Draft No. 4

John McPhee, "Checkpoints," in Draft No.4: John McPhee on the Writing Process, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 201,  pp. 129-155.

     Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it "will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed... silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata." With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge. It is in part, why the job exists and why, in Sara's words, a publication will believe in "turning a pack of professional skeptics loose on its own galley proofs." [136]
...
     Today's fact-checkers always start with the Internet, they tell me, and them ramify through the New York Public Library and beyond-- a pilgrimage from the errant to the trustworthy. [146]
...
    [On searching for the source of a Henry Moore quote] The Internet was no help, but Josh, searching through the catalogues of the New York Public Library, learned that collections of Moore's commentaries on sculptural art were in a midtown branch, across Fifth Avenue from the library main building.  After an hour or two there, he found an essay by Moore from a 1937 issue of the BBC's The Listener.  In the next-to-last paragraph were the words that Lynn Fracker had rattled off to me. [p.152-153]
...
     [On verifying a date of birth] When Mather died, on February 13, 1728, Seccocmbe was either twenty-one or twenty-two.  Which?  The Internet failed me. Libraries failed me. The complete works of Joseph Seccombe and Fluviatulis Piscator failed me. I called Kingston New Hampshire, where he had served as minister for more than twenty years. The person I reached there generously said she would look through town and church records and call me back, which she did, two or three days later. She was sorry. She had looked long and hard, but in Kingston evidently the exact date of Seccombe's birth was nowhere to be found. I was about to give up and insert "in his early twenties" when a crimson lightbulb lit up in my head. If Joseph Seccombe was a minister in 1737 (the year he arrived in Kingston) he had been educated somewhere, and in those days in advanced education in the Province of Massachusetts Bay there was one game in town. I called Harvard.
     By the main switchboard I was put through to someone who listened to my question and said right back, within a few seconds, "June 14, 1706."[p. 155]

COMMENT

     What wonderful reference stories these are! Note that in the extreme sport of New Yorker fact checking, the library is only the second line of defense.  McPhee gives the same advice I would give to student researchers -- try the quickest, easiest thing first. However, if that fails, the true fact-checker will be willing to go to great lengths to verify the truth of information.  

     Libraries figure in two of McPhee's fact-checking anecdotes. In the first the New York Public Library comes through with flying colors. Careful cataloging and a well-curated special collection focused on the artist Henry Moore eventually lead the dogged fact-checker to the source of the desired quote.  

     The second anecdote turns up one of those annoying failures of previous fact checkers  How on Earth did whoever edited the complete works of Joseph Seccombe (a.k.a. Fluviatulis Piscator) fail to learn his date of birth?  Though to be fair, it takes even the superhuman brainpower of McPhee more than a day to think of a strategy to find the answer.  

     In the scholarly literature of librarianship there are articles [1] that advocate replacing low-paid reference librarians with part-time staff hired from among the working poor. The primary argument for this money-saving strategy is that a category of question that used to be called "ready reference" (essentially fact-checking) has largely vanished due to the ease of Internet searching.  In theory, most of the questions that still come in are too "easy" to require expert assistance.  The problem is, there is actually no way to pre-determine whether a particular question is "easy" or "difficult."  The question about Seccombe's birth date sounds pretty easy, but in practice it was a stumper.  It turns out that regardless of various query-difficulty scales, the best proxy to measure difficulty is is, how much time it took to answer a question. [2]  Many libraries keep reference statistics, but treat "extended" questions as anything over about 15 minutes. A question that takes days or weeks to answer is not that unusual, but this type of question is barely even on the reference service radar. 

     The best librarians will take the time to follow the really difficult questions all the way through. It's good a way to keep in practice and develop a sixth-sense about how to approach questions.  The worst librarians "instruct" patrons how to do the research and then abandon them because they imagine that there is really no skill involved in tackling reference questions, or that they somehow think that skill can be acquired in a 15-minute consultation. On more than one occasion, I've observed  desk staff (librarians and non-librarians) give out information that is just plain wrong. There has to be some spark of passion for the importance of fact-checking.  If you don't have it, you should probably not present yourself as a reference librarian. 

