Showing posts with label Public Libraries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Public Libraries. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

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.  

Sunday, October 16, 2022

Factor Separation Into the Divorce Equation

 Emily O. Gravett, "Factor Separation Into the Divorce Equation," [Modern Love] New York Times,  Oct. 16, 2022 p. ST6. 


Monomaniacal in that way children can be, she knows all about polar bears, and now, I guess, so do I.  Over time, I have checked out every book from the library with a polar bear on the cover....
In the book we have checked out most recently, "The Ice Bear," a polar bear cub is separated from his mother, transformed onto a boy, and raised for many years by human parents.  The mother bear cries over the loss of her cub and the tears etch scars onto her face.  I almost can't read this part aloud. 

COMMENT

The public library is an endless source of reading for children's obsessions.   In this case, a particular children's picture book also provides a metaphor for a parent's pain of divorce.  

Thursday, October 6, 2022

Forget the Book on Impractical Boundaries

 Sophia Ortega.  "Forget the Book on Impractical Boundaries"  (Modern Love], New York Times, October 2, 2022 p. ST6.


Around this time my therapist assigned my homework, a book with a mortifying title: "Boundary Boss." I placed a hold at the library and was relieved to learn there would be a six-week wait, giving me plenty of time to bask in romantic recklessness.


COMMENT

The author checks out the book, but never reads it.  This made me laugh.  I use the library the same way, to borrow books I'm not 100% sure I'm really interested in reading. 

Monday, February 28, 2022

I Witnessed a Fatal Bike Crash. It Changed Me Forever.

Amelia Arvesen, "I  Witnessed a Fatal Bike Crash. It Changed Me Forever." Outside Online.  December 13, 2021. https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/fatal-bike-crash-flagstaff-bike-party-witness-trauma/
On May 28, 2021, I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. Ten months earlier, my husband, Steve, and I had relocated to Flagstaff, Arizona, in the middle of the pandemic so he could attend grad school at Northern Arizona University. We hardly knew anyone there and were growing lonely, so we were thrilled when a new friend invited us to an event one evening called the Flagstaff Bike Party, a monthly group ride in celebration of bikes and community. It was our first opportunity to gather with new people since our move. When we arrived at a park outside the city’s library, nearly 100 people were there, mounting fixies, mountain bikes, and commuters. A little blond girl giggled on the handlebars of her dad’s bike as he did figure eights in the grass. Some riders wore construction vests and strapped fluorescent orange traffic cones to their helmets to signify the night’s theme: safety.


COMMENT

The bike party meets in front of the city library? Why? Probably because everyone in town knows where that is.  I wonder if the library interacts with the bike party in any way?

Sunday, February 27, 2022

Mamoudou Athie Loves the Library

 "Momoudou Athie Loves the Library" (Headliner, My Ten). New York Times,  February 27, 2022, p. AR8.

8. New York Public Library Theater on Film and Tape Archive
Suzanne Esper [one of Athie's acting teachers] would always talk about particular performances that have long since passed.  I was like, "I wish I could have seen that."  I feel like it was Suzanne that alerted me to the place, but I lived there.  And I've seen so many plays, so much Shakespeare, so many things that taught me so much from watching. 

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

The public library is the latest place to pick up a coronavirus test. Librarians are overwhelmed.

 

Julie Zauzmer Weil, " The public library is the latest place to pick up a coronavirus test. Librarians are overwhelmed", Washington Post, Jan 18, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/18/librarians-coronavirus-tests-workers/


As public libraries in the District and across the nation have been pressed into service as coronavirus test distribution sites, librarians have become the latest front-line workers of the pandemic. Phones ring every few minutes with yet another call from someone asking about the library’s supply of free coronavirus tests, often asking medical questions library workers aren’t trained to answer. Patrons arrive in such large numbers to grab tests that the line sometimes backs up for blocks. And exhausted librarians also are getting sick with covid themselves.

“The library has always been a community center, a place where the public can get something they wouldn’t have otherwise, like free Internet,” another D.C. children’s librarian said. “But it feels like we’ve become too good at our jobs. It becomes, ‘Oh, the library can handle it.’ We’re getting more and more tasks and responsibilities that just feel overwhelming.”


COMMENT

While public libraries are an obvious location to distribute COVID tests, it's typical that nobody thought of sending over a few medical staff as well.  Librarians are in no way prepared to handle suddenly becoming a public health center.  yet where else is there?

