Famous people at the Library

I have written about my own famousness (link here, go ahead, I can wait. I won't type a word until you come back). But what about real live, mind bogglingly famous people?

"You must get loads of fascinatingly famous people pouring through your near urban, super busy Library, and you must have tons of hilarious, pseudo illuminating anecdotes about those famous people!"

Well of course I do! Don't think that because I'm in Minnesota we don't get the big stars, the cultural giants. Prince and Dylan are from here, and are naturally heavy Library users. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Garrison Keillor, um, er, ah, um, the Dalai Lama, Jane Austen, Muhammad Ali, Lady Gaga, Hillary Clinton, Winona Ryder, Rasputin, Linus Van Pelt, Miguel Cervantes, all native Minnesotans. And though most of them have moved on, there's always some adored Aunt or something that brings them back for a visit, and when they come, and need an only slightly greasy book, this is the place to get it!

What's that? The Dalai Lama is not from Minnesota? Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree. Still, I can immediately sight my source (here). I hope you can do the same.

So, hilarious anecdotes about some of these famous visits? Hmm, they're not exactly hilarious. They're more libraryish and mildly interesting, which, when dealing with famous people, is plenty! Like:

"I saw Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck once."

"Really? What were they doing?"

"Checking out the DVD When In Rome."

"Wow!"

No one will ever get tired of hearing that story. They will actually seek out even more mundane details. "Did they wear hats?" "Were you able to save any of their garbage?"

Anyway, I don't know where you got the impression that these stories would be hilarious.

Oh. I did say that? Hilarious? Well, I'll take your word for it, and I take your point. There are parts of this post, up near the top, that weren't a hundred percent accurate, but I feel we've worked through to a much better place now and it would be great if I could continue on in a more uninterrupted way, as much as I've appreciated all the attempts to set the record straight. Thank you.

Oh! I just had a thought. What if instead of trying to cram all these fascinating, er, vaguely interesting, famous people in the Library stories into the puny remains of this blog post, what if we had a famous people at the Library week? Then each anecdote could feel free to fully flower and instead of one Hollywood Squares episode, we could have like five or six episodes of This Is Your Life, except all with puny anecdotes instead of people. Remember how much fun we had during "Short Post Week"? To paraphrase one of my most esteemed readers "You kind of lost me with that short post week thing, but I started reading your blog again recently." So, yes, this could be great like that.

Okay, we're on then. Famous people at the Library week has now begun.

"But wait!" You cry out, before I leave. "How will I be able to tell the fake pointless famous people stories from the real pointless famous people stories?"

Alright, a hint. Real famous people don't really visit near urban public Libraries unless they're mid list authors, or half famous locally, or just famous by association, or, possibly someone like Keanu Reeves. But don't worry, there will be no stories about Keanu Reeves visiting. I hope that helps.

"But wait!" You cry, before I can leave. "When will you return to trenchant, clear eyed views of the world, all hard hitting and visionary and renowned throughout the blogosphere?"

As soon as famous people at the Library week is over. I must follow my bleary hallucinatory visions as they come. Read as you will.

Clerks, Beatles, beetles

 

Just the other day I was comparing clerks to beatles. I have always fancied myself to be most like John, but with some of Paul's boyish charm, and George's spirituality. Also with some of Ringo's drumming ability.

What?

Oh, right, I was comparing clerks to beetles. The little bugs! Ha ha ha. 

I've always fancied myself to be a lot like Trigonopterus Viridescens, but with the sparkiness of a Big Dipper Firefly, and the industriousness of a Hercules Beetle.

Weirdly that's about all I have to say today. I had a whole bunch more on little yellow notes I carry around in my pocket. It really dug deep on how clerks are just like Beetles in many ways. I absentmindedly chewed all my notes up. I can't imagine why I would chew these notes up. That kind of behavior would be more normal for a Carpet Beetle, or a Cigarette Beetle, not a clerk. 

Well, I guess this kind of proves my point.

Tis the season

Because we live in a hyper Candid Camera era, where some kind of oddball public prank or flash event may take place at any moment, I go into a state of alert when something eye opening starts unfolding in my Library as if it is just happening "naturally." 

And yet all these strange, carnival weirdnesses that take place here actually do seem to be natural, they don't show up on youtube, and they aren't stunts designed to blow our minds. They are just the everyday magical confluences of a varied world.

And what is it today? You ask.

Santa Clauses.

