Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, Be Very Afraid

David Streitfeld. “Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, be Very Afraid: Citing Amazon’s Dominance, a ‘Legal Prodigy’ Argues for a new Approach to Antitrust Regulation,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2018, BU 1, 6-7. 

The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.      

     “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.”  Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades.  There are a dozen tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. 

     At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” Lina Khan said. 

COMMENT

     The photo accompanying this article shows law student Lina Kahn in law library stacks barely holding onto a toppling armload of hardbound library books.  She’s the author of a highly-cited paper [1] about the possibility of reviving and expanding anti-trust laws in order to rein in the outsized monopoly power of Big Tech. Khan is jump-starting her legal career by delving into historical legal scholarship on a topic that has been long ignored. The “dead” books she is using for her research sat on the shelf for more than 60 years but now it seems they were really just dormant, waiting for the passing of a fad for unregulated free markets. It’s a recurring library narrative -- finding intellectual treasure concealed in unused, supposedly obsolete books.  From an original research perspective, there is deep conflict with the  the commonly-held librarian notion that the most heavily used books are the most valuable.

    Big Tech, of course, is not responding passively to being labeled dangerously monopolistic.  As the article points out, Amazon has already hired its own lawyers to write rebuttals to Kahn. Shortly before this article appeared an op-ed [2] was published on the Forbes,com website (and then quickly redacted due to public ridicule) proposing that since public libraries are “obsolete” they would be better replaced with Amazon.com outlets. The idea was a logical if misguided extension of the tired old idea that public services would be more efficient if they were run like businesses. It’s hard to imagine an Amazon branded “library” outlet that would support antitrust legal research against its own parent company.  Yes, I know there’s a difference between public libraries and academic law libraries, but increasingly corporations are “sponsoring” university professorships in order to guarantee scholarship that is friendly to their own interests and political ideology. 

     Amazon really is overly powerful. Book sales statistics are not very precise, but in 2018,  Amazon sold about 1/2 of all print books, and about 80% of all ebooks (many of them self-published) in the U.S. Market. The company has been known to  promote or suppress publications, sometimes vindictively (such as the 2014 incident when Amazon attacked the publisher Hachette over ebook pricing).  It’s probably no coincidence that American democracy is in a state of crisis. A little trust-busting could be just what's needed right now. 

[1]Khan, Lina M. "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Yale Law Journal,  126 (2016): 710.  
[2] Mourdoukoutas, Panos. “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” Forbes.com, July 21, 2018 [deleted]

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J.K. Rawlings. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Bloomsbury, 1997.

They had indeed been searching books for Flamel’s name ever since Hagrid had let it slip, because how else were they going to find out what Snape was trying to steal?  The trouble was, it was very hard to know where to begin, not knowing what Flamel might have done to get himself into a book.  He wasn’t in Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century, or Notable Magical Names of Our Time; he was missing, too, from Important Modern Magical Discoveries, and A Study of Recent Developments in Wizardry. And then, of course, there was the sheer size of the library; tens of thousands of books; thousands of shelves; hundreds of narrow rows.

Hermione took out a list of subjects and titles she had decided to search while Ron strode off down a row of books and started pulling them off at random. Harry wandered over to the Restricted Section.  He had been wondering for a while if Flamel wasn’t somewhere in there.  Unfortunately, you needed a specially signed note from one of the teachers to look in any of the restricted books and he knew he’d never get one.  These were the books containing powerful Dark Magic never taught at Hogwarts and only read by older students studying advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts. 

‘What are you looking for, boy?’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry.

Madam Pince, the librarian brandished a feather duster at him.

‘You’d better get out, then.  Go on— out!’

Harry left the library.  He, Ron and Hermione had already agreed they’d better not ask Madam Pince where they could find Flamel. They were sure she’d be able to tell them, but they couldn’t risk Snape hearing what they were up to.  [p 145-146]

COMMENT 

     Madam Pince, the librarian, is neither friendly nor helpful.  She is the kind of librarian who is protective of books.  Her possessiveness reminds me a bit of an archivist I once encountered who kept his arms literally wrapped around a box of documents I wanted to use while lecturing me on how to treat the contents with respect. Despite her scariness (she is a "thin, irritable woman who looks like an underfed vulture,"), Madam Pince is a good librarian, though. She has assembled a truly excellent collection of magical information, a comprehensive treasure-trove that always seem to have whatever obscure information Harry and his friends need to find.

     As far as I recall, Madam Pince never teaches any kind of magical information literacy session. Hogwarts students are more or less on their own, though one in a while a professor allows them to look into the Restricted Section. The research styles of the three students  \match their characters.  Hermione is methodical with confidence in the cataloging system; Ron is haphazard; Harry is sure that the information has been hidden on purpose. The three fictional students are doing something that is often turns up in non-fiction narratives. They are seeking knowledge that they believe adults around them would not approve. It's a classic transition out of the children's section into the adult stacks.
     

