Windswept

 Annabel Abbs, Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women, Tin House, 2021.

I started exploring onine, prowling around second-hand booshops, investigating library catalogues.  Women remained elusive.  As Rebecca Solnit, one of the few female writers on the subject of waling, wrote "Througout the history of walking...the principal figures...have been men." 

Every now and then, Virginia Woolf's name appeared.  I'd spent my teenage years in the shadow of the South Downs, where Woolf had lived and walked for much of her adult life.  My parents were still there, so whenever I got the chance I plotted a Woof route and began tracing her footsteps over the South Downs. [xxi] 

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COMMENT 

After noticing that her colleciton of nature book is largely by and about mean,  Abbs began to research accounts of women  walking.  She notes that the absence of literature is a self-reinforcing loop:  "Many more have disappeared, the casualties of a self-referencing male canon of walking and nature literature, of men-only hiking and climbing clubs, of publishing firms historically run by men, of miguided concerns for female safety." [xxiii] 
      

How I Became Extremely Open Minded

Ross Douthat. "How I Became Extemely Open Minded. New York Times, Nov. 7, 2021 p. SR8.

I'm bad, but not that bad, I would think while walking through a photograph exhibit on chonic Lyme in the local library, with its pictures of hollow-eyed sufferers with platoons of pill bottles -- until I foun myself with drawrs full of enough pill bottles to put those medicne cabinets to shame. 

COMMENT

The library exhibt doesn't exactly help, but it becomes part of the story for Douthat who is dealing with chronic Lyme disease.  What does help is an alternative medicien Rife machine that Douthat reads about in a New Yorker article.   He doesn't say whether or not he reads the magazine at the library, but I would guess that he probably has his own subscription 

How to Recommend a Book

 Malia Wallan, "How to Recommend a Book," New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2021, p. 15.

"Recommending books you love is the hardest thing of all," says Joyce Saricks, 72, who worked for nearly 30 years as a reference librarying in suburban Chicago.  Saricks has written several textbooks on so-called "readers' advisory," which largely disappeared from libraries after World War II and is credited with helping spark a national revival in the practice of librarians' suggesting books to patrons.

...

When Saricks was stumped, she often led patrons into the library stacks, where book spines would spur ideas and conversation.  "My colleague used to say, 'The books know when you're desperate,'" she says.  

COMMENT

The librarian in this story is an author of a book for librarians that, according to this author, helped restore a culture of reading and literacy to contemporary libraries.   The story includes a plug for physical browsing, which can lead to finding something unexpected.   The Internet most definitely does not know when you're desperate. 

How Laura Ashley Endures

 Amanda Fortini, "How Laura Ashley Endures, New York Times Oct. 24, 2021, p.ST3

In 1952, a 28-yar old secretary attended a traditional handicrafts exhibition at the Vitoria & Albert Museum in London.  Inspired especially by the hand-printed fabrics she encountered there, the young woman returned home and told her husband that she had never seen anything like them in stores and wanted to try making some similar styles herself. The pair spent 10 pounds on wood for a screen, diyes and linen and, after puring over a handful of instructional library boos, began sild-screening textiles at the kitchen table of their small London flat. 

COMMENT

This gratifying story involves two cultural institutions.  A museum exhibit that inspired a look and library books that showed how to achieve it.   In any case, as Fortinini writes "If you are a woman who grew up in the '80s or early '90s, chances are you have a memory of cveting, wering or living with something by the brand [Laura Ashley]". 

Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve

Steven Moity, "Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve," New York Times, October 17, 2021 p. 2.

The puzzles first go to three testers who work for Mr. Shortz.  One is Nancy Schuster, a former crossword editor and champion of the first American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the country's oldest crossword competuition.  LIke Ms. Eysenbburg, she test-solves the puzzle and keeps her eye  out for anything that is off.

Brad Wilber is the chief faxt checker.  A former librarian, he brings his attention to detail to meticulously check as much of the informaiton as possible.  "You have to watch old commercials on YouTube, you have to check song lyrics, you have to check quotations," Mr. Wilber explained. He then calls Mr. Shorz directly and discusses any errors he has found and discusses potential wording changes. 

COMMENT

My dream job!

Desert Vision

 Helen Macdonald, "Desert Vision," New York Times Magazine,  Oct. 17, 2021 pp. 55-

Villeneuve was 14 when he first saw the book, an edition with an arresting cover in the small library near his school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec: The face of a dark-skinned man with piercing blue eyes against a remote desert background.  It was beautiful, he told me, lifting a copy with the same cover from his desk.  He has kept it though the years and is using it to write the second movie ("Done" is a famously complex novel, and Villeneuve only agreed to adapt it if it could be broken into two films).  Looking at it even now evokes the same emotions he felt back then" "mystery, isolation, loneliness."  Billeneuve has dreamed of making "Dune" since he was a teenager; he tried to make his move as "close to the dream as possibel, and it was very difficult, becaus the dreams of a teenager are very totalitarian.  I was not expecting would be so difficult to please that guy!

COMMENT

Denis Villeneuve says that he has dreamed of making Frank Herbert's novel "Dune" into a movie since he was a teenager.  The cover art of the edition at the public library evoked an aesthetic for the movie of his imagination.  The inspiration of the life-changing book is explicitly tied to the book as a physical object.  Villeneuve bought his own  copy of the same edition to keep as as a kind of  talisman.

The Donor and the Borrower

 Robert Kolker, "The Donor and the Borrower, New York Times Magazine, Oct 10, 2021, p.24-

Last year as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group.  "I know virtually all of them," Dorland said.  "It was just like seeing friends."

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland's name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat.  Larson's life had moved on in so many ways.  She'd published another story.  She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the imporatance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who'd branded her a plagiarist, watching her.  "It really just freaks me out," Larson said.  "At times, I've felt kind of stalked."

COMMENT

This is from an article that appeared online under the title "Bad Art  Friend." In the article, Dorland has been "mean girled" out of the Chunky Monkeys. The article avoids taking sides in the plagiarism issue, but I've been in Dorland's shoes, listening to a bad boss present at a library conference about how to have "difficult conversations" after she had had a difficult conversation with me and let me down badly.  I went to the presentation and I made sure she saw me in the audience.  I did not, of course, make a scene, but I did privately hope she was freaked out.  It must have been infuriating for Dorland to see her former "friends" boasting about what a great, supportive community they had.   

Public events like this are, well, public.  Librarians can't really know who will show up or what their relationship is with the presenters.