Genevive Oswald [Obituary]

Marina Harss, "Genevivie Oswald, Innovative and Eclectic Dance Archivist, Dies at 97," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p. 25.

      In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Me. Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
     Ms Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library's main building on 42nd Street.
     She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library's ground floor.  In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center.  This year it celebrates there 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which had grown to more than 41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
.....
     Sometimes those records become a vital  link to a tradition in peril.  As the dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Ms. Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at there Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.

COMMENT
     An obituary for a New York Public Library archivist shows how the methodical, longitudinal work of librarians and archivists can have a profound impact on community.  A small archival collection started 75 years ago has become one of the world's major dance archives through years of collecting and preservation.  It strikes me that it would be difficult to sell this kind of specialized project to contemporary library administrators who would no doubt find it too expensive, too specialized, too space-intensive and insufficiently "cutting edge" (i.e. technological). Yet I've used this collection myself to write about dance for  Catalyst magazine  in Salt Lake City, Utah.

     The deep cultural importance of the dance archive is captured in the story of how the collection facilitated cultural restoration in Cambodia after a horrific genocide.  It's hard to overstate how important it must have been for survivors to know that these dances had survived. It's an extreme instance of how library collections can serve to support community resilience by preserving a record of how things were before the disaster.

    The obituary describes the problems of preserving the ephemeral art of dance which depends on years of specialized training and disappears into the moment.  Gegi Oswald said that she was "collecting around the absence of the dance itself."[1]   Perhaps in a way, that is not so different from other library and archival collecting where the historical moment recedes into memory leaving only traces behind.

    I have long thought that libraries should give all librarians at least a little money and space to collect their own obsessions.  Who knows what one person might be seeing that everyone else has missed?

[1]See, An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

 
   

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He's Caught On With Voters

Trip Gabriel, "He's Caught On With Voters, However They Say His Name," New York Times, March 29, 2019, p. A1.

"This was supposed to be a little meet-and-greet Q. and A.," he told hundreds of people in a college gym in Rock Hill, after his event was bumped from the library to accommodate a wave of RSVPs. 

COMMENT

     Pete Buttigieg who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana is running for president. He scheduled a small meeting room at the library to launch his campaign, but an unexpectedly enthusiastic response meant he had to change the venue.  Nonetheless, the library offered space for citizens to meet a candidate in person.  This kind of space is essential for the democratic process, especially for state and local politics where there is not a lot of money. 

The Stack

Katherine Schulz, “The Stack”, New Yorker, March 25, 2019, pp. 28-31.

It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure.  I do know that when he was nineteen he let Michigan for Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had so impressed him when he first arrived in America.  Instead, he found penury on the Bowery.  To save money, he walked each day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library.  Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he found there.

COMMENT

Here’s another version of the same story Frank McCourt told [1]— an immigrant finding the American   at the public library.  When the father has a bit more money and his own house he becomes a bit of a book hoarder, saving everything he has read in a large, sorted stack in his bedroom. 

In the essay, his daughter says that she keeps two photos of her father on her desk— one that is an image of him and another image of his stack of books.  Of the book photo she writes, “I can’t imagine a better image of the kinds of things that normally. Defy a camera.”  As in other library stories,  the reading list is described as a reflection of a person’s soul. From stories like this it seems clear that one of the reasons that people love libraries is that the books they have read are in the stacks.  The collection reflects a little reflection of the true self of each and every library borrower.  

Reading is a reflection of both true self and an aspirational self. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile is a haunting graphic novel in which a reading list comes to seem more representative than real life.  [2]

[1] New in Town

[2] Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010.

Sustainability: A Love Story

 

Nicole Walker, Sustainability: A Love Story, Ohio State University Press, 2018.

     Jill and her husband, Chuck, were Flagstaff icons.  Jill delivered half of the people's babies.  Chuck played music for those babies when they grew up and attended sing-alongs at the library.  He played guitar at the Hullaballoo and guitar at the Concert in the Park. He hosted sing-alongs and bonfires and they both were featured at the Viola Awards in 2013.  I saw them there. They told me they were moving to Portland.
... 

They moved to Portland because Jill would have whole days off. Whole lives without on-call shifts. Chuck could move beyond the local festivals and libraries, play big shows in the bit city.  [131-132].

COMMENT

     This is both a library success and a library failure told in practically the same breath. Sing-alongs at the library are  part of building a resilient community, but Chuck, the musician, can't make a living doing it. His ambition to have a musical career is incompatible with volunteering time at local festivals and libraries. When he decides to move away, the community resiliency of Flagstaff is eroded in order to fortify an already vibrant musical scene in Portlandia.

    Several other library stories view the library similarly as a second-rate stop-gap for things like Internet access, [1] government assistance, [2] or a social support network. [3]   It's a downside to the the library's model of sharing-- things seem to be free that are not really free. Deserving artists don't always get paid. Compromises and inconveniences necessitated by sharing space and resources come to seem like deal-breakers.

     One lesson from this story is that librarians should be mindful to support local artists and performers by hosting readings and performances that give them a chance to sell books and recordings. The Salt Lake Public Library, which has long had a local music collection,. has set up a website called Hear Utah Music (HUM) that streams a curated collection of  songs by Utah artists in order to help support the local music scene.  Maybe this collection will help draw bigger audiences which the bands play a gig so the musicians don't have to move to Portland to live their dream.

