Quips

Quips allow me to get through the day at my job. Quips, jokes, theories, witticisms, and existential queries, but mostly quips. Sometimes I get too tired for that and so have to resort to a shambling walk. But when you're a quipper the shambling walk is a quip in itself. Eyebrows raised, a co-worker inevitably asks "Are you okay?"

"Horribly drunk." I say.
"So happy to be here." I slur in deadened voice.
"BRAAIIINS!" I cry.

There is no hiding for me or for others. No rest either. I am off to the front desk. My first patron wants to pay off their ten cent fine. I hold their dime up like it's a glorious ruby.

"We have been waiting all day for this dime." I say. The next patron comes up and I am still holding the dime. "I hope you are not here to pay fines." I say "I already cannot fit this dime in the cash register. Look at it over there, bursting."

Next up is a couple who need pin numbers to access our digital collection. After this simple transaction is done one of them says "That wasn't painful at all."

"The pain sets in later." I respond.

Funny? Ha ha, no. You are thinking probably of jokes. These are quips. Quips. I thought that if I got too tired then I was too tired to quip, but no, alas, if I get really tired, desperately tired, can hardly move tired,  I am too tired not to quip.

More thrilling reading statistics

Yesterday we discussed the idea of reader statistics, a group of quantifiable annual reading measurements that one could, say, put on a baseball card, except it would be a readers card, with a picture of the person pretending to read a book on the front (instead of pretending to be at bat), and the perfectly chosen group of annual reading statistics on the back. For our first test case we looked at the statistics of an all star, possibly the library MVP reader, Marcus, the teen librarian. As promised, today we will look at my statistics.

Am I an all star, you perhaps wonder? I don't know. I am far more erratic than Marcus. And while I suspect that I could even end up leading the league in one or two categories, I will no doubt flounder horribly in others. I guess we can only compile the statistics and see. So, without further ado, here is:

The Back of My 2013 Readers Card:

1. Books Started: 2,142 (league leading)

2. Books Completed: 114 (very good)

3. Average: .053 (terrible)

4. Genres/Subgenres read from (GRF): 36 (league leading again!) (this reflects variety of reading)

5. Books of Notable Merit Completed: 4 (poor) (this reflects quality of reading)

6. Total Pages Read (TPR): 102,025 (excellent)

7. Bestsellers Completed: 2 (poor) (this reflects social zeitgeist of reading)

So what does this say about me? I am a voracious reader with a ferocious thirst for knowledge and literature, but I barely care what that knowledge or literature is, or whether anyone else thinks it's useful or interesting. While restless and not terribly focused, I read so much that I finish many books, almost by accident. 

This little list is surprisingly illuminating. You kind of have to make up the numbers though, cause you can't really know all this stuff, and you have to make up the adjectives for your totals too, but despite all that it ends up pretty accurate. What's your GRF?

Your reading statistics

I think of teen librarian Marcus as the most well read person I know. What he is reading always comes up when we talk, and often enough it's some complicated and difficult tome that he's done with a day later. Or so it seems to me. If he solicits a book suggestion from me I have three minutes to come through. After that he will have already begun something else, finished it, and started to work his way steadily through a pile of five or so varied books that he somehow acquired while I was racing upstairs to grab him the book I wanted him to read.

"Too late." he says, as I hand him the book it took me two minutes too long to find. And "Oh," he adds "I've already read this."

Of course he has.

When I was a child I loved baseball. I loved playing it and watching it, but I also collected baseball cards. Possibly, above everything, I loved and was fascinated by all that statistical knowledge, all that quantification. I loved how things could be broken down into so many distinct categories, charted year to year, and compared, in respective worth, to a history of other player's statistics.

All this reading stuff, and all this baseball card stuff, collided in my head this morning. I started thinking of a years reading in terms of statistics one could put on the back of a card, except instead of a baseball card it would be a readers card. Instead of a boring picture of a person pretending to bat it would have a boring picture of a person pretending to read. And instead of stats like RBIs, hits, at bats, and home runs, it would have stats like books started, books finished, and total pages.

Here, I'll show you. Because I don't know how to make proper looking tables, we'll go line by line with what I imagine Marcus's 2013 reading statistics would look like. Keep in mind these are the statistics of a reading all star, possibly my library's reader MVP.

