Blog of the Last Harbor Library: The question of over staffing

This is the second post in the blog of The Last Harbor Library.

The first post concerned our blogger, Nate, being instructed to write a blog, for the library, by the imperious leader of The Last Harbor Library, Amelia Browning. The post also concerned Nate's speculation as to the reasons for this instruction. The post can be found here.

Explanation for this blog within a blog can be found here.

Last Harbor's blog as a separate, but only barely fleshed out at this time, entity, can be found here. 

The Question of Over Staffing

I have received two indications that people have found their way to this newly minted Last Harbor Library Blog. The first was an actual comment on the blog page itself. A patron, or a person who roams very widely and randomly across the Internet, wondered what the books were that are in the background of the picture of our ferocious leader, Amelia Browning (below).

  It would be easy for me to glibly say that whatever the books are behind her, they will definitely be Classics. Very Important Classics! However, I took that picture, in our library, and so can find exactly what those books are. It turns out the truth is much, much worse than their being mere classics, and I think will indicate to you how profoundly confused our library is about what anyone in our town, or who visits our town, would ever want to read. Ms. Browning, in that picture, is standing in front of a prodigious shelf of books of Greek Literature. Indeed, it is but a small part of what we have of Greek Literature. I have tried to match up where she is with what we can see over her shoulders. Mostly what we can see is the Godley translations of the Persian Wars books, by Herodotus, who, it turns out, lied like a rug. I think we can also see some books by Hesiod (widely considered to be the first blogger), there might be visible a book that's sort of by Heraclitus (it's largely of things other people said he said. Heraclitus is famous for "No man ever steps in the same river twice." and has been dining out on that quote for millennia), and finally there's a good bit of Hippocrates. I won't insult you by identifying who he is, but I cannot resist mentioning that not every library on the North Shore of Lake Superior carries 2,400 year old books on what to do about "Haemorrhoids". 

If you wish for more detail and to peruse specific volumes Ms. Browning will be quite keen to walk you through the collection there. I'm far too busy writing a blog (in the spirit of Hesiod) to help you further than I have already done here.

The second indication that someone found our new blog was more blunt. Kent Carlson, a regular, walked up to the front desk, leaned on it, and said, with a twinkle in his eye "I hear you're over staffed."

This sounded familiar, but it took me a moment to place it. I let that viewpoint of our staffing drop in my very first blog post. "I said that, didn't I? We're over staffed?"

Kent nodded.

" I guess I should see if it's actually true. Would you care to come with?"

Kent gestured in a rather grand manner for me to lead on, and I headed to a readily accessible staff area.

Anna Selly, Page

If you have ever worked with the public you probably have one question right now. "What are you doing taking a wild patron back into the private works of your institution?"

Bah! I say. It's good for you, builds character, lets you see things with a fresh eye. Plus, and here is the big boon: when one has an august patron in tow, one is suddenly on library business. If I wander the library while I'm supposed to be at the front desk I am liable to attract the piercing glares of my colleagues, or, worse, my employer, whose glare can leave scars. With Kent in tow I might get a question or two ("What's up?" or "Is there anything I can help you two with?" To which I could answer "Mr. Carlson was interested in some of our operations."), but I will attract no enmity.

Of course, to tow a patron around they have to be of the right stuff. Kent Carlson is. He is large, bald, older, quiet, wry, and has absolutely nothing to do. I know he has nothing to do because:

1. He spends almost as much time in the library as me.

2. He spends almost as much time in Kelsey's Pub as he does in the library.

3. He does not read.

4. He does not drink.



 
Kent Carlson, Patron



I know that I earlier referred to Mr. Carlson as "august".  I know that he may be seeming less so to you now. But our library is so under visited in the winter that mere voluntary presence lends even the most dissolute character gravity. Also, managing to spend your whole life in the town of Last Harbor, make no great enemies, and acquire no police record, puts you quite high on the august curve. And for human beings it all comes down to the curve. Kent Carlson would be nearly a pauper in New York City, and he would be nearly a King in Madagascar. He would be insignificance itself in Los Angeles, but in the Last Harbor Library, he is august.

And that is the story of how Kent Carlson and myself went on a survey of the staff of the Last Harbor Library. Because it was mid afternoon we saw most of them, and we saw what they were doing. I look forward to telling you who and what that all was, and to answering the question of whether we are over staffed, but it will have to wait until my next post. A blog post should never be too terribly long, and this one is already half way to being so.

-Nate

A book moves somewhere and I know it

I have not been getting enough sleep lately. Late at night I go downstairs into my bitterly cold basement, turn on a small electric heater, and wrap a giant faux sheepskin blanket around me. For some reason this makes me feel like Victor Hugo, so, naturally, I write. Blog posts, yes, but I try to make them as good as his poem The Ocean's Song, which is not as high a bar as one might think. And then I go to bed and get six hours of sleep. It is a well known scientific fact that I require 11 hours of sleep each night to function properly. So I am spending a lot of time in a strange hallucinatory daze at the library. This daze makes me a less efficient worker, but it also gives me access to strange and heightened clerking abilities. So, though most of what I am capable of at work in this sleep deprived state is, 1. reading books, 2. leaning on things, and 3. staring into space, I am also at my peak of what I'll call Heightened Library Awareness, or HLA. This is a skill that leads to feats that, from the outside, can look a bit like magic, or ESP, but really just has to do with the power of the human mind.

I'll explain.

There was a book that I loved when I was younger called The Tracker. It is Tom Brown's story of growing up spending a lot of time in the Pine Barrens, in the woods, and it is about learning about tracking, and the wilderness, from an older Native American teacher. I'll add it to my list of beloved books (here). But what I am thinking of now is the quote on the back. Tom Brown says:

When somebody moves something in your house, you notice it. When somebody moves something in the woods, I notice it.

