An Excavated Voice Never Leaves Her

Alexandra Alter, "An Excavated Voice Never Leaves Her," New York Times, March 8, 2020, p. AR18.

     Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library.  She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she's been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.
     "And then when you wake up," she said,  "you've got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don't know what the sentence was."

Comment 

     Here's a new twist on the extreme research story.  The nightmare involves finding the exact information  needed and then not being able to read or remember it.   It's the joy of research inverted, 

Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed [By the Book], New York Times Book Review, Feb. 16, 2020, p. 8.

About 20 years ago my husband, Brian, and I were in Antigua, Guatemala, when I became desperately ill with a stomach parasite.  For days, I could do nothing but lie in bed in the cheap hotel where we had a room.  Brian found an English-language lending library nearby that would allow you to check out two books at a time for a small fee.  He brought back the first two installments of Stephen King's serialized novel, "The Green Mile," and read them out loud to me.  When we were done, he returned them and checked out the next tow and so on until we'd gotten through all six.  Brian and I have a long history of reading books out loud to watch other, but that one was especially bonding.  His steady voice guided me back to life.
...
In elementary school, they used to hand out catalogs form the Scholastic publishing company that allowed you to order books that would then be delivered to you at school.  I'd study those catalogs for hours and meticulously fill out the order form on the back, as if I could buy them.  But I couldn't.  I never turned in the forms because my family was too poor to pay for the books.  It's such a visceral memory, aching for those books!  The public libraries and school libraries saved me, as did my mother's bookshelf.  I read everything that looked even a little bit interesting. 

COMMENT

 Not one but two library stories.  The first is about the relief of finding English books in a non-English country.  It helps to understand what a relief it mush be for people with non-English first languages to find non-English books in American libraries.

In the second story, a young reader is too poor to buy cheap paperbacks from the Scholastic catalog.  when I was a kid I was allowed to order books and I absolutely loved getting my new stack of them.  The books where printed on acidic paper and fell apart if you read them too many times, but that was mostly OK because the old ones quickly became too childish.

Downriver

Heather Hansman, Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West, 2019. 

Life in Vernal ticks by hot and slow.  I eat gas-station burritos, drink weak Utah beer, and run the mountain-bike trails outside of town at dusk, when it gets cool enough to move in the desert.  I camp on chalky flats of BLM land alongside the river and spend a lot of time in the air-conditioned public library and recreation center, which both seem unnecessarily big and glossy for a town this scratchy. [p.104]

COMMENT

   The author is writing a book about the Green River, but she says she goes to the library for the air conditioning.   Though she is camping recreationally, her need for a cool-shelter is essentially the same as is experienced by homeless people.  The library is a benefit of boom-and-bust oil and gas money, but this was written during a bust. 

Sad Buildings in Brooklyn

Adam Gopnik, "Sad Buildings in Brooklyn: Scenes from the Life of Roz Chast," New Yorker, December 30, 2019, p, 32-

     "My mother didn't let me read comics growing up. She thought comics were morally low rent, for morons.  Superheroes, cartoons, animation-- didn't matter.  I had to go to a friend's house to look at comic books."  She points to two sources as essential to turning her love of drawing into there vocation as a cartoonist. One was Addams' work (from this magazine), which she first encountered as a child in the nineteen-sixties. "'Black Maria,' 'The Goaning Board,' 'Monster Rally,' 'Drawn & Quartered,'" she says rapturously reciting titles of Addams collections.  "These are books that I discovered at the browsing library at Cornell.  My parents used to go to Ithaca in the summer-- they lived in student quarters and it was cheap.  There were other Brooklyn school-teachers, mostly Jewish, mostly without children.  When my parents took me, they let me hang out."

COMMENT 

     This is the tale of the life-changing book, but also a coming of age when the unsupervised child discovers the books her parents won't let her read.   The library is also a refuge where a teenager with no friends can hang out.  

      The life-changing book is a classic, but at the Cornell Library it was in the browsing collection-- labeled as something just for fun.  Still, it works its magic, starting a girl down her career path. 
     