Back of Marcus's 2013 Readers Card:

1. Books Started: 947 (extremely good)

2. Books Completed: 429 (league leading)

3. Average: .453 (excellent)

4. Genres/Subgenres read from (GRF): 29 (excellent) (this reflects variety of reading)

5. Books of Notable Merit Completed: 61 (excellent) (this reflects quality of reading)

6. Total Pages Read (TPR): 111,415 (league leading)

7. Bestsellers Completed: 17 (fair to good) (this reflects social zeitgeist of reading)

Certainly one could come up with more stats, but, as with a baseball card, one has to be able to fit it all on the card back itself. Also, one wants to stick with a concise, elegant array of stats that can tell a complete story. From Marcus's card we can learn that he is a voracious reader, borderline obsessive actually, very exploratory in his reading, focused on content of good quality, and not overly concerned with general popularity or with reading the things most readers are talking about.

I'd like to share my reading statistics with you as well, but like baseball cards, and readers cards, one doesn't want to try and squeeze too much information into one blog post. We'll do it tomorrow.

It wasn't a test

A week or two ago, during a post in which I devised a foolproof method to test the quality of any public library, I let drop, casually, the idea that there are only two known "good" knock knock jokes. It then lay out there in plain sight. Though it was not a test or a plant I suppose some part of me felt like it would pick up some sort of response, some query or challenge, because when it didn't, it suddenly seemed full of meaning. I had no idea what sort of meaning though. Wildly unrelated meanings started blooming in my head like bubbles in lava that has been poured over ice. Insulting, fawning, inscrutable, illuminating, obfuscating, and odd, all these meanings are about you. For you are the reader after all, and all these meanings touch on the reader's, your, nature. So surely it is your right to see this strange plethora of meanings.

The lack of comment, response, or query to my offhand comment that there are only two "good" knock knock jokes is a clear indication that:

1. The readers of this blog are profoundly educated on the subject of knock knock jokes and understand every implication of my reference.

2. The readers of this blog are eager for any discussion of knock knock jokes to go away and think I could only be joking in bad taste when I use the impossible phrase "good knock knock joke", but forgive me for it if we could just move along already, like, now please?

3. The readers of this blog assume most things I say are whimsical rather than foundational.

4. The readers of this blog dislike being drawn out, and know what I am up to long before I know what I am up to, and conceive that silence alone drives me to flower.

5. The readers of this blog are "print version" readers and have scrawled in the margins of the text: "But WHAT are the two knock knock jokes!!!!!!" even though it will reduce the resale value of their copy.

6. The readers of this blog mostly sit quietly, hoping one among them will raise their hand.

7. The readers of this blog DON'T LIKE TO BE TALKED ABOUT!

8. The readers of this blog trust the author and assume he will tell them everything he needs to tell them exactly when it needs to be told.

But suddenly it strikes me as unwholesome to speak of grand, collective "you"s here. You, after all, are just you. None, or one, or more of these may apply to you, and you alone, and what else matters here?

Nothing.

We are muppets!

Recently I wrote a blog post in which I suggested that my library is a lot like Sesame Street (here). As I was thinking of it and walking around my library with it rattling in my brain, I found myself seeing my library through a kind of Sesame Street lens. It turns out there were Sesame Street moments everywhere; the way kids asked questions, the way a young man helped a tired old lady put her many books one by one into the return slot, even the way the library started to look like a stage set to me. Not only was all of this terribly helpful when it came time to write the piece, but it filled my head so to bursting with the idea that I had to tell Dave, my co-worker.

I won't go too deeply into our strong co-worker bond and its peculiarities here, but I have been noticing lately that when either of us brings up a new idea, a musical recommendation, a recipe, whatever, the others reaction is knee jerk negative, which inspires a discussion and reevaluation until that negativity is reformed by a broadening vision of the universe into something either basically accepting or downright positive. Like I said, I will not venture into the rich psychological territory of all that here, but it was very much in effect when I exclaimed to Dave "We work on Sesame Street!" and Dave responded "I think that's going a little far. Where are the puppets?"