Well, when somebody moves something in the library, I notice it.

Tom Brown, in this entertaining book, recounts some amazing abilities, say, being able to observe a few scuffs in the dirt, a mark on a tree, a bit of grass out of place, and construct an account of the travels of a small bird that ends in finding it on, yes, over on that branch there. And there is the bird.

It is not only what he has learned, but his deep presence and familiarity with the woods.

I am very familiar with this library. I am interested, and I am here a lot. Sometimes I'll be listening to the radio, or hear people discussing books, and a book will come up that I've never read, but invariably the cover will appear vividly in my mind, perhaps a blurb from the back, and its precise location on the shelves. Sometimes a patron will come to the front desk and say "I just have a quick question." and I will know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the question is.

But it is only when I am exhausted, with my conscious mind too bleary to put up a fight, that my strongest HLA, heightened library awareness, comes through.

A woman comes to the desk.

"It's in the Board Room." I say. "Go upstairs. Left, and left again."

Not believing I can know the answer to her question before she asks, she asks. "Where is the PACA meeting?"

"It's in the Board Room." I say. "Go upstairs. Left, and left again."

I am walking through the library in a daze, perhaps on some vague mission to get some Mo Willems books from the kids' room, when a man at a computer waves an arm to flag me down. I don't even look. "After you hit print, select "shrink to fit page" on the lower right." I say it not even breaking my shambling stride.

"How did you know that?" The man calls after me. "How did you know that!"

I'm in the back tending the machine, or leaning on the machine, or whatever. A couple co-workers come back because a book that a patron had on a table got "cleaned up" and put onto the machine. No one remembers what the book was. It could be anything in 25 bins. I walk to one bin and pull out a paperback. "What about this one?" They laugh. I am being silly again. "No, no, try this one." I say. Me and my comedy routines. One co-worker heads back to the patron for more information. I stand there in my stupor saying "This one. This one." 

It ends up being that one indeed.

Even writing this Dave asks to use the computer for a minute. He needs to put something to mending.

"It's stained." I say. And though you cannot see that until you open the book, it is.

So how do I do this? How do I know all this?

I've seen it all. Over and over. And I am so tired. Too tired to pretend I don't know exactly what's going on in this place just to be polite. I will tell you this though. All of these magic tricks put together are probably not worth being able to get a whole cart of books shelved without staring into space drooling for 45 minutes.

I have got to get some sleep.

Mo Willems Fan Fiction

Highlights from an hour at the library front desk

1. Waived $24 in fines from a patron's record due to their medical emergency involving a detached retina. Did not ask for proof, but as a reward, apparently, for my waiving the fine, I did get to see a picture of the bloody eyeball.

2. Was able to accurately answer, in one try, the patron's question of "Oh, what's the name of that woman author who's so funny?"  with "Janet Evanovich."

3. Man had a cell phone conversation while I was helping him so I decided to hold him up to public ridicule by publishing his name shamingly on my widely influential blog. I privately recanted of my plans when he nicely apologized, but I'm keeping a bloody eyeball on him.

4. Checked out BY HAND (sort of like in the old days) 42 books to a family that forgot its library cards. I told them that it would help facilitate the check in process if, when they returned them, they included a synopsis of each book.


That concludes the highlights. Thankfully there were no lowlights.

Wabi Sabi Library

Wabi Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic valuing the imperfection in things, the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. The slow, the weathered, the authentic and the unfinished. I am very enthusiastic about Wabi Sabi and seek at all times to bring the principles and beauty of Wabi Sabi to my Library. This is why when someone comes to my desk and says "I would like to renew this book." I say "I would like for this to happen too. Perhaps if we both concentrate."

Am I being a smart aleck? No indeed. I am merely bringing a curve to our interaction, weathering it, aging it. I am saying "You have come to no slick, plastic, technologically clean library. I am not a figure of precise efficiency. We just both happen to be here. Let me see if I can help you out. I am not slow, but we must respect time."

I work in a white library, high ceilings, more white, and glass. It strives for a clean look, sometimes minimal, sometimes plastic, sometimes simple, and sometimes dreaming it is an expression of technology itself. There is little to recognize in it of the natural world, and yet ever it spills in. Real light falls through the windows. Weathered people walk through in their thousands, all snowflakes, not a single one here for the same thing. Our general plans for what we do in the library always crack. Every person in the library uses it ever so slightly to the left or right, above or below, before or after, of its intended purposes.

The books themselves start as a replicative technology. We get our small share of a thousand print run, or our few of ten thousand identical copies. But our library wears them into unique, battered, smoothed, and decaying objects. What library user who gets to choose from three copies on the shelf of the same old book doesn't know this? The cover of one is grubby and beaten. Another seems swollen and loose. A last one is stained but pleasantly squared. Our beating heart is all these books, shaped by hands into their own fingerprints, or, like the toe of a beloved marble statue, kissed away.

My library, a modern institution, is ever striving for currency, perfection, stasis, vacuum sealed freshness. It is eager to be slick and vital and rich and fresh. But it will never happen. The paint will keep cracking. I will keep letting the wind in. I will be bending the books. For good or ill we will all touch everything here, aye, the world will touch everything, and if we let it, make it better.

The six joys of training people

Just a few days ago I was telling you about our five new clerk trainees. This led to a discussion of our hiring processes, which caused the post to get so long that the only way I could figure out how to end it quickly was to employ the plot and characters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Oddly, though, none of that was what I meant to write. You'd be surprised how little control I have over what I write here. There's a steering committee in my brain. AAAHHH! THERE'S A STEERING COMMITTEE, IN MY BRAIN! They're nice though. Sometimes I think they're even nicer than me, so, it's okay.

