Stony Mesa Sagas

Chip Ward. Stony Mesa Sagas. Torrey House Press. 2017.

But in his last story, the one he didn'’t complete, he learned he leaned that sometimes It's hard to distinguish the the good guys from the bad and the bad guys do get away and the truth is suppressed. He’d investigated the shooting deaths by police of homeless men. Not just homeless. There were many people who are temporarily homeless while trying desperately to land on their feet, but the people who had been killed were chronically homeless. They are the ones we point to, the ones who live on the streets, sleep in parks and alleys, spend their days reading in public libraries, and sometimes rant on sidewalks, piss in the courthouse shrubs, and scream in the subway when visited by their inner demons  They’re the ones who cry with joy in fast food lines when angels appear above the condiment bar. 

     America, Buchman realized, had kicked the mentally ill out into the streets and then punished them for expressing the symptoms of untreated illness. Often, way too often , the ranters and screamers who didn’t or couldn’t respond to the police when confronted were coldly executed.  In case after case, an order was given once and given again. If the raging didn’t stop, a cop would calmly and deliberately take aim and then fire. These incidents had a cold and calculated aspect and they were becoming almost routine, like removing pests from a garden, bullets instead of bug spray. [p. 36-37]

COMMENT

      This is fiction, so it's made up, but the premise is drawn from real life. Ward's essay about homeless people at the public library [1] is probably the only essay ever written for an audience of librarians that has been turned into a Hollywood movie [2]. In the novel Buchman, Ward's fictional alter-ego (get it?), is a journalist who has quit his job and moved to a small town in Utah after a cover-up involving the murder of homeless people. There he continues to serve as a sort of  reference librarian/detective, helping people find and use useful information.  

    I don't think that Ward knew of any actual cover-up as horrifying as this fictional one, though I'm sure he was aware of abuses. After Ward's essay came out, many libraries actually made an effort to be more helpful to homeless patrons. [3] The Salt Lake Public Library, for example, staffs a Volunteers of America desk to help connect people with food, shelter and other services. 

     Public libraries are a key institution for democracy, one of the few places where people of all ages, ethnicity and social class all share the same space. It's hard to imagine a privatized space that would find ways to mitigate the disruption of homelessness or welcome homeless people in any way.

[1] Chip Ward, "How the Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel," TomDispatch.com, 2007 .
[2]  The Public (2018)
[3] Dowd, Ryan. The Librarian's Guide to Homelessness: An Empathy-driven Approach to Solving Problems, Preventing Conflict, and Serving Everyone. ALA Editions, 2018.
[4] [Book Review] Stony Mesa Sagas. Reviewed by Amy Brunvand in Catalyst magazine, November 2018.

Beyond 'Rent,' Tunes Awaiting Their Star Turn

Michael Paulson, "Beyond 'Rent,' Tunes Awaiting Their Star Turn: Bringing New Life to Unknown Songs by Jonathan Larson," New York Times, October 7, 2018, p. AR7.

     The concert is a passion project for Jennifer Ashley Tepper, the club's creative and programming director and a longtime fan of Larson's work-- her bat mitzvah sign-in board depicted her dressed as Mimi, popping out of a pile of "Rent" playbills.  She dived into his archives at the Library of Congress, listening to hours of recordings and sifting through boxes of documents to reconstruct his catalog.
     Larson wrote about 200 songs over 18 years, starting when he was in college.  They were for unproduced musicals, workshops and benefits; there were pop songs, political songs and songs cut from his to posthumously produced musicals, "Rent" and "Tick, Tick...Boom!"
     Many are about being a struggling artist in New York. Few of the songs existed in written form, so the producers of the "Jonathan Larson Project," as the 54 Below concerts are being titled, had to transcribe and orchestrate them from recordings. 

COMMENT

     As far as research projects go, this one is high profile. After Larson died in 1996, Mark Horowitz, an archivist at the Library of Congress, contacted his family to ask if they would consider donating his papers.[1] The songs were on audio cassettes (remember those?) and computer data files. The archivists registered copyright protection and made back-up copies of the media files. [2]  Preserving historic media is a big problem for libraries. Plastic materials used for recordings are generally not chemically stable. Computer technology keeps changing and it's hard to keep up. You either have to save the device that plays the media or you have or continually migrate it to some new-fangled media platform. All of this is expensive and time-consuming so librarians have to pick and choose what to save.

