An Excavated Voice Never Leaves Her

Alexandra Alter, "An Excavated Voice Never Leaves Her," New York Times, March 8, 2020, p. AR18.

     Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library.  She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she's been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.
     "And then when you wake up," she said,  "you've got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don't know what the sentence was."

Comment 

     Here's a new twist on the extreme research story.  The nightmare involves finding the exact information  needed and then not being able to read or remember it.   It's the joy of research inverted, 

Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I

Neil Genzlinger, "Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I," New York Times, March 6, 2020, p. B16.

     She went to Cornwall House in London, site of the British Foreign Office library and asked the librarian, C.H. Fine, if any archival material from staff officers existed.
     "He took me into a very dusty room and opened cabinets that had clearly not been cleaned for decades," she wrote.  "Out fell, along with bound volumes packets of papers tied up in pink ribbon, which dropped on to the floor as well as envelopes of pictures covered in dust.  "Oh dear," he said, "you had better have a look."
     "That, she added, "was how I began as a researcher."

 Comment

Hidden treasure in dusty boxes again.  Always the dust concealing the undiscovered gem.  These documents turned Dr. Steiner into an expert on what happened in England between WWI and WWII. The end of the  obituary quotes Dr. Steiner wondering how future historians will do their work in the age of Twitter and Facebook.  Without the dockets and minutes and paper trail, how will anyone ever discover what really happened.

My Ex-Boyfriend's New Girlfriend is Lady Gaga

Lindsay Crouse, "My Ex-Boyfriend's New Girlfriend is Lady Gaga," New York Times, March 1, 2020, p. 4.

     Page six produced a deep dive into Lady Gaga's new "mystery man,."  Refinery29 announced that Gaga was "wearing 2020's hottest new accessory: a normal boyfriend."  The story appeared in the Daily Mail, and Business insider and People, where my mother read about the couple after checking the magazine out from the local library
     I dated this normal, mystery man for seven years.  Our relationship lasted all of college, and then a few years more. (A popular song from back then described being "caught in a bad romance.")
      As you can guess from the fact that you've probably never heard of me, I'm not famous. 

COMMENT

    The article descries celebrity gossip spread on the Internet, though the author's mother is still old-fashioned enough to check People out of the library. And  People is still publishing a print edition despite the instant celebrity-gawking on the Web.  I know because sometimes I look at it while I'm waiting at the car mechanic's.  Those magazines are often several years old and do something the Internet doesn't.  They are an archive that reminds you of old, out of date celebrity gossip.   I hope there is a library somewhere saving them.

Teaching Children in the Bible Belt How to Reverse an Overdose

Dan Levin, "Teaching Children in the Bible Belt How to Reverse an Overdose," New York Times, February 24, 2020, p. A1-

     Shortly after his first-grade class let out for the day, Nash Kitchens sat with a dozen other young children at a library and played a murder mystery game that had a surprising plot twist.
     The victim was a restaurant worker who had been found dead in a freezer.  The killer, the children would discover, was heroin laced with fentanyl, an often fatal opioid.
   Nash, who at 7 years old has a relative who has struggled with addiction, was wide-eyed as Jilian Reece, a drug prevention educator, talked about an ongoing opioid epidemic in their small rural community.  She then demonstrated how to administer Narcan, an overdose reversal nasal spray. 

 COMMENT

    Since the public library is also a community center it is normal to host all kinds of unlikely events.  Even so, teaching little kids how to deal with an overdose seems unusually gritty. 

Read Deeper

Seth Douglas, "Read Deeper," [letter], High Country News, v.52 no.3, Much 2020, p. 6.

Having read Mary Slosson's review of Deep River ("Wading into murky waters," 11/11/19), I picked up the novel from my local library against my better judgment.  Imagine my surprise when I found, in lieu of the reactionary, stereotype-laden, and politically tone-deaf work described by Slosson, a novel focused on the struggles of working people in the Northwest at the turn of the century.

COMMENT

   A library card lets you try books you might not like.  The negative review was still interesting enough so that this reader borrowed the book, and he loved it.

Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed [By the Book], New York Times Book Review, Feb. 16, 2020, p. 8.

About 20 years ago my husband, Brian, and I were in Antigua, Guatemala, when I became desperately ill with a stomach parasite.  For days, I could do nothing but lie in bed in the cheap hotel where we had a room.  Brian found an English-language lending library nearby that would allow you to check out two books at a time for a small fee.  He brought back the first two installments of Stephen King's serialized novel, "The Green Mile," and read them out loud to me.  When we were done, he returned them and checked out the next tow and so on until we'd gotten through all six.  Brian and I have a long history of reading books out loud to watch other, but that one was especially bonding.  His steady voice guided me back to life.
...
In elementary school, they used to hand out catalogs form the Scholastic publishing company that allowed you to order books that would then be delivered to you at school.  I'd study those catalogs for hours and meticulously fill out the order form on the back, as if I could buy them.  But I couldn't.  I never turned in the forms because my family was too poor to pay for the books.  It's such a visceral memory, aching for those books!  The public libraries and school libraries saved me, as did my mother's bookshelf.  I read everything that looked even a little bit interesting. 

COMMENT

 Not one but two library stories.  The first is about the relief of finding English books in a non-English country.  It helps to understand what a relief it mush be for people with non-English first languages to find non-English books in American libraries.

In the second story, a young reader is too poor to buy cheap paperbacks from the Scholastic catalog.  when I was a kid I was allowed to order books and I absolutely loved getting my new stack of them.  The books where printed on acidic paper and fell apart if you read them too many times, but that was mostly OK because the old ones quickly became too childish.

Downriver

Heather Hansman, Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West, 2019. 

Life in Vernal ticks by hot and slow.  I eat gas-station burritos, drink weak Utah beer, and run the mountain-bike trails outside of town at dusk, when it gets cool enough to move in the desert.  I camp on chalky flats of BLM land alongside the river and spend a lot of time in the air-conditioned public library and recreation center, which both seem unnecessarily big and glossy for a town this scratchy. [p.104]

COMMENT

   The author is writing a book about the Green River, but she says she goes to the library for the air conditioning.   Though she is camping recreationally, her need for a cool-shelter is essentially the same as is experienced by homeless people.  The library is a benefit of boom-and-bust oil and gas money, but this was written during a bust.