Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians

 

Taylor Brorby, "The Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians" New York Times, Feb. 24, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/opinion/libraries-sex-books-north-dakota.html

Last fall, I was the keynote speaker at the North Dakota Library Association’s annual conference. The theme was “Libraries: The Place For Everyone.” There were rainbow flags, paper-link chains and multicolored glitter scattered across tables. It was the safest I have ever felt back home as an out, gay man. When I was a young person, libraries were where I went to find stories that made me feel I could fit in, not only in North Dakota, but in the wider world.

...

Growing up in the closet in North Dakota in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I found sanctuary in libraries that I couldn’t find anywhere else. I ate breakfast every morning in Bismarck High School, combing the stacks and reading books by authors like James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Willa Cather. When some of the school’s football players circulated a petition to have the one openly gay boy in my class change in the girls’ locker room, I went deeper into the library shelves, tried to keep quiet and hide who I was.

COMMENT

This op-ed is technically about libraries, but it contains a library story about a place of refuge and finding identity.  

'West Side Story': The Great Debate

 New York Times, "'West Side Story': The Great Debate", New York Times, pDecember 5, 2021, p. AR10.

CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKI
I  first saw "West Side Story" on a VHS tape my mom and I rented from the public library when I was maybe 9 or 10.  I grew up in California, away from my Puert Rican family in Washington Heights, so I thought I might find something about my culture that I didn't know before.  But nothing onscreen -- beyond the latticework of fire escapes -- reminded me of the people or neighborhood I new from frequent visits to New York.  I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean -- to me, and to the average American. 

COMMENT
     The identity (or lack of identity) portrayed in a popular musical by and for white people is a disappointment to a person who is a little homesick for Washington Heights.  However, the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's "In the Heights" was criticized for not having enough dark-skinned actors.  The library, of course, can provide both movies to anyone who wants to judge for themselves.

Freedom Made Visable

 Kolbie Peterson, "Freedom Made Visable." Salt Lake Tribune August 29, 2021, p. E1-2. 

On a Saturday morning in August, volunteers at the Glendale library are arranging pairs of shoes, folding jeans neatly on long tables, and hanging  tops and dresses on racks.  At one end of the large meeting room is a table of new binders (which flatten the breasts to create a more masculine-looking chest) and packages of underwear, sorted by size for easy browsing.

Organized by Salt Lake Community Mutual Aid, the community group's first gener-affirming clothing closet was tailored specifically to teenage and homeless transgender people, although anyone in need was welcome.

... 

 The decision to hold the Aug. 7 pop-up clothing closet at a library was a deliberate way to ensure a welcoming environment, said organizer  Cameraon (who uses they/the pronouns and requested to be identified only by their first name).   "Libraries tend to be a very accessible place, they tend to be places where a lot of people com, they tend to be a place where people feel safe," they said.

Glendale library staff worked with the team to set up two private changing areas, so people could try on a variety of items and "see what connects best with them," Cameron said. 

COMMENT

Library safe space provides a way of finding identity throught fashion. 

The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest

 Judith Shulevitz,  "The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest,"  September 2021, Atlantic pp. 94-101.

I stumbled upon Poulain at the Barnard library in 2016.  I was reading up on feminists of the past because I felt stifled by the feminism of the present, particularly the kind just then embodied by Hilary Clinton, whose presidential campaign leaned hard on the notion that she would shatter the glass ceiling -- never mind that most American women were just trying to get by.  I wasn't struggling to get by, but I wasn't soaring either. 
...

Fully forgotten by the 19th century, Poulain took a long time to resurface.  In 1902, a young French graduate student named Henri Pieron pulled Poulain's dusty books of the shelves of the French National Library, apparently by chance (the copy of On the Equality of the Two Sexes had likely never been opened, since the pages were uncut).  Pieron recognized the significance of his find: He was something of a radical himself, and precociously well read in philosophy.  In a pioneering essay, he described the experience or reading Poulain: "Sometimes the astonishment is such that you feel the need to return to the first page and make sure that the Roman numerals really do say 1673."