Upstairs today, less than an hour ago, I was able to count six, yes six full on Santa Clauses! No, not guys in costumes. That kind of thing is small time. There's always some reason for that. These are the real deal, just regular men, going about their business, who happen to fit, in every basic, out of costume particular, the required parameters of Santa. Rotund? Check. Late middle age or older? Check. Full white beard and white hair. Check. Rosy cheeks. Yeah, pretty much. It's a warm day, they had to climb the stairs. Did they all have a twinkle in their eye? Well, no, let's not get carried away, it's a Library here, not a charming story about the North Pole. But the best one had maybe a little twinkle. I don't know. Give them all the suit, a pipe, a few gifted reindeer, and they all would have been perfect enough. As they actually were attired it was more like they were of the funny Santa genre. Santa on vacation in bermuda shorts. Yes, he's up there. Biker Santa. Yes, but he comes here all the time. There was a kind of techno Santa too. Santa nerd I guess, all wired up, packing screens. He seemed to have an antenna coming out of his head. So no classic Santas, but more like they'd all come from magazine advertisement photo shoots as companies put together their Christmas print campaigns. A hip, modern Santa selling Christmas computers, that sort of thing. Of course they were a bit too real to really be that. One guy had water bottles and ziplocked sandwiches strapped to his body, another sported mysterious, overstuffed briefcases. Many had tangled or frayed or unkempt beards. I literally can see one more across the library coming down the stairs. He has suspenders, which is very Santaish, and an army camoflauge shirt, which isn't, and a tan golf hat. Very white hair, long enough, but beard a bit thinner than ideal, and his cheeks could be rosier. I'm gonna throw him back. I can afford to be picky. I've got so many to choose from.

My fiction mood

My reaction to the fiction section is a very good barometer of my mood. If I am dazzled by the bewildering and sophisticated magic of the literature on display, the testaments to art at a profound level far surpassing our thin notions of God, then I should be okay. But when I am shelving my way through fiction and become convinced, in reading jacket quotes, synopsis, bios, epigraphs, dedications, and stray passages, that though I am encountering hundreds of different authors, hundreds of different books, it is all, in reality, one book, over and over, with a few unimportant changes between each of them, then I know I am in trouble for the day. I should seek out quiet places as often as possible and just...

sit there.

The one book? How is it described? This is it:

Fusing tragedy and hope in this heart wrenching masterpiece is only part of so and so's brilliance. This (Pulitzer, Booker, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner award) winning author has crafted a narrative that explores the deepest meanings of what it is to be human. So and so takes us on a journey down to the souls of characters that are beyond our love and hate while evoking both. This book and it's small/large fictional town/city of Whatsit will stand testament to the power of evocation and to the mastery of one of our greatest living authors. This book and the characters of Whatsit, will live forever in the shattered remains of your heart.

No, really, some days they're all like this, and I either want to read them, or hide under the stairs. It's under the stairs today for me.

Furniture store

I have been doing a lot of furniture shopping lately. My wife and I venture off into one furniture store after another. My focus is only partly on the furniture. I like the air conditioning. I like the sitting. I am keenly interested in the music. Often the music is jazz. Sometimes it is very good. Hip places these days are intensely focused on mid modern, which covers, in practice if not by definition, furniture and design and suchlike from the late 50s to maybe the mid seventies. I know some of this stuff from childhood. Time and memory has made it hideous and charming. For music in these places it is Big band, rat pack sixties, and the non-rock pop of the era. It's all pretty entertaining.

The workers too at furniture stores interest me. They are not clerks. Indeed, they belong to a different genus than clerks. They are sales people.  Clerks tend to be in complicated tension with Capitalism. Sales people are an ultimate expression of Capitalism. These furniture folk seem to mostly be commissioned sales people. Their very livelihood mainly depends upon you actually buying stuff as they attend upon you. A clerk's livelihood mainly depends upon you not shooting them, that and upon their ability to live on a modest budget. But what I really think of for an analogy is from the animal kingdom. Clerks are like, um, maybe beetles. You know, like, look at that little beetle! It's so cute and industrious rolling that dung around! Or, look at that little beetle, it's so shiny! Why is it just sitting there? Is it dead? Poke it.

Furniture sales people are like spiders. 

You walk in the store, maybe you touch a fabric. A reverberation sounds out through all the fabrics and deep into the store. Suddenly a sales person appears right before you to ask if you need help. You never see them move fast, but they can be right up close at a moments notice, instantly at your right hand, attendant, ready, with a claim and possession. A gruff "Just looking" sends them back deep into a quiet heart of the store. Where is it, that quiet heart? I don't know, but start to like something, have a question, or just remain in the store long enough, and there, instantly, they are again.