Branching Out

Nalini Nadkarni. "Branching Out," in Nature Love Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness. ed. by Thomas Lowe Fleischner, 2017, pp. 27-40.

                Although immense amounts of knowledge are contained in the science libraries around the world, rates of deforestation, climate change, species invasion, and over-consumption if tree-derived products are increasing.  Humans— especially those living in urban environments and working in windowless cubicles— are more and more separated from their connections to trees, soils and wind.  Midway into my academic career, I realized that communication of all my scientific findings to scientists — through my academic papers and talks at ecology conferences —did very little to fulfill my childhood dream of being a grownup who protected trees. [p. 31]

COMMENT

 The fact that so much academic writing has no market has misled some academic librarians into misunderstanding the motivation and interests of academic authors. Often, academic writing is an indirect path to the rewards of scholarly reputation, job promotion and successful grant applications, valued according to citation statistics. Some librarians therefore assume that scholars only care about reputation. However, in this case Nadkarni has a much larger goal. She wants her writing to create change in the world. This ambition places her squarely into an academic no-man’s-land between science and activism.

      There has long been an ongoing debate among scientists regarding the role of activism in the sciences and where to place appropriate limits. In his classic textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953), Eugene Odum hoped that ecology would emerge as an  interdisciplinary bridge between science and society.  Instead what happened is the vocabulary shifted.  "Ecology" became more scientifically focused and integrated in Biology departments. The term “environmentalism” gained favor to imply ecological activism. In the academic environment, biological scientists criticized environmental studies as  being a “church of the environment” for idealistic students.  Eventually, the word “environmentalism” was deemed too narrow and after the Brundtland Report (1987) it was replaced by the word “sustainability." Sustainability was defined by a triple bottom line of ecology, economics and society, an attempt to deliberately pull science and society back together.  However, once again scientists balked at the fuzziness of social science and policy. The ideas of sustainable development, criticized as insufficiently evidence-based, spun off  “sustainability science” on the one hand and “resilience” on the other.  And so it goes.  As each new term becomes “tainted” by association with activism, scientists imagine that the next effort to save the planet will succeed due to rigorous standards of objectivity.

     In the end, Nadkarni was not able to create change within the context of pure science. Instead she engaged with humanities by inviting “forest novices” to help interpret what she was seeing —  artists, dancers, musicians, and indigenous people from the Arctic who have never seen a tree.  

 

     Academic librarians like to structure collections and organizations to mirror the structure of  academic departments at a university, but that means libraries are bound by the same limitations. Interdisciplinary ideas can end up marginalized, or caught in a tug-of-war of words and definitions. I wonder how many of the science libraries that have Nadkarni’s academic papers also have a video of the dance performance inspired by her work?

Autobiography of Red

“XXIV. Freedom,” in Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, Vintage Books, 1998.

Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.

 ——-

He got a job in the local library shelving government documents. It was agreeable to work in a basement
humming with fluorescent lights and cold as a sea of stone.  The documents had a forlorn austerity,
tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war. Whenever a librarian came clumping down the metal stairs with a pink slip for one of the documents, Geryon would vanish into the stacks. A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track above it.
A yellowing 5x7 index cardScotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.Geryon went flickering though the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and off.The librarians thought hima talented boy with a shadow side. One evening at supper when his mother asked himwhat they were like, Geryon could not remember if the librarians were men or women. 

COMMENT

     The words of the old spiritual say, "this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." It's a reference to Matthew (5:15), Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house."

     The dreary government documents stacks are a dark night of the soul for our hero Geryon who has been dumped by his lover and is now obeying instructions to "extinguish light when not in use."
I find the metaphor particularly amusing since I am a documents librarian. And yes, we documents librarians are a lot like the ones in the poem —  heavy-footed, gender ambiguous trolls lurking in the basement with flickering lights, pink slips, and forlorn, joy-killing, unreadable books. But note also  the librarians' radical inclusion. Geryon is literally a monster, red with wings (incidentally also a queer, tortured artist) but to the librarians, he is a talented boy. In an depository, grand dramas of sex and passion are quite simply irrelevant.  If Geryon wanted to, he could become one of them.

     It seems probable from the nuanced description that Anne Carson experienced this particular documents library as an actual place. These days most government documents are online. One day the FDLP depository in the poem may seem like pure imagination, the fanciful invention of an impossibly drab, soul-sucking job.

Hard Times

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854.  (Pocket Books ed., Supplementary Material written by Kathleen Heal, 2007).

There was a library in Coketown to which general access was easy.  Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library — a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance but a melancholy fact that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths, of common men and women! They sometimes after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own. They took Defore to their bosoms instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker. Mr. Gradrgrind was forever working in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product. (Chapter VIII).

