"Future Library" from Margaret Atwood's Burning Questions collection

I have read many of Margaret Atwood's works, but there are many others that are still on my "To Be Read" list. While I would like to be able to read them all before I die, I know this will not be possible. As the first author invited to be part of Katie Paterson's Future Library project, a 100-year endeavor, not even Atwood herself will live to see her contribution published. Neither for that matter will Paterson. Paterson's project is a leap of faith. Each year between 2014-2114 different authors will be invited to submit their works to be published, printed on paper made from a forest growing in Norway, when the project ends. 

Atwood's short essay about the Future Library explores questions of Time Travel, language, and climate change. "Will any human beings be waiting to receive it? Will there be a 'Norway'? Will there be a 'forest'? Will there be a 'library'?" she asks, and offers hope that they will.

Since she wrote this piece in 2015 she could not have known that libraries would be under such a threat as they are today, only eight years later. I can only hope that the censorship contagion in the United States does not make its way to Norway. 

The Dissidents podcast - The Librarians are Not Okay

Last month I was invited to The Dissidents podcast to talk about libraries, librarians, and banned books. Click on the image below to listen. 

 The interview is about one and a half hours long. The short version is: Treat librarians with respect and don't ban books.

Our Missing Hearts - by Celeste Ng

This dystopian novel, reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale, gives us a glimpse of what happens when prejudices go unchecked. As we watch the far right cycle through villanzing every marginalized group, (landing most recently on the LGBTQ+ community) this work is prescient in more ways than one.

In Our Missing Hearts Anti-Asian sentiment is sanctioned by the government through PACT (the Preserving American Cultures and Traditions Act). PACT also encourages citizens to report their neighbors for un-American activities (broadly defined) and allows great leeway in banning books. Children are removed from their homes and permanently re-placed if their parents are deemed to be un-American. Current news from Florida and Texas regarding trans children echoes this story line. Ng's book centers on a mixed race family: Asian-American mother Margaret; Caucasian father (Ethan); and their son Bird (aka Noah).

When Margaret's little-known (and apolitical) book of poetry unwittingly becomes a symbol of a protest movement Margaret goes on the lam leaving Bird and Ethan behind in hopes of keeping father and son together even as she cannot be with them. When asked about Margaret's whereabouts Bird and Ethan always answer that they do not know, and that she is no longer a part of the family.

There is much in this book about libraries and censorship. Although libraries exist they are largely empty (of people and books). Described as a "ghost town" the public library is still a sanctuary for Bird (and his friend Sadie). The librarian helps Bird to find a book based on only a vague description. They use an old card catalog to find it but the book has been removed from the library. As was his mother’s poetry book - Our Missing Hearts. The librarian tells him “We don’t burn books here this is America…we pulp them. She says his mother’s book was probably turned into toilet paper and wiped someone’s butt a long time ago. Although they do not traffic much in books, the librarians are still connecting people and information. "The brain of a librarian is a capacious place." 

The public librarians are part of a subversive group that provides information to parents whose children have been “re-placed” - surreptitiously passing notes between the pages of interlibrary loan books. The librarians also hide Sadie away from her foster family as she tries to reunite with her parents. Train and bus schedule information is provided to Bird at the library. The librarian tells him that she is only letting him know how to find the information: what he does with it is his business. 

Likewise classrooms are described with empty bookshelves because “books are outdated the minute they're published”. However, students are informed by their teachers that books haven’t been banned, obviously, because that would contradict the first amendment. Rather, the books have been removed so as not to expose students to harmful ideas. This is eerily reminiscent of a viral video that recently made the rounds online of an empty school library in Florida.

Ethan shelves books in a Harvard University library. A PhD, he used to teach linguistics there, but lost the job over Margaret's "politics".  As a linguist, Ethan is especially interested in word derivations. He enjoys explaining where words come from (in multiple languages) to his son. The book included an explanation about the derivation of the word library coming from the word for tree bark, something I had never known before.

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey : Crazy Stories about Racism - by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

Sisters Ruffin and Lamar grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. Their cringeworthy anecdotes about race and racism focus mainly on Lamar's experiences working there, but also about growing up in Omaha in the '80s and '90s. The audiobook is read by the authors and it is well worth a listen. The sisters laugh together and enjoy some easy banter as they tell their tales.

