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Libraries are Essential

 

Libraries are Essential

Carla Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to serve as the Librarian of Congress was sacked by Donald Trump on Thursday night, May 8^th this year. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that her continued service did not fit the needs of the American people, did not serve the interests of the American taxpayer, and the President is well within his rights to fire her.

In published remarks in June, Ms. Hayden said she got a short email from Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, Trent Morse: “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

No contact in person before or after, no phone call, just one email. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, is now in charge of the facility.

In an editorial by author George Saunders on May 13^th, he tell us that one of the things he and Dr. Hayden bonded over was the idea that knowledge is power; that in a democracy, the more we know, the better we are.

Firing the Librarian of Congress was alarming. Are our libraries under threat from this administration? Or was it just another cultural makeover, as when Trump fired Colleen Shogan, Archivist of the United States in February. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was put in charge as Acting Archivist.

Ms. Shogan stated that no cause or reason was cited. “It has been an honor serving as the 11^th Archivist of the United States. I have zero regrets – I absolutely did my best every day for the National Archives and the American people.”

In 1949, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), published a Public Library Manifesto: “The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.”

When we read, we gain access to information and knowledge and culture and history and art. In person or online, librarians make suggestions about what we might want to read, based on asking us questions, and by pointing us to the material and by telling us how we can search for ourselves.  

Caring and helping are normal human instincts. Most everyone has strong feelings and memories associated with the libraries they visited and the help they received.

Susan Orlean wrote The Library Book, and in it she says that a library is a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years, even when you’re alone. And she concludes by stating that all the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

James Baldwin said: “I went at least three or four times a week (135^th Street branch of the New York Public Library) and I read everything there. I mean, every single book in that library. In some blind and instinctive way, I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me. And I was trying to make a connection between those books and the life I saw and the life I lived.”

Ursula Le Guin: “A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community, and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place. I remember certain libraries, vividly and joyfully, as my libraries --- elements of the best of my life.”

Ray Bradbury:  “Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

There are two national groups that advocate for libraries: the Public Library Association (PLA) and the American Library Association (ALA). Island County libraries are part of the Sno-Isle Library system which has 23 branches, the Library on Wheels, and Express Lockers at three of their libraries.  

In support of the Sno-Isle Library branches, there are sixteen Friends of the Library chapters. These are nonprofit volunteer organizations that bring together people who support and promote the services and programs of their respective libraries. Money raised by these groups goes toward programming for all ages, summer reading programs for children and teens, library capital improvements, special project funding and more. This link provides contact information for the Friends of the Library groups.

https://www.sno-isle.org/friends-of-the-library/

The Sno-Isle website lists their Vision, Mission, and Values. Their mission is to engage and inspire our communities through equitable access to knowledge and resources. Their values are straightforward: Community, Equity, Inclusion, Welcoming, Learning, and Respect. I believe the majority of Americans embrace and live these values.

 

My Antonia, by Willa Cather

(If you haven’t read this book, know that spoilers abound in this overview.)

I find it rare, when I am reading, to be gripped by feelings and longings I don’t understand. Non-fiction and memoirs are where I usually hang out. Sometimes good fiction can plumb the depths of whatever my unconscious is holding onto. My Antonia, by Willa Cather (1873-1947), was published in 1918, and it caught me unawares.

A description: “All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.” The setting is southern Nebraska, near Red Cloud.

An evocative writer makes you stop reading and think about what you are imagining and feeling. Willa Cather developed her talent through years of hard work and determination. In 1896 she got a position in Pittsburgh at a women’s magazine: Home Monthly. She wrote short stories, poetry, articles, and continued working as a journalist for other publications. She also taught at Pittsburgh’s Central High School for a year, and taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School. She published her first book of poetry in 1903, followed by a collection of short stories in 1905. She joined McClure’s Magazine as an editor and her first novel (Alexander’s Bridge) was serialized by McClure’s in 1912.

“…Cather learned to create on her pages a new-found sense of intimacy, one borne of the relation between intimates. This is first really seen in My Antonia.” 

(From the section “Emerging Writer, 1914-1922”, Willa Cather Center website: https://www.willacather.org/about/willa-cather-biography.)

Kathleen Norris wrote a Foreword to the 1995 paperback edition of My Antonia. She says: “Intent on telling the truths of a particular time and place, she made her own prose as spare as the land about which she was writing, and became a pioneer in American fiction.” Norris mentions that Cather had the great good fortune to have lived among the first generation of white settlers in 1880s Nebraska. In her Foreword, Norris also states: “In many ways the world of My Antonia is still with us, a neglected but significant part of America.” 

