The Overstory

Richard Powers, The Overstory, WW Norton & Company, 2018.

NEELAY MEHTA

     He works for months on a role-playing space opera slated to be his greatest giveaway yet. The graphics are sixteen-bit high-res sprites, come to life in sixty-four glorious colors.  He heads out on a hunt for surreal bestiaries to populate his planets.  Late one spring evening he winds up in the Stanford main library, poring over the covers of golden age pulp sci-fi magazines and flipping through the pages of Dr. Seuss. The pictures resemble the mad vegetation in those cheap Vishnu and Krishna comics from his childhood. [108]

DOUGLAS PAVLICEK

     He's missed the complimentary continental breakfast by four hours.  But the clerk sells him an orange, a chocolate bar, and a cup of coffee, three priceless tree treasures that get him to the public library.  There he finds a librarian to help him research. The man pulls several volumes of policy and code off the shelf, and together they search. The answer isn't good.  Thing Two, that loud bastard, was right. Planting seedlings has done nothing but green-light more colossal clear-cuts. It's dinnertime when Douggie accepts this fact beyond all doubt.  He has eaten nothing all day since his three tree gifts. But the idea of eating again-- ever-- nauseates him. [187]

    He doesn't leave Portland right away.  He heads back to the public library, to read up on guerrilla forestry.  His old librarian friend there continues to be more than helpful.  The man seems to have a little thing for Douggie, despite his aroma. Or maybe because. Some people get off on the loam.  A news story of an action near the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness gets his attention-- an outfit training people how to blockade logging roads.  [206]

PATRICIA WESTERFORD

     Journal articles have always been hard enough.  Her years as an outcast come back to her each time she writes one, even when she's only one of a dozen coauthors. She feels even more anxiety when others are on board.  She'd sooner retire again than inflict on those beloved colleagues anything like what she once suffered. Yet even journal articles are a walk in the woods compared to writing for the public.  Scientific papers sit in archives, matters of indifference to almost everyone.  But this millstone book; She's sure to be mocked and misunderstood in the press.  And she'll never earn out what her publisher has already paid. [219]

ADAM APPICH

     He squeezed through a channel in the milling crowd, alongside the People's Library.  He can't help grazing the shelves and bins. There's Milgram's Obedience to Authority, marked up with a  million tiny marginal words. There's a collection of Tagore. Lots of Thoreau, and even more copies of You vs. Wall Street.  Free circulation, on the honor system.  Smells like democracy to him.
      Six thousand books, and out of all of them all, one small volume floats up to the surface of its heap like a fossil coughed out of a peat bog. The Golden Guide to Insects.  Bright yellow-- the only real edition that classic ever had.  In shock, Adam picks it up and opens to the title page, ready to see his own name gouged there in smudgy no.2 all-caps balloons.  But the name is someone else's, inked in Palmer Method cursive: Raymond B. [427]

DOROTHY CAZALY

     The knock gets faster and louder.  She crosses through the living room, reviewing in her head the defense of their property rights that Ray has helped her prepare.  She has spent days at the public library and the municipal building learning how to read local ordinances, legal precedent, and municipal code.  She has brought back copies to her husband for explanation, one stunted syllable at a time.  She has pored through books, compiling stats on just how criminal mowing, watering, and fertilizing are, just how much good a reforested area and a half can do. All the arguments of sanity and sense are on her side. [468]

COMMENT

      The nine main characters in this novel use libraries in various ways that turn out to be pivotal to their life stories. The Dr. Suess book used by Neelay, the computer game designer, is pretty clearly The Lorax; Two of the characters use the library for civic engagement to investigate laws and policies, leading to acts of civil disobedience in defense of trees; The small-town librarian is portrayed as helpful, and maybe even a bit  conspiratorial in support of environmental activism; At the Occupy Wall Street library, an explicit metaphor for Democracy, one character reconnects with his childhood innocence, which leads him to an act of noble self-sacrifice.

     In her evaluation of the academic library Patricia, a field biologist, describes the contrast between unreadable scientific information and the stories that people tell to actually make sense of the world understand (another character, a psychologist named Adam Appich,  makes the same point from a different perspective), and a third storyteller is not a library user but a mystic who hears the voice of the trees directly without the filter of  science or human interpretation.