Anyway, lately we have all these new people we're training. In the old days, when my job was really brutal and awful, I used to love training people. Somehow it was way better just telling a person what to do in detail than actually doing it. Now that my work level is tolerable, and with the cold it has been exceptionally quiet and so very tolerable, it has been a little sad not to be able to disappear into my own little private tasks and routines. But as I took my turns training various people along, I did find things to appreciate about it all. Indeed, I found six things to appreciate:

1. The stretching of the old prognostication muscles. How fast can I spot just what sort of weakness the trainee will ultimately have? The answer is, pretty darn fast. Trainee number one is aloof and will end in resenting everything and everyone. Trainee number two will be forever unable to learn a third gear to shift into. Trainee number three will never know how to stop and breathe and direct her energy properly and thus will soon drive all her co-workers mad.

2. I get in on the ground floor of forming their habits and philosophy. "This isn't an official rule. You are technically allowed to do this, but if you do so you will be widely resented."  I'm pretty sure I said something just like that this week. Sometimes I frighten myself!

3. I get the feeling of great skill, speed and mastery, by comparison. Watching a trainee empty a bin into boxes knowing that they are taking 12 times as long as I take can be a little frustrating, but it also makes me feel almost supernaturally fast.

4. I get to talk and talk about clerking. Yes, I get to muse, philosophize, lecture and instruct all about clerking, about the history of clerking and about the history of clerking at the library. You may well wonder why anyone would want to do that. My only answer, for good or ill, is 300 exhaustive blog posts. I hope you have read them all.

5. Training these people is my only hope of learning their names. Actually, I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I still don't really know them, mostly.


6. When they are my deeply embittered co workers I will be able to remember their sunny innocence. They won't believe me, but I'll know.

Real submarines under water

A couple days ago we opened a discussion of the library sub pool which led to a silly joke about submarines. My imagery for that joke was based on a Disneyland ride that I loved, The Submarine Ride. It required an E-ticket! I grew up in L.A. with a fierce and hungry, nay, desperate, love for Disneyland. The E-ticket, as the highest level ticket, was a very precious commodity in my youthful trips to Disneyland because my family was of the horrible sort that would never consider getting more tickets than those that came in the standard entrance book. The submarine ride was a touch overvalued as an E-ticket, but would have been brilliant as a D-ticket ride. Not least because there were almost no good D rides. In the Submarine Ride one walked down into a submarine, sat at a porthole, and went on a thrilling adventure in an underwater world. I believe there were mermaids, shipwrecks, an octopus, a squid, polar ice caps, a sea serpent, fish. Plus I think it was one of the cooler (temperature-wise) rides, or gave the illusion of being cooler due to its watery nature. This was a great benefit in the hot summers when we usually visited. The Submarine Ride closed in 1998, which is later than I would have guessed. It was originally supposed to have real fish back when it was built in the fifties. I am thankful that that didn't pan out since I don't think it would have been in the proper Disneyland spirit.

 



When I was eleven and a trip to Disneyland was in the offing (it happened maybe once a year) I would make obsessive lists and plans concerning my time in Disneyland. This is actually something that carried over into my adult plans for trips to Europe, which, come to think of it, are just versions to me of trips to Disneyland, complete with their E-ticket rides (Villa Borghese, Sant'Ivo Sapienza). And why not. After all, what was Disneyland in the sixties and seventies but a synthetic vacation tour of the world, and one with many stops in Europe. One simple thing I might do, in my youth, just for starters, is list the E-ticket rides in order of quality. It would run off of the above E-ticket like so, though the commentary is modern:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean
The greatest amusement park ride ever made. It's the mood, no, the fake sky, no, the shanties, no, the rapids...

2. Haunted Mansion
I was never entirely keen on the crowdedness of the rooms at the start of the attraction, or the stuff jumping out later on. Other than that it is all dark, glowy, spooky magic.

3. Matterhorn Bobsleds
The thrill ride that a slightly timid ten year old can handle the second he is tall enough.

4. Jungle Cruise
A comedy performance! A boat ride! Wild animals that are fake!

5. Submarine Voyage
Hey, this is our topic today!

6. It's a Small World
The only thing that allows this ride onto the tail end our hallowed list here is the fact that it is in a boat. I feel passionately about any ride that takes place on the water. Plus it gave one something to sing incessantly for the next month.

The other "rides" listed on the ticket are pure chaff as "E" attractions. Do these people seriously think I would want to go to America Sings more than getting another precious visit to The Pirates of the Caribbean? Did I ever go to America Sings? Certainly not while there was a ticket system. There was also one C-ticket ride that was good enough to be an E-ticket ride, maybe about on par with The Submarine Ride. That was Adventure Thru Inner Space (1967 to 1985), the ride where one shrinks smaller than an atom. You shrink smaller than an atom! And there was no movie tie in! Actually, come to think of it, there was no movie tie in with any of these. And everything was analog, illusions, yes, but existing in the real world.

Ah Disneyland.

Blog of the Last Harbor Library: five reasons

This is the first post of the blog within a blog of The Last Harbor Public Library. For details concerning this project consult here. You can also view this fictional blog over on its dedicated site, here. I will be double posting.

 

The imperious leader of our library has instructed me to write an official blog. This is that blog, the blog of The Last Harbor Memorial Library. Our head librarian, benefactor, and local tyrant, Amelia Browning, who issued these instructions, is pictured above. Seized with initiative I have leapt to work on this blog and from this moment on intend to keep you fully informed as to every unimportant thing that happens here at the library. Perhaps you are wondering if I am approaching this blog in the proper spirit, if this is what Ms. Browning had in mind to represent The Last Harbor Memorial Library, the finest library on the viciously cold and nearly abandoned shores of Lake Superior. I don't know, but I will grant you that it would perhaps be fair to present to you the discussion of my instructions so that you can decide for yourself.

