Fighting for Life on Death Row

Lauren Gill, "Fighting for Life on Death Row," The Nation, April 22, 2019, pp.22-26.

     A couple of month after he arrived on death row at theWilliam C. Holman Correctional Facility, Drinkard met Darrell Grayson, who offered him coffee, cigarettes, and an invitation. Each Wednesday, Grayson and a group of other death-row inmates would meet in the prison's law library and work on a plan to raise awareness about  inequity in the criminal justice system.  Dubbed Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, it was -- and remains -- the nations's only anti-death-penalty organization run by death-row prisoners.

COMMENT

     This library serves some essential function of libraries, but in extremely constrained circumstances. The inmates are in the prison library hoping to become knowledgeable enough about the law in order to avoid getting executed. It's hard to imagine library research with higher stakes, Particularly since the men in Project Hope are trying to make up for the inadequate legal representation that landed them on death row in the first place. The article says that people rich enough to hire a lawyer were never sentenced to death no matter what crimes they were charged with;  impoverished  defendants with court-appointed lawyers were sentenced to death even though some of them were innocent.

     The prison library also serves as a meeting space.  The article says that the group, which has existed for 30 years, is allowed to meet so long as they do not discuss prison conditions.  There is a law class for Project Hope and members share information in a quarterly newsletter written on typewriters and printed by an outside board member who distributes 1,300 copies to subscribers.  Since the library has no digital networking or news databases, the board members also have to gather and share articles about the death penalty.

   

   

   

He Didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It.

Tammy La Gorce, "He didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It," New York Times, April 14, 2019, ST11.

     In posting the Tifa shot, she had unwittingly sent up a smoke signal to a kindred spirit: "I wanted to show that I was actually a real-live nerd," said Ms. Nastasi, who is the associate manager of book conservation at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
...
    Ms Nastasi, by contrast, was not sure what she wanted her professional life to look like, but she knew it would have to satisfy her appetite for frequent and meaningful change. "I like to try new things and I like to go big," she said.  That explains her shift from AmeriCorps to her stint as an event manger for Saucy by Nature, a catering company in Brooklyn, and eventually to the Thomas J. Watson Library.  There she acts as a sort of air traffic controller for rare and damaged books, ensuring they are properly tagged an labeled after being repaired and recirculated.

COMMENT

   This librarian's OKCupid profile had a photo of her in the costume of an obscure anime character.  When a man complimented her cosplay and not the sexiness of her costume, reader, she married him.

  The  librarian's occupation is interesting enough to that the writer that it is described twice in the profile.  It is taken as representing her commitment to social justice,  her appetite for meaningful change and her cultural involvement -- in  short,  evidence of her desirability as a partner for a smart, nerdy man.

"Fandom," incidentally has been identified as a trend by the Center for the Future of Libraries.

A Haven Like No Other

Sean P. Means, "A Haven Like No Other, Salt Lake Tribune, April 5, 2019, p. D1.

     Estevez--whose onscreen history with libraries goes back to The Breakfast Club in the 1980s-- was so taken with Ward's essay that he bought the film rights to it and worth a script inspired by it.  After several starts and stops, Estevez's move, The Public is opening Friday in theaters nationwide,
     Estevez saw what Ward was describing years before the essay was published. Estevez did most of the research for his 2006 drama Bobby about the days before Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, in the Los Angeles Public Library. 

COMMENT

     Technically, this whole article is about libraries and falls outside the scope for this blog which is dedicated to libraries that appear in stories that are not otherwise about libraries or librarianship.  The article is about programs for homeless patrons at the Salt Lake City Public Library. [1]  However, the embedded anecdote about library use is simply too good to leave out.   Where else besides a library is it possible for a famous Hollywood actor and homeless people to coexist in a state of social equality?

     So I'm going to count it in because it relates an organic library use. Like the story of Micky Hart at the library, [2] this library anecdote involves a person who is famous enough that he might be recognized.  Yet there he was, apparently anonymous, at the public library researching history for his next movie.  Honestly I would have imagined that the rich and famous would hire someone to do research for them so it makes me happy to know that Emilio Estevez went to the library to do his own research.

     The article also recounts how Estevez read Chip Ward's essay in the Los Angeles Times and then looked it up again on TomDispatch.com where it originally appeared.  The daily newspaper provided inspiration for the movie by providing a curated collection of articles.  Estevez went back to read the article online, but he might never have found it in the first place without the newspaper editorial page.

[1] See Stony Mesa Sagas
[2] See Drumming at the Edge of Magic

The Best Restaurant if You're Over 50

Frank Bruni, "The Best Restaurant if You're Over 50," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p.SR1.