How To Do Nothing

Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019

     I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly the opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online.  When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn't immediately present itself.  You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons.  The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a non-commercial and non"productive" space so often under threat of closure, allows for growing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information-- provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it's even about-- are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment.  Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it's me who's being researched.  [p.175]

COMMENT

    This is a beautiful description of library research as a practice of close attention--  the opposite of the endlessly distracting information deluge online.  By "non-productive" Odell doesn't mean that library time is worthless, but that library time is not economically optimized for money-making.  The book argues that such economically unproductive time is not  just a good thing but essential for a good life.

   

Struggling with College Tuition after Excelling in High School

Elisha Brown, “Struggling with College Tuition After Excelling in High School,” New York Times, December 4, 2019, A23 

     Ms. McNair received $27,000 in scholarships for the current academic year in addition to $9,500 in federal student loans. She also received nearly $6,500 in grants, including a $6,195 federal Pell grant A job at the campus library is paying her $2,000 for the school year through the federal work-study program.  But she still owed a few thousand dollars each semester to cover the $57,000 annual cost of attendance, including tuition, fees, room and board. 

COMMENT

     Ms. McNair, who is from Harlem, studies Health Science at New England College in New Hampshire.  She wants to go to medical school, but if the student loans keep piling up it’s hard to see how that will ever happen.  A student job at the library is part of her aid package, but the article says she is planning to work at a grocery store after the work-study money is gone.

     There are many fewer student jobs at the library than there were before so much information was online -- no longer the need for so many people to shelve and check out books, file periodical subscriptions, and catalog cards or order books.  The result is that many fewer students get to experience library work.  That's a problem both because student jobs were a way to attract people into the profession and because people who have worked in a library have more knowledge of and respect for information systems.  The student jobs vanished unnoticed, except perhaps as a cost savings the annual budget. Few librarians considered what might be lost along with all those student jobs.  I have thought that academic libraries should make student jobs part of their mission, creating paid internships that let students work with librarian mentors.  If we truly believe that libraries are centers for creativity and innovation, these library internships would be the best jobs on campus. 

Original Man

Michael Schulman, "Original Man Why Do So Many Directors Want to Work With Adam Driver?" New Yorker,  October 28, 2019, pp 54-63.

"One time he snapped so sharply at a student who had used his yoga mat that he reduced the guy to tears. "I was, like, I gotta be better at communicating," he said.  He holed up at the performing-arts library and read plays by David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley, and found that drama helped him express his roiling emotions."

COMMENT 

The library as refuge and self-directed learning for a student destined to become a well-known actor. The library provides a foundation for an unlikely career. 

Chen Wei Guo's Killer Has Been Extradited to Colorado, Charged with Another Murder

Stephany Cortez, "Chen Wei Guo's Killer Has Been Extradited to Colorado, Charged with Another Murder," The Utah Chronicle, V.29 No. 11, 2019 p. 9.

     The next day, Oct. 30, 2017, Austin Boutain was recognized by a librarian at the Salt Lake Public Library, after more than 200 officers and FBI agents conducted a lockdown to find the culprit and assure students were safe on campus.  Boutain pled guilty to two felonies: attempted aggravated murder and aggravated kidnapping, which qualifies for the death penalty in the state of Utah. 

COMMENT

     Vocational awe, anyone?  Though no part of this story is actually surprising.  It's not surprising that a fleeing murderer would go to a perceived safe space in a public library.  It's also not surprising that a librarian there had been following the news and was able to recognize the suspect. 

Book Publishers, Unbound at Last

Jane Margolies, "Book Publishers, Unbound at Last," New York Times, June 12, 2019, p. B6.

