A Night at the Museum

Jane Halpern, " A Night at the Museum: How a French Cat Burglar Pulled Off he Biggest Art Heist in Decades," New Yorker, Jan 14, 2019, p. 30-39.

At the age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. He broke into a library in Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street level.  He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred years old.  (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and returned Tomic's plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures, "It was intuitive. Nobody ever taught me anything." 

COMMENT

     Not one, but two stories about criminal careers that began at the library!  (see: Lee Israel).  Perhaps the temptation is that library patrons are invited to touch and use objects that are rare and valuable.  They seem to belong to nobody.

    Many years ago a graduate student friend admitted to me that he had stolen library books that were relevant to his PhD thesis.  The books were so specialized he could not imagine another person ever wanting to borrow them.   Sometimes you encounter stories of people who, like the friend's older brother, develop guilt over unreturned library books.  Sometimes people return stolen books  many years later, occasionally together with an appropriate fine.

    One college librarian I worked with used to buy books on sexual health and deliberately fail to install protective magnetic strips that would set off the anti-theft gates.  He thought there was a need to put such books in the hands of students too embarrassed to check them out.  When the books inevitably disappeared he'd simply replace them, deliberately stocking the library shelves with books meant to be stolen.

What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home

Rhonda Kaysan, "What to Do With the Stuff That's Cluttering Your Home," New York Times, Sunday, January 26, 2019, p BU9.

Charities that will take specific donations:...
Books and other Media

• Libraries: Call first to find out their policy for taking gently used books.  Even libraries that do not generally take donations often have a collection day for annual book sales. 

COMMENT

   Some years ago I worked with an especially arrogant male library administrator who foolishly believed that libraries should be run "more like a business."  This man used his administrative power to eliminate the library book sale which was breaking although not making much money.  He claimed it was "inefficient," but I suspect that he actually just hated print books.  He strongly believed in the mythological "death of print" and thought his own advocacy to replace print libraries with ebooks was "cutting edge."

    Fast forward to now.  That same library has re-instated the book sale as a popular periodic event.  What that administrator never grasped was that library book sales are an important public service whether or not the library makes money.  People who buy books need a way to get rid of the ones they don't want to keep.  The New York Times article points out that "used bookstores buy books," but "some stores can be quite selective."  The library becomes a place to re-distribute books in order to support a culture of reading.  Unsold books may still end up in the recycle bin, but not until they have been thoroughly picked over by people who might want to read or re-sell them.

   That same administrator, by the way, failed to grasp that non-ownership is actually one of the biggest benefits of libraries.   He believed if information were cheap enough people would always prefer to store electronic files on  their computers instead of using libraries.  It's not at all clear where he got the idea that organizing digital files is a simple, pleasant or convenient task.  It's actually a great service to be able read zillions of books without having to keep and organize them.  At the library, I can always take a chance on something that I may not end up liking well enough to read all the way through.

 

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke (By the Book), New York Times Book Review, December 30, 2018, p.7.

What kind of reader were you as a child?I loved the bookmobile. My favorite books were the Hardy Boys. When I was growing up, people did not have a lot of discretionary income, and on Thursday afternoons the arrival of the bookmobile on our dead-end street sent kids running down to the cul-de-sac to be first in line for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  In many ways it was a grand time to be around. 

COMMENT

     The Hardy Boys is hardly great literature, but in the context of the miraculous bookmobile it became life-changing reading for Burke who grew up to become a mystery writer. It's hard to imagine the Internet having any kind of similar effect to foster a love of reading within a whole neighborhood of kids.

     Burke mentions that his family didn't have a lot of money to spend on books. One way that libraries can promote their service is by reminding people how much value their library card offers. Recently, the Salt Lake Public Library and other libraries have started to print receipts that estimate how much money you saved by borrowing library materials instead of buying them.  In 2018, my teenage daughter borrowed over $1000 worth, and I borrowed at least as much. My property taxes for the library are less than $100/year.  Offering a visible metric also has the psychological effect of making me want to borrow even more stuff so that I can feel virtuous for getting such a good bargain.

     Nonetheless, I have been at meetings with librarians who have pooh-poohed the importance of cost savings through shared resource use (these people tend to be administrators who earn about double the local median income). Their argument is that digital information has become so cheap that people will inevitably prefer the convenience of purchasing what they want over the inconvenience of using shared library resources.  Yet even among the rich, who would want all those Hardy Boys books cluttering ups their McMansions?  Kids (and adults, but especially kids) go through reading stages. There may be a few "keepers" but it's a feature, not a bug to be able to give books back once you have read them.  It also solves the problem of books you liked too well to simply toss but will probably never read again. 

   Another library solution to the problem of book clutter, of course, is to host periodic book collection and book sales events.  It's a mistake to think of book sales as simply library fund raising.  They are actually an essential public service for many library patrons.

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.

It's a Dog's World in the Lab

James Gorman. “It’s a Dog’s World in the Lab: When it Comes to Research, Scientists Favor Canines Over Cats by a Large Margin.” New York Times, December 30, 2018 p.F14 [Originally Published Feb. 26]

And now the numbers: A search of Pub Med, a database that include most biomedical journals, yielded 139,858 results for cats and 2,850,000 for dogs.  These are sample searches, of course, and don't say much about the kind of research that was undertaken. As for journalism, my searches on the news database Nexis for dogs and cats kept returning more than 3,000 hits, which my screen warned my would take a long time to retrieve.  So I settled for searches of “dog genome” and “cat genome.” The result, 20 for dogs, 6 for cats.  The dog genome was sequenced before the cat genome.      I would caution against concluding anything based on this haphazard browsing other than the results do back up the researchers’ sense that there’s more research on dogs. 