"Nathaniel?"

"Yes, Amelia" A frown at my response. Perhaps she would prefer to be called Ms Browning. Perhaps her wrist was bothering her.

"I'd like you to start one of these "blogs", for the library." She said "blogs" like it was a word that did not belong in her mouth.

I regarded her. "Why is the head of one of the most technology averse libraries in the country suggesting I write a blog?"

"I am not technology averse. We have the Internet." She said, waving a disdainful backhand at our barely enough share of computers.

"You loathe them."

"They are useful tools. Nothing more."

"A blog?" I asked.

"We need to communicate better with our next generation." I believe Ms. Browning considers there to be only two generations. I, at 40, belong to the inscrutable, immature one. "Library Journal speaks well of them and I thought you would be suitable for this endeavor."  Aha. Library Journal magazine has a biblical like authority with Ms. Browning. Unless she doesn't agree with what they have to say, in which case whatever article is involved ceases to have ever existed. Why the "Every Library should have a Library Blog" article made it to the biblical side of things is the subject of this initial blog post.

"Okay." I said cheerfully.

 She looked at me with suspicion and headed towards her accustomed information desk to decide whether the latest Booker prize winner was of adequate quality for our library. But before she got very far she stopped, turned, and said "Try to put in a good word for Literature, Nathaniel."

"Will do ma'am." I said, tipping an imaginary hat.

And she was gone, if about 70 feet away can be considered to be gone.

Because our library is privately endowed, overstaffed, and pretty well empty due to Winter and our unpopular commitment to quality in our circulating materials, I have had a great deal of time to consider the mysterious reasons behind this blog request. Fortunately I feel free to give full reign to my imaginations here because Amelia Browning will never, ever actually read this blog. Which, of course, is part of the curiosness of why she would ask one to be written.

I have come up with five reasons.

1. She is ready to make some compromises in the battle for Literature, so long as she needn't dirty her hands.

2. Like one of Bertie Wooster's aunts she feels I need improvement and engagement.

3. She has occasional fits in which she is under the illusion that our library is "With It" because we have the Internet and carry Catcher in the Rye.

4. She thinks that despite the fact that our library, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is the most famous building of any kind on Minnesota's North Shore, a National Landmark, and virtually the only tourist attraction in our town, people are so immersed in their Internet that they have yet to hear of it.

5. She has not the faintest idea of what a blog is, and has decided to bluff her way through.

Whatever her reasons The Last Harbor Memorial Library now has a blog. You should be able to find it on our website as our website is so threadbare it will be easy to pick out. You can also follow us, by email, if you fill in the box to the right. I must go now as I have a patron to help. No, my mistake. It is just Lawrence, who has confused our Frank Lloyd Wright building with the True Value Hardware store once again. Still, I believe my assistance may be required.

-Nate

We sprinkle the sunrise with dew!

We have recently been training at my library a rather large group of new library clerks. All of these people are destined for the sub pool where they will ride around in underwater vehicles viewing fish, shipwrecks, and mer-people. 

Hmm, that sounds odd. Wait, let me check my notes here.

Hold on.

Ah, no, not submarines! In a pool! No, ha ha ha. Substitutes! In a, er, a pool, but one without fish. I write my notes so small on these post it notes that I think you'd agree this is a very understandable error.

This is how everyone now starts out, or gets their feet wet, in clerking at my library, as a substitute. When we post an actual job, people with regular hours have the first shot at it. It's their way to improve or increase their hours. But then, even if they get that job, which one of them will, their old hours will become vacated. So then that job will now be posted. Eventually it will all filter down to some horrible position at a branch with a deranged supervisor, probably for two hours a day, one early in the morning, one later in the evening, mostly weekends, that no one with regular hours would consider swapping to. At this point the substitutes have priority. This is their way to get regular hours. Once they have these crappy hours they are regular hours employees who can now apply for a position with more, or better, hours when it comes available. This structure has been in place for at least several years now, with everyone coming up through this odd sort of minor league system.

One would think that this massive filtering system would create a very refined, high quality clerk staff. Three hundred people apply for a sub position (perhaps some of them hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendary giant squid!). A battery of tests weeds out two thirds of them. A team of managers pour over the applications and eliminate more. Exhaustive interviews are conducted of the most promising of the remaining 100, and five lucky, talented, or possibly virtuous applicants are selected to be substitute clerks and given gold tickets. This group of five shows up at the massive front gates of our library and the gates are unlocked for the first time in decades. The group is taken inside, shown our wonders and then is rigorously trained. Then they work as substitutes throughout the system where everyone can size them up and decide if they have what it takes. A new, typically awful job opens up, and more interviews are conducted. Only the best of these subs are then hired as real clerks, for some paltry hours regular position. We watch them under fire some more, and only hire them into a bigger position when they've shown they can hold up under this array of adverse conditions. It is an amazing system.

Except, oddly, mysteriously, the quality of all the clerks that advance to our highest rungs, that is, to enough hours to sort of live on, is pretty much the same as if we chose them all randomly in one fell, unfiltered swoop, if we just stuck five golden tickets into library books and hired whoever found them. Under this laboriously detailed, slow trickle up system, we get bright people who will take care of things without anyone even knowing about it, and we get people who will take 15 minutes to determine that a DVD case is not empty. We get people who can use their own judgement and people who only strictly and absolutely follow policy that they are unclear on. We get people for whom the buck stops here and people so confused by the buck that they sneak it into the recycling bin.