Yes, yes, I know they are not spiders. They do not want to wrap you in a cocoon of death and suck the life juices out of you. They do not want to eat you. While a couple of these sales people were alarmingly offensive, I found most of the sales people to be nice and, on the surface, not so dissimilar from clerks, good clerks that is. They could be caring, helpful, and at our service. But these sales people do care just a little bit more, and though, in the best of them, you will never see it, there is a gleam in their eye, an avid, hungry gleam. Of course they want to eat you. Everyone's gotta eat. It's not personal.

Our brutal return instructions

If you want to return items to our exterior, drive-up, automated return book drop you drive up to a little door, in the middle of a brick wall,  just maybe about five inches high, that raises up very smoothly and slowly when approached.  And just as you activate it by approaching, a deep voiced recording says nicely "Please return your materials one at a time." At this point you put a stack of six children's books into the slot, then a stack of three dvds, and finally two fat novels that you have to sort of squeeze and shove to get through the slot together.

Just kidding. You don't do this. Some people do, but not very many and not you. But, alas, some people really do. I have tried to listen in my heart for who these people are, but it's a lot of work. The best I could get to is that they are so wildly distracted by the cure for cancer they are working on in their head that they don't hear the voice.  Or, maybe, if the belt is moving super slow, because the machine is under heavy return load, they are making the executive decision to defy the return process request of "One at a time" because they are dropping off their items while on the way to the hospital to have a finger reattached, or they could be firemen on the way to a fire. They could be deaf. They could be rocking out too intensely to the most awesome, blistering guitar solo ever recorded, they could know that "One at a time" guy from somewhere and have a really ugly history.

Whatever they are up to that causes them to return items in a stack, in defiance of deep voiced instructive guy, it should be a very very powerful thing, such a divine emergency, or so understandable a mistake. And the reason it should be such a strong thing is because on our side of the wall, when all the little items come in, and, suddenly, unexpectedly they are in stacks, each stack feels like a little slap in the face, or like someone put a gob of phlegm in there,  or maybe, instead of three books, like they put in three sheets of paper, one after the other, and the first one says "I", and the second says "HATE" and the third says "YOU."

Maybe the fact that these stacks feel like hate mail, or spit, seems silly to you. But you would be no different working this machine. I have seen even the mildest mannered of us all, the least confrontational, yelling "One at a time!" at the slot even though it is unlikely they can be heard. They try to sound reasonable, but you can hear them coming unhinged.  No one is immune. Some leave notes on the patron record. Some take it out on the books. I personally like to pick up one of the offending books like maybe I'm going to throw it in the garbage. I think I even mean to for a second. An unrealistic scenario plays out in my head. The patron saying "I know I returned it in the book drop."

"Did you return it in a stack?" I ask "The machine will easily lose items returned in a stack, destroys them, we have to charge the patron. We have no choice."

It all passes. I don't throw good books in the garbage, or yell through the slot. I unstack the books. It is a small indignity. Small is too big. It is a tiny indignity, and it is just part of the job. I can handle a few stacks a day, I can shoulder these little indignities. What do I expect anyway, what with all our confusing rules?

Bad news

It is always a moment that sticks in my throat, a momentary touch of toil in my job unlike any of the other toils. and it is worse when my dealings with the patron are warm. We are chatting maybe about their Portugal guidebooks, the ones they are bringing to check out. They tell me excitedly about their plans, and I tell them about that nice gelato place in Lisbon, or about the fabulous cafe' Pois (pronounced, I think, poysh). They want to know more. And while we're talking they give me their Library card. I bring up their record and everything stops. I have some bad news.

Oh how I pity a Doctor. My burden and bad news is but a trifle next to someone having to tell someone that they have some terrible cancer or something, but, nevertheless, I find no joy in it.

"You have $150 in late fines." I say in the gentle tones of an undertaker. "And these four DVDs are still out and overdue." I add, turning the screen towards them.

Our warm chat is over.

If there is any saving grace it is that people rarely take the news as hard as I think they will. I can't think of anyone ever breaking down in tears, and hostile belligerence is very rare. To tell you the truth I think the sort of people whose Library borrowing can go so completely pear-shaped tend to be, at least generally, the sort of people who are used to it, and the sort of people who take it with aplomb.

"A hundred fifty dollars?" They might say. "I'll write you a check."

No worries, huh?

I just hope it doesn't bounce.

Fallow

I have spent much of my day today writing.

