Sad Buildings in Brooklyn

Adam Gopnik, "Sad Buildings in Brooklyn: Scenes from the Life of Roz Chast," New Yorker, December 30, 2019, p, 32-

     "My mother didn't let me read comics growing up. She thought comics were morally low rent, for morons.  Superheroes, cartoons, animation-- didn't matter.  I had to go to a friend's house to look at comic books."  She points to two sources as essential to turning her love of drawing into there vocation as a cartoonist. One was Addams' work (from this magazine), which she first encountered as a child in the nineteen-sixties. "'Black Maria,' 'The Goaning Board,' 'Monster Rally,' 'Drawn & Quartered,'" she says rapturously reciting titles of Addams collections.  "These are books that I discovered at the browsing library at Cornell.  My parents used to go to Ithaca in the summer-- they lived in student quarters and it was cheap.  There were other Brooklyn school-teachers, mostly Jewish, mostly without children.  When my parents took me, they let me hang out."

COMMENT 

     This is the tale of the life-changing book, but also a coming of age when the unsupervised child discovers the books her parents won't let her read.   The library is also a refuge where a teenager with no friends can hang out.  

      The life-changing book is a classic, but at the Cornell Library it was in the browsing collection-- labeled as something just for fun.  Still, it works its magic, starting a girl down her career path. 
     

Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind

Jason DeParle, “Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind,” New York Times, December 17, 2019 p. A1-

     Money helps children in part because of what it can buy— more goods (cheesy chicken spaghetti) and services (gymnastics classes or tutors).  Ms. Bradford, the teachers’s aide, is so eager to invest in her sons that she has used tax refunds to send them on Boy Scout trips to 42 states— even when a flood left them living in her car “I’m trying to instill in them that it’s education that gives you knowledge and power, not cars or clothes,” she said. Before traveling to Washington and visiting the Vietnam Memorial the boys — Tony 17, and Micah 13— wrote a report on a Monroe man killed in the war, which the public library added to its collection.  Finding the soldier’s name on the wall, Micah said, “felt like touching history.”

COMMENT

     The article is about people who are too poor to get the full amount of a child tax credit.  In this example, the extra money helps buy educational experiences that aren’t available at public school.  The library is part of an education plan that includes schools, extra-curricular clubs, field trips and independent research. 

     The student work was added to the local history collection.  This kind of hyperlocal collecting is important for community identity.  What’s more, the library collection is a way to validate the importance of student research.  Academic libraries typically require graduate students to deposit dissertations and theses, but many also allow professors to submit selected undergraduate work for the collection.  In public libraries, display space is available for K-12 students to show off artwork and projects to the larger community. Since people without kids seldom have reason to go into a school building, the library becomes a link between students and community 

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?