     These libraries are not just incidental plot devices.   In the narrative they offer enlightenment. The the library is almost like an oracle, offering up a book or new article that shows the next step.  This book is not anti-science, but one of the themes is about information--  laws and policies can be wrongheaded and scientific prejudices can prevent people from connecting with the mysteries of the world around them.  Nonetheless, the truth is there for people who take time to do their library research.

      

An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

Walter Terry, “An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance.” Smithsonian, Oct. 1980, p. 61-69.

     The procedure for mounting each of the historic dances in “early Years” varied.  Rehearsals went on in company studios or in the University of Utah’s old Kingsbury Hall. But coaching sessions and practice also took place wherever and whenever there was time; individuals sought out advice from from New York to Hollywood. They sat in screening rooms at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, the greatest dance archives in the world, or they huddled by screens at home to see movies, whole and fragmentary, of the dances they were preparing. They sprawled on studio floors while listening to reminiscences and they rehearsed and sweated on those floors as they strove to capture the past 

     On occasion, someone from he Dance Notation Bureau in New York City would come to them with the score of a dance recorded in Labanotation, a highly accurate and detailed system. (It is named after Rudolf von Laban, pioneer, along with Mary Wigman of Germany’s modern dance, and it can record the position of thumb and the flicker of an eyelid as well as vast patterns by a huge company.  After notation set the dances, “live” experts would come to place final touches because, says Chmelar, commenting on one weakness of the notation system, “the breath of life is missing.”

COMMNET

     Here's a truly amazing story of extreme library research. The Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT) re-constructed a program of early modern dance performances from the 1920s-50s from evidence left behind.  The problem is, of course, that dance happens in the moment.  The traces it leaves are in the memory of the people who did it or saw it.  Other than that, the movement has been translated into words or images.

     But what about movies?  What about the that Labanotation?  The problem is, says  Robin Chmelar who performed Isadora Duncan choreography in the show, "the breath of life is missing."

     Walter Terry, the dance critic who wrote the article, hated this project. “In theory, the multiple-source procedure used by the RDT to stage its fist program of historic dances was admirable.  But there were pitfalls," he wrote.  Terry believed that the movements of modern dance are inextricably connected to the original style of the original dances, and that the dances could only be properly transmitted by a teacher/guru who had learned the original.  Linda C. Smith, who was Executive/Artistic co-director of RDT felt differently.  If the dance had validity, she responded, then it had validity on her dancing body.    

       In library terms these two are arguing over preservation issues.  In Terry's view, the recorded traces in the archive are memory aids, but not living documents.  Smith, by contrast, views the archives as preserving a form of memory that can be re-activated in a meaningful way. 

     I actually saw this program back in the 1980s, and it made a big impression on me.  It was not merely danced, but was accompanied by a lecture on dance history.  The audience left knowing who the original artists were and why they were important.  Seeing these dancers with the "breath of life" was an entirely different experience from watching films or looking at still photos in books.  I think Terry was wrong to think that the reproductions were "tampering with history".  We recreate fictionalized history in all kind of ways with novels, movies, and plays and other art.  Why not  use what's in the  library archives to re-create an experience of seeing early modern dance?  As Linda C. Smith pointed out, she never claimed to impersonate Isadora Duncan.  Rather, she was dancing her own interpretation of dances that Duncan made, taking the inspiration of the dances into the future. 

One Elf's Path

Jenifer Schuessler, "One Elf's Path: Turning Satire Into a Legacy, New York Times, p. C1.

     Now [David] Sedaris has sold his archive to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, where his manuscripts, drafts, notebooks and other scraps will be part of the library's rich holdings relating to social satire from the likes of Gary Trudeau Saul Steinberg, David Rakoff and Mark Twain.
     The more than 150 volumes of Sedaris's complete diaries will be off limits during his lifetime. (A second volume of excerpts is in the works.) But the archive contains some three dozen other handmade books from his prefame years that hint at their visual and tactile richness.
      Timothy G. Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said the archive showed the years of exploration it took Sedaris to become an "overnight" sensation. 