COMMENT

A radical feminist book from 1673 is re-discovered twice-- once by the author who feels that there is something missing from "glass ceiling" feminism, and once in 1902.  Shulevitz says that instead of crediting Poulain's ideas, other writers simply adopted them with their own modifications.  Returning to the original source re-introduces caregiving as a feminist issue and one that had been utterly  left out of much contemporary feminism until COVID exposed the lack of support for mothers and other caregivers.  

The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good

 Danika Ellis "The Books that Changed My Life Weren't Very Good," Book Riot  April 209, 2021. https://bookriot.com/books-that-changed-my-life/?fbclid=IwAR0pNwY-CRmK11x3nfG83MySaefkwDiZOCgKpHWyNXdJ9tmq6PGATuKIoGg

I keep a giant list of books I want to read — actually, I keep three: ones available through the library, through inter-library loan, and ones I’d have to buy to read. These have been steadily growing for decades now, and there are thousands of books on them. I also almost never consult them?? They seem to exist just so I can believe that one day I will read them all.

...

I requested the book, and when I began reading it, my mind was blown. Here was a completely different way of understanding desire and identity. Diamond laid out the incredible complexity of the biological components of sexual attraction, and the book included multiple accounts of women who had gone through the same journey as I had. It rewrote my relationship to my queerness, my identity, my understanding of the basic building blocks of desire. It’s also…not a perfect read. It’s cissexist and has a small sample size. It can be incredibly dry. But it changed my life.

COMMENT

To this writer, the library represents aspirational reading. One day she requests a book on the list from the library (Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire by Lisa M. Diamond) and discovers insights about human sexuality that are relevant to her own identity.

Shelf Lives

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

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

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

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

COMMENT

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

Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children’s Book Author, Dies at 104

 

William Grimes, "Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children’s Book Author, Dies at 104" New York Times March 26 2021. ://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/books/beverly-cleary-dead.html

After two years at Chaffey Junior College in Ontario, Calif., she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated in 1938. A year later, she earned a degree from the University of Washington’s school of librarianship and went to work as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Wash.

...

At her library job in Yakima, Ms. Cleary had become dissatisfied with the books being offered to her young patrons. She had been particularly touched by the plight of a group of boys who asked her, “Where are the books about us?” She had asked herself the same question when she was a schoolgirl. “Why didn’t authors write books about everyday problems that children could solve by themselves?” she wondered, as she recalled in her acceptance speech on receiving the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the American Library Association in 1975. “Why weren’t there more stories about children playing? Why couldn’t I find more books that would make me laugh? These were the books I wanted to read, and the books I was eventually to write.”

COMMENT

Who knew Beverly Cleary was a librarian?   This is the first story of Finding Identity where these days the identity is not at all hard to find.   It hadn't occurred to me that before Cleary, children's books  didn't feature white suburban kids. 

Utah parents complained after kids were read a story about a transgender boy. Now other diverse books are on hold.

 Courtney Tanner, "Utah parents complained after kids were read a story about a transgender boy. Now other diverse books are on hold. Salt Lake Tribune," February 11, 2021, https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2021/02/11/utah-parents-complained/?fbclid=IwAR1LgTnXZE7lCX9LKgaRrK7xLh4bweSHmCu7rKg1k0mNrgfsCFBKQZ7PAZ0

     It’s not the first time there’s been concern about Utah schools having LGBTQ books. In 2012, a picture book about a lesbian couple raising a child was removed from the shelves of elementary school libraries in Davis County after a group of parents there raised objections.

     But Murray School District is taking its response a step further, now reviewing all of the literature in its “equity book bundles” program — even though “Call Me Max” is not part of that initiative and is not in any of the district’s libraries. It was only in the classroom because the student had a copy.