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000

 Lori Teresa Yearwood, "Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000", New York Times January 2, 2022, p. SR10.


By the beginning of 2015, I had become a woman forlornly clutching plastic garbage bags as she makes her way from food pantry to shelter to public library to park bench.  I had once been a writer who helped to cover the Dalai Lama's visit to Maiami.  I had traveled to Ireland to interview a famous self-help author.  By contrast, my homeless existance was limited to a two-mile radius.

...

He began appearing every morning at teh entrance of the shelter and he would follow me until I got to the public library.  One day he said he would give me a duffle bag to replace my garbae bags and told me I could keep some of my other belongings in a shtorage shed he owned.  When we arrived, he pushed me inside, where he sexually assaulted me. 


COMMENT

The library is a safe space, but also a dangerous space.  The predator follows a homeless woman to the library because he knows that's where she'll go, and makes a false offer of help to lure her into a bad situation.  Librarians are not social workers, and the library doesn't save this woman.  An actual social worker does that, taking her to lunch and helping her sort out impossible medical bills in order to help her get a place to live and resume working as a journalist.  

Saturday, December 18, 2021

A Place Built By Poets for Poets

 Jessica Kassiwabara. A Place Built by Poets for Poets. Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2022, p. 15-17.

In 2013, Sims noticed a disconnect between the community of active poets he knew from ope mics and the staff of small presses who told him they didn't know of and weren't recieving submissions from these poets. "I met all these fantastic poets, none of whom had books," says Sims.  That's when he started the Community Literature Initiative (CLI), a nonprofit organization though which he offered classes supported by his alma mater, the University of Southern California, on the process of book production, completing a manuscript and finding a publisher.  In the fourth year of running the program, Sims asked students to read one book of poetry a week, but a roadblock emerged: they couldn't find poetry books at the library.  "I didn't believe them, and then I went to the local library and there was no poetry section," says Sims. To help his students, Sims gathered eighty poetry books of his own and put them into a rolling suitcase to take to class. 

COMMENT

I've actually been meaning to write an article on how clueless librarians are about collecting poetry.  I'm pretty sure there are librarian poets, but whenever I want a book of poetry, the library never has it and I have to request a purchase.  What seems to baffle librarians is, poetry communities are localized, so that different places have different influential poets.  In order to get their books, you have to buy from small presses.  Instead of supporting poetry, libraries seem to have eliminated subscriptions to literary journals, or they only get a few Big Names and not the local ones that matter.  For people who like to read and write poetry, it's very, very frustrating. 

Monday, December 6, 2021

'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.

Why We Want Readers to Choose the Best Book of the Past 125 Years

 

Sarah Bahr, "Why We Want Readers to Choose the Best Book of the Past 125 Years", New York Times, December 5, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/insider/why-we-want-readers-to-choose-the-best-book-of-the-past-125-years.html

This isn’t the first time the Book Review has anointed a favorite title. In 1996, staff members asked critics and scholars to pick the best novel of the past 25 years. (The winner, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” is also a finalist this year.) 

But there was little transparency about the panel’s selection process, Ms. Jordan said, and she was left wondering what other books were in the mix.

So she decided the time had come to ask again — only this time, readers would nominate the books.To reach as many readers as possible, the Book Review enlisted the help of public libraries across the country. Rebecca Halleck, an editor for digital storytelling and training at The Times, and Urvashi Uberoy, a Times software engineer, helped compile a list of email addresses for nearly 5,000 libraries, hoping they would spread word of their contest to their members.The team sent each library a flyer, designed by Deanna Donegan, an art director for The Times, and Joumana Khatib, an editor on the Books desk, that included a QR code created by the Interactive News Technology desk. When scanned, it would take people to the nomination site.

COMMENT

     The New York Times newspaper took advantage of the geographic distribution of public libraries to gather a list of best novels from the past 125 years to celebrate 125 years of the NYT Book Review.  The responses were winnowed into a list of 25, which includes "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, named Best Novel of the past 25 years by the NYTBR in 1996, and currently a target of right-wing censorship. 

 

Monday, November 22, 2021

Windswept

 Annabel Abbs, Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women, Tin House, 2021.


I started exploring onine, prowling around second-hand booshops, investigating library catalogues.  Women remained elusive.  As Rebecca Solnit, one of the few female writers on the subject of waling, wrote "Througout the history of walking...the principal figures...have been men." 