So what's going on? 

At my library system hiring is a seal. It is tenure and a lock. After you are hired you will never truly be evaluated again. Probationary periods, yearly reviews, internal hiring processes are all window dressing. Hand us that golden ticket that allows you merely to occasionally substitute, and, barring crime, you are golden forever as well. People may not want to hire you up the rungs, but wait it out and eventually you will have no competition, eventually they will have to hand over some of those precious hours. And each hour is like a ratchet. Once given it can never be taken away. Part of me is absolutely horrified by this, and is keen to come up with all kinds of solutions and explanations, evaluations and criticisms, which would make this much too long of a blog post. So I will give this blog post to that other part of me. The part of me that is sort of happy about this bizarre system of extreme tenure. The part of me who enjoys the outsized massiveness of this job security. Who revels in a system that forces managers to go through four months of constant interviews to hire for one position because its overwhelming formality dooms it to domino into six sequential positions. And I am okay with all these mad things because this same part of me also suspects that if you hire five people anywhere, you will get the same five types no matter what you do. This part of me suspects that you could gather the greatest hiring team in the world and you will still end up with exactly these five people:

One who will feel horribly entitled. 
One who will be gluttonous. 
One who will seek constant mindless stimulus. 
One who will chew gum incessantly and chatter on about trivia. 
And only one who will truly love books, carefully treasuring the one he receives each year on his birthday and carefully reading it one page at a time to make it last. And he will have been kind to his bedridden Grandparents who all four shared the same bed in an impoverished hovel. He will be deserving. And if we are lucky, he will write a blog.

Welcome to my Broken Library

Come on by! We have many wonderful broken things at my library. Broken systems, broken equipment, broken people, broken programs, all kinds of broken things. But you'll want to hurry down because our selection of broken changes constantly and without notice. If you were wanting to use internet computer 107 with the headphones torn out of it, it could, without any advance notice, be fixed. You may now have to proceed to internet computer 73 if you want one with headphones torn out of it. Of course, its changeability and uncertainty can be part of the charm of my broken library. Will you get the broken clerk who will take twenty minutes to take care of your two minute task and throw in, for good measure, a complicated error that will cost you $8.00?  Maybe. There are no guarantees here. You could get stuck with someone entirely competent and helpful. But don't despair. There are so many broken things to find I'm sure you'll have better luck somewhere else in the library. We have broken things all over the place so you're bound to run into something. We have broken things for enjoying here, and we have broken things for taking to go. You never know if any DVD or CD in our library will work on any device you have. There is a very good chance that any case that holds more than one disc will instantly disassemble into 11 pieces at the slightest touch. Our books tend to be more sound, but exciting discoveries like missing pages or detachable innards are findable by even our most casual users. You may even get the full glorious experience and checkout something broken, conscientiously return it to a broken clerk, and end up with a broken charge for it on your record. Then your car may be broken into under our broken parking lot light. Keep your fingers crossed.

 Might I direct your attention to our giant slide projector. No, no, it is a very expensive piece of equipment and is in perfect working order. It's what the slide projector is showing that's broken. It's only for a real connoisseur of broken libraries, for those of us with refined tastes. Currently featured is a rotation of 30 or so black and white photographs from WWII, not of the war overseas, but "A New Look at the "Good War". These pictures are sort of interesting. Actually I vaguely remember that they were very interesting when I first watched them in August. We have shown these 30 pictures, at about 6 feet by 10 feet, on the giant wall of the main area of our library, every moment we have been open since, roughly, late August. My figures say 1,170 hours of showing the same 30 pictures. To put that in perspective find a picture of people dancing at a nightclub during World War II. Got it? Good. Now look at it for 39 hours. You can take breaks. I like how the title for the series of photos says something like "Watch for our history programs this September through November". I'm pretty sure there's something seriously broken in there. You really have to pay attention to this sort of brokenness in a different way than if a ceiling fixture leaks ocher fluid, or there's an incessant buzzing coming from our intercom system, but the rewards can be infinitely greater.

You may be thinking "I love your broken library so much I wish I could be there all the time! I wish I could work there!" But you may be wondering "Are all the broken benefits of the broken library available to its employees?"

They are! It is incredibly broken to work here! One of our most important staff computers has been dead now for ten days and communications with our Computer Services staff suggest we have a whole broken department! The phones we use here were donated by the Republican National Convention. Why would Republicans donate phones to a Socialist institution? Because these phones are all broken! We have four broken bins, two broken loaders, a pair of broken speakers, several broken display fixtures, shelves of broken books, a sort of broken water dispenser, and a vending machine that appears to be broken about half the time. I don't use it, but people get very excited about its brokenness and cover it in affectionate notes. Our organizational structure has always been broken. My current count on broken co-workers stands at two fully broken, and at least seven mostly broken.


So, yes, it is paradise. A broken paradise. Come on down here! Grab your broken bicycle, see if you can get your broken car running, or just hobble in on your broken ankle because you are going to love our broken library. I mean, if you can get in. The handicapped door has not been working so great lately.

 

Frozen library

By the time this post goes live our ferociously cold, minus twenty something weather will have begun to fade. According to predictions we will soon see temperatures inch their way above zero. Our little weather emergency will be over. But, like most not too horrible library emergencies, it was fun while it lasted.