COMMENT

The "Enriched Classics" edition has a note to say that the British Parliament passed the Public Libraries Act in 1850 which created the British public library system. Dickens didn't think the public library was primarily a means of education or job training. Rather, he imagines it as a form of escapism, a way to improve the dreary lives of oppressed factory workers in the Industrial Revolution.  The hilarious opening chapters lampoon the notion of education based solely on facts and practicality. The aptly named teacher Mr. McChoakumchild instructs his pupils that it is illogical to use wallpaper with horses printed on it since they would never glue actual horses to their living room walls. Dickens indicates the high high moral character of certain working-class characters through their reading habits. Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus clown, reads Arabian Nights tales to her illiterate father. Stephen Blackpool, a scrupulously honest factory worker, has a room with little in it besides a bed and a few books. To Dickens the fiction writer, reading fiction develops what we might  these days call “emotional intelligence."  Evidence bears Dickens out. Researchers have found that reading literature actually does engender higher levels of empathy and tolerance. [1]

[1] Julianne Chiaet. "Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy," Scientific American, October 4, 2013. 

Moby Dick

Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale  1851.

EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

      It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
      So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! 

COMMENT

Melville seems to be making fun of his own book by starting out with a librarian, a sad, unadventurous person who "belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm."  Yet the librarian is acknowledged to be good company and has helpfully compiled a bibliography of whales. He will reappear in the narrative (Chapter 32: Cetology) speaking in the first person in order to catalog actual whales.  Personally, I was so pleased by the presence of the librarian in Moby Dick, that I wrote a poem about him. [1]

Cetology 

Sometimes on days when work is slow
I take my lunchbox and I go
Down by the People’s Freeway
To the Garden of Modest Bureaucrats

Where I breathe the intoxicating patchouli
Narcissus scent of paperwhites
Planted in the Grove of Inferiority
Complex with Attitude near the statue

Inscribed, “To that sallow Sub Sub Librarian
Whom Melville mentioned in his book
Which is mostly about people chasing whales”
The Librarian, too, was hunting Leviathan

And met with notable success
Finding him swimming though Genesis, Psalms,
Job, Milton, Shakespeare’s plays;
The Marine Mammal Protection Act

Had not yet been written; Whales were prey
To Quakers and cannibals, but soon the bureaucrats
Would arrive armed with regulations; the whales
Would be saved from pagan harpooneers;

Melville, or at least his doppelganger Ishmael,
Was misguided when he wrote that chapter
Overstating the eternal, unbreachable
Future of those immensely vulnerable creatures,

Now even the oceans have become too small
To absorb the wrath of those damned whalers
Who must forever blame something
For whatever limb it was they lost at sea

While the Librarian sat calmly compiling
Folio, octavo, duodecimo, of cetology
Steadfastly refusing to be drowned
When all hands on the ship went down.


[1] Amy Brunvand,  Pink Birds and Beasts of Land and Sea, Journal of Wild Culture, 7/15/2016.

Transported

Ruth Franklin. Transported: How should children’s books deal with the Holocaust? New Yorker, July 23, 2018, 64-69. 

I was fourteen when “the Devil’s Arithmetic” was published. Although it won numerous awards, no teacher or librarian ever gave it to me.  I wish someone had, because the book speaks in a profound way to the painful paradox I felt then and still feel now: how to be an adequate witness to something I haven’t myself experienced.[p. 66]

COMMENT

In this anecdote the librarian has failed, probably without ever knowing that this student needed to learn about the Holocaust.

Franklin writes that as a child  she had relatives with tattoos on their arms who had survived the Holocaust, but she had little information to understand exactly what it was they had survived. She was given “The Diary of Anne Frank," an excellent book, but one that stops at a confusing place. An adult would know the implication of the Frank family being sent off to Nazi death camps. To a child the ending conceals the true atrocity.

Children are often aware of horrifying world events, but lack vocabulary or background knowledge to really understand the truth of what happened. Adults want to protect not only kids but also themselves from facing the full horror. They end up either refusing to talk about it or offering information so thoroughly sanitized that it doesn't really make sense. 

 “The Devil’s Arithmetic” uses fantasy as a frame to help children cope with emotionally difficult information. Some adults didn't like the use of fantasy for such a serious subject, but Franklin thinks it would have worked well for her 14-year-old self.  In the documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” Fred Rogers uses hand puppets to address children’s fears after the assassination of President Kennedy. Through the voice of Daniel Striped Tiger, Rogers timidly asks Lady Aberlin, “What does “assassination” mean?”

Probably Franklin never asked for book suggestions. If so, what could a librarian have done? It might have been hard to guess at this particular information need. An astute librarian who knew that there were Jewish families in the community might have made a selected list of Holocaust books for kids-- something that a kid could pick up without having to ask a scary adult. [1]  But often, kids find the kind of books that adults don't quite like through word of mouth. 

[1] A letter to the editor in the August 6 & 13  issue of the New Yorker says that quite a lot of Children's literature about the Holocaust was written in Yiddish but for the most part it was never translated.