     Transcription is also an issue for researchers using multi-media sources. Transcription software exists, but none of it is totally automatic.  It's still a time-consuming, nitpicky process to listen and transcribe recordings.

     Nonetheless, in a blog post she wrote for the Library of Congress, Tepper describes her research as "the adventure of a theatre historian's wildest dreams."[3]  The photo accompanying the New York Times article shows singers using sheet music on music stands.  Essentially, Tepper's transcriptions made Larson's music accessible by migrating it from digital formats to paper, and then from paper into live performance.

[1] Jonathon Larson Papers 1978-1996

[2] Amy Asch, "Creating Jonathan Larsen's Archive: a Letter from the Woman who Built his Library of Congress Collection," Playbill, Jan. 28, 2016.

[3] Jennifer Ashley Tepper, "Finding Jonathan Larsen’s Lost Works In Tapes and Boxes…and Turning Them Into a Show," Library of Congress> Blogs > Music, Sept. 6, 2018.

A Famous Nude Gets a Face and an Identity

Adam Nossiter, "A Famous Nude gets a Face and an Identity: Historian Solves Mystery of a Gustave Courbet Painting," New York Times, Oct 2. 2018, p.C1;C6.

     The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin called the work "pornography" but also "a little masterpiece of overt sexuality."
     And now finally the matter of its sitter seems to have been solved, thanks to a chance discovery by a mild-mannered French historian toiling in the archives.
...
     Mr Schopp's breakthrough came innocently enough.  He had been working on annotation the letters between Dumas and the writer George Sand, and had long been perplexed by a passage in the old typewritten copies, where Dumas inveigh against the  "insolent" and "cowardly" Courbet, who had committed an artistic heresy, in the view of Dumas:
     "One doesn't paint with one's most delicate and sonorous brush the interview of Mademoiselle Queniault of the Opera, for the Turk who took refuge inside it from time to time -- all of it life-size, and life-size also two women passing for men."
...
     But what about that world "interview" in the typescript, and the other painting referred to?  Mr. Schopp went back to the source -- the manuscript of the Dumas letter at the National Library.
The word Dumas had actually written was "interior," not interview.  He underlined it, to emphasize that he was playing with worlds.
     "I dared to utter an inner 'Eureka,'' Mr. Schopp writes in a new book about the affair, "The Origin of the World: Life of the Model," which will be published in France this week. 

COMMENT 

The first rule of research is, when in doubt consult the original source. The name of the model for a famous (and famously risqué) painting by Gustave Courbet was unknown, even though the answer to the mystery was hiding in plain sight.  It took a researcher brave enough to admit that the transcription made no sense to go back and investigate what the original manuscript actually said.  It didn't help that Dumas had misspelled the name of Constance Queniaux, foiling a keyword search strategy.  The journalist is pleased to report that the sexy Ms. Queniaux lived long and prospered. 

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. 

On Planes, in Bars, Around Phones, a Nation is Transfixed

Jack Healy and Farah Stockman. On Planes, in Bars, Around Phones, a Nation is Transfixed. New York Times. September 28, 2018. P. A1

     Travelers on airplanes cried as they watched it on their seatback televisions. College students holed up all day at library computers and streamed it on their phones, drowning out their lectures.  Friends sat together, stunned and still, on living room couches. Television screens at mall salons, sports bars and hotel lobbies were tuned to nothing else.
     All day on Thursday, though eight hours of tears, anger and exasperation, it seemed like the country could not look away.

COMMENT

     The article is about the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at the Supreme Court hearing of judge Brett Kavenaugh whom she accused of attempted rape. Back before everybody had a computer in their pocket libraries used to wheel out televisions for big events. I can remember being at a library watching events like the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (1986), the testimony of disgraced congresswoman Enid Green Waldholtz (1995)  and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (2001). In each case the shared experience was important.

     In this account students are using library computers and cell phones at the library (I assume for fast wi-fi and streaming) but the library doesn’t seem to have set up any shared viewing space where students could watch together. Perhaps the newspaper reporters just didn’t notice it, or maybe librarians really are so detatched from current events that they didn't recognize the emotional power of the hearing and left it up to sports bars and hotel lobbies to provide community space.  If so, that’s too bad. Libraries claim a role in civic engagement, and this seems like a missed opportunity. 