     These days, weaponization of information has made Internet fact-checking into a minefield.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has identified disinformation as a danger that is moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock closer to Armageddon. [3] Unwary researchers are are likely to encounter unfiltered lies in disinformation generated by corporate-financed think-tanks, Russian trolls and hyper-partisan news stations. It seems urgent for librarians to re-focus information literacy instruction so that it's less about constructing scholarly bibliographies and more about fact-checking. 

[1] Susan M. Ryan, "Reference transactions analysis: The cost-effectiveness of staffing a traditional academic reference desk." The Journal of Academic Librarianship;34, no. 5 (2008): 389-399. This frequently-cited article invalidates itself when the author admits that she couldn't find a method for coding the queries so she made one up. I, too, can get any result I want by jiggering the coding system. 
[2] Sarah LeMire, Lorelei Rutledge, and Amy Brunvand. "Taking a Fresh Look: Reviewing and Classifying Reference Statistics for Data-Driven Decision Making." Reference & User Services Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2016): 230.
[3]Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement. 

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake. Doubleday, 2003.

Jimmy had a couple of term papers to finish before the holidays. He could have bought them off the Net, of course-- Martha Graham was notoriously lax about scorekeeping, and plagiarism was a cottage industry there -- but he'd taken a position on that.  He'd write his own papers, eccentric though it seemed; a line that played well with the Martha Graham type of woman. They liked a dash of originality and risk-taking and intellectual rigor.
     For the same reason he’d taken to spending hours in the more obscure regions of the library stacks. Ferreting out arcane lore. Better libraries, at institutions with more money, had long ago burned their actual books and kept everything on CD-ROM, but Martha Graham was behind the times in that, as in everything. Wearing a nose-cone filter to protect against the mildew, Jimmy grazed among the shelves of mouldering paper, dipping in at random.
     Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered— at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power— an archaic waste of time.  Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who’d said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn’t recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete  book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection.  [p195]

COMMENT

     Margaret Atwood’s razor-sharp wit skewers the "library of the future."  On the very first page of the Maddaddam trilogy human civilization has managed to destroy itself. Among the few (fully human) survivors is Snowman-the-Jimmy, now living among genetically-engineered Crakers, hyper-sexual blue demi-humans designed by asocially maladapted young man. The joke is that Jimmy’s education (at Martha Graham Academy, a school named to honor interpretive dance) is worse than useless. He has no survival skills. The remnant library offers no help since everything of value was converted into digital formats that can't be read now that the grid no longer exists.

   In an utterly sadistic twist typical of Atwood’s fearless writing, the actual print books that remain in the Martha Graham library are not only literally toxic, but  come from that most useless of genres— self-help books. In the end,  the remnants of useful human knowledge are transmitted by Toby, a middle-aged woman with practical knowledge of gardening, beekeeping and herbal medicine that she acquired by living with preppers in a doomsday cult. 

     Atwood's satire takes a dig at a kind of library futurism that was especially in vogue around 2003.  Futurists, predicting the imminent  Death of Print, were in a rush to digitize everything. In the process they attacked core values of librarianship and libraries as outdated and useless. The futurists did a lot of damage.  They convinced politicians to reduce library funding, and convinced librarians to reject collection and preservation as important activities.  The pushed people out of libraries into online space. If only those digital-futurist librarians had read Oryx and Crake perhaps they might have felt a bit less hubris about imposing their flawed vision on the actual future.  

Deep in Time

Holly Haworth. “Deep in Time: Standing Still in the Age of Oil.” Orion. 37(2), 2018, pp. 36-47.