"What have you been writing?" You ask. 

Why, blog posts of course. Did you think I was working on a novel or something? I may be old school, but not that old school. More 2007 than 1886.

And so writing all day I have said pretty much all the important things I wanted to say. This is always a good time to come write my Sunday post, the fallow post. There is not overmuch order to it, really what comes up can just come up. Today is a field of weeds for you. If you are fortunate enough to find some wildflowers pick them freely. Tonight we plow this all under and tomorrow we get a richer and fresher soil.

Today it is quiet here and songbirds and flocks of blackbirds poke around under a gray sky. Tomorrow I will be eager to tell you things once again.

Like other things

A few days ago my colleague, Dave, who, for some reason I'm not clear on, is my only colleague I freely name on this blog, brought to my attention the tagline of a book or DVD he came across while emptying a bin: "Like Downton Abbey, but with magic!"  We thought this was pretty amusing. It had been a very long day and we were very eager to be amused. Perhaps what seemed amusing is that "magic" seemed so antithetical to the essential nature of Downton Abbey, and so made its eagerness of association especially desperate and silly seeming. But who knows, there are only so many kinds of things around, and much is like much else. Perhaps it pretty much is Downton Abbey, but with magic. I myself have always fancied that this blog is a lot like Don Quixote, only in English, and Non-fiction, and in blog form. For the record though, I'm not saying Dave is anything like Sancho Panza. You can draw your own analogies here. Since I'm not selling this with taglines, you'll have to.

She is leaving

I try to be circumspect in how I discuss my co-workers, not so much generally, but in the specific. The foibles of a basically decent co-worker are certainly fodder for this blog, but not if they can't be separated some from the actual person, and tempered by that person's virtues even as that person is disguised. Curiously, it is always a delight and surprise to me, but some of my co-workers read this blog, and I have no wish to wound or to expose them.

But some don't read this blog. And some are not quite in that "basically decent" category.

While I suspect it is an immutable law of humanity that all people have some virtues, some people have cut wrecking paths through life. Occasionally those wrecking paths are run right through my work world. They have burned and scarred ground in the history of my library. And while these people are great for stories and staff unity, for the bizarre carnival colorings of our world, we should not lose sight that they are destroyers, and by their very nature have eschewed our protection. On the contrary, if we have any job it is to watch these people, keep them in check, and speak truth to them. Patching the wounds people like this inflict on the public and sometimes on my colleagues, for instance, is as much my job as is registering library cards. And speaking about a person like this with more clarity and lack of forgiveness than of a co-worker who is trying, is, to my mind, not just fair, but right.

And so I come to report today that one of these people is leaving us, retiring. I can see her now through the window I am sitting near, as I am typing, on my dinner break. My association with her is long and I still feel a certain kind of affection for her, a slight touch of sympathy. I am surprised it has survived, though there have been many times in our history where it has gone dark altogether. Like I said, small virtues, a sense of humor, playfulness even, can be readily apparent in her. Also like I said, all have some virtues, but a few flowers poking up through burnt and ruined ground makes for some heartbreaking poignancy while still remaining a long way from healing that ground. She has committed no great or singular crimes that I know of. Whatever evil is there is truly mundane and almost easy to forget, especially in these quieter days, when her fangs have dulled and her effect has been quieted by poor health, a mellowing of age and a diffusion of her personality in a changed Library dynamic. It would not be so hard to take the small virtues, the sins made comical by softening time, and the fact that it is over, that in a way it has been over for awhile, to say an almost nostalgic goodbye. There goes one of our own. There goes someone who has been part of what defined this place for thirty years. There goes someone around whom so much spent drama was once spun. There goes someone who we will never really be able to explain to the workers to come. There is no way to convey that persecuted, Eeyore gruffness of hers, that intensely unwelcoming approach to the patrons, that profound unhelpfulness. Who would believe it? The newer people already don't really understand who she is, not now that there are worse people, worse in a modern way, failing all of us and this place in a way that is contemporary. She is history. Couldn't we just wave as she drifts off into the horizon, shed a (metaphorical) tear for lost youth, different times, and long faded grievance?

But.

She hurt a lot of people. She hurt a lot of people. Maybe none so much that anyone carries so much of a wound anymore. There is that. But. People cried in the bathroom after encounters with her. They were locked in months long pitched battles about nothing, that they could not choose not to fight. She alone in her time filed more grievances than all the other people in my library system put together over that same time period. Thousands of patrons had their days ruined by that needlessly grudging, antagonistic, unhelpful woman. Some feared her. And none of it, not for a second, was for something constructive. It was always to serve some unresolved horror in herself, to protect her from any change, any self examination, and any reckoning.