Of course any library tale will pique my interest. There was only one in this book, but it caused me to do a lot of thinking. It centered on Ruffin's elementary school library. A lover of arts and crafts, Ruffin borrowed a craft book that included instructions for making a Gollywog doll. She was unaware of the racist nature of the craft and innocently asked her mother about making one. Her mother's swift response included not only a call to the school librarian to complain, but also an admonishment to her daughter to use only the books they had at home from then on.

As I said, I had to think about this episode quite a bit to determine what to say about it, especially in light of the wave of book banning happening across the country. I will begin by saying that Ruffin's mother was perfectly within her rights to contact the school and complain about the book. Furthermore, schools should have processes in place for book reconsideration, and they in fact count on parents to bring books to their attention that may not belong in the collection. Not all book removal constitutes book banning. Books are discarded from libraries for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps they are out of date, worn out, or otherwise no longer appropriate for a particular audience or collection. "Weeding" is part of the process of keeping a library relevant.  

However, removal of individual titles, with cause, is not what we are witnessing in schools today. Instead hundreds of books that the censors have not read are being summarily removed from classrooms and school libraries (and indeed public libraries). Those who would remove books from libraries under the guise of "parental rights" are full of shit. They already have the right to request that their child not have access to certain books. Meanwhile, they are preventing other parents who would like their children to have access from doing so. 

I was surprised that Ruffin's mother told her daughter not to use the library any more over this one incident. Of course any parent can contact their child's school and request that they not be allowed to check out specific books (or any books for that matter), and they are also within their rights to tell their own child not to use the library any more. I would argue, however, that students should be given (relatively) unrestricted access to their school and public libraries. Young people need to be able to explore difficult topics at their own pace. Librarians, teachers, and parents can be guides but ultimately everyone should be able to access the information they need when they need it - without judgement.  See my post Why I Let my Daughter Read Twilight Books for additional thoughts on this. (Note that the post is 10 years old and my "daughter" now identifies as non-binary and uses he/him pronouns).

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey is the One Book One Community selection for the Bridgewaters for summer 2023.

Playing with Myself - by Randy Rainbow (yes, that's his real name)

 In this house we believe...

that if a gay man writes a memoir it is best to "read" it as an audiobook, read by the author himself. Listening to Rainbow's work solidified this belief. We laughed, we cried, we felt.

Of course my favorite part of his heartfelt memoir was hearing that the author (as part of his work as a cruise ship performer) also checked out books to passengers from the ship's library. His name tag read "social staff and entertainment".

I don't wear a name tag at my job as a university librarian. If required I would insist on having it read "Puddin' Tame". Since the university prides itself at respecting preferred names I imagine I could actually get away with it.

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon - by Bill McKibbin

 

It is certainly trendy to blame everything that is wrong with the world on my generation ("Okay, Boomer") and, to be fair, there is plenty of blame to go around, but as McKibben points out we Boomers were born during a rather long span (the years 1946-1964) - a population over about 70 million people which "means you're making generalizations about populations larger than France or England". We can look at Zoomers (those born between 1997-2012 - a population which includes my own child) and find fault with their addiction to fast fashion and shake our heads at the problems of sustainability it causes. At the same time I can also see that they are leading the way in seeking racial justice, fair wages, and health care reform. 

McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, just up the road a piece from my own home in the Bay State. He describes his childhood home as "like a child's drawing of a suburban home: a square block with a door and a window on the ground floor and two windows on the story above". I expect that the second story in the "child's drawing" was triangle shaped. This describes my own house as well. McKibben uses the house as a starting point in the book and moves from there to descriptions of his schooling, first jobs, and the history of the area to explore some bigger questions on race and the common good.

McKibben is clearly a fan of libraries and indicates that he has made good use of them throughout his life. Early in the work he describes a lecture given in 1970 by Ralph Nader at the town library in which he [Nader]

blast[ed] both air pollution and hot dogs, which he called "innovations to relieve food companies of all their crud". 

I've always been a fan of Nader and voted for him in the epic presidential election of 2000.