There definitely used to be several factors in choosing where I wanted to eat, but all of them pale now in comparison to quiet,” said Mo Rocca, the actor, TV journalist and host of the CBS News podcast “Mobituaries.” He proudly turned 50 two months ago. “I have no problem saying that I’d rather eat at a place that’s more like the library,” he told me. “In fact, if the library opened a restaurant, I’d be first in line.

 COMMENT

Can this really be the first article I've run across that mentions libraries in terms of noise?  I'll have to look back to see if I missed something because enforced quiet at the library is one of the Big 4 stereotypes along with 1) there is nothing there but books, 2) librarians read all day and 3) the Internet makes libraries obsolete. As this article expresses, peace and quiet is not the opposite of lively.  Some degree of enforced quiet may actually be necessary if you want to have  social interaction without shouting at each other.  Particularly for the over 50 crowd whose hearing range is shrinking, (full disclosure: me) it can be impossible to follow a conversation at all in a noisy environment.  The quiet library space becomes an ideal of what public space could be like without all the loud music echoing from  hard surfaces. If this makes us old people sound like fuddy-duddys, so be it. Today's youth will be old someday too, and they'll want quiet places to go.  Maybe the shushing librarian deserves a little more appreciation!

Genevive Oswald [Obituary]

Marina Harss, "Genevivie Oswald, Innovative and Eclectic Dance Archivist, Dies at 97," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p. 25.

      In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Me. Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
     Ms Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library's main building on 42nd Street.
     She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library's ground floor.  In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center.  This year it celebrates there 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which had grown to more than 41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
.....
     Sometimes those records become a vital  link to a tradition in peril.  As the dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Ms. Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at there Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.

COMMENT
     An obituary for a New York Public Library archivist shows how the methodical, longitudinal work of librarians and archivists can have a profound impact on community.  A small archival collection started 75 years ago has become one of the world's major dance archives through years of collecting and preservation.  It strikes me that it would be difficult to sell this kind of specialized project to contemporary library administrators who would no doubt find it too expensive, too specialized, too space-intensive and insufficiently "cutting edge" (i.e. technological). Yet I've used this collection myself to write about dance for  Catalyst magazine  in Salt Lake City, Utah.

     The deep cultural importance of the dance archive is captured in the story of how the collection facilitated cultural restoration in Cambodia after a horrific genocide.  It's hard to overstate how important it must have been for survivors to know that these dances had survived. It's an extreme instance of how library collections can serve to support community resilience by preserving a record of how things were before the disaster.

    The obituary describes the problems of preserving the ephemeral art of dance which depends on years of specialized training and disappears into the moment.  Gegi Oswald said that she was "collecting around the absence of the dance itself."[1]   Perhaps in a way, that is not so different from other library and archival collecting where the historical moment recedes into memory leaving only traces behind.

    I have long thought that libraries should give all librarians at least a little money and space to collect their own obsessions.  Who knows what one person might be seeing that everyone else has missed?

[1]See, An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

 
   

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He's Caught On With Voters

Trip Gabriel, "He's Caught On With Voters, However They Say His Name," New York Times, March 29, 2019, p. A1.

"This was supposed to be a little meet-and-greet Q. and A.," he told hundreds of people in a college gym in Rock Hill, after his event was bumped from the library to accommodate a wave of RSVPs. 

COMMENT

     Pete Buttigieg who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana is running for president. He scheduled a small meeting room at the library to launch his campaign, but an unexpectedly enthusiastic response meant he had to change the venue.  Nonetheless, the library offered space for citizens to meet a candidate in person.  This kind of space is essential for the democratic process, especially for state and local politics where there is not a lot of money. 

The Stack

Katherine Schulz, “The Stack”, New Yorker, March 25, 2019, pp. 28-31.

It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure.  I do know that when he was nineteen he let Michigan for Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had so impressed him when he first arrived in America.  Instead, he found penury on the Bowery.  To save money, he walked each day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library.  Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he found there.

COMMENT

Here’s another version of the same story Frank McCourt told [1]— an immigrant finding the American   at the public library.  When the father has a bit more money and his own house he becomes a bit of a book hoarder, saving everything he has read in a large, sorted stack in his bedroom. 

In the essay, his daughter says that she keeps two photos of her father on her desk— one that is an image of him and another image of his stack of books.  Of the book photo she writes, “I can’t imagine a better image of the kinds of things that normally. Defy a camera.”  As in other library stories,  the reading list is described as a reflection of a person’s soul. From stories like this it seems clear that one of the reasons that people love libraries is that the books they have read are in the stacks.  The collection reflects a little reflection of the true self of each and every library borrower.  

Reading is a reflection of both true self and an aspirational self. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile is a haunting graphic novel in which a reading list comes to seem more representative than real life.  [2]

[1] New in Town

[2] Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010.