The brilliance of the Muppets (and, yes, all Sesame Street puppets are Muppets) is that, like any great caricatures, they express the human even better than the real thing. It took less than 30 seconds for Dave to be making thorough analogs of staff with specific Muppets. I have always done a bit of this matching, and have worked with striking versions of Elmo, Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, Bert and Ernie (I was even Ernie in this case) and, venturing a bit farther afield, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef. But to stand there with Dave, making the argument for it, and having the argument be so easy, so wildly obvious, gave me a new lens. Suddenly, with a powerful presence, I found that there were Muppets everywhere in the library!

That shaggy man shambling through, the old lady with the florid gestures, the animated talkative teen, all Muppets! And it wasn't like they were analogs for famous Muppets, they were their own, unique, brilliantly designed Muppets, each one a work of elegant crafted genius from Jim Henson's studios. I liked it. I liked it a lot. All the old categories for seeing people, class, race, youth, success, style and on and on were all swept away. It was fabulous. Just Muppets, we are all Muppets, strange, snowflake, uncategorizable, Muppets, everywhere!

Famous for the wrong thing

Sometimes I'll write up some really smashing bit of prose here, and feel all tingly and proud, and I'll send it off to the internet with as much of the tiny fanfare as I can muster with my crude, paleolithic marketing skills, only to find it slips right into that internet ocean with barely a whisper. Sinks silently, Just another blog day gone. And yet on other occasions I'll dash off, with barely a whiff of fanfare, some touch of nonsense that I think will just barely do for the day, and I find quite a bit of fuss over it out in internet land, relatively speaking. Co-workers who I thought long since stopped reading my blog say suddenly "I liked today's post."

"The one I wrote about how I tie shoes?" I ask amazed.

The thing is, you just can't ever tell. Other people are, curiously, not me, and so have wholly different standards for quality. Of course, I am nearly always startled and taken aback that almost anything I write isn't insanely popular. It mystifies me. But I bear up better under it than I used to, with a lot less bitter disappointment and a lot more genuine curiosity and bafflement. "Is the internet broken?" I ask myself. I shake the internet. Seems okay. I can still get to amazon. Youtube videos of Jack White playing Ball and Biscuit still garner tens of thousands of views. I guess the internet is working. Perhaps I am not the greatest blogger ever. No, that doesn't seem right. I scratch my head. Sometimes I think I will never crack the mystery.

Fortunately I am not alone in all of this wrong thing famous sort of thing. I've seen many an artist struggle with this stuff. Arthur Conan Doyle did not seem very keen on his success with Holmes, going so far as to kill him off, thinking that would convince everyone to go nuts over his historical fiction if only he could just disappoint them into it. I recently read Kerouac hated beatniks. Anthony Burgess seemed to have only one famous book, Clockwork Orange, and he also seemed to have only one book he sort of loathed and wished he hadn't written. Yep. Oddly, I'm not so keen on Clockwork Orange either, so maybe I should dig out some of his other books. I wonder if one can find them anywhere. Maybe shelved in the closet of a dying bookstore somewhere next to Doyle's historical fiction. Mark Twain detested Pride and Prejudice, which I feel was one of his best books. Oh, really? Well, still, it's interesting, there he is, on about three million different subjects  the best quote by anyone ever turns out to be by Mark Twain, and then, from out of nowhere he totally misses the boat on Pride and Prejudice. Odd. Where am I going with this? I do not know. I cannot stop. Eons ago I saw the Kinks in concert. I was pretty sure they passionately hated Lola with every fiber of their being. But I suppose that could have been from the repetition problem. Like on that Joni Mitchell concert album, Miles of Aisles, where she actually complains to adoring fans who want her to play her songs. "No one ever asked Van Gogh to paint starry night again." She notoriously complains. Well, to begin with, at the time no one was the least bit interested in Van Gogh painting Starry Night in the first place. He toiled in near obscurity. I think maybe he had to work at a library to make a living! Imagine, a genius like that toiling in a library! In the second place, if we could bring Van Gogh back (not that he'd want to come) that is basically what everyone would ask him, some version of "Hey Van Gogh, could you please paint Starry Night again?"

"Sorry, man." He'd have to say, over and over "I'm into this more conceptual stuff now."