When Abrams Books recently moved to new offices in Lower Manhattan from its longtime home in Chelsea, it hired the consultants that companies typically calling for their expertise in audiovisual, m lighting temperature and ventilation needs,     It also hired a library consultant, who identified the first and latest editions of almost every title the 70-year-old publisher had ever printed, which were then line up on towering oak shelves.  The 10,000-volume library is the first thing visitors see when they enter the new workplace.     That may sound musty, but Abrams was striving for a modern workplace.  Designed by the architecture firm Spacesmith, the 41,0000-square-foot office has an open plan, m a spacious cafe and state-of-the-art technology.

COMMENT

     In a redesigned publisher's headquarters, the first thing visitors see is an impressive library of all the books Abrams Books has published.  The books serve as a kind of architectural decor that communicates the 70-year history of the company in a concrete way.  The author of the article feels obliged to take a dig at a company "committed to print in a world going digital," and yet the publishing industry has stabilized and is even beginning to grow again.  Maybe the world of reading has become as digital as it's going to get.  When ebooks started to gain a foothold, librarians who never studied calculus believe that the trendline of digital publishing would keep going up until nobody read print any more.  But in fact, not all curves are straight lines, and not all readers want ebooks.

     Librarians may sneer at the decorative use of books, but a photo with the article shows just how effective this design strategy is.  The library stacks are enticing-- they make you want to go in and browse.  If Abrams were going to publish your book, they help you envision it on the shelves of a bookstore or library.  It doesn't look musty at all.  It looks kind of magical, like a place I'd be happy to work. 

     

Imagine Resetting Your Digital Life

Cal Newport, "Imagine Resetting Your Digital Life," New York Times, April 29, 2019, p. B8.

    Inspired by Mr. Bennett, I encouraged them to aggressively reintroduce high-value leisure activities that had nothing to do with glowing screens-- even if those activities required more energy and commitment than clicking "next episode" or scrolling a Twitter feed. Many embraced my advice. 
     A graduate student named Unaiza replaced her habit of browsing Reddit at night with reading library books, finishing eight during her digital declutter.  
     "I could never have thought about doing that before,"she told me proudly.

 
COMMENT

     One of the trends identified by the Center for the Future of Libraries is "unplugged." CFL even suggests: "This may be a rebranding from "quiet reading spaces" to "unplug zones" or "digital escape spaces" that capitalize on the trend's language.

      The fact that reading library books counts as a "high value leisure activity" shows why librarians have been mistaken to overvalue immediate digital access.  Actually reading a book takes hours to weeks. Getting the book right now is often not the most important consideration compared to selecting books that are worth the time commitment. Sometimes waiting is even preferable.  When you get in the queue for a current best-seller it  might not come for a month, but when it does arrive it's nice to be reminded of something that looked interesting. The public library has a wonderful "Lucky Day" shelf near the exit with popular books on it, and once in a while you get to jump to the head of the line by going to the actual library.

      In the digital age, libraries should spend less time trying to become part of the Internet and pay more attention the advantages of analog media and physical space.  Those are things that the Internet will never have, and they are things that are becoming more and more valuable as the drawbacks of virtual space become more and more apparent.

    

A Haven Like No Other

Sean P. Means, "A Haven Like No Other, Salt Lake Tribune, April 5, 2019, p. D1.

     Estevez--whose onscreen history with libraries goes back to The Breakfast Club in the 1980s-- was so taken with Ward's essay that he bought the film rights to it and worth a script inspired by it.  After several starts and stops, Estevez's move, The Public is opening Friday in theaters nationwide,
     Estevez saw what Ward was describing years before the essay was published. Estevez did most of the research for his 2006 drama Bobby about the days before Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, in the Los Angeles Public Library. 

COMMENT

     Technically, this whole article is about libraries and falls outside the scope for this blog which is dedicated to libraries that appear in stories that are not otherwise about libraries or librarianship.  The article is about programs for homeless patrons at the Salt Lake City Public Library. [1]  However, the embedded anecdote about library use is simply too good to leave out.   Where else besides a library is it possible for a famous Hollywood actor and homeless people to coexist in a state of social equality?