We started with advance warning of the imminent cold front and an accompanying rising hysteria about it on the weekend. While the weather was still in the twenties our DVD section was mobbed. Traditionally disdained movies like Birdemic: Shock and Terror or the loathsome I'm Not There, were greedily scooped up and taken out of the library for the first time in years. We can only hope the discs still remember how to spin in the disc drives. All 3,000 people I helped that day said to me "Stay Warm" to which I invariably replied "Warmth is for the weak." Unless I replied "You too." or "I'll need to since we've decided to turn off the library's heat as a cost saving measure this week."

The heart of the cold wave struck early Monday morning. When I arrived at the library, at my appointed time, I was informed that seven people had called in, unable to come in for various reasons, mostly transportation related. The fact that being short seven people made very little difference here was faintly alarming. I took comfort in the fact that I wasn't one of the seven people and so could hang on to my illusions that I am the linchpin whose absence would bring this library to a horrible, grinding halt. Throughout the day, when people owed us money, I waived all their fines while being as unfriendly as possible. Then, just before they hated me, I would say "I waived your fines and was cold about it for a reason. It was a cold waive. Get it, a cold wave?" If they didn't pretend to laugh I added all their fines back on.

During the day it wasn't as quiet as one might have anticipated with minus 50 wind chills. Some people were perhaps trying to assert how intrepid they were, some maybe had nowhere else to go. At two the coffee shop closed because they are heartless, weak kneed Capitalists, leaving only us public loving Socialists to enrich and serve the frozen community. By evening my library did get as close to as quiet as it does. We are too big to really empty, but 25 or 35 visitors, mostly on computers, feels pretty close to empty. It freed up our staff and our staff's special guests, to go outside and hurl water in the air and watch it flash freeze, turning instantly to mist and drifting into the night sky.

At 8:40 I had to go out and unlock the backup return bin. It was only minus 17 at the time, with minus 40 wind chills, so there was no need for a jacket or hat or anything. I wanted just to, you know, see. The whole thing only takes about a minute or a minute and a half. It really wasn't too bad. When the wind gusted on my bare wrists though they ached like they were horribly bruised, and it was only when I walked back inside that I realized I was suddenly on the verge of being freezing, shiveringly cold. Before I walked into the library though a woman said "I can't believe you're out here dressed like that." to which I replied "Look who's talking, you don't even have a hat!"

When it was time to go everyone's car started up just fine. There was some preemptive starting them up, but I figured if the car got them to us it could get them home too, and I found no frozen corpses in the parking lot today.

Things are pretty well back to normal now. They say minus 13 tonight, but you get acclimated. I doubt it will even make my wrists hurt.

 

My brain on cat

I was working on our giant, musclebound, sometimes reminds me of Lenny from Mice and Men, automated check in machine. Kafka, the library cat was dozing in a nearby blue transit box, when, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a book. Someone returned a book! They do that a lot at my job. Aye, they do it so often that it erases a good deal of the pleasure of it. Nevertheless, since absolutely no text of any kind is allowed to pass before me without my reading it, I read the title: You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secret of Happiness by Julie Klam. 

I make no judgement against this book. Indeed I could conceivably decide to read this book seeing as dog books tend to have a much higher rate of quality than books about any other animal, certainly better than books about cats. But we've covered all that (here), and it was not what was running through my mind when I saw that book. What leaped to my mind when I read the title You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secret of Happiness was:


I would rather be sad like a cat than happy like a dog.

In praise of Rex Stout

It is a secretly held conviction of mine that all art is leftist.

"Not much of a secret" you might say "If you're going around telling everyone on your blog."

But you'd be surprised at just how well contained and concealed everything I say here remains. People do not discuss amongst themselves. They like to put what I say in a tiny box, then put that box in a slightly larger tiny box, then put that box in a jar, then find an obliging old woman on a park bench somewhere smoking a cigar and ask her to exhale smoke into the jar. They seal the jar quickly before the cigar smoke can escape. Then they put the jar with other jars in shoebox which they stack in a closet. Metaphorically. Some of this is speculation. But I think it supports my position since you have already ceased considering my secretly held conviction and allowed it to retreat back into privacy.

Nevertheless, I do think all art is leftist. So I like it when a good artist casually throws that blunt, radical humanism right up front. I have been reading, with great pleasure, a variety of Rex Stout books, all concerning the detective Nero Wolfe, and related by Archie Goodwin. And to my enormous joy they are all filled with bits of this casual leftism. The best Rex Stout book I have read yet is called The Doorbell Rang (now on my official list of beloved books, which is starting to get more organized. The list is here). The Doorbell Rang is a mystery. But it is also, casually, about how the FBI is basically a force ruled by corrupt self interest and assertion of power. This was written during the Hoover era. It had a nice matter of fact quality to it. It worked pretty much like if some hot mystery writer wrote a book that was just casually assuming that the department of Homeland Security was commonly and normally unscrupulous and evil. They are, so, why not just let it be. It doesn't have to be the main point. It's not an expose', it just is so.

Here's another one like that from Rex Stout. It's from Over My Dead Body, which was written in, maybe 1939. Just a casual tossed off paragraph. A bit jokey, sure, but an awfully good joke. So, watch this little bit, thrown out from a late thirties book:

(Nero Wolfe is speaking) When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn't occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.

Perfect, prescient and immensely suited to our times. It is too good for my own shoebox collection of jars, so I share it with you.

A Plan

Traditionally, or erratically, I have treated Sunday as casual day on the blog and everyone wears dockers. Whoa, where did that come from? Dockers? Khakis? Izod? I don't know. I just pull things from the culture. I read about casual day. I make associations, but I haven't really experienced casual day. For most of my life I have worked at a library where I tend to show up in my pajamas and have run into no particular problems doing so. I like to make the patrons feel at home. I don't want patrons to feel like I'm showing them up with my fancy job and clean clothes and teeth and everything. It's a matter of respect.