Along the trail I bend and squint to look at the fossils. I am carrying the Guide to the Permian Reef Geology Trail that I picked up in the park library. The book’s authors, who represent the oil companies ARCO, Marathon, Texaco and Chevron, have documented the types of rocks and fossils within the reef at several stops on the trail. I match the shapes that I see with the photos in the guide. [p.42]

COMMENT

     A few years ago I did a quick-and-dirty citation analysis in order to see what kind of materials students in our new Environmental Humanities program were using for their Masters theses. I found that their citations fit a normal humanities research profile (lots of books, relatively fewer journal articles) with the notable addition of some unusual types of research materials -- local newspaper articles, government land use plans, photographs, maps and guidebooks.  It made sense because Environmental Humanities explores the relationship between people and place. These types of resources are all ways to associate information with a particular geography.

    Conventional instruction for information literacy tends to ignore place-based research. Librarians focus on a universal kind of knowledge that's contained in books and scholarly journal articles. However, the old style of inquiry is  not working out as well in an age when sustainable change requires engagement with place. One way librarians can help build resilient communities is by developing place-based information literacy courses.  Environmental Humanities research provides a  model for what place-based research could look like.

     Popular guidebooks don't just report on what's there; they can generate a kind of feedback loop that in a way creates a sense of place.  Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to the Birds (1934), for example, or the Powell Expedition reports that inadvertently became the first recreational guidebook to the Colorado River. Some guidebooks become controversial when they draw crowds into formerly peaceful areas, for example, or reveal the location of fragile archaeological sites. One author of Utah hiking guidebooks became notorious for overambitious agendas that lure ill-prepared novices into trouble. Guidebooks like Atlas Obscura expose undiscovered places and are accused of contributing to overtourism. One hazard for library copies of guidebooks is that patrons are likely to take them out into the field.  I’ve done it myself, most recently with a library copy of  Guide to the Green and Yampa Rivers in Dinosaur National Monument. 

     Librarians should keep an eye out for unique local guidebooks that record  a sense of place. One of my favorites is a guidebook to the trees growing by the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. [1].  With the guidebook in hand, the trees appear in a whole new light. Another recently published treasure is Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path by Elliott R. Mott [2]who hopes his guide to a neglected urban river will help create change. He writes, "It is hoped this book will accelerate the transformation and pave the way to developing a first class pollution free, wildlife rich, urban water trail." 

[1] Jenifer Baguley, Trees, Spirituality and Science: A Guide to the Trees of the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City, U of U Center for Science and Mathematics Education, 2013.

[2] Elliott R. Mott, Jordan River Water Trail & Bike Path, Roosevelt & Torrey LLC, 2018. 

A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney's Poetry

Jim Dwyer, "A Tasting Menu of Seamus Heaney’s Poetry: An Exhibition Offers an Archive of a Productive Literary Life," New York Times, Oct. 31, 2018, p. C6.

DUBLIN— On a December day several years ago, the poet Seamus Heaney drove up to the back door of the National Library of Ireland, his car packed with 12 boxes of attic. The haul was more than 10,000 pieces of paper—drafts of poems on envelopes and halfway-there typescripts, even a clipping of one he first published in a newspaper and later reworked in pen and pencil on the printed page. Now that collection has been harvested to create a tasting menu of Heaney, young to old, in “Listen Now Again,” an exhibit to be housed for three years in a cultural space at the Bank of Ireland on college Green, here in Dublin.

COMMENT

     Heaney was a Nobel laureate poet and therefore his paper debris was deemed worthy of archival space. In the digital age many writers no longer leave behind this kind of paper trail.  There are no longer any typescripts. Revisions done on a computer leave no trace of previous versions.  Nonetheless, the thought process of famous people is thought to provide insight into their writing.  

     
     The library must have asked Heaney for the papers which he delivered himself. It occurs to me that if by some unlikely turn I ever became a famous poet I would have no papers to give.  I don’t save anything.  It all goes in the recycle bin as soon as I’m done marking it up and typing the revisions.  In fact, I find early drafts deeply dismaying with their sloppy word choice and poorly-expressed ideas.  