     So I'm going to count it in because it relates an organic library use. Like the story of Micky Hart at the library, [2] this library anecdote involves a person who is famous enough that he might be recognized.  Yet there he was, apparently anonymous, at the public library researching history for his next movie.  Honestly I would have imagined that the rich and famous would hire someone to do research for them so it makes me happy to know that Emilio Estevez went to the library to do his own research.

     The article also recounts how Estevez read Chip Ward's essay in the Los Angeles Times and then looked it up again on TomDispatch.com where it originally appeared.  The daily newspaper provided inspiration for the movie by providing a curated collection of articles.  Estevez went back to read the article online, but he might never have found it in the first place without the newspaper editorial page.

[1] See Stony Mesa Sagas
[2] See Drumming at the Edge of Magic

The Best Restaurant if You're Over 50

Frank Bruni, "The Best Restaurant if You're Over 50," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p.SR1.

There definitely used to be several factors in choosing where I wanted to eat, but all of them pale now in comparison to quiet,” said Mo Rocca, the actor, TV journalist and host of the CBS News podcast “Mobituaries.” He proudly turned 50 two months ago. “I have no problem saying that I’d rather eat at a place that’s more like the library,” he told me. “In fact, if the library opened a restaurant, I’d be first in line.

 COMMENT

Can this really be the first article I've run across that mentions libraries in terms of noise?  I'll have to look back to see if I missed something because enforced quiet at the library is one of the Big 4 stereotypes along with 1) there is nothing there but books, 2) librarians read all day and 3) the Internet makes libraries obsolete. As this article expresses, peace and quiet is not the opposite of lively.  Some degree of enforced quiet may actually be necessary if you want to have  social interaction without shouting at each other.  Particularly for the over 50 crowd whose hearing range is shrinking, (full disclosure: me) it can be impossible to follow a conversation at all in a noisy environment.  The quiet library space becomes an ideal of what public space could be like without all the loud music echoing from  hard surfaces. If this makes us old people sound like fuddy-duddys, so be it. Today's youth will be old someday too, and they'll want quiet places to go.  Maybe the shushing librarian deserves a little more appreciation!

The Stack

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

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

COMMENT

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

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

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

[1] New in Town

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

Taking Notes on How Bibliophiles Flirt

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

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

… 

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

… 

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

COMMENT


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

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

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

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

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

No Good Alternative (Carbon Ideologies v. 2)

William T. Vollmann. No Good Alternative, (Carbon Ideologies v. II), Viking, 2018 p. 217.

     By 1980, world coal production totaled 71.2 quadrillion BTUs.  By 2011 it had more than doubled to 152.5 quads. It had to, to accomplish all the thermodynamic work we commanded. After all, given (as I keep repeating) that our power plants needed to burn three pounds of it in order to utilize one pound's energy, coal didn't stretch terribly far.  As the following table shows, keeping the lights on for a single hour in the reading room of one of those Western Virginia libraries that I frequented while writing Carbon Ideologies might take 20 pounds of that good old brownish-black stuff-- which meanwhile released 49 pounds of carbon dioxide....

COMMENT

     Vollmann was on the road investigating the worldview that defends burning fossil fuels despite the existential threat of climate change.  His book is framed as an apologia to people of the future, now living on a hot, miserable and resource depleted planet.  

     As he was writing, Vollmann used public libraries for temporary office space and  information research.  The availability of fast Internet, lighting, office furniture and research sources enables him to work remotely.  The network of libraries means that people can check in to work from remote locations.  It's especially great for writers who may need to do a little fact-checking. 

As he often does throughout the book, Vollmann  muses about the energy use of his ordinary life.  In this instance, though, he doesn't point out that the 49 pounds/hour of carbon are at least shared between many library users instead of squandered by a single individual. The table he cites is from American Electricians Handbook  (2002) --  "Cutting, inspecting, sewing dark colored cloth; Also: Library reading rooms" clocks in at 60 watts per square foot,  where 1 watt = 3.413 BTUs per hour when lit by incandescent filament lamps, so the library could also save energy by using energy-efficient fluorescent or LED bulbs,  or for that matter, lighting the reading room with sunlight from windows.