...

     The move also comes after a separate Montessori school in North Ogden was allowing parents to “opt out” of the curriculum around Black History Month, but later reversed that decision after facing community pushback.Perry said that many books by Black authors and about people of color will still be available for teachers and kids to read, including “Of Thee I Sing” by former President Barack Obama, as well as picture books about Rosa Parks and Frederick Douglass.
     Some of those also appear on the equity book bundle lists and will remain on the shelves even with the program temporarily suspended, Perry added. Nothing will be pulled until the review is completed.
     “Anything in our libraries is fair game for teachers to use right now, including many books that are in the bundle program,” Perry added. “In fact, the bundle program is by no means an exhaustive list of books on equity. Our libraries have many others.”

     The equity book bundles effort began this fall. Under it, an elementary school is given a copy of the 38 books on the district’s list. The list was curated by Vanessa Jobe, a vice principal at Horizon Elementary where the program started. It includes works by diverse authors, including Ibram Kendi, and on diverse topics, such as what it means to grow up in a Latino family or to live with a disability. It’s meant to encourage educators to incorporate the stories into their lessons.

COMMENT

    An effort to present diverse books to schoolchildren runs into the kind of prejudice that makes it so important for schoolchildren to have diverse books. 

 

 

American Dirt is Proof that the Publishing Industry is Broken

David Bowles, "American Dirt is Proof that the Publishing Industry is Broken, New York Times,  January 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/american-dirt-book.html

     The white saviorism is tough for me to swallow, and not just because I’m a Chicano writer critical of “American Dirt.” My hometown library was chosen in late 2019 to be part of a pilot partnership between Oprah’s Book Club, the American Library Association and local library book groups. The libraries would receive several boxes of books to use with patrons in their book club, as well as other discussion and promotional materials. 

     Last week I was in touch with Kate Horan, the director of the McAllen Public Library here, via phone and email. She told me she felt “excited and honored” by the news, “proud that our library on the border with Mexico was recognized and selected to be part of a new initiative.”

     No one at the library knew which book had been selected: Ms. Winfrey keeps titles a tightly guarded secret. But Ms. Horan was told that it would be “the most talked about book of the year.” Instructions were given: Upon arrival of the shipment, the library should film an “unboxing” video and submit it to Ms. Winfrey.

     The boxes arrived on Jan. 17. Upon opening them, Ms. Horan said, her “heart sank,” and she immediately recoiled at this “deliberate assumption that libraries on the border, who were selected to receive the books, would be automatic endorsers, given the subject matter.”

     She sent the unboxing video off, and after two agonizing days consulting with her predominantly Latinx staff and others, she decided to send the books back, and politely declined to participate in the pilot program.

COMMENT

   This is a sticky issue and not as simple as the op-ed writer wants it to be. Accusations of "cultural appropriation" seem to me to be a red herring.  The real problem with the "American Dirt"  seems to be that it has been heavily marketed as your next book club read yet according to to the critics (who all dutifully reviewed it), it's not actually very well researched or written.

    In many of the library stories I've collected on this blog, readers describe a transformative experience of finding people like themselves in the pages of library books.  It's a reasonable guess that people in the U.S. borderlands might enjoy reading a novel located there. At the same time, I remember hearing a librarian complain that when she gathered books for imprisoned black men people would donate "Black Like Me," which is actually an autobiography about a white man traveling through the South in blackface, albeit with an intention for the reader to develop empathy for "the other."   The publishers who promoted "American Dirt" similarly thought the novel might promote white empathy by focusing on a Mexican woman who is a lot like a middle class white American woman. The virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the Trump administration  suggests that now might be the right moment for such a novel.    Positive reviews on Amazon.com indicate that it might even be successful in generating empathy for migrants.  

