Losing the Fiance but Winning the Honeymoon

Nell Stevens, “Losing the Fiance but Winning the Honeymoon,” New York Times August 5, 2018, p. ST5.

In the preceding months, I had been in the fateful state of being both bored and in love, completing my Ph.D. in London while the man I was going to marry worked in Boston. In the rare-books reading room at the British Library (where I had gone to write), I spent a lot of time entering online contests filling out form after form in the hope of winning vacations, designer clothes and theater tickets.

COMMENT 

    The library is a refuge for writers, but technology is a source of distraction and a ready excuse for procrastination.  Print books and frustratingly slow (or non-existent) Internet offer a handy solution to distractibility. Some people even advocate solving the problem by reverting to using a typewriter.  The romance, needless to say, was just an excuse to avoid writing.  It didn't work out. 

On Planes, in Bars, Around Phones, a Nation is Transfixed

Jack Healy and Farah Stockman. On Planes, in Bars, Around Phones, a Nation is Transfixed. New York Times. September 28, 2018. P. A1

     Travelers on airplanes cried as they watched it on their seatback televisions. College students holed up all day at library computers and streamed it on their phones, drowning out their lectures.  Friends sat together, stunned and still, on living room couches. Television screens at mall salons, sports bars and hotel lobbies were tuned to nothing else.
     All day on Thursday, though eight hours of tears, anger and exasperation, it seemed like the country could not look away.

COMMENT

     The article is about the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at the Supreme Court hearing of judge Brett Kavenaugh whom she accused of attempted rape. Back before everybody had a computer in their pocket libraries used to wheel out televisions for big events. I can remember being at a library watching events like the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (1986), the testimony of disgraced congresswoman Enid Green Waldholtz (1995)  and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (2001). In each case the shared experience was important.

     In this account students are using library computers and cell phones at the library (I assume for fast wi-fi and streaming) but the library doesn’t seem to have set up any shared viewing space where students could watch together. Perhaps the newspaper reporters just didn’t notice it, or maybe librarians really are so detatched from current events that they didn't recognize the emotional power of the hearing and left it up to sports bars and hotel lobbies to provide community space.  If so, that’s too bad. Libraries claim a role in civic engagement, and this seems like a missed opportunity. 

     On that Thursday women especially were in a state of shock and emotional turmoil. Screens often isolate people, but in some cases (movie theaters, Super Bowl games, Sound of Music sing-alongs, etc...) they can also create a shared experience. It strikes me as sad that college professors and librarians tried to press on with business-as-usual instead of pausing for a day to let students participate in a shared  experience of civics and community grief. In the old days, librarians used to know better. 

Six Kinds of Rain

Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore, “Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy,” in Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work and Identity, ed. By Jenifer Sinor and Rona Kaufamn, Utah State University Press, 2007, pp. 27-38.

“In this folded space, it’s hard to know where a university is. Maybe the university has become a paradox, a place with no particular place —  in a familiar geography of classrooms, restrooms, computer networks, and labs where uncomfortable table-chairs and library shelves are an iconography recognizable around the world. This global University has a common language, shared ethical codes, standardized measures of status, and ingrained methodologies, economic systems and taboos. What the University doesn’t have is a meaningful relationship to a particular place— its absence the final achievement of the goal implicit in the word university. [pp.31-32]

COMMENT

Let's sing along with Malvina Reynolds’ classic song!

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they got put in boxes
And they came out all the same
There are doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

     In Becoming Native to this Place (1993) Wes Jackson asks, what if universities had a homecoming major? I would add, if they did have one, what would need to change in Academic libraries? 

     In the name of efficiency, academic collecting has been largely outsourced to approval plans and digital aggregators. That means libraries are spending a lot of money to buy very similar digital collections no matter where the institution is located. This in turn has led to proposals to replace academic libraries with huge regional book warehouses in order to “share” shelf space. [1] The book-warehouse idea presupposes that all campuses are interchangeable. All of this only makes sense if  you don’t truly think of your  university campus as a “community”

     Interestingly, even the people who most strongly advocate replacing libraries with book warehouses have realized that diversity (a.k.a. "unique print book manifestations") in academic library collections derives from collecting that reflects geography. Place is still important, no mater how much universities have been trying to ignore it.  If academic libraries start to pay attention to place it suggests a better way forward than replacing libraries with remote warehouses. 