Every now and then, Virginia Woolf's name appeared.  I'd spent my teenage years in the shadow of the South Downs, where Woolf had lived and walked for much of her adult life.  My parents were still there, so whenever I got the chance I plotted a Woof route and began tracing her footsteps over the South Downs. [xxi] 

.

COMMENT 

After noticing that her colleciton of nature book is largely by and about mean,  Abbs began to research accounts of women  walking.  She notes that the absence of literature is a self-reinforcing loop:  "Many more have disappeared, the casualties of a self-referencing male canon of walking and nature literature, of men-only hiking and climbing clubs, of publishing firms historically run by men, of miguided concerns for female safety." [xxiii] 
      

Sunday, November 7, 2021

How I Became Extremely Open Minded

Ross Douthat. "How I Became Extemely Open Minded. New York Times, Nov. 7, 2021 p. SR8.

I'm bad, but not that bad, I would think while walking through a photograph exhibit on chonic Lyme in the local library, with its pictures of hollow-eyed sufferers with platoons of pill bottles -- until I foun myself with drawrs full of enough pill bottles to put those medicne cabinets to shame. 

COMMENT

The library exhibt doesn't exactly help, but it becomes part of the story for Douthat who is dealing with chronic Lyme disease.  What does help is an alternative medicien Rife machine that Douthat reads about in a New Yorker article.   He doesn't say whether or not he reads the magazine at the library, but I would guess that he probably has his own subscription 

Sunday, October 24, 2021

How Laura Ashley Endures

 Amanda Fortini, "How Laura Ashley Endures, New York Times Oct. 24, 2021, p.ST3

In 1952, a 28-yar old secretary attended a traditional handicrafts exhibition at the Vitoria & Albert Museum in London.  Inspired especially by the hand-printed fabrics she encountered there, the young woman returned home and told her husband that she had never seen anything like them in stores and wanted to try making some similar styles herself. The pair spent 10 pounds on wood for a screen, diyes and linen and, after puring over a handful of instructional library boos, began sild-screening textiles at the kitchen table of their small London flat. 

COMMENT

This gratifying story involves two cultural institutions.  A museum exhibit that inspired a look and library books that showed how to achieve it.   In any case, as Fortinini writes "If you are a woman who grew up in the '80s or early '90s, chances are you have a memory of cveting, wering or living with something by the brand [Laura Ashley]". 

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Desert Vision

 Helen Macdonald, "Desert Vision," New York Times Magazine,  Oct. 17, 2021 pp. 55-

Villeneuve was 14 when he first saw the book, an edition with an arresting cover in the small library near his school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec: The face of a dark-skinned man with piercing blue eyes against a remote desert background.  It was beautiful, he told me, lifting a copy with the same cover from his desk.  He has kept it though the years and is using it to write the second movie ("Done" is a famously complex novel, and Villeneuve only agreed to adapt it if it could be broken into two films).  Looking at it even now evokes the same emotions he felt back then" "mystery, isolation, loneliness."  Billeneuve has dreamed of making "Dune" since he was a teenager; he tried to make his move as "close to the dream as possibel, and it was very difficult, becaus the dreams of a teenager are very totalitarian.  I was not expecting would be so difficult to please that guy!

COMMENT

Denis Villeneuve says that he has dreamed of making Frank Herbert's novel "Dune" into a movie since he was a teenager.  The cover art of the edition at the public library evoked an aesthetic for the movie of his imagination.  The inspiration of the life-changing book is explicitly tied to the book as a physical object.  Villeneuve bought his own  copy of the same edition to keep as as a kind of  talisman.

Sunday, October 10, 2021

The Donor and the Borrower

 Robert Kolker, "The Donor and the Borrower, New York Times Magazine, Oct 10, 2021, p.24-

Last year as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group.  "I know virtually all of them," Dorland said.  "It was just like seeing friends."

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland's name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat.  Larson's life had moved on in so many ways.  She'd published another story.  She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the imporatance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who'd branded her a plagiarist, watching her.  "It really just freaks me out," Larson said.  "At times, I've felt kind of stalked."

COMMENT

This is from an article that appeared online under the title "Bad Art  Friend." In the article, Dorland has been "mean girled" out of the Chunky Monkeys. The article avoids taking sides in the plagiarism issue, but I've been in Dorland's shoes, listening to a bad boss present at a library conference about how to have "difficult conversations" after she had had a difficult conversation with me and let me down badly.  I went to the presentation and I made sure she saw me in the audience.  I did not, of course, make a scene, but I did privately hope she was freaked out.  It must have been infuriating for Dorland to see her former "friends" boasting about what a great, supportive community they had.   