     Should the librarian have sent the books back?  I assume that the library does offer "American Dirt" for anyone who wants to borrow it.  It's certainly not censorship to pick a different book for a book club.  I agree with the op-ed, though, that the misstep reveals a big problem with centralized book publishing and library acquisitions.  The publisher's marketing division, Oprah's Book Club and ALA missed the mark largely because nobody working there stopped to think that Latinx readers were never the target audience for this book. In fact, it seems unlikely that Oprah (a Black woman originally from Mississippi) is ever going to develop a reading list that is particularly sensitive to U.S. borderlands readers.  The reaction of Latinx library staff suggest that they would really love to have a book club that highlights their own region, featuring  people and situations that are more like their own experience instead of getting stereotyped by someone far away.  That's exactly why libraries need to pick their own books instead of outsourcing those decisions.

I've actually written an article about this:  "Re-Localizing the Library: Considerations for the Anthropocene. 
  

   

Educated

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir, 2018.

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

...

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

COMMENT

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

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

Paule Marshall [Obituary]

Richard Sandomir, “Paule Marshall, 90, Influential Author Who Wrote of Ethnic Identity, Is Dead,” New York Times, August 17, 2019, p. B13. 

     At a local library, she found sustenance in writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Zane Grey  and William Makepeace Thackeray.  She also discovered the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.  The opening lines of his “Little Brown Baby” (“Little brown baby with spa’klin’ eyes/ Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee”) moved her, she later said because her father had already left. 

COMMENT

Her obituary says that Marshall, best known for writing Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959),  wrote strong female characters using the linguistic rhythm s of Barbaddian speech, and that her novel is conserved to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s writing. I am a bit surprised that I have never heard of the book.  I am also surprised that a foundational Black writer felt inspired by poetry written in dialect.  I have always hated reading dialect because, I suppose, I assume that people with different accents are really just pronouncing written language differently.  The issue of Black language also comes up in an article about Maya Angelou who wrote in Black vernacular. [1]   It seems that as more diverse writers use English it may be even more important to represent different language patterns on the page, but hopefully without falling into the trap of stereotypes.

[1] Well Read, Well Known

Selling Treasure Chest of Black History

Julie Bosman, "Selling Treasure Chest of Black History: The Auction of Ebony and Jet Magazines' Photo Archive Has Scholars Worried," New York Times, July 17, 2019, p. B4-5.

     "It keeps me up at night, thinking about the future of this archive," said Tiffany M. Gill, associate professor of Africana studies and history and the University of Delaware.  "You can't really tell the story of black life in the 20th century without these images from the Johnson archive.  So it's important that whatever happens in this auction, that these images are preserved and made available to scholars, art lovers and everyday folks."
      Several museums have expressed interest, and the obvious candidates are the Schomburg Center from Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library; The National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
     Another possibility that is feared by scholars: A private collector buys the archive and stashes it away. 

COMMENT

    The photo archives from Jet and Ebony document a cultural history of African Americans in the U.S., but the like many other print periodicals, these once-popular magazines are victims of the Internet.  The photographic archives are set to be auctioned to whomever can pay for them.  That is likely to be one of the world's billionaires, but it's impossible to say whether they will be friend or foe to the interests of scholars.  On the other hand, if a library or museum buys them it will open up a whole new world of images; if a private buyer gets them they may be off-limits.

      Libraries, in other words, are a kind of public space in more ways than one.  It's not just the physical space but the information space where things like these photographs can be made accessible to the public.  One frequent library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  These photos no doubt contain such treasure if anyone is ever allowed to go looking for it.

New Poets of Native Nations

Heid E. Erdrich, ed. New Poets of Native Nations. Graywolf Press, 2018.

