How To Do Nothing

Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019

     I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly the opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online.  When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn't immediately present itself.  You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons.  The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a non-commercial and non"productive" space so often under threat of closure, allows for growing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information-- provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it's even about-- are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment.  Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it's me who's being researched.  [p.175]

COMMENT

    This is a beautiful description of library research as a practice of close attention--  the opposite of the endlessly distracting information deluge online.  By "non-productive" Odell doesn't mean that library time is worthless, but that library time is not economically optimized for money-making.  The book argues that such economically unproductive time is not  just a good thing but essential for a good life.

   

Electric Woman

 

Tessa Fontaine, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-defying Acts, 2018.

    Story goes as a high school student in New Jersey, Tommy elided he wanted to be a circus performer, but a six foot two and possessing little grace or flexibility, his options felt limited. He didn't come from a circus family and didn't have the physique of a typical aerialist or tumbler.  What he wanted most of all was to wrestle an alligator.  When he learned about sword swallowing, he thought it could take him to the circus, the gators.
     He checked out a bunch of books on swallowing swords from the library and spread them across his bed, desk and floor.  Their illustrated pages provided step-by-step instructions and accounts of some of history's most famous sword swallowers.  He got to work.

COMMENT

     Nowadays would a wannabe circus performer learn his skills from youtube?  Or would he still go to the library to get those books about the most famous sword swallowers in history?   In the book Fontaine writes a scene where experienced performers try to teach her to swallow swords, so maybe the real trick is to learn how to swallow swords directly from another person. 

Christian Doomsayers Have Lost It

Peter Wehner, “Christian Doomsayers Have Lost It” New York Times, December 8, 2019, p. SR3.

Sohrab Ahmari— a convert to Catholicism who is both the op-ed editor of The New York Post and a contributor to the religious magazine First Things— was so outraged that drag queens were reading stories to children at a library in Sacramento that he has relegated civility to a secondary virtue while turning against modernity and classical liberalism “To hell with liberal order,” as Mr. Ahmari put it. “Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path.”

COMMENT

     Judging by the political behavior of Trumpist Christians, you’d think that enforcing stereotypical gender roles was a foundational principle of Christian religion. Mr. Wehner suggests that such prejudice is, in fact, contrary to a practice of spirituality, joy, gratitude, kindness and healing grace.

    As a target of self-appointed morality police the library takes on two roles that appear in other library stories: 1) a target of censorship 2)  a defender of free speech and diversity.

Struggling with College Tuition after Excelling in High School

Elisha Brown, “Struggling with College Tuition After Excelling in High School,” New York Times, December 4, 2019, A23 

     Ms. McNair received $27,000 in scholarships for the current academic year in addition to $9,500 in federal student loans. She also received nearly $6,500 in grants, including a $6,195 federal Pell grant A job at the campus library is paying her $2,000 for the school year through the federal work-study program.  But she still owed a few thousand dollars each semester to cover the $57,000 annual cost of attendance, including tuition, fees, room and board. 

COMMENT

     Ms. McNair, who is from Harlem, studies Health Science at New England College in New Hampshire.  She wants to go to medical school, but if the student loans keep piling up it’s hard to see how that will ever happen.  A student job at the library is part of her aid package, but the article says she is planning to work at a grocery store after the work-study money is gone.

     There are many fewer student jobs at the library than there were before so much information was online -- no longer the need for so many people to shelve and check out books, file periodical subscriptions, and catalog cards or order books.  The result is that many fewer students get to experience library work.  That's a problem both because student jobs were a way to attract people into the profession and because people who have worked in a library have more knowledge of and respect for information systems.  The student jobs vanished unnoticed, except perhaps as a cost savings the annual budget. Few librarians considered what might be lost along with all those student jobs.  I have thought that academic libraries should make student jobs part of their mission, creating paid internships that let students work with librarian mentors.  If we truly believe that libraries are centers for creativity and innovation, these library internships would be the best jobs on campus. 

Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City

Scott Shane, "Amazon's Expansive, Creeping Influence in an American City," New York Times, December 1, 2019, p.1, 26-28.

Public libraries are stocked with digital audiobooks from Amazon's Audible, and browsers can check reviews on Amazon's Goodreads.