Do I want her to read this? No. Do I want to hurt her? No. Would I be delighted at her self reflection, apology, and pursuit of redemption? I would be amazed and dazzled. But I do not believe it is coming. And to you great cultural purveyors of forgiveness I say this:

I sit here of sound mind and heart. My spirit is calm and without rancor and whole. Forgiveness is beautiful and powerful and profound, but forgiveness is only disrespected when bestowed unsought and unasked. And contrary to all you may have heard, wrongly given, it does not ennoble and heal the heart from which it issues, rather it degrades it because it plays too light with truth, and no heart can be sound without truth. The uncountable, dazzling thousands of stabs of pain my co-worker has inflicted stand in the small fabrics of history forever, and though I suppose it is possible for every one of them to heal in their victim's hearts, there is no chance of absolution without her, and the book of these deeds belongs open, forever.

My co-worker is leaving. The time when that would have engendered a profound relief and joy is passed. Now the newer people can merely see it is a good thing, and the veterans are merely... amazed. I don't believe I have ever had a colleague leave the Library without my feeling at least some touch of sadness. I have traveled a long way with this one and that touch is not so small here. But as long as there is a single star in the sky it will stand testament to the grief you have sown in this world, just as it will stand testament to the joy.

Flattering spam

I don't just want to be a megalomaniac, I want to be the greatest megalomaniac who ever lived!

-me

One regular feature for a person writing a blog is that we receive some very, very flattering spam. I have so far managed to prevent any of it from appearing on my blog because I think you would be less interested in hearing what iwouldliketostealyourhandbag@violentcriminal.eu has to say. But I am always delighted to know that he or she has "found my very interesting post." and is "certain I will be a blogger much to watch!"

Oh, sure, I look to be the eminently confident, self possessed blogger to you, but when soonhavingpowerofattorneyoveryou@insanesociopath.ru writes a comment to say, about my post on who the people in my neighborhood are, "You sir have given me much thinking in your wonderful post and I will be coming back here often. Check out my own site at..." my heart thrills to know, in reaching out to the world, I have touched someone so much that they would like to sell me shoes or steal my identity. Sure, we value my identity around my house, but it's so nice to know others out there do as well. So to all the nice spammers out there; thanks for letting me know, and I'll be sure to check out all your sites as soon as I can. So nice of you to leave those handy links! Your very general, but also perceptive and encouraging comments, totally keep me going. Bless you.

Old guys, a 5 minute story

Older guys tell me stuff. These guys are anywhere from 5 to 40 years older than me, and I like them. At least, in the context of being a library clerk, I like them. It's a perfect context for me. I'm at home there at that front desk, comfortable, welcoming, and my expectations for fun and freedom are pretty modest, so if someone wants to entertain me I'm all in. Plus, and perhaps most importantly of all, everyone is limited to, very roughly speaking, about 5 minutes maximum with me. All of this seems to engender a certain amount of formality, and, if the chat is going well, a certain amount of not entirely satisfied interest and enjoyment. This makes us happy to see each other the next time we meet. Also, these are people, so terrible deeds and darknesses of all kinds lurk in the corners. But I don't usually get to that stuff in five minutes. I just get highlights: one man's long travels in Europe, bar stories from distant, historical versions of my own cities, a lawyer's work stories. Could they become evil or boring? Sure, but not in five minutes. And I am no great interviewer, but again, in five minutes I don't have time to ask the wrong question or start to tell one of my own stories, breaking the flow. They give me a best of, and I am attentive.

Just the other day I got some interesting snippets from a man just back from Rome (this is a city I love, but I am still waiting to hear from someone who doesn't sort of hate it in the summer. The interesting parts were concerning his Roman cousins there, who were only there for a bit because they hate Rome in the summer too!). This lead to the next man picking up on the Italian stuff and telling me about enlisting in the Navy in WWII as an Italian-American. He said when war broke out they thought of putting Italian-Americans in internment camps like the Japanese-Americans until they realized there would be no one to fight their war for them. He said everyone wanted to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but he was underage so his distraught Italian mother had to accompany him on the bus downtown to sign for his enlistment. He said his mother, weeping, made the recruitment man promise to take care of her son. The recruitment man did promise, the man told me ruefully, a tone that spoke richly to many interesting stories of not being taken care of while fighting in the Pacific. But that was the end of it. People were in line behind him and we had to break off. Would I have liked to have heard all about his being in the Navy in the Pacific in WWII? Sure. Will I? I doubt it. Maybe I'll see him again in a week or a month or two. Maybe he'll tell me another five minute story. I hope so. I'm a big fan of five minute stories, after all, it's the kind I tell too.