 

[1] The Gap in Broadband Access

[2] At Social Security, Service at Arm's Length

[3] Baby Center

Like This or Die

Christian Lorentzen, "Like This or Die: The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm," Harper's, April 2019, p 25-33.

To be interested in literature all you need is a library card. Literature is any writing that rewards critical attention.  It's writing that you want to read and read about. It's something different from entertainment. It involves aesthetic and political judgments and it's not easily quantifiable.  Negativity is part of this equation because without it positivity is meaningless. 

... 

The past two decades have been a phase of upheaval, panic, and collapse.  The crisis of closures that has struck America's regional newspapers hit their books pages first.... But as these losses piled up, it was difficult to feel that something wonderful had been lost, even if it had real value in swaths of the country that were losing many things all at once.  What mattered most were the big city papers, especially the New York Times and, as [Elizabeth] Hardwick wrote, "All those high school English Teachers, those faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe in the judgment of the Times and who need its direction."

COMMENT

      This view of libraries is contradictory.  All you need is a library card, and yet the librarians are lumped in with those poor provincial souls dependent on Times reviews to know what to read.  The writer, a book critic, wants people to read and appreciate capital "L" Literature and engage with some national community of readers and writers. He pooh-poohs the idea that regional writing matters compared to the 750 or so books reviewed annually in the New York Times Book Review. 

  And yet he knows what's going on in publishing-- "An ever consolidating set of big houses in New York and an ever expanding array of small presses across the country."  Personally,  I find myself  gravitating increasingly towards small publishers such as Milkweed Editions or Torrey House Press, and spending more time with literary journals (I especially like Bicycle Almanac, Dark Mountain,  Orion, saltfront, Sugarhouse Review, and Terrain.org).

     I am a librarian who also writes book reviews but reading this essay I get a sense that I am probably the type of "anti-intellectual" reviewer that Mr. Lorentzen despises.  I got my start writing capsule reviews for Library Journal -- 100 words to let you know whether or not to buy the book.  Nowadays my interests have shifted to poetry and more broadly, environmental humanities.  I read reviews to decide what to read.  I write them becasue I'm convinced that they are an essential part building of a local literary culture, supporting writers and poets whom you can hear at readings and meet at book signing events.  Since small press publications are unlikely to appear in the Times, it's up to us regional  librarians to nurture regional literature.

     Lorentzen sneers a the new Match Book column in the NYTBR that is essentially a readers' advisory -- "The world is full of desperate people." he writes. "Who know they were so desperate for book recommendations? Aren't those easy to come by in any bookstore or on Amazon?"  Well, sure.  Or at the library for that matter. But if people are going to discover literature at the library then the library has to collect literature, and approval plans are not very helpful.  There is a need for librarians to become acquainted with the expanding array of small presses across the country and someone (librarians?) needs to review the books published by them.  Lorentzen is right that the model of a few fancy critics writing for the NYTBR no longer works, but I think he's dead wrong about the irrelevancy of regional and local book reviews.  All those faithful librarians have a gap to fill reviewing, purchasing and collecting literature that's not covered by the NYTBR. 

     

   

Children's Books / Graphic Novels

Victoria Jamieson, “Children’s Books/ Graphic Novels,” New York Times Book Review, March 10, 2019 p. 18.

Craft invites us into the world of Jordan Banks, one of the few African-American students at a fancy private school. As a realistic graphic novel starring a kid of color, “New Kid” is a desperately needed addition to middle-grade library collections everywhere. This funny, heartwarming and sometimes cringe-inducing take on middle school is sure to resonate deeply with its young audience. 

COMMENT

    The reviewer, who is described in a note as “the author and illustrator of several graphic novels for young readers,” imagines this book about a middle-schooler in a middle school library where it could be discovered by kids who would see themselves in the story. This suggestion shows a canny understanding of how library collections facilitate both diversity and self-discovery.  If an adult handed this book to a kid it might be taken as a heavy-handed message.  If kids find it themselves it may seem like it was written just for them.  A savvy librarian might put a book like this on display  in the school library and simply wait for the right kids to find it. 

     

     

Donna Leon [Interview]

“Donna Leon" (By the Book) [interview], New York Times Book Review, March 10, 2019, p. 7.

What kind of reader were you as a child?I loved books about animals (and still do: Sy Montgomery’s “The Soul of an Octopus” [1] is a dream)  and about ancient history. When I was about 7, I complained to my mother that I had nothing to do. She did not hesitate but drove me immediately to the local library and took me to the children’s room and told me I could take home five books. The first was a book about Egypt, with pictures. I remember realizing that the whole world was there, in that small room.

COMMENT

Here’s yet another coming-of-age-at-the-library story — that memorable moment when a child is allowed for the first time to chose her own library books and take them home. Leon's memory of the event is so clear she remembers the details right down to the number of books she was allowed to take and what those books were about.

Leon describes a feeing of awe to think that books contain the whole world. Perhaps it’s not just the knowledge and stories inside of books, but also a newfound sense of responsibility that creates such indelible childhood library memories.  Children given the freedom to choose books are also asked to take care of them and return them on time. In a sense,  the rules of the library make them into guardians of the whole world.

[1] Sy Montgomery, The soul of an octopus: A surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness. Simon and Schuster, 2015.