     What if academic libraries decided to adopt a core mission of  fostering  resilient community? That would trigger a shift in library collection priorities away from globalized, generic knowledge towards specific local and hyperlocal knowledge.It would make regional Special Collections more prominent. But more importantly, it could help with the sustainability agenda to make the world a better place.

[1] OCLC Shared Print Management https://www.oclc.org/en/services/shared-print-management.html

Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like 'New Genocide'

Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londono. Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like ‘New Genocide,” New  York Times, September 14, 2018, p. A4. 

“It’s the museum that’s on fire!” Said Jose Urutau Guajajara, a member of the Tenetehara-Guajajara tribe who had been researching his people’s heritage in the archives of Brazil’s National Museum for more than a decade.  “We can still manage to put it out with buckets.”

    By the time they reached the centuries-old place , home to the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history, flames had butted the building’s core and a dense column of smoke towered above it. 

…

“This is like a new genocide, as though they had slaughtered all these indigenous communities again,” Mr. Gajajara said. “Because that was where our memories resided.”

COMMENT:

The grief of cultural loss is unbearable.

Libraries and archives preserve textual information, which means they privilege textual cultures whether they mean to or not.  Artifacts and texts that describe pre-genocide indigenous cultures were often collected by cultural outsiders. Yet those scraps of information are often all that’s left to reconstruct cultural memory.

In the University of Utah Marriott Library there is a truly beautiful artwork [1] that incorporates textual excerpts from the library collection of  Mormon pioneer diaries. The library is justifiably proud to highlight this special collection.  Still, the diaries tell a one-sided text-based story. The Mormon pioneers didn't move into an inhabited place. They settled a cultural landscape that was already occupied by Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo people. The diaries don't record non-textual cultural memory that is embedded in Utah’s desert landscape. That failure of information has real-world consequences. 

[1] Paul Housberg, Another Beautiful Day has Dawned Upon Us (2008). Handcrafted, kiln cast colored glass silvered on the back. Selected diary passages, from the Library’s private collection about the westward migration, are included in the four unique murals. The work was commissioned by the State of Utah as part of Utah’s Percent-for-Art Program, 2008.

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. 60th Anniversary Edition. Simon & Schuster, 2013. 

“In order to finish the novel— I had no office, I looked around for a good place to write this fantastic story that was coming to birth, and I thought, “Well, what’s a better place to write a novel about book burning in the future than a library?”   And I discovered , in that time, that wonderful downstairs basement room in the UCLA library with a typewriter that you fed a dime into every half hour. So I sat there and fed dimes into this typewriter for eight or nine days, twenty cents an hour, and finished the  short novel “The Fireman” on that typewriter in a room with ten or fifteen or twenty other students who didn’t know what I was up to.” [p.194]

COMMENT

     Bradbury seems to feel like he was getting away with something.  The CPI Inflation calculator says that in 1951 when he wrote The Fireman, $0.20 was worth $1.98 in 2018 dollars. That's dirt cheap rent for office space in an age.
      Are there modern-day Ray Bradburies writing the next great novel in library computer labs? Maybe. Good word-processing software is available open-source, but not everyone has a big screen and an ergonomic keyboard. The ubiquitous computer these days is a cell-phone which is not well adapted for typing. AS people are increasingly stuffed into crowded megacities the future demand for libraries as writing retreats might grow, too. In 1950, the average size of an American houses was 983 square feet.  The median size of a single family house built in 2017 was 2,426 square feet which should provide plenty of office space. Except that in many American cities average people can't afford to buy houses any more.
    Typewriters, by the way, seem to have experienced a bit of a comeback.[1] Some writers like the way they eliminate online distraction, slow down the thought process, and record a first draft without corrections.  A few libraries admit to still having typewriter rooms including Oberlin College Library A San Franciso Public Library  Facebook post implies that their typewriter is so popular people are queuing up to use it.