Public events like this are, well, public.  Librarians can't really know who will show up or what their relationship is with the presenters.  

Thursday, October 7, 2021

Finding the Mother Tree

 Suzanne Simard, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 

I spent the day writing up my planting reports before mailing my envelope of yellow needles to the government lab to have the nutrition levels analyzed and checking the office for reference volumes about mushrooms.  There were plenty of resources about logging, but books on biology were scarce as hen's teeth.  I called the town library, glad to learn that there was a mushroom reference guide on their shelves.  [p. 24]

...

I collected the mushroom book and filed my report on the plantation but vowed to keep my observations quiet and do my homework.  I often feared I'd been hired into the men's club as a token of changing times, and my goose would be cooked if I came up with a half-baked idea about how mushrooms or pink or yellow quilts of fungus on roots affected seedling growth. [p.24]

...

Then I discovered what I was looking for.  After days of searching journals in the university library, I happened upon a new article by a young Swedish researcher, Kristina Arnebrant, who'd just found that shared mycorrhizal fungal species could link alder with pine, delivering nitrogen directly.  I sped through the pages, stunned. [p.121]

...

I dashed out of the stacks and called Robyn from a phone in the foyer.  [p.121]

COMMENT

Simard describes instances where library materials offered answers to her forest observations.  The book is an excellent account of the progress of scientific research, describing a process of observation, literature research  and review and experimental design.  However, by the last chapter Simard says that the scientific method is too limited to fully understand the complexity of the world.  She writes

 I'd been taught in the university to take apart the ecosystem, to reduce it into its parts, to study the trees and plants and soils in isolation, so that I could look at the forest objectively.  This dissection, this control and categorization and cauterization were supposed to bring clarity, credibility, and validation to any findings.  When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print. [p. 283]

Simard finds that her "discoveries" were already part of indigenous knowledge, but of course there was no published record of this knowledge and even if there had been, forresters wouldn't have read it.   

 

 

 


Sunday, September 5, 2021

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. 

Gratitude and Praise

Editors. "Gratitude and Praise" Orion, Autumn 2021, p. 4.

We also partnered with the Brooklyn Public Library to cosoponsor discussions of Lauren Groff's Florida and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass as part of their monthly Climate Reads series.  If you missed us live, you can find recordings of these events and more archived at www.orionmagazine.org/connect/events.


COMMENT

The public library partners with an environmental magazine to hosts public presentations that address climate change.

Sunday, August 15, 2021

Alice McDermott

 Alice McDermott, "By the Boo", New York Times Book Review,  August 1, 2021, p. 6.

I've also always loved to read in some quiet corner of a university library -- all the books I'll never get to standing by, lending their fragrance to the place.  An occasion I'm sorely missing of late.

...

My father gave me a brand-new hard-cover edition of W.B Yeat's "Collected Poems" when I was in my mid-20's.  I think it must have been the most expensive book he'd ever purchased (he and my mother both were advocates of the public library), and it signaled to me that he had resigned himself to my troubling ambition to write.

COMMENT

The library is a place of refuge, nd a place to share books (and save money).  It represents aspirational future reading.


The Invention of Wings

 Sue Monk Kidd, "The Invention of Wings," Penguin Books,  2014. 

Acknowledgements
...
The following institutions, which along with Historic Charleston Foundation and Drayton Hall, served as resources: The Charlesong Museum, the Charleston Library Society, the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library and the Avery Research Center, the Charleston County Public Library, the South Caroliniana Library, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, the Nathanial Russel House Museum, the Charles Pinckney House, the Old Slave Mart, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Lowcountry Africana, Middleton Place and Boone Hall Plantation. [p. 371]
...

Jaqueline Coleburn, rare book cataloger at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for her enormous assistance in providing me with a treasure trove of letters, newspapers, Anti-Slavery Convention proceedings and other documents related to Sarah and Angelina Grimke and early-nineteenth-century history. [p.371]



COMMENT

To write her historical novel, Kidd made use of a resources from a wide variety of cultural institutions including museums, historical societies and libraries.  She mentions one librarian by name who was especially helpful to locate historical materials that contribute to the historical accuracy of a fictionalized story.