     On that Thursday women especially were in a state of shock and emotional turmoil. Screens often isolate people, but in some cases (movie theaters, Super Bowl games, Sound of Music sing-alongs, etc...) they can also create a shared experience. It strikes me as sad that college professors and librarians tried to press on with business-as-usual instead of pausing for a day to let students participate in a shared  experience of civics and community grief. In the old days, librarians used to know better. 

Six Kinds of Rain

Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore, “Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy,” in Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work and Identity, ed. By Jenifer Sinor and Rona Kaufamn, Utah State University Press, 2007, pp. 27-38.

“In this folded space, it’s hard to know where a university is. Maybe the university has become a paradox, a place with no particular place —  in a familiar geography of classrooms, restrooms, computer networks, and labs where uncomfortable table-chairs and library shelves are an iconography recognizable around the world. This global University has a common language, shared ethical codes, standardized measures of status, and ingrained methodologies, economic systems and taboos. What the University doesn’t have is a meaningful relationship to a particular place— its absence the final achievement of the goal implicit in the word university. [pp.31-32]

COMMENT

Let's sing along with Malvina Reynolds’ classic song!

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they got put in boxes
And they came out all the same
There are doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

     In Becoming Native to this Place (1993) Wes Jackson asks, what if universities had a homecoming major? I would add, if they did have one, what would need to change in Academic libraries? 

     In the name of efficiency, academic collecting has been largely outsourced to approval plans and digital aggregators. That means libraries are spending a lot of money to buy very similar digital collections no matter where the institution is located. This in turn has led to proposals to replace academic libraries with huge regional book warehouses in order to “share” shelf space. [1] The book-warehouse idea presupposes that all campuses are interchangeable. All of this only makes sense if  you don’t truly think of your  university campus as a “community”

     Interestingly, even the people who most strongly advocate replacing libraries with book warehouses have realized that diversity (a.k.a. "unique print book manifestations") in academic library collections derives from collecting that reflects geography. Place is still important, no mater how much universities have been trying to ignore it.  If academic libraries start to pay attention to place it suggests a better way forward than replacing libraries with remote warehouses. 

     What if academic libraries decided to adopt a core mission of  fostering  resilient community? That would trigger a shift in library collection priorities away from globalized, generic knowledge towards specific local and hyperlocal knowledge.It would make regional Special Collections more prominent. But more importantly, it could help with the sustainability agenda to make the world a better place.

[1] OCLC Shared Print Management https://www.oclc.org/en/services/shared-print-management.html

Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like 'New Genocide'

Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londono. Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like ‘New Genocide,” New  York Times, September 14, 2018, p. A4. 

“It’s the museum that’s on fire!” Said Jose Urutau Guajajara, a member of the Tenetehara-Guajajara tribe who had been researching his people’s heritage in the archives of Brazil’s National Museum for more than a decade.  “We can still manage to put it out with buckets.”

    By the time they reached the centuries-old place , home to the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history, flames had butted the building’s core and a dense column of smoke towered above it. 

…

“This is like a new genocide, as though they had slaughtered all these indigenous communities again,” Mr. Gajajara said. “Because that was where our memories resided.”

COMMENT:

The grief of cultural loss is unbearable.

Libraries and archives preserve textual information, which means they privilege textual cultures whether they mean to or not.  Artifacts and texts that describe pre-genocide indigenous cultures were often collected by cultural outsiders. Yet those scraps of information are often all that’s left to reconstruct cultural memory.

In the University of Utah Marriott Library there is a truly beautiful artwork [1] that incorporates textual excerpts from the library collection of  Mormon pioneer diaries. The library is justifiably proud to highlight this special collection.  Still, the diaries tell a one-sided text-based story. The Mormon pioneers didn't move into an inhabited place. They settled a cultural landscape that was already occupied by Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo people. The diaries don't record non-textual cultural memory that is embedded in Utah’s desert landscape. That failure of information has real-world consequences. 

[1] Paul Housberg, Another Beautiful Day has Dawned Upon Us (2008). Handcrafted, kiln cast colored glass silvered on the back. Selected diary passages, from the Library’s private collection about the westward migration, are included in the four unique murals. The work was commissioned by the State of Utah as part of Utah’s Percent-for-Art Program, 2008.