One Elf's Path

Jenifer Schuessler, "One Elf's Path: Turning Satire Into a Legacy, New York Times, p. C1.

     Now [David] Sedaris has sold his archive to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, where his manuscripts, drafts, notebooks and other scraps will be part of the library's rich holdings relating to social satire from the likes of Gary Trudeau Saul Steinberg, David Rakoff and Mark Twain.
     The more than 150 volumes of Sedaris's complete diaries will be off limits during his lifetime. (A second volume of excerpts is in the works.) But the archive contains some three dozen other handmade books from his prefame years that hint at their visual and tactile richness.
      Timothy G. Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, said the archive showed the years of exploration it took Sedaris to become an "overnight" sensation. 

COMMENT 

     Before I started to collect library stories I did not realize how newsworthy archival acquisition can be.  If I were not reading through the limited perspective of librarianship, I would have read this article as primarily a biographical story about the writer David Sedaris and  his career as a humorist.  In library terms, though, the story is about archiving, and the newspaper article itself becomes part of the biographical archive. 

  The particular collection includes juvenilia.  Apparently as a second grader Sedaris was already showing the talent that would lead to his future career.  Between 1984 and 1990, he made unpublished art books for his friends.  He didn't get famous until he  broadcast "The SantaLand Diaries" in 1992.

   Fame, in other words, is what specifically attracted the archivists since the Beinecke is collecting around a theme of social satire.  It's not always obvious how or where to place limits on what libraries collect.   How do you know now what will be valuable to the future?   In different ways, journalists, librarians, and authors are all engaged in a process of  creating a historical  narrative.  The "manuscripts, drafts, notebooks, and other scraps" that were said in this collection would just be  debris in dusty boxes unless  someone thinks they are  interesting enough to put them into a story. 
     

The Light Under the Bushel

Chigozie Obioma, "The Light Under the Bushel: A Father Ignites a Passion for Reading, " New York Times Book Review, Dec 9, 2018, P20.

     By the fifth month I had read every book my father owned.  One Saturday, he returned home and asked me to get in the car.
     "I have a surprise for you."
We drove through streets clotted with people until we got to a newly painted building with an arch over the gate that read, Ondo State Library. We walked through the arch into the building, the likes of which I had never seen. There were books everywhere, on shelves, on tables, on the floor.
     "I want to register you here and bring you every Saturday here to read, "my father said.
     I wanted breathlessly as he completed the registration at the counter with an elderly, bespectacled woman who seemed in awe of the idea of a child coming in alone to read.  My father, proud, agreed and said that it was all I wanted to do.
     "That is good," I herd the woman say. "Very, very good.  Reading is like finding light, you know.  Jesus said a light cannot be hidden under a bushel"
     "That is true," my father said, nodding as the woman wrote my name on a small, square yellow card.
     "Your son has found the light under the bushel."
     She handed me the card and my father said he would pick me up at noon.  I waved him goodbye and disappeared among the crowded shelves.

COMMENT

     The author tells the story of how he got his first library card at the Ondo State Library in Nigeria when he was eight years old. He receives the treasured card along with a literal blessing from the librarian and from his father.

     Obioma relates how his mother told folktales in Igbo language, but his father's stories, told in English, seemed far more complex and interesting. One day Obioma finds out that his father has been re-telling stories he read in books, He begins reading obsessively himself. Looking back from the perspective of an adult, he realizes that his mother had no Igbo literature to draw from.  English language books were the pathway to education, but also a way to escape the limits of his own culture. He writes, "it struck me that if I could read well, I could be like my father. I too could become a repository of stories and live in their beautiful worlds away from the dust and ululations of Akure."

     Concealed in this triumphant story of education is a sadder tale about the Igbo stories that were never written down and never added to any library. Literature written in English comes to seem more important simply because there is so much more of it.