Anyway, ahem, gosh, so Sunday. Right. Unless I'm just cram full of real heavy duty blog posty kinds of things, with THEMES and RUMINATIONS it's all just a bit more chatty on Sunday. I tell you about PLANS and about BLOG PROJECTS and about how kafka the library cat has tasted organic, cream top whole milk and we have, like, a junkie cat on our hands. You know, that kind of thing. So today, in that spirit, I am going to tell you about AN AMBITIOUS PLAN. Doesn't that sound fun. At first I thought I would do this project on Sunday, but when I started to tell you about this all here, I got all sad. I started having a very, very nice time chattering to you without THEMES, and I realized: wouldn't my AMBITIOUS PLAN go much better on Saturday? I decided it would. So, here is what's going to start happening here next Saturday:

I am going to write a book!

Genre: Mystery
Setting: North Shore town (Lake Superior), a very unusual Library!

And the way I will do this is by having a blog within a blog. The book's narrator (first person) will tell the story through blog posts, written for his Library's website. So, the idea then is, every Saturday will be a fictional blog post, telling a continuous story.

FAQ

How will I remember what happens from week to week?

I am thinking I will very briefly synopsize, in a sentence or two, the previous posts in a list above the newest post.

I only visit your blog during the High Holy Days. Will there be some way to read back sequentially through the posts so far to get fully caught up?

Sure, I can do that. Somehow. Maybe by putting a link at the top of the new posts, before the synopsizes, that takes you to a complete, story so far, page.

Why don't you just create, like, a new, fake blog for this project?

I did think of this you know! 

Oh, sorry. One probably shouldn't get defensive when answering questions one has asked of oneself. I will answer. Two reasons. One, I would like to keep all my writing energy directed point blank at this fabulous confection of a wonderland of a blog. Two, it has been a long, brutal, and confusing journey for me to build a regular readership of somewhere between 8 and 29 people. The process of coming to terms with that level of fame (apparent to the close readers of this blog), has not been pretty and is ongoing. I just couldn't take embarking on that all over again.

If I don't like it can I opt out somehow?

Yes, just click here.

Is once a week enough for continuity?

Let's see how it goes.

What day again?

Saturday. See you then.

Wait. Will you still do the regular blog?

Oh, yes. Everyday! I'll be in my pajamas writing away at the library for you tomorrow!

Everything old is new again

I suppose I could harken back to the dawn of culture. I could go all the way back to stories told around a tribal fire, but I will only travel as far back as my own TV obsessed childhood. We had nine channels, which is a lot because I was growing up in one of the largest cities in the country. There was no cable. We'll place this in my earlier childhood, so no VCRs either. Just nine channels. All full of riveting stuff, obsessively watched, widely reviled, nine channels.

Over the course of 40 years since then those nine channels exploded. I'll be brief because you know this story too well for it to be interesting or informative. The aforementioned cable came and widely expanded the channels. VCRs created almost infinite possibility. You could make your own TV, or you could watch anything anyone made, or, more likely, any recorded movie or show. There were game systems to hook up, the refining technology of harddrives and DVDs, HD and 3D, and, ultimately, the last thing that brought it all together, that took those nine channels and exploded them into a firmament of infinitude. The Internet. Once upon a time our Science Fiction dream was to travel the stars and open the universe to endless worlds, visions, stars, and beings. It didn't happen. The Internet was our unanticipated, distant second best: an infinity of TV stations. We leaped on it greedily, with unslakable hunger, and, mostly, ditched any other dreams, which were all so unlikely anyway.

So this is the Internet. Everything is here. And yet I feel oddly unfulfilled by it. When I compare my level of entertainment with the nine boring, riveting channels of 1975 to my level of entertainment stumbling across the Internet I am a bit surprised to find that I come up with something a lot like a draw. Nine channels against and infinity of channels and it's a tie? That can't be right!

And yet it is. And do you know why it is? It is because we can still only look at one thing at a time. On those ancient TVs we could click through the channels searching for something decent to watch. We had knobs! They had such a distinct, soft feeling as they slotted into place. And we would turn and turn, sometimes finding something, sometimes giving up and watching... whatever. But even though there were only nine channels, with every turn they were different, imbued with the tiniest of hope it would be better, good, somehow, finally, on this go around. Because it was narrative, moving pictures, it was never static, and the nine stations became their own infinity, changed with each 360 of the dial. And so likewise, as you click unceasingly through this infinitessimal wonder of the Internet, hungry for wisdom and contact and entertainment, it is only one thing at a time. The continuity may change. I rotate through more than nine channels. But it all runs one at a time. My odds rarely ring better that the TV. Sure, sometimes I land on something good, but what do I remember, how deep did anything go? It is and was rare to find the magic. Mostly you just get tired of clicking, of turning the knob, and you settle on the best of nothing. The glorious tools, the whole world right before us. We are Kings of nothing.

Profession

One of my co-workers recently told me a horrible medical story involving a close relative. I am protecting identities in a fit of caution here, so we'll say it was my co-worker's brother. And this brother was diagnosed with some dread circulatory disease and the Doctor said the only thing they could do in this situation involved a wildly invasive surgery with far reaching impacts. Trying to be roughly analogous to the real story I will say the Doctor said that they would have to remove this man's entire arm. Perhaps thinking that the arm in question might come in handy for opening jars and such, the man went to another Doctor. This other Doctor said that was ridiculous, they just needed to do a couple nips and excisions to the shoulder and the upper arm, an hour and a half of surgery, and he should be okay. So he had the surgery, went home that day, and is doing well, and still has two arms, which is a very nice amount of arms to have, if you can.