Further McKibben describes walking past the town library in 1971 (where he was "already a regular in the downstairs children's room") as part of a protest of the Vietnam War, led by another later presidential hopeful John Kerry, leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

As a high school student McKibben got a job giving tours of the Lexington Battle Green. Donning a tricorn hat he regaled tourists with tales of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. In order to get such a job 

you needed to pass a test...administered by the venerable rector of the local Episcopal church...He handed you a reading list, and you repaired to the town library's local history room for long days of study.

In one passage he demonstrates the importance of libraries through their absence. Eighteenth century Lexingtonians, according to Richard Kollen "the most determined chronicler of the town's religious history", would have 

attended an average of seven thousand sermons in a lifetime, that meant they heard fifteen thousand hours of preaching from their pastor. (And of course that was pretty much all heard, in an era with no theater, no library, no radio, no internet).

It would seem that today's far right politicians and Christian Nationalists would prefer that we return to this as they remove books from libraries and attempt to censor legislators who speak out for an end to gun violence, and basic rights for transgender people. 

Meanwhile, McKibben tells us that people's interest in libraries, theater going, and even sports has been waning in recent years.

Everything that the affluent possess in private has swelled in size... and what we share in common has been allowed to decay.

 This is evident in California's passage of Proposition 13 in 1978

which sharply limited the ability of cities and towns to assess taxes. Local property tax revenues dropped 60 percent overnight, and though the state filled some of the gap, services like education suffered immediate hits from which they never recovered...They cut maintenance, assistant principals, librarians...in south LA, or the north-eastern San Fernando Valley the library opens rarely...

City and town libraries suffered as well with summer and after-school programs cut. Some branches were closed, or hours had their hours shortened.

Finally, McKibben gives props to "Lexington's superb Cary Memorial Library" in providing access to back copies of the Lexington Minuteman which allowed him to do the research for this book.

Post Script:

To answer the question posed by the subtitle of this work ("What the hell happened?") I submit that we really should have listened to Bill McKibben back in 1989 when he wrote The End of Nature. But we didn't. 

National Library Week - There's More to the Story

This year we’re going to party like it’s 1981! That’s because book banning has never been so popular. After Ronald Reagan was elected president we saw the rise of the Moral Majority headed by Jerry Falwell. Book banning, in order to protect children, became a popular pastime of the religious right. As a high school student I found the book banners laughably naïve. What on earth did they think they were protecting us from? 

I kicked off National Library Week a few days early this year by watching Judy Blume Forever, a new documentary available on Amazon Prime, over the weekend. I highly recommend this film for all. Fans will be thrilled with the way eighty-five year-old Blume is honored by young and old, authors, readers, and librarians alike. Those who are not already fans will surely want to find out more by reading some of her books. My almost-sixty-year-old husband has called her a “national treasure” now that he has not only seen the new film, but also listened to her most classic work Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret on audio, and watched her in some Zoom discussions during the pandemic. 

The American Library Association (ALA) declared April 24 as National Right to Read Day, so as a follow-up to the movie the ALA and Prime video sponsored a Zoom event featuring a panel discussion with Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok (directors and producers of Judy Blume Forever); Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada (ALA President); Suzanne Nossel (CEO at PEN America) and Pat R. Scales (author and retired librarian). The panel was moderated by Chris Finan (Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship). Pardo and Wolchok discussed the villainizing of Blume and her books during the 1980s, explaining that they expected it to be a small part of the film, but that they had no idea what was still to come. In one segment of the film we see a clip of Blume on the television show Crossfire with Pat Buchanan. Buchanan, who has clearly not read her books, attacks Blume, repeating the same sentence from her book Deenie. Finan mentioned the segment during the panel discussion, letting audience members who might have been too young to remember Buchanan, that he was a “blockhead from the eighties”. I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Judy Blume shows off some books in her bookstore Books & Books in Key West, FL

One of the panelists mentioned fear as a parental motivation for the sudden rise in book challenges. As I said, even in the eighties the whole thing seemed rather simple-minded, but today when we know that children can find whatever they want on the internet, and as children deal with real issues such as gun violence, abject hunger, and church-sanctioned pedophilia, I can only see this new wave of book banning as a deflection. Parents cannot control what is available online, but they can try to control what books are in their public schools and libraries, no matter how futile it may be.

The theme of this year's Library Week is "There's More to the Story". And, in fact, I have a lot more to say. Listen to me on The Dissident's podcast talking about libraries, library work, and book banning for National Library Week.