COMMENT 

     Before I started to collect library stories I did not realize how newsworthy archival acquisition can be.  If I were not reading through the limited perspective of librarianship, I would have read this article as primarily a biographical story about the writer David Sedaris and  his career as a humorist.  In library terms, though, the story is about archiving, and the newspaper article itself becomes part of the biographical archive. 

  The particular collection includes juvenilia.  Apparently as a second grader Sedaris was already showing the talent that would lead to his future career.  Between 1984 and 1990, he made unpublished art books for his friends.  He didn't get famous until he  broadcast "The SantaLand Diaries" in 1992.

   Fame, in other words, is what specifically attracted the archivists since the Beinecke is collecting around a theme of social satire.  It's not always obvious how or where to place limits on what libraries collect.   How do you know now what will be valuable to the future?   In different ways, journalists, librarians, and authors are all engaged in a process of  creating a historical  narrative.  The "manuscripts, drafts, notebooks, and other scraps" that were said in this collection would just be  debris in dusty boxes unless  someone thinks they are  interesting enough to put them into a story. 
     

The Light Under the Bushel

Chigozie Obioma, "The Light Under the Bushel: A Father Ignites a Passion for Reading, " New York Times Book Review, Dec 9, 2018, P20.

     By the fifth month I had read every book my father owned.  One Saturday, he returned home and asked me to get in the car.
     "I have a surprise for you."
We drove through streets clotted with people until we got to a newly painted building with an arch over the gate that read, Ondo State Library. We walked through the arch into the building, the likes of which I had never seen. There were books everywhere, on shelves, on tables, on the floor.
     "I want to register you here and bring you every Saturday here to read, "my father said.
     I wanted breathlessly as he completed the registration at the counter with an elderly, bespectacled woman who seemed in awe of the idea of a child coming in alone to read.  My father, proud, agreed and said that it was all I wanted to do.
     "That is good," I herd the woman say. "Very, very good.  Reading is like finding light, you know.  Jesus said a light cannot be hidden under a bushel"
     "That is true," my father said, nodding as the woman wrote my name on a small, square yellow card.
     "Your son has found the light under the bushel."
     She handed me the card and my father said he would pick me up at noon.  I waved him goodbye and disappeared among the crowded shelves.

COMMENT

     The author tells the story of how he got his first library card at the Ondo State Library in Nigeria when he was eight years old. He receives the treasured card along with a literal blessing from the librarian and from his father.

     Obioma relates how his mother told folktales in Igbo language, but his father's stories, told in English, seemed far more complex and interesting. One day Obioma finds out that his father has been re-telling stories he read in books, He begins reading obsessively himself. Looking back from the perspective of an adult, he realizes that his mother had no Igbo literature to draw from.  English language books were the pathway to education, but also a way to escape the limits of his own culture. He writes, "it struck me that if I could read well, I could be like my father. I too could become a repository of stories and live in their beautiful worlds away from the dust and ululations of Akure."

     Concealed in this triumphant story of education is a sadder tale about the Igbo stories that were never written down and never added to any library. Literature written in English comes to seem more important simply because there is so much more of it.

But a library card is a blessing nonetheless. I got my first library card when I was 5. The school librarian didn't believe a kindergartener could read so she asked me to read aloud from a book which had the word "orphanage" in it. I read the whole book pronouncing the unfamiliar word as four distinct syllables, or-pa-ha-nage. She did not correct my pronunciation until I had read through the entire book.  I was absolutely furious at her for letting me humiliate myself like that. But still, I got the library card and after that could take home all the books I wanted from the school library.  I never asked the librarian for any suggestions.     

Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75

Margalit Fox, "Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75," New York Times,  Jan 27, 2015, [online].