Time to Snuggle Up with a Good Book and a Candle

Danielle Braff, "Time to Snuggle Up with a Good Book and a Candle: Scents From the Old-Fashioned Reading Aid Can Help Transport You to Another Place and Time, New York Times,  Jan.13, 2019, p.ST3.

Candles are also now a common impulse purchase at independent bookstores.  There are shelves upon shelves of literary-themed ones at the Strand in New York.
     If you like to read on a rainy day but it's sunny outside there's Rainy Days Reads ($32.95).  Or if you want to pretend you're in a library, complete with that musty scent of the books and the waxed, creaky floors. there's Enchanted Library ($24.95).
     "We've learned one thing from our customers: Nothing goes together quite like candles and reading, " said Leigh Altshuler, a spokeswoman for the Strand. "Except candles and coffee and reading, and maybe candles and coffee and cats and reading."   

COMMENT

     The author declares with no small amount of snark, "It's not enough just to read anymore. It's not even enough to post your reading on Instagram anymore.  Today, you have to create an atmosphere to show just how analog and sensual you're being."

    In this evaluation, "analog and sensual" are just for show and kind of pretentious to boot. But what if they're not? What if people actually experience online reading as a form of sensory deprivation?  After Amazon.com nearly destroyed the business of bookselling, independent bookstores and small presses are making a comeback.  The reason seems to be that people genuinely crave an analog, sensual experience to enjoy along with their data acquisition.

     Digital reading only focuses on one narrow part of the reading experience -- the part where someone locates some useful bit of data.  This concept of reading encourages perverse behavior where people collect digital files on a computer and imagine they have learned something without ever reading at all. When librarians embraced ebooks as more convenient and cost-effective than print they failed to acknowledge that convenience and price are not the most important reasons why people chose what to read.

     Actually reading a book is  a big time commitment that can take days or weeks to complete.  There is a whole  process of selecting what to read through reviews, recommendations, browsing and following the threads of shifting interests.  Once a book is selected it's followed by experiental immersion in reading.  There is often a post-reading communal experience of book clubs or conversations about books.  If the process were not enjoyable, it's unlikely that anyone would  put in the kind of time it takes to do it right.

     Nonetheless, overzealous digital futurism made many librarians feel ashamed to promote the old-fashioned pleasure of reading.  Reading is touted for qualities of  information, data, convenience and access.  In the article, the scents that conjure "library" are described as woody, musty, waxy, and leathery with a hint of cinnamon. it was up the the candlemakers to realize that people associate the library with pleasures such as  "Bibliothéque," "Old Books," and "Lost in the Stacks," Once the reading experience is understood as sensory,  it's natural to make the association with candles, coffee and cats. I would buy a candle that smells like coffee and dusty sun-warmed cat fur.

New in Town

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

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

COMMENT

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

   
   

The Cry Closet

Marina Gomberg, "The Cry Closet: Behind Nemo Millers Viral Sensation," Continuum: The Magazine of the University of Utah, Fall, 2018, pp. 14-15.

     University of Utah art student Nemo Miller's life changed on April 24, 2018 when her final project for her woodshed class became international news.
     It took one tweet from a fellow U student and about 24 hours for word about Miller's work, The Cry Closet, to reach nearly every corner of the globe. The response was uniformly emphatic, but ranged drastically in sentiment.
     Some thought the three-foot-by three-foot wide "safe place" installed in the J. Willard Marriott Library during finals week was the perfect antidote for stressed students who needed to take a breath, regain composure, and get back in  the action. Others, many of whom didn't realize the installation was an art piece and not an intervention devised by the university, deemed it an unnecessary measure to comfort an already overcoddled generation.

COMMENT

     The author of this article doesn't quite capture the nature of the uproar over The Cry Closet, though she does mention that the work was installed in the library during the stress of finals week when emotions always run high. It's not that uncommon for distraught students to break down in tears. The librarians try to cope by hosting soothing activities like therapy dogs and yoga breaks.