But a library card is a blessing nonetheless. I got my first library card when I was 5. The school librarian didn't believe a kindergartener could read so she asked me to read aloud from a book which had the word "orphanage" in it. I read the whole book pronouncing the unfamiliar word as four distinct syllables, or-pa-ha-nage. She did not correct my pronunciation until I had read through the entire book.  I was absolutely furious at her for letting me humiliate myself like that. But still, I got the library card and after that could take home all the books I wanted from the school library.  I never asked the librarian for any suggestions.     

Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75

Margalit Fox, "Lee Israel, a Writer Proudest of Her Literary Forgeries, Dies at 75," New York Times,  Jan 27, 2015, [online].

     Of her body of forgeries, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, “I still consider the letters to be my best work.”
     By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives — including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities — and leaving duplicates in their place.
     “She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”

COMMENT

    Obviously, Lee Israel (1939-2014) shouldn't have been stealing library books, but her inspiration to crime was remarkably similar to the motivation of other researchers who love to poke around in the manuscript archives. In the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) Lee Israel (played by Melissa McCarthy who deserves an Oscar) is shown in a library doing research for a biography of Fanny Brice when a letter signed by Brice herself falls out of a book. As she gawks at the letter, McCarthy perfectly captures that sense of spooky connection with history that so many researchers describe.  She shows the letter to a buyer who has the same awestruck reaction.  The star-struck reaction leads Israel into a life of crime, in part because she is so deeply pleased that her own writing is good enough to be mistaken for the words of other more famous writers.

     I have heard librarians claim that that format doesn't matter as long as the information content is the same.  Israel's facsimiles had the same textual content as the letters she stole, but clearly they aren't the same.  It's not just the chemistry of the physical object [1].  The objects that Israel stole were valuable specifically because they have that spooky connection to history, an intangible thing that  is mentioned again and again as a transformational library experience. It seems that it even transformed the library experience of literary forger Lee Israel.

[1] Hidden Traces.
   

     

When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered

Michael Cooper, "When Puccini Came, Saw and Conquered," New York Times, November 18, 2018, p. AR15-.

The Met Opera's archives contain a copy of the contact that brought Puccini back to New York in 1910 for the premier of "la Fanciulla del West." To promises of pay, expenses, and room and board, one more is added in handwriting: "cars." 

COMMENT

   This article is full of references to  historical documents-- letters, news reports and playbills that must have been found at a library or archive. However, the writer makes only direct reference to the research method in describing a handwritten note on a contract in the Metropolitan Opera archives. That single word "cars" is one of those spooky contacts with history because it affirms an impression of Puccini's personality.  It's clear that the writer  found the discovery of this hidden treasure so thrilling that he couldn't resist including it in the final article.

     The article also mentions that Puccini attended a shocking production of Richard Strauss' opera Salome based on the Oscar Wilde text. When we read about historical people getting all hot under the collar about some opera we think they were just being prudish and old-fashioned. I saw it at the Utah Opera a few years ago. It's really shocking.  Seriously.  Prudish people will not like it one bit. I am still surprised that Utah opera fans didn't riot.

Nebraska Governor Won't Honor Book by 'Political Activist' who has Criticized Trump

Lisa Gutierrez. Nebraska Governor Won't Honor Book by 'Political Activist' who has Criticized Trump. Kansas City Star, Jan. 8, 2019.

     Nebraska’s Republican governor Pete Ricketts has refused to sign a proclamation honoring a book about a farm family in the state, calling the author a “political activist” and suggesting the book is divisive.
...
     “This Blessed Earth,” written by Nebraska writer and journalist Ted Genoways, is the 2019 “One Book One Nebraska” selection chosen by The Nebraska Center for the Book. The nonprofit, affiliated with the Library of Congress, “supports programs to celebrate and stimulate public interest in books, reading, and the written word,” according to its website.
...
     “It’s an award-winning book,” Rod Wagner, director of the Nebraska Library Commission, told the World-Herald. “It’s received national attention. Of course there are ideas in the book that people will not agree to, but I think that’s also a reason why it makes for a good one to consider and discuss. “It’s a contrast of the modern farm with that of 40 years ago. It’s one that’s a subject of interest across Nebraska. People who have disagreements with ideas in the book will be able to talk about those.”