     Of her body of forgeries, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, “I still consider the letters to be my best work.”
     By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives — including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities — and leaving duplicates in their place.
     “She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”

COMMENT

    Obviously, Lee Israel (1939-2014) shouldn't have been stealing library books, but her inspiration to crime was remarkably similar to the motivation of other researchers who love to poke around in the manuscript archives. In the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) Lee Israel (played by Melissa McCarthy who deserves an Oscar) is shown in a library doing research for a biography of Fanny Brice when a letter signed by Brice herself falls out of a book. As she gawks at the letter, McCarthy perfectly captures that sense of spooky connection with history that so many researchers describe.  She shows the letter to a buyer who has the same awestruck reaction.  The star-struck reaction leads Israel into a life of crime, in part because she is so deeply pleased that her own writing is good enough to be mistaken for the words of other more famous writers.

     I have heard librarians claim that that format doesn't matter as long as the information content is the same.  Israel's facsimiles had the same textual content as the letters she stole, but clearly they aren't the same.  It's not just the chemistry of the physical object [1].  The objects that Israel stole were valuable specifically because they have that spooky connection to history, an intangible thing that  is mentioned again and again as a transformational library experience. It seems that it even transformed the library experience of literary forger Lee Israel.

[1] Hidden Traces.
   

     

When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered

Michael Cooper, "When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered," New York Times, November 18, 2018, p. AR15-.

The Met Opera's archives contain a copy of the contact that brought Puccini back to New York in 1910 for the premier of "la Fanciulla del West." To promises of pay, expenses, and room and board, one more is added in handwriting: "cars." 

COMMENT

   This article is full of references to  historical documents-- letters, news reports and playbills that must have been found at a library or archive. However, the writer makes only direct reference to the research method in describing a handwritten note on a contract in the Metropolitan Opera archives. That single word "cars" is one of those spooky contacts with history because it affirms an impression of Puccini's personality.  It's clear that the writer  found the discovery of this hidden treasure so thrilling that he couldn't resist including it in the final article.

     The article also mentions that Puccini attended a shocking production of Richard Strauss' opera Salome based on the Oscar Wilde text. When we read about historical people getting all hot under the collar about some opera we think they were just being prudish and old-fashioned. I saw it at the Utah Opera a few years ago. It's really shocking.  Seriously.  Prudish people will not like it one bit. I am still surprised that Utah opera fans didn't riot.

Nebraska Governor Won't Honor Book by 'Political Activist' who has Criticized Trump

Lisa Gutierrez. Nebraska Governor Won't Honor Book by 'Political Activist' who has Criticized Trump. Kansas City Star, Jan. 8, 2019.

     Nebraska’s Republican governor Pete Ricketts has refused to sign a proclamation honoring a book about a farm family in the state, calling the author a “political activist” and suggesting the book is divisive.
...
     “This Blessed Earth,” written by Nebraska writer and journalist Ted Genoways, is the 2019 “One Book One Nebraska” selection chosen by The Nebraska Center for the Book. The nonprofit, affiliated with the Library of Congress, “supports programs to celebrate and stimulate public interest in books, reading, and the written word,” according to its website.
...
     “It’s an award-winning book,” Rod Wagner, director of the Nebraska Library Commission, told the World-Herald. “It’s received national attention. Of course there are ideas in the book that people will not agree to, but I think that’s also a reason why it makes for a good one to consider and discuss. “It’s a contrast of the modern farm with that of 40 years ago. It’s one that’s a subject of interest across Nebraska. People who have disagreements with ideas in the book will be able to talk about those.”

COMMENT 

    The governor has failed to understand that some aspects of his job are purely ceremonial.  It makes him look like a book-burner to reject a book award because of his own politics. After all, he does not represent the organization that gives the award and he doesn't get to veto the award the way he could veto a bill.  The book also won a 2018n Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and was selected for state reading programs in Iowa. What's more, the book is about  issues facing family farmers-- the kind of thing that the governor of Nebraska should probably care about.

   I haven't read the book (yet) either, but apparently in it Big Agriculture doesn't play well with others and farmers are worried that leaks from the  Keystone XL pipeline will contaminate the aquifer that supports irrigated farming throughout the region.  Does the governor think that suppressing knowledge of these problems will somehow cause them to disappear?

     One hopes that the governor's petty behavior draws more readers to the book.  The danger is, if politicians think the librarians who are advocating freedom to read are advocating partisan political positions they might try to cut off public funding for libraries.