Antiques, the cautionary tale

 


I went with my wife to a pretty river town and looked through many huge stores crammed with antiques. Yes, crammed. I really liked them and could see a bit of a path not traveled in myself. Some part of me could have become obsessively absorbed with all this stuff, with its light touches of rareness and history and time travel, with all the collecting and treasure hunting and value. But, as a career, for me, I think it would have failed hard. I am not good at sales, never mastering that essential emotional remove that is required for it. I am far too inclined to go all Daffy Duck and have vivid, feverish dreams of swimming in gold coins as any sale is negotiated. I'm not sure people would really like buying some Victorian doctor's case from a person who starts exulting flamboyantly about being a fabulously wealthy millionaire the second their $175 sale is completed. And besides that problem I suspect I would have formed deep emotional attachments to all my collections that no money exchange could adequately compensate for or reflect on my real valuing of the object. So if I went that route I probably would have ended up more on the hoarder end of the spectrum, which, I imagine, is where most antique dabblers end up anyway. A man at our recent garage sale (here, if you want to hear a small bit about it) told us about how he had to get a second house to store all his stuff. He has a 21 room mansion, he said, to keep it all. He said it could be in a museum, it should be in a museum. It should be a museum. 

But it shouldn't, really. It should be in an antique store somewhere, and he shouldn't have so much money that he can have a spare mansion just to store stuff he buys. Of course, I might not feel this way if he had bought something at my garage sale, and made me a millionaire. A millionaire! But he didn't buy a thing. I guess he just came to tell his Rime of the Ancient Mariner story. Every weekend he leaves behind his multiple houses that have no room for him anyway. He travels up and down the alleys of my city, seeking garage and yard sales at which he can tell his lonely story. It is his ritual and all he has left, if you don't count all the houses and stuff. But also it is his curse, to tell that story over and over throughout the city, and, perhaps, it is his gift, too, not buying, rather telling, telling us garage salers we have chosen the right path. And so we have.

Real truth behind shocking Library reading program story!

"Why," no one ever asks "does your blog never include outrage inducing stories that turn out to be totally deceptive and misleading?"

I love this question. Say more!

"Well, I read your blog and never walk away with a sense of fury about how terrible the world is and a desire to share my now totally confused, frothing misconceptions of reality in a viral way that will have the whole Library world talking about YOUR BLOG!"

You don't? Crap.

Well, thank you for your input. I try to be misleading but truth keeps leaking out like blood from a bad wound. And so I am consigned to be me, and you are consigned to being you. We must try and make peace with it.

But wait! Don't leave! I have a story the Library world is up in arms about! I will tell it more roughly, sort of, vaguely, as it was told to me by a co-worker. Good story, good co-worker, and if all the details turn out to be not exactly true it is all probably vastly more true than anything you can find about it anywhere else in the world. It will enrage you! You will go insane!

So, in Hudson Falls, NY, a kid in the Library there has won the reading contest at his local Library five times in a row now. Do you know this one? Well, it's true, He read more books than any other kid to take the prize five years running. Publicity spread about this because it is an amazing, once in a lifetime story. Oops, no, it isn't. I think the closest we can get to "once in a lifetime story" is that if his grandmother is around she was probably politely interested. The librarian over there was contacted about this five time winner by a reporter for reasons no one will ever know because it bears no relation whatsoever to news.  So the librarian said something about the kid dominating the contest and how it was discouraging the other readers. I believe she used some variation of the ill-advised word "hogging" and said something about switching to a drawing. The mistake here is the "hogging" thing. And there's a good chance there is something about the librarian hating the kid's mother, but unlike the hard facts I have been presenting, the hate part is just super perceptive speculation. Anyway, the pro and anti competitive reading sections of the internet went nuts over this and local news teams (the real villains in most news stories like this, keep your eye on the ball) went into high gear. They interviewed left and right, found dissenting opinions in that very library and puffed desperately on the super tiny flames. Fights raged across the internet, and many scoffing, hypothetical accounts of young, competitive athletes being asked to lose, just because they won too much, were invoked until the fires burned out of control. Everyone pretended to be sensible the whole time, even me.

Finally, as Fox news covered this wild controversy that shook the foundations of competitive bulk reading among children, the kid was asked what he thought. 