So what's the point of all this? Oh, sorry, I guess you didn't know. We don't do "points" on Sunday. It's casual day on the blog. I am free to ramble along the edges of sheer nonsensicality. And that is exactly what I have done in this blog post. But just you watch. I bet it takes the internet by storm.

Last Harbor Library 4: Five Winter Questions

This is the fourth 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 can be found here.

The second post is too complicated to explain and is recapped a bit in the third post anyway. It is here. 

The third post is about the staff not working and is 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. 

Five Questions for Winter

I received a few sharp words from my co-workers for my recent post in which I not only suggested that no one at my library does any work, but actually demonstrated them in the act of not doing it. These sharp words stirred up several questions in my mind.

1. Why are my co-workers reading this blog when they could be reading any number of books from our thorough collection of Medieval Literature, like The Mabinogion for instance?

2. Do my co-workers not know they're not working? I could demonstrate it for them so they become more familiar with what it looks like. But not now because I am too busy writing the library blog.

3. Would they rather I lie to the public here? Lie! In a library, the repository of human knowledge and truth! I am scandalized at the mere suggestion!

4. Do they think that all this not working is some fault of their own?  There is nothing to do here! Nothing! This is due not to worker laziness. It is due to the fact the only person in all of Last Harbor, Minnesota, who would actually want to read The Mabinogion, which is the sort of thing our collection focuses on, is upstairs, so industriously refining our collection and micromanaging our library that she has time to read neither it nor this blog.

5. Are my co-workers unaware that this time belongs to them, to be enjoyed, because once the summer season arrives again they will all be fantastically overwhelmed? Have they forgotten the throngs of tourists who under no circumstances are interested in one of the greatest buildings in the world, our Frank Lloyd Wright designed masterpiece, when it is minus 20 degrees out, but are fanatically interested in it when it is a steamy, ice cream eating, 60 degrees out at the height of summer? Have they forgotten the endless tours, the convincing of people that even though we own not a single book by James Patterson, they might really like The Mabinogion (they won't), the complicated issuing of library cards to people living across the planet so that they can check out three books one time in order to never read them? Have they forgotten the mad carnival of events, shows, architectural lectures and confused tourists who descend on Last Harbor mistakenly thinking there is something of note to do here besides this library ("No, I'm sorry. I believe you're thinking of Grand Marais. No, moose rarely wander into town.")?

Yes, my co-workers have forgotten. All people who live in an extreme climate share this in common: they are incapable of remembering the other seasons or any other conditions than the current ones. It requires so much effort to contend with these conditions that there is no room for that small bit of imagination that allows one to conceptually travel in time. It is, as I mentioned, minus 20 degrees out right now (I was neither kidding nor exaggerating). For us it is like this always and ever will be. But I have now lived up here for a bit less than three years, and so still retain, barely, a bit of the ability to see in the long view. I know that if you take the average of the whole year it is merely cold here, not insanely freezing, that it is not always dark, but balanced between light and dark pretty evenly, and that though we all have nothing to do now, averaged through one of our summers, we do our share of work. And so I say to anyone contending with a bitter, shut in winter, pick up a copy of The Mabinogion, or tune your internet dial to this blog, and stay calm when the truth is spoken.

Tech Problems

I suppose every library department, maybe every department everywhere, has their moment in the sun (in the shade?) where they really hit their stride in sucking. For the past month or so our Computer Services department has been, um, struggling. It started off slowly enough. A printer or computer would go down, sometimes an important one. The automation people would arrive on the scene, mess about, and leave with the problem fixed. But there was something alarming in how they would say it was fixed "for now".  Fifteen minutes or an hour or two later we'd go through the same thing with the same piece of equipment. It all accelerated from there. We'd repeat the process half a dozen times. Response times slowed or responses merely disappeared. Makeshift post it note signs saying "Work order sent in" would be put onto more and more pieces of equipment. Essential workstations would sit abandoned. Once friendly and voluble tech staff would clam up suddenly when the issues of the broken things were brought up. The makeshift post it note signs would get so old and tired that they'd curl and fall off the abandoned machines. The head of automation would make rare, Reaganesque appearances where he would evince surprise that anything was broken, say they would be taken care of, and disappear into his reclusive basement lair for several days, presumably too busy to respond to increasingly strident emails.

