Processed Meats

 Nicole Walker. Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster. Torrey House Press, 2021.

When I lived in Portland, I worked at a place called Orlo -- Raising Awareness about the Environment though the Creative Arts.  We published a literary magazine, performed Word on the Street where we stood on the steps of Pioneer Square and the Library and read volubly from Cadillac Desert and Silent Spring. We had an outfit for Vinnie the Fire Boy and one for a bear-looking creature so we could compete with Oregon's other mascots -- the Beavers and the Ducks.  Vinnie and Orlo the Bear walked along the Willamette River, handing out bumper stickers that read "YouENDanger" and "Cows Kill Salmon." [p. 28-29]

COMMENT

 Activists use public space on the library steps to read from life-changing books that inspired their own activism. The hope is that the readers going in and out of the building will be drawn to read influential environmental works and be likewise inspired.  The power of books to change the world is implicit. 

An Architects' Muted Triumph

 Brett Sokol. "An Architect's Muted Triumph" New York Times, March 18, 2021 pp. C1, C6.

[Maya]Lin appeared equally buoyed by touring the library.  She led the way to a rooftop terrace that offered stirring views of the surrounding mountains, pointing out meaningful details along the way.  Large upper-floor windows that were near treetops had been laced with an ultraviolet webbing pattern-- invisible to human eyes buy not to flying birds that might otherwise crash into the clear glass. Bird watchers had a comfy nesting spot too, with many of the window frames large enough to climb into.  "People are going to be sleeping in here," Lin said with a chuckle, flashing back on her won long days -- and longer nights -- studying at Yale, where, as a 21-year-old senior she beat out 1,420 competing proposals for the Vietman Veterans Memorial.  "I know because I was one of those people."

COMMENT

When Architect Maya Lin was hired to remodel the Neilson Library at Smith College she designed a place of refuge with window nooks to sit in.  My college library had with window nooks, but sadly, they   were lost to remodeling that created larger windows and overall brighter space.  Lin's design also highlights ink and paper books. "You're still in a house of books," Lin says, "Ultimately a library has to be about reading.  I don't read on an iPad and I never will.  Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm a dinosaur.  But I still feel the beauty of a book, I still believe in that beauty".

The Missing Hours

 Julina Kim & Lila Barth. "The Missing Hours: 7 Students on Losing a Year of After-School Activities" New York Times, March 16, 2021, p. A6.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/us/nyc-after-school-activities-reopening.html

While living in homeless shelters as a child, Sam Bilal, 18, a senior at the Lowell School in Queens, could count on any public library to be a free, clean and quiet place to study. For the past year, the city’s public libraries have been open mainly as grab-and-go centers for books reserved online.

The 96th street library on the East Side was my second happy place, after home. I would go there after school, get my work done, then go home. The security guard knows me, some staff know me. It was like a family to me over there.

Sometimes, I would hang out with people after school but most times, I would just take the train with some of them, then we would go our separate ways and I would go to the library. Libraries were the place you could rely on and have peace. I’ve been through shelters since I was 8 years old. My dad kicked out my mom, and she took me and my little sister with her. It was a lot of back and forth.

When I was in elementary school, right across the street was a library that my little sister, my mom and I would go to. We helped each other out with homework, played computer games, talked for a bit until the library was closing or it got dark.

But since 2017, I’ve been living in a NYCHA apartment. It can be a little distracting at home. My mom would have the TV up. My little sister would be somewhere around the room, playing her music.

Some kids out there might go to a cafe, but they have to buy something if they want to study. So it’s hard. The library is really the only option. When they were opening up schools, I was like, “OK, are they going to open up the library?” But they mentioned nothing about the library. What’s the whole point of opening up schools if you can’t go to the library?

COMMENT

A classic Place of Refuge story, and also,  Sam is right.  There are no redeeming qualities to lectures and homework if you can't go to the library. 

 

Metropolitan Diary

 Joyce Marcel. "Back in Time" (Metropolitan Diary), New York Times, March 14, 2021, p. 32.