"I don't see what the big deal is." He said. "The prize was a T-shirt."

All the wisdom in the world

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
-Henry David Thoreau

I don't know what to do with this quote. It grabbed me by the scruff of the neck while I was looking at books about elephants. It left me wobbly. But everything leaves me wobbly lately; the Finnish book about the guy who leaves everything and travels with a rabbit for a year, elephants listening with their feet, by vibration, and just all this thinking about writing. I wander around the Library, composing in my head, fixing things in my mind that no one will ever be able to lay a hand on no matter how perfect the fix. And everywhere is answers...

Oh, here it is:

I have accumulated all the wisdom in the world. It is packed in my psyche like junk in some hoarders attic. I have all the wisdom in the world.

Now it is time to use some.

No one likes your music (with three links!)

There I am in the hold processing corner, also known as "The dream job location" where one quietly processes requests and answers the phone calls which are usually not that frequent, and, best of all, for me, listens to music. No one really talks about it being the dream job location because of clerk law (or is it fear?) number four: If you show joy in something it will be taken away from you.

Right, so I am listening to music. What is my current obsession? Jama Ko. Yes, that is a link, but you won't like it. Not if you're anything like my co-workers. I get very excited listening and call them over. "Here, co-worker, come listen to this amazing music!" They are polite, and do drop in for a listen. Why not, we're up for any distraction we can get at work. After two seconds they start talking to me. "No, no!" I am thinking "I was expecting you to listen in rapt silence for five minutes!" But perhaps I was not being realistic. There are reasons why no one likes your music at work.

One. 
Listening radius. If I point the little speakers at me and turn the music up I create a little circle where the music sounds clear and sensible and is possible to enjoy. It extends about seven feet in front of me and 15 feet behind me. Beyond that circle it is noise, it is like a dropped peach left in the sun. How could someone just walk by that peach and not recognize my excellent taste in fruit! So what that flies are swarming on it!

Two.
The second reason is that I am at my job location. Sitting there, at the phones, with my music, I am where I am supposed to be and so probably, in theory, I am somehow doing something related to my job. The people I am calling over to me are displaced people. Different rules apply to them. If they're standing around talking to me about anything they could be talking to me about something work related (remember, everything is work related!), but if they have a glazed, stoned look of trance-like ecstasy while listening to electrified lute music they might not be in a super productive looking mode. Even the teen librarian will keep his dancing to said music under 30 seconds, which brings us to the third reason.

Three.
People have other stuff to do. When we have stuff to do it seems really important to us, but if we've chosen not to do much for a bit people doing stuff can look a bit odd and manic and insensible. This creates a music appreciators divide.

Four.
I learned this so recently that there is a blog post about it (here). People are different than me and may have different taste, for instance, in music. Furthermore, even if they like really similar things and are open to new music, people will often be in a very different kind of musical mood than you.

So, in conclusion, I think maybe I should just try and listen to music at work for my own private enjoyment, if I can, just, you know, in the same way I blog. 

But, seriously, have you heard this? 

Notes to some people around here

 

 

Notes to some people around here

I was just wanting to dash off a few notes to people around here. They will never see them, but you will, and perhaps you'll pass them along to the people concerned if you run into them.
 

To the woman watching the youtube videos of octopuses on computer 42 upstairs:

Thank you. I really enjoyed them.
 

To the woman in the office with my supervisor all afternoon: 
 
You are always welcome here.


To the very exasperated lady I helped a lot at the front desk: 
 
Looking like famed British actress Judi Dench could be a source of joy in your life.


To my quiet reference co-worker who now says "Hi." and also now occasionally comes to me with questions: 
 
My virtues really start to shine through after five or six years, and I in no way hold your caution against you. 
 

To the young man with the t-shirt that says "I am immature, unorganized, lazy and loud, but I'm fun!":

Your t-shirt set up an array of expectations with me, none of which were met.


To the gigantic man who returned his internet guest pass to me and said "Thanks, chief.":

You have brightened my day.


To Lao Tzu, who said, in a book by Donald Rumsfeld (ick!), “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”:

That is totally harsh for bloggers and Taoist poets! 

What is beauty?