I have taken it hard. I heartily dislike the layout and inconveniences of the alternate workstations we're forced to use. And because of this I have perhaps been a bit immoderate in my scathing commentary about Automation Services. But it all might be a little unfair. We all hit bad patches sometimes. Automation Services could at any moment turn dynamic and effective once again. And my turn in the shade could come soon. What if, for mysterious reasons, I start shelving every single book alphabetically by the first name of the author, or registering every new patron under the name "Wansu Reeds Morbuks"? What if I transfer every call we get at the library to the home of a confused elderly patron of ours named Ethel Winton? What if I just can't help doing all this no matter what polite correctives people suggest to me? I could become self conscious and highly insecure about my sudden rash of failings. I could get cagey, hide in the bathroom, and deny everything: "Why would I transfer people to Ethel Winton's number? That's absurd! I don't even know her phone number very well." If it does happen like this, I hope others are more understanding of me than I have been of our Automation Services. I hope they are as understanding as I shall now endeavor to be.

A sunny day at the library

There is no shortage of cynicisms here at the library I work at. My co-workers complain about the patrons regularly, and we're pretty free with the complaints about each other too. We have petty thefts here, bizarre personalities, and unpleasant encounters with bodily fluids. From the moment I started working here it has come up, in idle staff conversation, about how they should make a sitcom about this place, a zany library sitcom where crazy things happen to the crazy staff and their crazy patrons. While I imagine many a worker fancies their workplace would be rich fodder for a sitcom, I don't object to them or to any of my co-workers' sitcom contentions over the years. A sitcom is fine. But despite all my own personal crankiness, my disaffectedness, and all my jaded complaints, despite even my own penchant for screwball comedy, I don't, at heart, see my workplace, the library, in the guise of a sitcom. Nope.

Before I tell you what TV show my library is like, before I set up particular expectations or make you feel like surely I'm stretching the point, let me just tell you what it's like here at the library. Not what it's like all the time, or everyday, but enough, and deep down in its heart, if you let it in.

Tonight, for instance. I'm out at the front desk working with a perfectly pleasant and competent co-worker. Here come two paramedics. They're just here getting some movies, but they're our special guests and so we happily talk about life as a paramedic for a bit. It's interesting. Another patron comes to the desk. This one has music to take home that he is very excited about. He calls me by my name. We are very friendly with each other in a formal way. People talk about how cold it is outside, in simple terms, but with humor, and agreement. Sometime crabby people come, but they're funny. Differently abled people visit. Sometimes they're nice, sometimes they're troubled, but they're interesting for being different. There's Black people and White people and Asian people, Native Americans, Italians, Indians, Hmong, African, Central American, and on and on. It's a real picture of the world. Some people are just learning English and it is harder to communicate with them, so we use signs with each other and talk slower and are relieved when we understand one another. We smile. The people who think it's all a sitcom will tell you that a lot of the people are very rude, but I don't believe it. On the contrary I am amazed at how polite everyone can be. They wait in line patiently. They are not loud. They say please and thank you. They laugh at my jokes. I laugh at theirs. They say "Can I get a library card?" and "Do you have this book?" and "Can I pay my fine?" and "Can you help me with the computer?" and "Can you answer a question?"

And the answer is "Yes."  "Yes" is the answer.

It's a big library, like an outside space, but inside and safe. It's like a wonderful stage set, a playground, a store where everything is free. Even with all the people coming through such a big place I know probably a third of them at least a tiny bit. Everyone is kind of friendly and everyone's time feels like it's free time. We talk about how we are, happy goings on, trips to foreign places, books and movies and music we like. No one pretends it's perfect. There are problems. We discuss them civilly. People get sad. People are troubled, but it's warm in here, and almost everyone comes here simply because they want to be here.

The air is sweet. Everything's A-OK. There are friendly neighbors there. That's where we meet. In my heart of hearts I am pretty sure, aye, nearly positive, that I work on Sesame Street.

Yes, Sesame Street.

Sunny day.