COMMENT

      Journal databases provide a quick and dirty estimate of the relative number of scientific studies.  The researcher used Pub Med for scholarly journals and Nexis for news, two databases that most librarians would be familiar with. One assumes that the author was a savvy enough searcher to realize that the letters "CAT" and "DOG" don't always mean felines and canines.

   The author does not actually say whether these databases were from a library or not.  Pub Med is a service of the National Library of Medicine, though, so it's technically a library regardless. Nexis is an expensive subscription so a library is the most likely point of access.

     When people search online databases they often miss the fact that they are a library service.  Scholars at universities sometimes claim that they never use the library because they can find all the articles they need online.  These researchers don't realize that the library has paid for their access or that convenient links to articles from Google Scholar are thanks to library software that integrates database subscriptions into the search.

A more formal version of this kind of citation analysis is frequently used in bibliometric studies to trace the development of scholarship-- say the use of the word "Sustainability" after the publication of the Brundtland Report, [1] or the rise of the word "Anthopocene" as a metaphor for human influence on the Earth. [2]
   
   [1] Schubert, András, and István Láng. "The literature aftermath of the Brundtland report ‘Our Common Future’. A scientometric study based on citations in science and social science journals." Environment, Development and Sustainability 7, no. 1 (2005): 1-8.

[2] Belli, Simone. "Mapping a Controversy of our Time: The Anthropocene." inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225-248.

Brondizio, Eduardo S., Karen O’brien, Xuemei Bai, Frank Biermann, Will Steffen, Frans Berkhout, Christophe Cudennec et al. "Re-conceptualizing the Anthropocene: A call for collaboration." Global Environmental Change 39 (2016): 318-327.

Autism as Metaphor

Marie Myung-Ok-Lee, "Autism as Metaphor," New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2019, pp. 12-13.

     I ask myself why using autism the way these books do feels wrong. As a child who was disappointed to find the only Asian Characters in any book in the library to be the Japanese-American family in "Farewell to Manzaner," I am acutely aware of the importance of feeling represented in literature.  And yet, when it comes to autism appearing in literary fiction, I instinctively feel a need to protect my son from these portrayals.  He's not an Ojibwe curse, a savant or an alien.  Nor is he an emotionless cipher with no inner life.
     As a writer, I understand the absurdity of trying to place restrictions on what can and can't be written about. Keats defined negative capability as an artist's ability to transmute an experience or idea into art even if she hasn't experienced it herself; without it we'd have no historical fiction, no "Madame Bovary," no "Martian Chronicles."
     The crux of the issue is that with autism there is often, not metaphorically but literally, a lack of voice, which renders the person a tabula rasa on which a wrier can inscribe and project almost anything; Autism is a gift, a curse, super intelligence, mental retardation, mystical, repellent, morally edifying, a parent's worst nightmare.
   As a writer, I say go ahead and write what you want.  As a parent, I find this terrifying given the way neurotypical people project false motives and feelings onto the actions of others every day. 

COMMENT

    Borrowing a title from Susan Sontag's famous essay, Myung-Ok-Lee is distressed by the way fictional characters with autism become a fill-in-the-blank plot device, not people but a metaphorical illness.  She argues that this blank spot constitutes a form of erasure similar to the way that diversity blank spots in library collections render Asian people invisible.   

    For a more authentic view of people with autism, Myung-Ok-Lee suggests The Reason I Jump (2013)  by Naoki Higashida, a non-verbal Japanese man with autism whose mother assisted his writing.   Other autistic authors do have a voice to explain themselves such as scientist Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, 1995; The Autistic Brain, 2013), or photographer Rosalie Winard (Wild Birds of the American Wetland, 2008).  As for fiction, there is a fully-realized autistic character  in The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) (biologist Patricia Westerford) who seems to be modeled on someone like Grandin.  

   So the problem is not just a problem of diversity, but one of avoiding stereotypes.  The story of Asians in America is much broader than just Japanese internment camps; the story of Autism is not limited to the reaction of neurotypical people.   

     

     

     

     

The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate

Alexandra Alter. "The 'Rush' of a Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith, Poet. " New York Times, January 27, 2019, p. BU4.

Monday
9:15 A.M. Get to Lewis Library on campus where the broadcast center is.  In a couple of hours, I'm scheduled to record a brief interview for an "on the Media" segment about my libretto for "A Marvelous Order." 

 COMMENT 

     It seems the life of a poet is not as relaxing as one might think!  As the poet laureate of the U.S., Smith is described as "an evangelist for her medium."  She is also a professor of creative writing at Princeton and on this particular day she is using a studio at the library to record a radio broadcast.

     These days, when a lot of poetry is often published on the Internet poets are often asked for a recording to go with the text version of a poem.  I've used the campus library for that purpose myself in order to get high-quality sound (For example, see: Can Opener by Amy Brunvand in Terrain.org)

    The library is a good place for a shared public recording studio because it's a neutral campus space, not controlled by a single department.  One department might use it to record educational podcasts, while another might use it to read poetry, and another for student projects.  Having the expertise and equipment in neutral library space means that the priorities can be set by users telling the library what they need.