Chloe Kim Is Grown Up and Ready for the Olympic Spotlight

 

John Branch, "Chloe Kim Is Grown Up and Ready for the Olympic Spotlight," New York Times, 

Kezia Dickson, a student from New York, vaguely knew who Kim was. She saw people stare at Kim in the dining hall. She heard them whisper, “Oh, my God, that’s Chloe Kim,” as Kim played pool.

Dickson sensed how uncomfortable it must be. She introduced herself and, at some point, mentioned that she was struggling in French, a language familiar to Kim.

“Chloe gave me her phone number and was like, ‘I really like chatting with you, and if you ever need help in French, just reach out to me,’” Dickson recalled. “I did, and she actually answered the phone. And then we went to the library and she tutored me for three hours. And she would do it every other week.”

COMMENT

The library offers study space that also serves as a place of refuge for an Olympic gold medalist to establish a friendship. 

At Long Last, He Really Could Kiss the Bride

 Tammy La Gorce, "At Long Last, He Really Could Kiss the Bride," [Vows] New York Times, April 1, 2021 p. ST13.

He was so comfortable in her company that, as the night wore on and she started falling asleep across the table from him -- McDonald's was the local destination for studying after the school library closed at midnight -- his playful side emerged.  "I started drawing on her chin with  a marker," he said. "That's not something I would have done with anybody but her.  It was like we were already best friends."

COMMENT

When the library as Place of Refuge at Stephen F. Austin State University shuts down at midnight, a couple who are interested in each other more to a late-night fast food restaurant.  At the restaurant, studying begins to transform into something more physical.  Librarians know that people make out at the library, but here there is a clear implication that the McDonalds seem  less safe than a place where study space is the explicit agenda.

Library association awards Carnegie medals to McBride, Giggs

 

Hillel Italie, "Library association awards Carnegie medals to McBride, Giggs" Washington Post, February 4, 2021.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/library-association-awards-carnegie-medals-to-mcbride-giggs/2021/02/04/5a82f238-6735-11eb-bab8-707f8769d785_story.html

NEW YORK — This year’s winners of the Carnegie medals for fiction and nonfiction, presented by the American Library Association, have each checked out a few books in their time.

“I work from libraries a lot, and my wallet is full of library cards,” says Rebecca Giggs, an Australian author whose “Fathoms: The World in the Whale” received the nonfiction prize Thursday.

James McBride, the fiction winner for “Deacon King Kong,” has library cards in four different cities and wrote parts of his novel in branches in New York City and Philadelphia.

“In New York you can get anything you want but it takes longer because you can’t leave the library with them. But in Philly, you can,” explained McBride, whose novel last year was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

...

McBride and Giggs each have strong childhood memories of libraries. McBride, a longtime New Yorker, would visit them often because they were a “safe space” and because his family couldn’t afford to buy many books. Giggs remembers her mother getting into aerobics “in a big way” and , a few nights a week, dropping off her and her sister at a library next door to the workout space.

Ghost stories were a favorite.

 

COMMENT

Authors describe using libraries as a workspace and to check out books.  

 

 

 

 

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.

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.

   
   

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.

Losing the Fiance but Winning the Honeymoon

Nell Stevens, “Losing the Fiance but Winning the Honeymoon,” New York Times August 5, 2018, p. ST5.

In the preceding months, I had been in the fateful state of being both bored and in love, completing my Ph.D. in London while the man I was going to marry worked in Boston. In the rare-books reading room at the British Library (where I had gone to write), I spent a lot of time entering online contests filling out form after form in the hope of winning vacations, designer clothes and theater tickets.

COMMENT 

    The library is a refuge for writers, but technology is a source of distraction and a ready excuse for procrastination.  Print books and frustratingly slow (or non-existent) Internet offer a handy solution to distractibility. Some people even advocate solving the problem by reverting to using a typewriter.  The romance, needless to say, was just an excuse to avoid writing.  It didn't work out. 

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 60th Anniversary Edition. Simon & Schuster, 2013. 

“In order to finish the novel— I had no office, I looked around for a good place to write this fantastic story that was coming to birth, and I thought, “Well, what’s a better place to write a novel about book burning in the future than a library?”   And I discovered , in that time, that wonderful downstairs basement room in the UCLA library with a typewriter that you fed a dime into every half hour. So I sat there and fed dimes into this typewriter for eight or nine days, twenty cents an hour, and finished the  short novel “The Fireman” on that typewriter in a room with ten or fifteen or twenty other students who didn’t know what I was up to.” [p.194]

COMMENT

     Bradbury seems to feel like he was getting away with something.  The CPI Inflation calculator says that in 1951 when he wrote The Fireman, $0.20 was worth $1.98 in 2018 dollars. That's dirt cheap rent for office space in an age.
      Are there modern-day Ray Bradburies writing the next great novel in library computer labs? Maybe. Good word-processing software is available open-source, but not everyone has a big screen and an ergonomic keyboard. The ubiquitous computer these days is a cell-phone which is not well adapted for typing. AS people are increasingly stuffed into crowded megacities the future demand for libraries as writing retreats might grow, too. In 1950, the average size of an American houses was 983 square feet.  The median size of a single family house built in 2017 was 2,426 square feet which should provide plenty of office space. Except that in many American cities average people can't afford to buy houses any more.
    Typewriters, by the way, seem to have experienced a bit of a comeback.[1] Some writers like the way they eliminate online distraction, slow down the thought process, and record a first draft without corrections.  A few libraries admit to still having typewriter rooms including Oberlin College Library A San Franciso Public Library  Facebook post implies that their typewriter is so popular people are queuing up to use it.

[1] California Typewriter [documentary], 2016. http://californiatypewritermovie.com/