    
     While Heaney used the library to store a record of his work, the exhibit curator used it as source material for a museum museum display. Dusty boxes, however exciting the contents, are not very visually appealing.  The challenge for the curator was to find a way to give textual information some kind of visual impact.  In this case a nod to Irish history with a circle of pillars that resemble Neolithic standing stones and the progress of revisions shown through multimedia displays.  For ordinary poets, the best we librarians can do is just to keep the pretty dust jackets on and set up some book displays. 

The Best American Poetry, 2018

David Lehman series ed., Dana Gioia, guest ed., The Best American Poetry, 2018, (Best American Poetry Series) Scribner Poetry, 2018.

     My editorial method was simple and unoriginal.  For twelve months (starting October 2016) I spent two or three hours each day reading new poetry. I read through every journal I could find as well as dozens of online journals. I bought piles of unfamiliar small magazines and subscribed to new journals. I read every issue of every literary magazine in my university's large periodical room.  When I traveled, I brought along a separate bag of journals to read on the plane or in the hotel room.  Meanwhile the series editor sent me weekly packets of poems that had caught his attention.  I initially wondered if David Lehman might want to press his suggestions. He is a persuasive advocate for the poetry he loves.  Lehman, however, gave me complete editorial autonomy.  I told no one outside my family that I had taken on the assignment. I didn't want to be lobbied by poet friends and acquaintances.
    I'm not sure how many thousands of poems I read. I surely broke the five-digit mark. Every time a poem grabbed my attention, I earmarked it or printed it out for rereading. My studio became a mountain range of periodicals, printouts, and photocopies. The most interesting part of the process was rereading and comparing the hundreds of poems that had made the first cut. Week after week I read and sorted the poems into three scientific categories -- Yes, No, Maybe.  After much agonizing, I made the final selections. 

COMMENT 

     This tale of extreme research raises a question: Why didn't the university library's large periodical room have more poetry journals? Actually, I can answer that one myself.  Many years ago during a budget shortfall the library where I worked slashed periodical subscriptions. The poetry journals were the first to go.  They weren't expensive -- we could have bought all of them for less than the cost of one science journal subscription.  But library use statistics indicated that almost nobody ever read them. 
     One problem was, most literary journals weren't listed in any of our indexes. Nowadays, Project Muse indexes a few of the well-known poetry journals (most of them represented in this book according to an appended "List of Magazines where the Poems were First Published"). But there are also zillions of small-press poetry journals. In order to submit to them, the poet sends in a few poems with a small fee that presumably keeps the journal going. After a while, this process of fee-based submission becomes deeply discouraging. It feels like everyone submits poems but nobody reads. 
     Yet libraries are nonetheless doing a disservice by ignoring poetry.  The mistake, I think, is trying to focus on  "important" poetry. There are a few poets who are famous enough so that their books are likely to circulate (I'd say Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, etc...  I doubt that Gioia particularly likes any of them).  However, I'd argue that the  most important poetry for librarians to collect is localized, written by the local community of writers (including at local institutions of higher education) but also (don't laugh) nature poetry. Gioia identifies an emerging trend of politically charged place-based poetics.  He writes, "The nature poem had become the major vehicle for political meditation and protest.  The bright innocence of Walt Whitman's American Eden has been overtaken by Robinson Jeffers's dark prophesy of spacious modern civilization."
    While librarians were busy cutting poetry from our collections, the poetic form has re-emerged as an particularly  important voice responding to the slow emergency of the Anthropocene. The Dark Mountain Project explicitly makes the Robinson Jeffers connection, and in Uncivilised Poetics (Dark Mounain10) the editors write "What's the point of poetry when the streets of Syria have been bombed beyond recognition? What's the point of poetry when the permafrost is melting?  But poetry matters because it offers an alternative reality --it refuses the logical, reductionist, materialist aspects of industrial cult; aslant, it invites us to feel our way in the dark." If libraries want to capture this important voice, they are going to have to rediscover poetry. 
    