Have I mentioned how emotionally exhausting shelving in fiction can be? The books come flying out at me. They overload my curiosity which is wild and does better in calmer places. And I have no resistance to these books. They are all humming and burning with life. I don't even need to read them for half their content to leap out of the books and flood my emotions. The teen librarian over lunch asks me if I'm reading anything good. A nice question, but I don't know. I'm reading six books at home, five books at the Library, four books just while I'm shelving. They're piled up, I can't remember their names three minutes after putting them down. They're all good I guess. If I had to I could track most of them down and prepare a fervent evaluative speech for them, but it doesn't matter, not really. Most of them I only finish by a kind of accident because that also doesn't matter. The whole book or a paragraph or a synopsis is nearly the same to me. And anyway, I am shelving up here. I can't sit around reading these books through. A book seizes my attention and I can give it a minute; the cover, the quotes, the first paragraph, the last, but it's all way more than enough. It's all piercingly vivid. The book floods me with story and perspective and possibility. I stand dazed. I place the book carefully and stare blindly at the bindings, my mind reeling until I can shelve again. And I do, until the next exotic marvel of a volume seizes me by my very heart, pulls me in and breathes one brief, nearly toxic gust of pure magic into my face. My soul sprawls, too small for a world made like this, for the seething wonder of literature. "What is beauty but the beginning of a terror we can barely endure." Rilke said. He should know, just look at that sentence. Jesus.

Policy Genius

I was upstairs doing a spot of genre fiction shelving in between the eleven lunches I am eating today and I was just sort of in a receptive zone, perhaps due to all the food. Yes, a receptive zone, a kind of hypnotic other worldly openness to the firmament. I think that's the only way to account for the kind of profound inspiration that was visited upon me. And when I say this inspiration was visited upon me I say it because I feel it would be wrong for one lone human, one small library employee, to take credit for such velocity of vision. We are vessels for something greater, or can be, or, well, apparently, I am. And I mention all this to try and temper the vanity that is so easily stoked by dabbling in genius. Yes, I said it. Genius. But I am not a genius, probably, depending on how you define "genius". I am just a simple man plying my trade as best I can, a vessel, a conduit, merely someone chosen. Why was I chosen? I don't know. I was just shelving, quietly, earnestly, devotedly shelving and genius was thrust upon me. Did anyone ask me if I wanted this geniusness? No. Sure, I probably would have taken it, but mostly just to be nice, to help the world. I'm just saying I wasn't clamoring for it. I wasn't begging to be a genius. It happened to me, and I accepted it. And I hope you can accept all this in that vein.

So, anyway, there I am shelving along and suddenly this thought comes unbidden into my head: We should have a policy saying that books are to be shelved alphabetically by the authors' last name.

We do? Really? You're sure?

Hmmm. Good policy. Very sensible. Our policy and procedures manual should totally have one of those thumbs up, +1 kinds of things to click. It is one seriously great idea.

How you can be a librarian!

Yesterday, in speaking of the virtues of Little Free Libraries, I made some only mildly snarky mention of institutional libraries taking a cue from them in how we develop our own services, and in doing so also contributing to the improvement of Little Free Libraries. If I were you I would have been thinking "But aren't Little Free Libraries already basically perfect?

The answer to that is "NO!" Thank god someone was thinking about Little Free Libraries being perfect so that I could correct them. It's kind of the linchpin of my whole post here! The fact is that I have been keeping a close eye on Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood and they suffer from one important, little mentioned, glaring weakness:  People dump terrible books into them. The average Little Free Library I look at is about one quarter real books a person might want to read and three quarters books people seem to have been unable to sell at garage sales. I was recently at the Grand Marais Library and they had a version of a Little Free Library on a section of shelves at the front of their branch. This is totally what I was advocating yesterday! Good for them! Unfortunately that shelf of books was possibly the most pathetic collection of books I have ever seen gathered in one place. It looked a lot like the romance section of my own Library circa 1997, but with the more popular "quality" titles removed. I even had the sad, cynical, fleeting thought that it was all like that just to make their slightly dicey regular collection look better by comparison. But really, it was just neglect. The interesting thing is that this all makes Little Free Libraries actually an argument for the value of librarians. You'd think librarians would be all over this argument for their necessity. But often I get the impression that librarians are conflicted about their roles, sometimes more comfortable with their role being objective (it isn't), and less comfortable with their role as curators (have courage, embrace it!). Well, if they refuse to step up, it is fortunate I have become increasingly comfortable with the idea of anyone being a librarian. If books in a Little Free Library look like bookstore rejects they probably are. Go ahead and take a chance on weeding them. Take all those crappy books to your local brick and mortar Library and donate them. People will buy practically anything.  Just don't forget to replace all that drek in that now much emptier Little Free Library with some books you loved. Bam, you're a librarian.