     The course instructor, Professor Kelsey Harrison, said that the assignment was, "to design and fabricate an object that would solve a problem." The artist said, "I thought it would be funny to make a closet since I identify as a lesbian."  But whatever the artist intended,  The Cry Closet didn't seem like a very safe space to cry.  On one level, it seemed to endorse a kind of relational violence that first bullies people to the point of tears and then demands that they limit and conceal their distress.  Once it hit the Internet it really brought out the bullies.

     In the context of the library where surrounding tearful emotions were authentic The Cry Closet became a piece of site-specific performance art. In synergy with the location and the earnest efforts of librarians to offer stress relief for students it seemed like it could be real and it told us something about the way we treat each other that we didn't especially want to confront.  Learning is not always a safe space.  It can be extremely emotionally intense.  Despite claims that college provides a safe place to fail, actually failing often gets you attacked in various ways. Thanks to the display space in the library  The Cry Closet brought some of the unacknowledged cruelty of education out into the open and the artwork became deeply meaningful and actually shocking.

   

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.

End the Innovation Obsession

David Sax, "End the Innovation Obsession," New York Times, December 9, 2018, p.SR9.

     A year ago I stepped into the Samcheog Park Library in Seoul, South Korea and saw the future.  The simple building in a forested park had a nice selection of books, a cafe at its center and a small patio. Classical music played while patrons read, reclining on extra-deep window benches that had cushions and tables that slid over their laps so that they could sip coffee and eat cheesecake while gazing at the leaves changing colors outside.  Seoul is one of the most modern cities in the world a place suffused with the latest inescapable technology.  This library was designed as an antidote to that.
     "What's so innovative about that?" a friend asked who works  for the library here in Toronto asked when I showed her pictures.  Innovation to her meant digital technology from drones and movie-streaming services and 3D printers, which the library was constantly showing off.
     "Why couldn't they both be innovative?" I asked.
     We are told that innovation is the most important force in our economy  the one thing we must get right or be left behind. But that fear of missing our has led us to foolishly embrace the false trappings of innovation over truly innovative ideas that may be simpler and ultimately more effective. This mind-set equates innovation exclusively with invention and implies that if you just buy the new thing, voilà! You have innovated!

 Comment

     This commentary by the Author of The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (2016) uses libraries as a frame to exemplify the foolishness of mistaking technology for "innovation."  As an academic librarian I have crashed into the brick wall of technology worship again and again.  The librarians who want to purchase some "innovative" technology are lauded as "visionaries" no matter how much money they waste on ineffective techie toys; Any librarian who wants to preserve literacy and contemplative space is labeled old-and-in-the-way no matter how many patrons ask for a quiet place to study.
   
      As the article points out,  the false promise of technology is hardly benign.  Schools have sacrificed art and music and sports programs in order to by computers that turn out to be ineffective for learning and quickly obsolete. Cities that destroyed their human-scaled centers to accommodate parking now have to innovate to get rid of too much traffic.

      In the library stories I have collected,  technology (with the exception of digitized archives) hardly ever figures as "innovative, much less transformational. Rather, libraries are given as an example of the digital divide -- only the poor and underserved need to travel to a library for clunky, outdated tech offered during limited hours.  The stories of transformation tend to center on collections and on the intellectual space of the library faculty -- study space, a place to meet, discovery of a life-changing book, finding hidden treasure in dusty boxes, self-discovery and coming of age through reading.

    Sax defines innovation as "a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment."  When technology becomes the problem, the true innovation may be what Sax calls "rearward innovation" to  adapt or revive older systems that worked in more social and human-focused ways.  As an example of rearward innovation,  Sax cites the publication of "Penguin Minis," pocket-sized print books that combine convenience and physicality.  This re-designed codex format was launched in the U.S. with a set of John Green books, an author especially popular with "iGen" readers.  That fuddy-duddy librarian from Toronto hasn't yet realized that computer technology is old-hat.  In order to be innovative it has to do something that is useful and beneficial.