Gentrifier: A Memoir - by Anne Elizabeth Moore

 

Over the summer I made my first visit to Detroit. My husband (James) has been teaching a one-credit course about it for several years, but neither of us had ever been there. He recommended this book to me after he read it. A story told in vignettes from a writer who is given a house in Detroit by an unnamed organization. The intention was that Moore would have "a room of one's own" in which to concentrate on her writing without the distractions of rent. Things did not work out exactly as intended. A myriad of problems beset the author as a result of the gift of the house.

James recommended the book to me when he read the first snippet about a library

A woman emails me because she hears I have been asking about local literacy programs. In her email she writes that she presumes I own many books. She would like some, she says. She is taking up donations because her child's school library does not have any books. She says this casually, as if books were an option that this library simply chose not to offer. Later I discover it is common in Detroit schools to not have books. I give her every title I can spare.

This depressing view of libraries in Detroit continues throughout:

The downtown public library is grand and stately...Inside are frescoes, rotting, ornate decorations marred by water stains or holes, and a display of all the former branches of the Detroit Public Library system, their years of and reasons for closure or, in a few cases, their current hours...For three years, the branch near my house is not open when I stop by. I go to the main branch instead to request information on the history of my neighborhood, but the librarian looks annoyed when I ask for assistance. He tells me there are no books for me. So I leave.

Easily the most gutting architectural experience of my life is stumbling across the charred crumbling beams of a house on the northwest side...The roof is gone, only a few corners of the building still standing, and full daylight shines on a space intended to remain interior...The contents of the burned half structure have been picked through, with only functionless children's toys...sacrified to the land. Undisturbed is a whole children's library, remarkably undamaged, that no one thinks to plunder. 

In unpacking her personal library Moore's initial excitement of turning the second bedroom in her house into a library is quickly thwarted when she discovers that there are not furniture stores that carry book shelves, nor that any local furniture makers have any interest in building any.

Eventually, she determines that the headache that came with the free house isn't worth it.

After teaching for two years in Detroit, a former student, no longer in any of my classes, tells me she checked out my book from interlibrary loan. She expresses dismay that the school I teach at does not carry my books, although they are used as texts in schools elsewhere. "It was really good!" she says, eyes wide. "I can't believe you teach here!"
By this time I have already submitted my notice.

A bittersweet moment comes when a young neighbor, against her parents wishes, comes to Moore's house to and asks her to help create her own zine. Which she does and "It is amazing". This is only after Moore

put every imaginable effort into convincing the young women of Detroit, in this neighborhood and elsewhere, not only to love and value literature but to wield it as a tool

However, Moore has given up at this point and has packed up her belongings to move to a new city and a different job. 

convinced that the disregard for literacy in the schools and bookshelves in the furniture stores and books in the libraries all point to a basic truth about the way writing is valued here. It is not.

As she reflects on her time in Detroit she has this to say about her neighbors

If I were to craft a composite portrait of Detroiters I have come to know, I would sketch out a strong, steady woman of color who conserves her energy to ensure she retains enough to get through the day, focused always on the survival of her children. She would be kept with some regularity from opportunity by municipal failure or malfeasance, making instead do with what is on hand, parceling it to loved ones carefully, often well aware of the lead poisoning, the crumbling public school, the absence of books from library shelves, the water shutoff, the foreclosure. The women I meet in Detroit maintain an entire city on the strength of love and perseverance... 

It should not have to be so. 

The Book of Form and Emptiness - by Ruth Ozeki

Please note: Because I listened to this book, there may be misspellings in character names, and quotes may not be exactly as written in the print version.

There are too many levels of meta in this one for me to follow them all. The book, in addition to narrating the lives of the characters, is also narrating itself.  

A host of rich characters populates this book: these include Corey, a children's librarian; Annabelle, a would-be librarian who had to leave library school when she became pregnant; Benny, Annabelle's son - a truant who hears voices and uses the local public library to hide out; Aikon a decluttering guru and bestselling author; and a band of colorful library patrons. 

After Annabelle's husband, Kenji, dies in a freak accident she has a hard time coping with raising her son, doing her job clipping news stories for clients, and running her home. As she begins to hoard, Benny struggles with his own mental illness and he begins to have auditory hallucinations. He and his mother share a love for libraries and both find refuge in their local public library. 

I listened to this book on audio, and there was so much in it, I will limit myself here to commenting only on the notes I made while listening.

I start with my favorite quote from the book. Librarian Corey shows up to help Annabelle clear out her house wearing a shirt that reads: "Librarian - because bad-ass motherfucker isn't an official job title".

As she attempts to console Annabelle, who is feeling completely overwhelmed and begins to sob, Corey "shushes" her. As a librarian she, of course, knows from shushing.

The books in the library calmed the voices in Benny's head. Books are described as sacred, and the libraries as temples. Stopping at the library on the way back from a psychiatrist appointment was a treat.

In an attempt to "liberate" the voices from his body, Benny injures himself with a thumbtack. Thumbtacks are described as dangerous, but not as dangerous as books. This was especially striking to me as I consider the new age of book banning that we are currently experiencing. Although I cannot recall the exact context of this description of dangerous books in Ozeki's work, it is appropriate to say that some believe that the ideas found in books are more dangerous than any of the myriad real life-threatening dangers we face daily.

Although Annabelle didn't finish library school, she clearly has a librarian's keen sense for finding elusive information. When Benny disappears she is aware that he may be with his friend who calls herself The Aleph. Searching Aleph alone wasn't enough to find her. Annabelle knew to search for "The Aleph". 

The Aleph is an artist who specializes in snow globes. The best one she makes is one for Benny that features a library scene with books and letters floating in the water.

The question "What is real?" is at the center of this work. It is a question Benny explores at the behest of The B-Man one of the eccentric patrons of the public library. It is what makes this work so meta. Is the book narrating itself, or is it Benny's head? 

A Sand County Almanac - by Aldo Leopold

I'd been meaning to read this for a long time. It had been just sitting there on my shelf for ever so long. My husband read it decades ago, and although my intentions were always there, there was always something else I wanted to read. Now its time has finally come.

This was really a mood piece. The nature descriptions were soothing and poetic. I felt much like I was simply floating in a dream, awakened now and then by the word "library". Often this is used metaphorically. Leopold understands that landscapes, like so many things can be "read".

The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he who hammers or saws may read at will. Come high water, there is always an accession of new books.

...he who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution.

        A farmer and his son are out in the yard, pulling a crosscut saw through the innards of an ancient cottonwood. The tree is so large and so old that only a foot of blade is left to pull on.                Time was when that tree was a buoy in the prairie sea. George Rogers Clark may have camped under it; buffalo may have nooned in its shade, switching flies. Every spring it roosted fluttering pigeons. It is the best historical library short of the State College, but once a year it sheds cotton on the farmer's window screens. 

    This state of doubt about the fundamentals of human population behavior lends exceptional value, to the only available analogue: the higher animals. [Paul] Errington, among others, has pointed out the cultural value of these animal analogues. For centuries this rich library of knowledge has been inaccessible to us because we did not know when or how to look for it. Ecology is now teaching us to search in animal populations for analogies to our own problems.

Perhaps, though, my favorite was this:

If I were to tell a preacher of an adjoining church that the road crew had been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book?

Librarians know well that books themselves can be weeds. Our shelves are gardens, and outdated books are removed in order to make our gardens grow.

Literacy can take many forms. The ability to read, and interpret the printed word is but one. The ability to read and interpret our surroundings is another. It is a literacy that even when this book was written over 70 years ago we were losing. We have lost more ground since.

Like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, this work uses exquisite prose to explain science to the layperson.