Ms. Norris grew up in Lemmon, North Dakota, a small town near the southern border of that state. I grew up in Minnesota and immigrants, starting in the 1860s, moved into the state from Europe and Great Britain. Many settled on farmland, thanks to the Homestead Act of 1862 and the liberation the railroads provided after the Civil War. They usually banded together and were suspicious of others, even as they needed help outside their own enclaves.

But it is Antonia who left a lasting impression on Willa Cather. Cather writes: “Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade – that grew stronger with time…she lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true…but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things…All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.”

Someone like Antonia often leaves us with an intense yearning, a need to be near them, to feel their essence. Attraction to another person seems to work on a number of simultaneous levels. It can be visual, physical, appreciation of speech and style, gestures, even sexual attraction can be part of it. Whatever their special quality, it pulls us to them by proximity or thought. Why is that?

PBS American Masters  did a review of her life. In it, David McCullough speaks about the suicide the Grandfather commits: “Kills himself, commits suicide. Can’t take it – some people are crushed by it. It will either make you or break you. That’s a very American theme...And what really counts in the long run, is the feeling it leaves with you – that feeling that you have about the book, My Antonia. Ten years after you’ve read it, you can still feel that. Why? Because of the transforming magic of art. Because Willa Cather took that story and made it immortal.”

PBS Documentary:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1AJDk9QCkk&t=3343s

For several days, I have wanted to write just one more thing about Willa Cather and this novel. What I settled on was something Willa Cather wrote in her Introduction to the book in 1918. She is taking a long train journey with her friend, Jim, the narrator of the book.

“…our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. To call her name was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain.”

                                                        Civil War? Here?

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, 2024 Large Print edition

I have never felt strongly drawn to reading about the United States Civil War during the 1860s. I watched the Ken Burns’ Civil War series on PBS and thrilled to the history he and his team brought to life. Books about the American Civil War abound, and as best-selling author Erik Larson says in an Introduction to his non-fiction book, The Demon of Unrest: “I suspect your dread will be all the more pronounced in light of today’s political discord….which has led some benighted Americans to whisper once again of secession and civil war.” Even knowing the outcome, the reader senses the attitudes and beliefs at play in the drama that led up to the attack on Fort Sumter.

As Covid unfolded in early 2020, Erik Larson began to wonder: “Exactly how did the Civil War begin? What really happened at Fort Sumter?” Ordering a bound copy of: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Mr. Larson found letters, telegrams, and reports that captured in vivid detail the march toward fratricide. He had his narrative spine for the book. As pandemic restrictions eased, he was able to visit the Charleston Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and consulted other primary source material archives. Secondary sources were also sought out and listed at the end of the book. Mr. Larson also informs the reader: “This is a work of nonfiction. As always, anything between quotation marks comes from some form of historical document…”

As I read the book, I consulted the April 1861 map of Charleston Harbor provided in the front of the book, and Google maps of the area for reference, as well as the National Park Service website, Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie: https://www.nps.gov/fosu/index.htm  Any legitimate material consulted will aid the reader’s imagination in picturing the events as they are described in the book.

First thing that struck me was that the 2020 United States census shows a total United States population of 331,449,281. The 1860 census lists 31,443,321 people in 33 states and 10 territories. Of this number, 3,953,760 were slaves and the states that had the greatest number of slaves by percentage, were: South Carolina, 402,406 (57.2%); Mississippi, 436,631 (55.2%); Louisiana, 331,726 (46.9%); Alabama, 435,080 (45.1%); Georgia, 462,198 (43.7%); Florida, 61,745 (44%); North Carolina, 331,059 (33.4%); Virginia, 490,865 (30.7%); Texas, 182,566 (30.2%); Arkansas, 111,115 (25.5%); Tennessee, 275,710 (24.8%); Kentucky, 225,483 (19.5%), Maryland, 87,189 (12.7%).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census

According to Mr. Larson, there were 440 South Carolina planters who each held one hundred or more enslaved Blacks within a single district. They called themselves “the chivalry” and held jousting competitions and gave themselves military titles and loved elaborate uniforms. Honor was what they valued above all other human traits. When insulted, rage flared and duels commenced. After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 (which sold 300,000 copies in the first three months), Mr. Larson writes: “In the North, it confirmed readers’ worst imagining about the true nature of slavery; in the South, it was spurned as yet another Northern failure to understand how slavery benefited the enslaved themselves…”

After John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry in October of 1859, the South was galvanized. State militias received new recruits, stockpiles of arms increased, vigilance committees were formed. Charleston’s inhabitants were incensed and stepped up the aggressive interrogation of outsiders and free Blacks. Traveling salesmen were required to get a license. Lincoln’s election in November of 1860 intensified Southern discontent about the Union.