     Although a few poets of Native nations are now producing work within the mainstream of American literary publishing, very little poetry by Natives reaches a large audience-- few readers are exposed to multiple indigenous authors at a bookstore or library or even in an academic course. There's simply not enough of our poetry out there where readers can find it.  There is no current basis upon which others might understand what poetry by Native Americans is today, in the twenty-first century.  Consequently, I have witnessed editors and prize jurors choose poets they think are Native American. The result is that more often than you would imagine, what is selected is work by non-Natives.  This poetry not only misrepresents the lived realities of Native people, but it does our communities real harm by presenting another's views as our own. 

 COMMENT

     You'd think that someone, maybe academic librarians, would be working harder to collect Native American poets.  But poetry doesn't  tend to circulate much without encouragement and these days it's unfashionable to collect for the sake of bibliography.  In order to persuade my own library to buy such such poetry I've had to suggest a purchase for my own personal use, even for books by poets like Sherwin Bitsui or Orlando White who had recently been in town to give readings and workshops.

    Poetry is an especially weird genre. Everyone wants to be a poet, but nobody wants to read poetry. Well, I do. I even like to write reviews of poetry books. I think one barrier to poetry is that it's actually quite difficult to figure out which poetry to read. Poetry resists descriptive reviews so you have to experiment a bit to discover what you like.  There is a lot of truly dreadful poetry out there, so you also have to be confident to recognize it as dreadful and move on.

     That's why Heid Erdrich has performed such an important service to introduce us poetry readers to some Native American  poets she likes (she's a wonderful poet herself, BTW). [1]  Here's a book that we librarians can catalog and simply pull off the shelf when a student or professor is seeking Native American poets. It would be even better if we bought some of their books.  There's a bibliography of sources on pages 281-284 in case any librarians want to order some.

[1] Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects

Genevive Oswald [Obituary]

Marina Harss, "Genevivie Oswald, Innovative and Eclectic Dance Archivist, Dies at 97," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p. 25.

      In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Me. Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
     Ms Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library's main building on 42nd Street.
     She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library's ground floor.  In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center.  This year it celebrates there 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which had grown to more than 41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
.....
     Sometimes those records become a vital  link to a tradition in peril.  As the dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Ms. Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at there Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.

COMMENT
     An obituary for a New York Public Library archivist shows how the methodical, longitudinal work of librarians and archivists can have a profound impact on community.  A small archival collection started 75 years ago has become one of the world's major dance archives through years of collecting and preservation.  It strikes me that it would be difficult to sell this kind of specialized project to contemporary library administrators who would no doubt find it too expensive, too specialized, too space-intensive and insufficiently "cutting edge" (i.e. technological). Yet I've used this collection myself to write about dance for  Catalyst magazine  in Salt Lake City, Utah.

     The deep cultural importance of the dance archive is captured in the story of how the collection facilitated cultural restoration in Cambodia after a horrific genocide.  It's hard to overstate how important it must have been for survivors to know that these dances had survived. It's an extreme instance of how library collections can serve to support community resilience by preserving a record of how things were before the disaster.

    The obituary describes the problems of preserving the ephemeral art of dance which depends on years of specialized training and disappears into the moment.  Gegi Oswald said that she was "collecting around the absence of the dance itself."[1]   Perhaps in a way, that is not so different from other library and archival collecting where the historical moment recedes into memory leaving only traces behind.

    I have long thought that libraries should give all librarians at least a little money and space to collect their own obsessions.  Who knows what one person might be seeing that everyone else has missed?

[1]See, An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

 
   

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Children's Books / Graphic Novels

Victoria Jamieson, “Children’s Books/ Graphic Novels,” New York Times Book Review, March 10, 2019 p. 18.

Craft invites us into the world of Jordan Banks, one of the few African-American students at a fancy private school. As a realistic graphic novel starring a kid of color, “New Kid” is a desperately needed addition to middle-grade library collections everywhere. This funny, heartwarming and sometimes cringe-inducing take on middle school is sure to resonate deeply with its young audience. 