[1] California Typewriter [documentary], 2016. http://californiatypewritermovie.com/

The Portable Veblen

Elizabeth McKenzie, “The Portable Veblen, Penguin Press, 2016.

“Veb, did I ever tell you how I became interested in neurology?”

“Can’t say that you did,” she said stiffly. 

“Kind of painful,” Paul continued. “I was spending all my time in the library to get away from the freaks at home, and the librarian took me under her wing. Mrs. Brown. She was a stern old bag who pitied me, I think. I was all over the place. So one day she handed me the Life picture book called The Mind — up to that point I’d mostly been reading science fiction — but The Mind was even weirder.  I remember seeing this one page, ‘Isolate human.’ A Princeton student in a lightless chamber with no sound, his hands in gloves.  I think the guy went totally crazy after thirty or forty hours. [p.219]

COMMENT

This is an amusing fictional variation on the transformational book narrative, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading this actual book as a child, or at least one very much like it.[1] The joke is, the transformational book is both life-changing and self-delusional. Grownup Paul becomes a mad scientist. 
         Libraries, librarians and books occur frequently in this effervescent novel offering the characters ways to view the world and themselves (some more helpful than others). Mrs. Brown the Librarian turns up in another part of the story when young Paul is setting up a science fair experiment hoping to document the sound of screaming snails. She helps him find reference material in entirely made-up books called Invertebrates Around Us and Gastrapoda Today. When his experimental snails fail to scream young Paul, to his lasting shame, falsifies his data. Veblen, the protagonist, is named after the Norwegian-American philosopher Thorstein Veblen and she frequently channels her namesake. Her kind but self-effacing stepfather Linus, “had been an academic librarian at UC Berkeley, and a rare-book dealer.” He mentors his stepdaughter by offering her carefully selected books. As young Veblen is being sent on court-mandated visits to her insane biological father he supplies her with White Fang, Call of the Wild, and “a few other novels about ill-treated beasts.” 

[1] Wilson, John Rowan, The Mind,  Life Science Library, 1965.   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135687.The_Mind

Recently Returned Books

Gabbert, Elisa,” Recently Returned Books (Letters of Recommendation), New York Times Magazine, Sept. 9, 2018, pp 20-21.

My favorite spot in my local library — the central branch in Denver — is not the nook for new releases; not the holds room, where one or two titles are usually waiting for me; not the little used-book shop, full of cheap classics for sale; and not the fiction stacks on the second floor, though I visit all those areas frequently.  It’s a shelf near the Borrower Services desk bearing a laminated sign that reads RECENTLY RETURNED
…

The “recently returned” shelf is perhaps the subtlest most indirect way of advising readers, nudging them towards what others in the community are reading — an index of local interests, a a record of your neighbor’s whims.

COMMENT

     The most charming thing about this essay is how the author experiences the returned book shelf as a community connection. She imagines other people reading the books and wonders if they might be personal friends. I wonder if the librarians ever thought of it that way? The shelf is probably just there so that librarians can locate books in transit and so that shelvers can sort them onto carts.  

     As far as selecting what to read, the author lists her favorite ways to find books, none of which are keyword searching in an online catalog which is how librarians think people find books.

      I used to work with a library administrator who fancied  himself a prescient futurist. He loved to talk about how book circulation is going down and how "useless" books should be weeded so that shelf space could be put to “better” use. The circulation statistics he cited were deeply flawed, but never mind. He was utterly convinced that digital reading was The Future and that libraries should therefore purchase everything on clunky ebook platforms (the kind that will become instantly obsolete if technology ever really does replace print). 

    This administrator seemed to believe that book circulation arises from internal information needs of individual readers. He could never quite grasp that librarians (and booksellers) can persuade people to check out more books simply by putting more books in front of them. Likewise, librarians can suppress circulation by hiding books in onsite storage and remote repositories where nobody will ever stumble across them.