COMMENT 

    The governor has failed to understand that some aspects of his job are purely ceremonial.  It makes him look like a book-burner to reject a book award because of his own politics. After all, he does not represent the organization that gives the award and he doesn't get to veto the award the way he could veto a bill.  The book also won a 2018n Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and was selected for state reading programs in Iowa. What's more, the book is about  issues facing family farmers-- the kind of thing that the governor of Nebraska should probably care about.

   I haven't read the book (yet) either, but apparently in it Big Agriculture doesn't play well with others and farmers are worried that leaks from the  Keystone XL pipeline will contaminate the aquifer that supports irrigated farming throughout the region.  Does the governor think that suppressing knowledge of these problems will somehow cause them to disappear?

     One hopes that the governor's petty behavior draws more readers to the book.  The danger is, if politicians think the librarians who are advocating freedom to read are advocating partisan political positions they might try to cut off public funding for libraries.

At the Gates of Deep Darkness

Scott Russell Sanders, "At the Gates of Deep Darkness: Examining Faith in the Face of Tragedy," Orion, Autumn 2018, p.41-51.

While I was doggedly reading the Bible, three or four pages per night over several years, I was also reading books on science from our public library.  I followed my passions: fascination with dinosaurs led me to study evolution; model rockets led me to astronomy; birds and bugs led me to biology; rocks led me to geology; kitchen table experiments led me to chemistry and physics. When I had exhausted the offerings in the young adult section, I moved on to the books for grownups.  On the advice of a teacher, my parents brought me a subscription to Scientific American, a magazine that reported new discoveries along with the rigorous methods by which they had been achieved. The passages I could not understand-- and there were many-- only inspired me to deeper study.  While my Bible reading was dutiful, homework for graduation to heaven, my reading of science was driven by curiosity and delight. 

COMMENT

     Here's a lovely description of coming of age at the library, transitioning from children's science to the scientific method.  The author does not specifically mention librarians helping to find these books, though he does mention a helpful teacher.  For the most part, it seems to be a self-directed research process.
 
     There are two elements in this story that I've  noticed in other library stories: [1] The transition out of the juvenile section of the library as a rite of passage (See posts on Children's Literature) and [2] The use of library resources to investigate religious faith (Hypocrisy of Hanukkah; Go and See Jane and Emma; God is Going to Have to Forgive Me).   In this story, however, the library research is not about theology but a contrast to a childish understanding of theology.  In fact, when the author needs spiritual comfort, neither form of study turns out to  offer adequate solace.

The Fifth Risk

Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

     Kathy hadn't taken her brother seriously.  You really think they're going to hire an oceanographer? A girl????      

     A few weeks later she ran across the call for astronauts again, this time in a science journal. They really did seem to want women scientists. And she sensed that she might be the sort of woman they were looking for.  "I never brought normal girl books home from the library," she recalled.  "I was fascinated by maps and the stories they told." She was handy, too, and quick to figure out how things worked. [p. 137]

COMMENT

     Kathy Sullivan did become an astronaut.  Then she joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and figured out how to re-frame tornado warnings in order to get people to actually pay attention to tornado warnings and take cover.  That is to say, her scientific work has saved the lives of many people.

     She describes her own identity as a scientist in terms of library borrowing -- a  scientist is someone who doesn't read "normal girl books."  This comment relates to a previous post, What are We Teaching Boys when We Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls?  in which a librarian (who should know better) shames boys for reading a "girl's" book.  Likewise, Sullivan must have felt some degree of adult disapproval for reading "boy's" books.  Why else would she think that an interest in maps was not "normal" for girls?   (I also happen to love maps)

    The library offers a valuable kind of  anonymity.  A child with a library card can take a book off the shelf and take it home to read without ever asking for anyone else's permission.  This freedom for kids to chose what to read, even if adults or other kids don't like it, is mentioned over and over in library stories as a formative experience in the search for identity.