COMMENT

    The reviewer, who is described in a note as “the author and illustrator of several graphic novels for young readers,” imagines this book about a middle-schooler in a middle school library where it could be discovered by kids who would see themselves in the story. This suggestion shows a canny understanding of how library collections facilitate both diversity and self-discovery.  If an adult handed this book to a kid it might be taken as a heavy-handed message.  If kids find it themselves it may seem like it was written just for them.  A savvy librarian might put a book like this on display  in the school library and simply wait for the right kids to find it. 

     

     

A Seat at the Head of the Table

Emily Bazelon, “A Seat at the Head of the Table,” (The Future of Work), New York Times Magazine, Feb 24, 2019, pl. 38-.

BAZELON: Kathy, [Katherine W. Phillips] can we talk about another study you did, showing that black women may be less subject than white women to traditional expectations about femininity. 

PHILLIPS: In this study, we asked people taking an online survey to rate Asian, black and white men and women for their hireability for two jobs: security guard, a traditionally masculine position, and librarian, a traditionally feminine one.  Among other things, we found that black men and women, like white men, were perceived to be good fits for the security-guard position because they’re seen as more traditionally masculine.

COMMENT

      Here a stereotype of librarianship is employed in psychological research. This passage raised so many questions in my mind that I had to look up the article to see what Phillips’ research methodology really was. [1] Why would a highly intellectual (albeit feminized) profession like librarianship be presented as a gender equivalent of being a security guard? Did respondents really view black women as more masculine? Or did they actually stereotype black women as less educated?

    The original article says "We selected positions that exemplified femininity or masculinity, but that steered clear of strong stereotypes that are associated with the stereotypes geared to Asians (e.g., mathematical) and Blacks (e.g., athletic)." The researchers used a Princeton-Trilogy-based scale to identify traits associated with the two professions but there's no list of what those traits were for librarians. The study does acknowledge that "the librarian position may be perceived to be a higher-status position than the security patrol position. Thus, it is plausible that Asians were matched to the higher-status position due to their relatively high socioeconomic status in society."

     This is the job description the study invented for librarians: 

"Librarian. The librarian will work in the campus library. He or she will assist students in finding books and strive to maintain a quiet and serene atmosphere for the comfort of the student body."

     Good grief!

      The notion that librarians enforce silence is especially ironic. Back in the 1980s, librarianship was sold to me as a refuge for smart women who had been shut out of other options due to gender discrimination. For a time, I had wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician, and I was not surprised to find reference in this article to another study that found women with prominent math credentials on their resume are actually less likely to get a job interview.  One might expect that a pink-collar profession would be more female-friendly but I have not found that to be the case in librarianship.  Rather men are disproportionately promoted, and women are criticized for being "uncollegial" if they are assertive.  In librarianship I have encountered mommy-tracking, glass ceilings, sexual harassment, gender bias and policies that actively discourage diversity.  Questions are shut down with calls for "civility."  It's clear that I'm not the only person who has encountered this. After an incident of racist harassment at the 2019 Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association, April Hathcock wrote in her blog,

I know there are members of our profession—mostly white, though not all—who do not like me, do not like that I write and talk about race, do not like the direct and unapologetic way in which I call out systems of racial oppression. They find my work “divisive,” “uncivil,” and “unprofessional.” Some of them are leaders in our profession. Some of them were there sitting quietly as I was being harassed. When they talk about having conversations about “civility and professionalism,” they’re not talking about the inexcusable behavior that happened to me; they’re talking about tone-policing and silencing me.

     The traditional shushing isn't just an intimidation tactic used against noisy patrons.  Librarians use shushing against each other to enforce female stereotypes.

[1]Hall, Erika V., Adam D. Galinsky, and Katherine W. Phillips. "Gender profiling: A gendered race perspective on person–position fit." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41.6 (2015): 853-868.

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."
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     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.

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     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.
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     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.

   

Can't. Just. Stop.

