusing to be drowned
When all hands on the ship went down.


[1] Amy Brunvand,  Pink Birds and Beasts of Land and Sea, Journal of Wild Culture, 7/15/2016.