   
    
    
     

No Immediate Danger (Carbon Ideologies v.1)

 

William T. Vollmann. No Immediate Danger (Carbon Ideologies V. 1). Viking 2018. 

Carbon Ideologies also contains about 129,000 words of source notes, citations and calculations.  I am sorry to say that Viking could not justify the cost of printing these.  Therefore, Carbon Ideologies will be the first of my books to contain a component which exists only in the electronic ether (see https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/carbonideologies).  I will deposit a copy of that section in my archive at the Ohio State University. [p.v]

COMMNET

     Carbon Ideologies, a two-volume doomer tour de force, is addressed to a future person in a world ravaged by climate change. Vollmann's editor wanted him to trim content from this sprawling book.  He agreed to trim the list of references as long as all the content could remain. As Vollmann dryly points out, it is ironic to store references for this particular book in a system that will fail as soon as the grid fails. If Vollmann's gloomy predictions come to pass the single archived hard copy in Ohio probably doesn't stand much of a chance, either. 

     There is a digital preservation initiative at Stanford University with the acronym LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) but even that depends on a functioning grid to supply electricity for access to digital archives. The librarians at Stanford are aware of this weakness. The LOCKSS website says that, " technology failures, economic failures and social failures all pose threats to the protection of digital content."  In Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake the grid goes down in a spectacular fashion.  She satirizes digital libraries  to explain why the entire history of human knowledge is lost in the "Waterless Flood."

     Which raises questions with no good answer.  What kind of library would be useful in the face of climate change?  How should librarians approach preservation in an age when the imminant collapse of civilization is a realistic possibility?

God is Going to Have to Forgive Me

Elizabeth Dias. “‘God is Going to Have to Forgive Me’: Young Evangelicals Speak Out,” (Election 2018 The Voters),  New York Times, November 2, 2018, P. A13.

     I was pulled out of Smith College in 2015 when I told my parents that I was rethinking the legitimacy of anti-gay theology. I thought, “God is going to have to forgive me. I am not going to die in this culture war.” I was Republican like them. Before, I supported whatever my church told me about candidates and issues. I never questioned or read outside material on these subjects. I secretly started borrowing books from the library. I gave a communion message in 2016— it was, “Our God chooses to die the death of all these marginalized people. He dies like Matthew Shepard, like a kid at the hand of the state. He was a refugee.” My church reprimanded me for “abusing he pulpit.” Other members used it to openly stump for Trump and say hateful things about Muslims and L.G.B.T. citizens.

COMMENT

     I used to teach an online course on how to do library research. My students had to select a topic for a final project bibliography.  Occasionally I would get a student who tried to challenge me by picking an overtly religious topic like “the truth of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”  They thought I’d tell them no and then they could complain about being persecuted by those godless liberals at the University

     But I always told them, yes, that’s a great topic. The only problem, I’d say, is it’s not focused. I advised them to imagine that they were writing a sermon. Perhaps they could focus on the meaning of some specific teaching of Jesus? Or on how Christian theology informs some particular moral issue? The students who proposed religious research were always surprised to find out that there is a vast body of scholarly literature about theology and the Bible.  They thought the people at their church were the only authority. 

  The 22 year old woman in the article describes growing up in a culture where disagreeing with church authority was actually dangerous.  She was pulled out of college for questioning a quasi-biblical teaching and shamed by other members who ignored her message of Christian compassion.  What does it mean that she used the library and  not the Internet to start questioning the politics of her church?  Perhaps in such an intellectually repressive environment her home didn’t have the Internet. Maybe she used the library because she didn’t want anyone looking over her shoulder during her secret reading. Or maybe the Internet just doesn’t work well for this kind of questioning because online information has a tendency to amplify what you already believe. In any case, the young woman in the interview says she is still a Christian but she has changed her party affiliation to Democrat.