 

Sharon Begley, Can't. Just. Stop.: An Investigation of Compulsions, Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Although I mercilessly cull old clothing, papers and even books (donating them to the local library), I keep these things, and a few others, because they connect me to people and times I will never see again. They are little tiles in the mosaic of personal identity. Our stuff expands that identity, deepens the meaning of our lives, provides security, and attaches us to our own past as well as to a world beyond ourselves. [p. 203]

COMMENT

   This library anecdote comes from a chapter on Compulsive Hoarding.  The word "bibliomania" specifically refers to book hoarding.  Hoarding is driven not so much by greed for stuff as by an ability to imagine something potentially useful in each hoarded object.  Begley describes one Victorian bibliomaniac, Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), who was driven by anxiety at seeing the destruction of books dismantled for their gold inlays.  In his old age, Phillipps wanted to sell his collection to the British national library, but the librarians were not interested. Ironically, the immense hoarded collection did, in fact, save books that would otherwise have been lost or destroyed.  Some of these books eventually ended up in libraries and archives.

    The emotional value of books is something some librarians refuse to take seriously.  Begley describes how she hangs on to certain sentimental objects from the past, but is able to let go books go since they are going to support a good cause (the library).  In Carbon Ideologies Vol. II, William Vollmann writes "Of all things I owned I valued most my books.  I hoped that someone would use them after me." [p. 629]

   In another blog post (What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home) I talk about a library administrator who thought the library booksale was "inefficient."  This man openly mocked the emotional and sentimental attachment that people have to books, and fairly often the literature of librarianship similarly ridicules love of books, particularly when people object to weeding projects.  These librarians are surprised and offended when their patrons oppose throwing out books of little value in order to make space for things that are likely to be used more often.  They accuse patrons who oppose weeding of being, essentially, hoarders.  Yet the fact that something has seen little use in the past says nothing at all about its value in the future.  One recurring library anecdote tells of discovering hidden treasure in dusty stacks.  When the dusty stacks are thrown away, the hidden treasure goes with them.

     The problem as I see it is that typical library weeding policies define only what is bad and valueless, but not what is good and worth keeping. Denigrating whole shelves of books as worthless actually is offensive to anyone who values literacy, scholarship and education.  On the other hand, a policy that described how to find and save hidden treasures would go a long way towards reassuring people that librarians are making honest and well-considered decisions about how to clear out the clutter.

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.   

     

     

     

     

At the Gates of Deep Darkness

Scott Russell Sanders, "At the Gates of Deep Darkness: Examining Faith in the Face of Tragedy," Orion, Autumn 2018, p.41-51.

While I was doggedly reading the Bible, three or four pages per night over several years, I was also reading books on science from our public library.  I followed my passions: fascination with dinosaurs led me to study evolution; model rockets led me to astronomy; birds and bugs led me to biology; rocks led me to geology; kitchen table experiments led me to chemistry and physics. When I had exhausted the offerings in the young adult section, I moved on to the books for grownups.  On the advice of a teacher, my parents brought me a subscription to Scientific American, a magazine that reported new discoveries along with the rigorous methods by which they had been achieved. The passages I could not understand-- and there were many-- only inspired me to deeper study.  While my Bible reading was dutiful, homework for graduation to heaven, my reading of science was driven by curiosity and delight. 

COMMENT

     Here's a lovely description of coming of age at the library, transitioning from children's science to the scientific method.  The author does not specifically mention librarians helping to find these books, though he does mention a helpful teacher.  For the most part, it seems to be a self-directed research process.
 
     There are two elements in this story that I've  noticed in other library stories: [1] The transition out of the juvenile section of the library as a rite of passage (See posts on Children's Literature) and [2] The use of library resources to investigate religious faith (Hypocrisy of Hanukkah; Go and See Jane and Emma; God is Going to Have to Forgive Me).   In this story, however, the library research is not about theology but a contrast to a childish understanding of theology.  In fact, when the author needs spiritual comfort, neither form of study turns out to  offer adequate solace.