Now one thing this story makes a person think, in a stunned horror kind of way, is that you have to get a second opinion. And that was certainly there in what I was thinking when I was told this story, but because I was being told this story in a work environment, the more immediate thing I thought was that that's just like where I work at the library. You can come to the front desk and be helped by, for instance, the fully capable and quite nice person who was telling me the story, or, by mere chance, you may be helped by one of a small number of strange, completely clueless clerks or librarians. They will seem probably normal enough to you in your encounter, they will have the authority of the institution behind them and at least some kind of confidence, and yet they may very well suggest the removal your arm. Metaphorically.

I told my co-worker some version of this response and she was struck by it. She said it would make a good blog post. Whenever anyone tells me something would make a good blog post I think they must know something I don't. So here I am.

And my point is that it does not matter what the job is, there will be people who are quite good at it and people who really should be stopped from doing it, and yet aren't. It does not matter how rigorous the process of learning the job is, the years, the tests, nine years of medical school or fifteen minutes having the espresso machine explained. And it neither matters how relentlessly competitive it is to get the job. There will be terrible baseball players who made it to the majors, and terrible CEOs, horrible movie stars and incompetent Presidents. The authority of our culture, of position and success, triumph, popularity, wealth, accolades, degrees and sanction, guarantees precisely nothing. You may be inclined to dismiss a whole job class itself as horrible, perhaps as with Senators or spies or chiropractors, but within them a curve of some kind will innately develop. There will be great ones and terrible ones. Within any job class I don't know what the figure is, but let's throw out seven percent. Let's say seven percent of the people in any job will be horrible at it, will endanger your day, your week, the chances of your chosen sports team, the future of the nation, your arm. No one in charge will protect you from these people, because they have already failed. They have already placed that awful person there with all their faith and laziness and bestowed authority. The one real protection from arm cutting people and misinformed clerks, in the end, is just other people doing the same job, but doing it well. May you find them.

Selling out

I often think that I would like the opportunity to sell out, but I have yet to receive any offers. Maybe my expectations are all wrong. I keep expecting a group of polite but humorless, impeccably turned out business people to take me to a swanky lunch and make me a grand, Moment-With-Destiny kind of offer, a single place in time and space where I would encounter an ultimate reckoning. But in my heart of hearts I know that the officers of giant corporations, the representatives of the world's governments, and the agents of Satan have long since shrewdly industrialized this whole process. There are no epic, refuseable bargains. Chance is removed from the equation. There are in this life instead a maddening series of relentless, automated choices, swarming on us like mosquitoes. We may smash one, we may swat away seven, we may put on thick, inpenetrable layers, but there are so many, and they are so relentless and we must live. One gets in a bite on an exposed bit of neck, one's attention need slip only a fraction of a moment to find one of these pernicious beasts, the moral aptitude tests, sunk hungrily into the back of one's hand. In the end it cannot be stopped. There is no real reward. Blood is taken.

So perhaps I need to recast my whole scenario. What happens if I just let the mosquitoes at it? What happens if I offer my blood freely? I stand quietly. I am immune to madness for twenty seconds.

They bite, and they bite and they bite. I am covered in welts and I itch.

So I might as well kill as many of the little bastards as i can. No tolerance. Minute victories in the satisfaction of destruction of a scheme that dooms us. Kill as many as possible however few and futile that is. Fight. Slap. Swat. Dance. Eat garlic. And mosquitoes are famous for hating smoke too, aren't they?

What in this world can we burn?

Blog Study Group Discussion Questions.

1. What is this really about?

2. Are the mosquitoes analogous to really tiny, impeccably turned out business people, with teeny wings?

3. Would you describe this post as optimistic, or pessimistic?

4. Should we contact the authorities?

My super easy New Year's resolutions

The start of a new year is no time to put the pressure on. Life is hard enough! But that doesn't mean we can't take part in all the ennobling optimism of New Year's Resolutions. The trick is to create a rich, dazzlingly long list of super easy to achieve resolutions. I have done this and I urge you to consider adopting my resolutions below for your very own.

1. Stay alive.

This is a perfect example of what I'm aiming for. This is not automatic, and if you use this resolution every year, as I recommend, you will fail to achieve it at some point, eventually. But if you do fail to achieve it you won't know because you'll be dead and so will experience no sense of falling short. So, though you can fail this, you cannot experience the failure of it.

2. Eat food.

This resolution compliments resolution number one since you will need to do this to stay alive. But it is also an adapted, highly simplified version of Michael Pollan's dictum to "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." My version can certainly be taken to mean that a marshmallow is not actual food and you want to try to eat, say, pecans. Can you manage to eat one pecan this year, how about an apple? A carrot? Any one of those in 365 days and you're two for two on the resolutions. I mean, if you're not hit by a bus while eating them.

3. Read something of extreme quality and merit.

Have you read this blog post up to here? Me too. Then this one is now taken care of!

4. Fail to accomplish at least one of your New Year's Resolutions.

Yes, perfection is unattainable. So we have written it right into our resolutions. "But hey" you ask "With my resolutions being so easy to achieve what if I don't fail to accomplish one of my New Year's Resolutions?" Aha! If that happens you will have failed this resolution and therefore will have not failed this resolution. Hmm, perhaps perfection is attainable after all.

5.  Breathe

Another one taken care of at the get go, but still nice to reflect on and then fulfill whenever you do.

6. Shower

I do this rather a lot, but for some reason feel a compelling need to get more credit for it.

7. Blog

Well, I know I was recommending my resolutions for anyone, but this is an exception. It's too dangerous!

8. 8.  I forget what eight was for.

Yes, I know this will go down on my personal record.


9.  When making lists try to stop at nine.

I can do this.

10. I said try. I tried.