Working hard

One of my favorite stories from behind the scenes at my library comes from a long past era. The account, as I heard it from one of the involved parties, concerned two library pages who were working in a small backroom where we used to process the book drop and transit materials. The two pages were working side by side on their two computers. One of the pages turned to the other and said "Hey, slow down. You'll make the rest of us look bad!"

I am, to some extent, a defender of the slacker elements in all jobs. Indeed, I believe that all jobs are full of unacknowledged shirking. Actually I believe any number of irascible, truthful, unconventional things about work. I am on the side of the downtrodden, the low paid and the powerless. I believe in the twenty hour workweek and the $25 minimum hourly wage. Nevertheless I do not see eye to eye with this page urging the work slowdown. It is in violation of the code that says: don't correct a co-worker unless they are doing something wrong (and unless you can do it nicely, and you're sure of it). And it misunderstands the following important slacker principle: there is only so much work to be done, one should avoid getting in the way of other people doing it.

We have, at my job these days, a few small areas of "too much working"  that people get upset about. This getting upset has a lot to do with flow, with things piling up, and with things being hard to find. But I am not one to get worked up about it. Let people throw themselves into the work. It's rare and beautiful enough that it should not be tampered with. If I encounter a place where a surge of work has piled up I can live with it. Somewhere along the grand flow there is going to be less to do. 

And I will be there to do it.

How to judge any public library, a test

I had a somewhat negative reaction recently to a couple of studies that purported to measure the quality of libraries through statistics. I decided that surely there is a better way and devised the following test to determine how good any public library is.

It is point based. The more points, the better the library!

Though I haven't tested this test, I did a comprehensive study of this test that shows it will be entirely accurate.

You can run this test on your own library, though it will work a lot better if you wear a disguise.

The Five Part Test:

1.  Approach any service desk and say "Knock, knock."

If they say "There are only two known "good" knock knock jokes. I hope this is the third" they get 5 points!

If they say "Ohhh! A knock knock joke. I love knock knock jokes!" they get 3 points.

If they say "That's it. I quit!" and storm off they get just 1 point.

If they say "I don't understand." they don't get any points.


2. Collection:

 If the library has a copy of Beck's CD Midnite Vultures on the shelf they get 3 points. If a staff member mentions that Beck looks a lot like Harpo Marx they get 3 more points! If the name "Debra" is spoken in your hearing range over the course of the next week add 3 more points. If this seems inscrutable there's a link in red that should clarify things.

3. Pet points:

Cat: 7
Frog: 2
Giraffe: 6
Any rodent, Pygmy Jerboa through R.O.U.S.: 1 (must not be considered "pest" to qualify)
Bird: .25 per bird but 3 points for ravens
Tarantula: 1, mostly to prove I am not ruled by my arachnophobia but rather am mature master of my fears despite sort of screaming yesterday when the small spider sort of flung towards me off the curtains at my house.
Fish: 1 point per foot of length
Octopus: octopi should not be kept in captivity. If the library you are testing has an octopus, free it!

3a. If when freeing the library octopus:

It inspires a library worker to write a Caldecott winning children's book about it: 3 points
You are shushed by a librarian: 2 points
The octopus "Inks": 1 point. Ouch.

4. Bathrooms!

Theme bathrooms: 5 points
Smells like coffee: 3 points
Octopus "Ink" all over floor: 2 points
Popular!: 1 point
Toilet in stacks: Use your own judgement in awarding of points

5. Library cards:

Handcrafted by artisan: 6 points
A chatty process: 3 points
Byzantine: 1 point
Not for your type of people: no points

Please enter your library's point total in the comments section below for comparison's sake. Thank you.

Weather events

It snowed again last night and the wind is ripping around in fascinating spirals. The fine, light snow illustrates the fierce low swirling of the wind. At my view, from the front desk of the library, out past the rental books and the troughs of DVDs, through the windows onto a courtyard formed on one side by the coffee shop, on the other the teen room, I can see the snow streaming down off the roof at a ferocious speed. The ground drives the snow over in an elegant curve towards the teen room walls which drive it up, but the snow blowing off the roof pushes it back down to that space's exact center. Then suddenly all the wind and snow are out of places to go, and the whole lovely spiraling swirl comes apart into chaos.

It's windy.