Although shipping improved with steam power, and the telegraph speeded information access, these were early days for how people received information. Rumors and false assumptions were widespread. South Carolina kept trying for acceptance as a sovereign state, and Lincoln’s administration did not want to make any moves that could be seen as starting hostilities. 

When Major Robert Anderson moved his men and their families, on his own initiative, from Fort Moultrie to Fort Johnson, no one suspected that the real destination was Fort Sumter.  

As the sun set on December 26^th, he informed his officers what he had secretly planned and set in motion. It took two trips on three boats to get his two companies of soldiers to Fort Sumter. Once there, the vessel with the forty-five women and children set off from Fort Moultrie for Fort Sumter. By morning, smoke was rising from the Fort Moultrie burning gun carriages, and the flag was missing. Everyone was safely within the walls of Fort Sumter. 

Less than four months later, South Carolina weapons opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12^th, 1861.

In “A Note To Readers” at the beginning of his book, Mr. Larson tells us that while watching the Jan. 6^th 2021 Capitol riots: “I was appalled by the attack, but also riveted. I realized that the anxiety, anger, and astonishment that I felt would certainly have been experienced in 1860-1861 by vast numbers of Americans…I invite you now to step into the past, to that time of fear and dissension, and experience the passion, heroism, and heartbreak – even humor – as if you were living in that day and did not know how the story would end.”

If you would like to hear and watch Erik Larson talk about The Demon of Unrest, click on this link from the Library of Congress (Sept. 4^th, 2024).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHQv5oQd3Zg&t=2294s

A History of Reading by Steven Roger Fischer, 2019 revised edition

In an A.O. Scott essay about reading, published in the N.Y. Times Book Review section on June 21^st, 2023, Mr. Scott mentioned Mr. Fischer’s book: A History of Reading. I ordered the book from Sno-Isle Interlibrary Loan service. Mr. Fischer is a New Zealand linguist and former Director of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures in Auckland, New Zealand.

In his Introduction the author says: “What music is to the spirit, reading is to the mind. Reading challenges, empowers, bewitches, enriches.” In seven well-documented chapters, Mr. Fischer starts with Egypt and runs us up to present time. He tells us that writing prioritizes sound, and reading prioritizes meaning. And a key point to remember – for most of written history, reading was reciting. If scribes bore false witness, they were killed.

Reading represents freedom to me; the freedom to absorb anything and the freedom to think about whatever has been read. No one should be dictating what you can read, right? But some have raised the issue about what is appropriate reading material for those under a certain age. As a parent, I understand their concern. Some parents want the libraries to withhold or move material they feel is inappropriate for children. But I don’t like their approach. It’s confrontational and draws a line in the sand. And they get to decide for us.

Many of us expect parents to make suggestions and guide their children when it comes to choosing material. Some parents take no responsibility for kids’ choices. Schools may provide suggestions for age-appropriate reading lists. But when you expect school boards to arbitrarily censor books, you are putting the responsibility for choosing or discarding material in the hands of citizen-driven pressure groups. Where is the freedom in that?

  In Mr. Scott’s essay he says that: “Reading liberates and torments us, enlightens and       bewilders us, makes and unmakes our social and solitary selves.”

Most of us are nodding our heads in agreement. That book that looked so promising on the shelf, ended up sparking feelings of disgust, anger, or maybe horror. Some books chime within us and spark feelings that we can scarcely understand. Scott makes the case that: “Reading, like democracy or sexual desire, is an unmanageable, inherently destabilizing force in human life.” Reading holds risk as well as promise. Reading gives us a connection with another person and their imagination and opinions. The only price we pay is our time. And yes, a risk is involved, but taking a risk implies the freedom to do so. That is the crucial element: free to choose for ourselves.

Mr. Fischer makes the same argument. “A reader can choose to understand, react to, and interpret the author’s work however the reader wants….No text, not even the most fundamental religious, dictates to a reader. It is the reader who chooses how to react, what to think. The wonder in reading is that the writer is never in control. It is the reader who plays God.”

We choose to believe, cast aside, denounce or embrace the material we read. There’s freedom of speech, freedom of the press and there’s freedom of the mind. 

(Steven Roger Fischer also wrote: A History of Writing in 2021. Also available via the Sno-Isle Library system using the Inter-Library Loan portal.)