I was doing research on an accident that happened in 1945, when I was 3 and living on 51st Street in Brooklyn....

A friend who is a former librarian and now does genealogy research contracted a librarian in Brooklyn and learned that the Brooklyn Public Library had digitized its telephone directories.

Within a day, I had the name of the family that had lived next door.  It was an unusual name, so I did a search online and found a Buddhist scholar who, to my surprise, lived in the Vermont town next to mine. 

I left the man a garbled, giddy phone message asking if, by any chance, he was related to a family that had once lived in that house on 51st street, which has since been torn down.  

The next day he called back to say that he was related to all of the people who had lived in the house and that the person I was looking for was his grandfather. 

COMMENT 

Even former librarians still have the impulse to help people find information.  The digitized phone books record a snapshot of people and businesses from the past.  Libraries used to have shelves full of them.  

Personal Jesus

 Vinson Cunningham, "Personal Jesus: What Thomas Jeffereson did to the Gospels," New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021,  pp. 77-80. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/what-thomas-jefferson-could-never-understand-about-jesus

"The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" was brought to public attention in 1895 by Cyrus Adler, an observant Jew from Arkansas, who was a librarian and a curator of religious items at the Smithsonian.  Nearly a decade earlier, as a doctoral student searching the private library of a wealthy family, Adler had happened upon a set of Bibles that Jefferson had owned, with key passages of the Gospels snipped from their pages.  Now, charged with mounting an exhibition on American religion and still mulling over that discovery, Adler finally figured out where the missing passages had gone: into Jefferson's little book, which was hidden away in the library of Carolina Ramsey Randolph, Jefferson's great-granddaughter.  Adler bought the book from Randolph for four hundred dollars and promptly put it on display in the Capitol, where in Jefferson's time, it would almost certainly have been a scandal. Now it was met mostly with affectionate enthusiasm, as another example of Jefferson's wide-ranging brilliance.  [p.80]

Comment

     A librarian/historian solves a puzzle of why Thomas Jefferson cut up his Bible and tracks down the missing pages.  This story has all the elements of librarian heroism, recognizing and saving an important historical document. The fact that he put it on display illustrates a sense of triumph which I have felt myself upon discovering hidden treasure. 
 

Hey Let's Go and Zone Out at Hogwarts

 Eliza Brooke, "Hey Let's go and Zone Out at Hogwarts", New York Times, February 18, 2021, pp. D4-D5. 

Picture this: You’re in the Hogwarts library. Rain falls outside, a fire crackles across the room, and somewhere offscreen, quills scribble on parchment. You might look up from time to time to see a book drifting through the air or stepladders moving around on their own. Or maybe, you’ll feel so relaxed, you nod off to sleep. Welcome to the world of so-called ambience videos, a genre of YouTube video that pairs relaxing soundscapes with animated scenery in order to make viewers feel immersed in specific spaces, like a jazz bar in Paris or a swamp populated with trilling wildlife. They are part of a long tradition of audiovisual products and programming designed to make a space feel a little more relaxing, a little nicer.

...

There’s a video for just about every taste and mood. Library and cafe environments tend to be popular, but viewers can also enjoy the more specific experience of a carriage ride through the woods, a haunted Victorian manor, the RR Diner from “Twin Peaks” or a full hour of Olivia Rodrigo’s hit single “Driver’s License” edited to sound like it’s playing in another room during a rainstorm.

 COMMENT

The library place of refuge is so compelling that it is translated into things that remind people of libraries, in this case, a video meant to create a library mood. 

Across the Years the Pages Come Alive

Jennifer Schuessler, "Across the Years the Pages Come Alive," New York Times, February 19, 2021, p. C12.

Julie Carlsen, a librarian and cataloger who curated the exhibition with Lomazow, called his collection “endlessly fascinating,” if a bit daunting to sort through in search of a clear narrative line. “It’s encyclopedic, as is Stephen’s memory of it,” she said. “He has highbrow material, but also oddball one-off material. It’s wonderful to page through.”

COMMENT

The librarian helped curate a display of  first issues of magazines.