COMMENT

     In this article about the Kraken-like tentacles of Amazon.com libraries feature in the role of customers.  When libraries lend audio books, Amazon skims a little off the top.  Instead of turning to librarians for book recommendations, readers can plow through crowdsourced reviews on Goodreads (which are a lot less useful than you'd think with regard to finding something good to read).
     Libraries are a keystone of  literary culture.  They support books and reading by buying stuff, putting money back into writing and publishing. Yet in the world of librarianship there has not been much acknowledgement of this role. Instead, there is a tendency to prioritize efficiency and cheapness.  During the transition to online newspapers, librarians never asked the question of how journalists would get paid.  Likewise, librarians have cut down on purchasing books from university presses without ever asking how young professors will get tenure if there is no place for them to publish books.
     Librarians like to point to libraries as core institutions for community resilience and civic engagement.  Yet abandoning newspapers and academic presses for the sake of "cheapness" was not socially responsible.  It's probably not socially responsible for libraries to switch procurement to Amazon.com either, particularly since prioritizing convenience and cheapness are exactly what lured librarians to make bad decisions in the past.
     Somebody (ALA?) should take a hard look at library spending in order to understand exactly who and what it's supporting. The long and short is, Big Tech distributes information but does not create it.  Amazon.com is the new Wal*Mart, vacuuming up dollars and sucking the life out of communities.  Only now it's happening to cities and not vulnerable small towns.   The article ends with Emma Snyder, the owner of an independent bookstore who says that her customers will pay $10 more for a book just because they don't like the world Amazon is building:  "Part of what people don't like is that Amazon debases the value of things.  We're commercial spaces, but we fundamentally exist to feed and nurture people's souls."  What if libraries applied this idea to spending?  Is there a way to re-focus collection development on building strong communities, not just on getting cheaper best-sellers?

Can Marriage Counseling Save America?

Andrew Furgesun, "Can Marriage Counseling Save America?" Atlantic, December (2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/better-angels-can-this-union-be-saved/600775/

     Yet there I was one bright summer Sunday, wreathed in skepticism, gathered with a dozen others in the community room of a suburban public library in Northern Virginia to test whether this nation, or any nation so fragmented and so polarized, can be united and saved by a workshop.
     This was not just any workshop, of course. I was at a “skills workshop” put on by a grassroots citizens’ group called Better Angels. The group got its start in the shell-shocked weeks right after the 2016 election, and it takes its name from Abraham Lincoln’s famous plea, in his first inaugural address, that his divided countrymen heed the “better angels of our nature.” (They didn’t.)
     Paid-up membership in Better Angels stands at a little over 8,000, but the group creates a commotion bigger than that of organizations many times its size. On any given day somebody somewhere in the United States is hosting an event like the one I attended. There are an average of eight to 10 such events a week. The mission everywhere is the same, explained by the inspirational mottoes on the posters the organizers had hung in the library. “Let’s depolarize America!” “Start a conversation, not a fight.”

COMMENT

     Librarians don't always need to re-invent the wheel.  Here is a citizen group dedicated to civic dialog that is using library space to host events.  The idea is simply to get conservative and liberal voters to talk to one another.

   This may or may not work. One problem is that for all they gripe bout civility, Republican voters seldom show up to such meetings. As the author puts it, "Now, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who will join hands and sway gently back and forth while singing “We Shall Overcome” with Peter Yarrow, and Republicans." This same problem occurred with respect to the transportation open houses mentioned in Better Busses, Better Cities--- the people who show up to such meetings are self-selecting and not representative of the whole community.

   

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, (2019)

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent suites have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat.  The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data— coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against oppressive digital surveillance in many countries— means the it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must are assumed.  Within that range, however we are as confident as any historian can usually be (Laughter.) [p.409].

COMMENT

Libraries appear in Margaret Atwood’s fiction fairly often and she has strong, well-informed opinions about them.  This satirical paragraph is a good example.  At the end of the story, historians of the future try to piece together the evidence to figure out what really happened.   In Atwood's informaiton dystopia, digital material has utterly vanished,  vulnerable to war and misused to prop up a surveillance state.  In this story many of the words that do survive survive on paper.  Aunt Lydia records her own testimony using a antique-style pen and ink meant for teaching drawing.