The Missing Hours

 Julina Kim & Lila Barth. "The Missing Hours: 7 Students on Losing a Year of After-School Activities" New York Times, March 16, 2021, p. A6.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/us/nyc-after-school-activities-reopening.html

While living in homeless shelters as a child, Sam Bilal, 18, a senior at the Lowell School in Queens, could count on any public library to be a free, clean and quiet place to study. For the past year, the city’s public libraries have been open mainly as grab-and-go centers for books reserved online.

The 96th street library on the East Side was my second happy place, after home. I would go there after school, get my work done, then go home. The security guard knows me, some staff know me. It was like a family to me over there.

Sometimes, I would hang out with people after school but most times, I would just take the train with some of them, then we would go our separate ways and I would go to the library. Libraries were the place you could rely on and have peace. I’ve been through shelters since I was 8 years old. My dad kicked out my mom, and she took me and my little sister with her. It was a lot of back and forth.

When I was in elementary school, right across the street was a library that my little sister, my mom and I would go to. We helped each other out with homework, played computer games, talked for a bit until the library was closing or it got dark.

But since 2017, I’ve been living in a NYCHA apartment. It can be a little distracting at home. My mom would have the TV up. My little sister would be somewhere around the room, playing her music.

Some kids out there might go to a cafe, but they have to buy something if they want to study. So it’s hard. The library is really the only option. When they were opening up schools, I was like, “OK, are they going to open up the library?” But they mentioned nothing about the library. What’s the whole point of opening up schools if you can’t go to the library?

COMMENT

A classic Place of Refuge story, and also,  Sam is right.  There are no redeeming qualities to lectures and homework if you can't go to the library. 

 

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. 
  

   

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. 

How to Tap Your Inner Reader

Gregory Cowles, “How to Tap Your Inner Reader,” (Here to Help), New York Times, March 3, 2019, p3.

     In early high school, my authentic self read a lot of Stephen King. I had always been an avid reader — my mother worked at the local library when I was growing up, so I spent hours there after school, making why way methodically and indiscriminately from shelf to shelf and section to section inhaling it all.
     So when my English teacher asked me during a conversation what I liked to read outside of school, I answered honesty and enthusiastically. And he sneered.
     “I mean, Stephen King is a good story-teller, I suppose,” he said or something like it. “But you’re not going to learn anything about writing from him. Don’t you think you should read more serious authors?”

COMMENT

    The library as an after-school refuge; coming of age through unfiltered reading; discovery of beloved books through browsing; the disapproving (and deeply wrong) adult censorship of childhood reading -- this story has it all!

     Several other writers have related memories of clueless adults criticizing their juvenile reading choices [1] and it's obvious to any reader that these adults were dishing out terrible advice.  Who wouldn't want to write like Stephen King? He literally wrote the book On Writing. [2]

     "It's totally fine to read for pleasure," Cowles advises and he's perfectly right.

    The American Library Association has a Library Bill of Rights  that says, "Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves." It's an uplifting though,  but the language treats reading as a very serious pursuit and glosses over reading for fun.

   Author Daniel Pennac [3] rectified that with a Reader's Bill of Rights that includes "the right to read anything" (#5), "the right to escapism" (#6), "the right to browse" (#8) and "the right not to defend your tastes" (#10).  Go ahead and enjoy Stephen King, and while you're at it you might even learn to be a better writer.

 
[1] What are we Teaching Boys when we Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls? (librarian says Shannon Hale is not for boys) ; Well Read, Well Known (Teacher says Maya Angelou is not a good writer)...

[2] Stephen King. On writing. Simon and Schuster, 2002.

[3] Daniel Pennac. The rights of the reader. London: Walker, 2006.

Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale

Jennifer Schuessler, “Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 2018, p. C1-2.

Even when filing an essay spurred by a group of books, Mr. Finder of the New Yorker said, Professor Lepore will send in detailed footnotes that sometimes include primary source documents that seem to have never been cited before.  

“Her gravitation towards dust, towards opening boxes that haven't seen light for decades, as clearly never faded, “ he said. 

… 

She also vacuumed up secondary literature.

     “I wrote strictly chronologically, and for every chapter I would check out a gazillion books,” she said.  “The security guard at the library would always ask, ‘What year are you on?”

COMMENT

It’s those “dusty” boxes again. 

Professor Lepore has written a well-reviewed new history of the U.S. [1] and her attraction to dust is the specific thing that  makes her a great historian. (When librarians say "dust" they usually mean unused materials that are a target for weeding).  Mr. Finder’s comment also carries an implication  that most historians copy from each other when they cite sources. This copying can also be a side effect of keyword search engines that highlight the most popular links. Finding new primary source documents means not using the same research strategy as everyone else. 

I notice that Professor Lepore works from the print collection. Writing a book is information-intensive.  Many researchers find that reading from print is a quicker way to scan through a lot of text, slowing down to give more attention to the interesting parts. It's also a way to find things expressed in non-keyword vocabulary-- especially important since language changes over time. Online reading enforces equivalent attention to each page in a way that I, personally, dislike.  In my own research, I find that I often use ebooks for keyword searching and almost never actually read them. 

     It's interesting to me that Lepore who is clearly a library super-user mentions a relationship with the security guard but not with any librarians. Library support staff are often the ones on the front lines interacting with patrons, while librarians, hidden in their offices, miss making connections like this. I wonder how many librarians at the Widener Library knew that professor Lepore was making such heavy use of the U.S. History Collection?  I wonder if any of them cared what year she was on?

[1] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, W.W.Norton (2018).