There is another way for me to know it is windy out there. All the patrons tell me so. Well, maybe just half of them, but that's a lot of people. "It's really windy out there!" they say. There's a bit of variation on that quote, but not much.

This winter is a fine one for weather events. There may be several ways by which to explain what a weather event is, but by far the simplest way, here, is to say that a weather event is any condition of the outside world that causes most patrons to comment on it to me. Tomorrow, during the time I am likely to be at the front desk, the temperature should be somewhere between minus 10 and minus 15. I will hear the phrase "Keep warm." 150 times. One hundred fifty times! That is a weather event.

The other indication of a weather event is that the library gets much more quiet than usual.  Suffering the scars of many years of working a library that was far busier than we could reasonably handle, I am always very keen on the library being more quiet than usual. I am so keen on it that I can feel cheated when terrible weather fails to stem the great tide of library patrons. Yes, sometimes these two indicators of a weather event do not match up and we get half a weather event. The people of my city get sick of being limited by relentlessly awful weather. They go about their business regardless of the foot of snow that fell. "Incredible all the snow out there!" they tell me, a lot of them tell me. Two hundred people say to me "Don't go out if you don't have to. It's terrible out there!" 

"Then what are you doing here?" I think, but I don't say it. It's their library, and welcome to it. I just help them as I can, and when they're leaving, I merely say "Keep warm."

Innocent

Have you ever read a book? It is traditional in a lot of books for the author to write a little bit about all the people who helped the author. Sometimes the author gets pretty effusive about all these fabulous readers and agents and publishers and editors. Then the author takes responsibility for all the errors and failures, whatever they may be, that are in the book, saying that these errors are the author's own. It's an okay tradition. I won't make fun of it here. It is part of how the world works. There are great things in how the world works, beautiful and grave, magical and fierce. But I just wanted to tell you, and me, because it is easy to forget, that we defy the world here. Hopelessly. This blog is in opposition. It is part of our mission. It is the only way to get at some truth that may be impossible to get at. But we try. And any failures here are not my fault. And all the successes establish my innocence, and are my own.

Last Harbor Library Blog 3: It's what we do!

This is the third 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 can be found here.

The second post is too complicated to explain and is recapped a bit in today's post anyway. It is 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. 

It's What We Do!

In my last post I collected a stray library patron to provide cover for me as I headed off to report on exactly what your Last Harbor Library staff was up to on a cold, midwinter, midweek afternoon. It is all part of my plan to differentiate our library blog from other library blogs by giving you a no holds barred look at the behind the scenes operation of our library. Other library blogs like to keep you appraised of exciting events at their library. We have no exciting events, thus my alternate approach.

To help us along on our tour I have pictures. I start with my hijacked patron, Kent Carlson:

I said all I could manage to say about Kent in my last post, so I'll move right along to the first co-worker I encountered, Beth Selly, a Library Page who I asked to cover the front desk:

Beth, when we found her, was in the back room with the only cart of unshelved books in the library. It wasn't full. There were about 18 books on it. She could have shelved them in five minutes, but was using them as a kind of cover, much like I was using Kent as cover to pursue my real agenda. Her real agenda was to read. She was reading The Face of Battle by John Keegan. I asked her to watch the desk for me and she agreed nicely enough. She brought her cart and book to the front desk. She said "Hey, Kent." And never, at any point during any of it, did she stop reading The Face of Battle by John Keegan, which, it turns out, is an esteemed book of military history.

Next up was Librarian Assistant Linda Howe. She was leaning against one of our massive pillars and sketched a distracted wave at Kent and I with her cell phone. Here she is:

She was on her phone giving detailed instructions about everything to her elderly father. Her elderly father seemed to be endeavoring mightily not to understand a single one of them.

In the staff offices we found our Computer person, Lila Twofeather animatedly recounting an episode of the TV show Louie to Programs Manager (not TV programs!), Jay Sobanski:

I think you may be starting to get the idea, so I will run through the rest of the list a bit more quickly.  

Vicki David, Librarian, listening to jazz, complicated jazz I am not sure I understand as music.

Clare Tompkins, Student Worker, eating a bag of pretzels very slowly and with great concentration.

Mike Dahlberg, Janitor, messing about with his phone.

That was most of our staff. Of course, there was one person working who I have not accounted for here, so Kent and I headed upstairs to check on her. Amelia Browning, Head Librarian, was at the librarian's desk, engaged mysteriously with massive ye olde library sorts of volumes, a pencil, several ledgers. She looked up at us.

"Kent here, and I, have toured the entire library" I said. "Other than myself, not a single staff member is doing a lick of work, though they all seem fairly contented."

"And what exactly is the work you are doing?" Asked Ms. Browning.

"Blogging." I replied. Kent snickered.

"Well, write it up." Ms. Browning said as she waved me away with a backhand gesture of her hand.

And so I have.

-Nate

Your library ranking

Yesterday I  summarily dismissed a German University's study of the best libraries in the world. I felt there could be nothing fundamentally solid in analysis based on data without experience. It is not that they could not say something meaningful about their top U.S. library, Chicago, based on statistical information, but for them to make even the barest judgement of whether Chicago's library is terrible, mediocre, or brilliant in any actual sense, without walking into the place, is a lie. A big fat German University lie.

But I am forced to admit it is very easy for a person who grew up watching Hogan's Heroes reruns to call a bunch of Germans liars. When it has come to my own national library magazine carefully bestowing anywhere from zero to five stars to all the country's libraries I have figured they must at least sort of know what they're up to. Don't they?

Nope. They'd get on very well with the Germans.

Wait! I cry. But my library system got three stars! I thought almost for sure my extreme helpfulness with troubled old men who want Laurel and Hardy movies was made known to the Library Journal crew of analysts.

Nope.

Their small handful of parameters appears mostly to do with per capita check outs, per capita visits, per capita program attendance, and per capita internet use. That's about it. In one minute I could think of ten vastly better parameters on which to judge a library. I could do it while making a tempeh and kale sandwich. Given a few days I could come up with thousands of better parameters. But let's just go with a random ten:

1. Are the bathrooms private?

2. How many Nero Wolfe books are there on the shelf?

3. What can the librarian who buys CDs tell you about Jack White off the top of his or her head?

4. How many procedural steps must one go through to get on an internet computer?

5. What is the total number of weird and extremely interesting things in the library?

6. If you ask a librarian a flippant informational question do you get a flippant answer or a detailed one.

7.  How many hours are they open?

8.  How much local, community event information is posted there?

9.  How does the place smell?

10.  How many places are there where you'd really like to sit for awhile?

11.  Do they have Ulysses by James Joyce?

Oh, right. I'll stop, but I could go on, and on, and on, and on. And I probably will, at the least provocation.

Best library!

In my ceaseless desert wanderings of the internet I have come upon word that the Chicago Public Library is the best library in the country. I saw this at a distance, my eyes stinging with sand, my judgement dessicated by thirst, and I stumbled toward it, thinking there might finally be something to drink there.

There wasn't. It was another mirage. Is it all mirages on the Internet? Are we just warming our brains up here to be strapped into goggled VR suits, flailing at phantoms? Maybe. All I know is that I thirstily rushed towards the Chicago Public Library being the best library in the country and found...

Sand.

More sand.

There was a short, thin article I have no intention of directing you to here, referring with appalling generality to a German University Study that decided The Chicago Public Library is the very best library in all of our country. I needed at that point to look no further into it. Like Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe holding the essential clue, I had enough to know there was no merit there. Plus my mouth was full of sand.

Let's put it this way: What if my modestly esteemed local university, say, in The College of Liberal Arts, decided to fund and execute a study to determine the greatest novel ever written. Tirelessly they labor over this task, inputting parameters such as diversity of themes, social impact, clarity of grammatical construction, richness of humor, vocabulary, setting, and character. They devise elaborate computer programs, fabulous analyzing systems, and complex tabulations. They weigh citations, copies sold, even movies made. In the end, after millions and millions of pieces of information are correlated and compiled, they compute the winner.

And they do it all without reading a single book.

This, in the end, is how all these "best library" studies go, all attempts to judge by ingredients instead of taste. I do believe there is valuable information in the ingredients, but the taste is the soul, reading is the soul, walking into the library and using it is the soul. And to judge and use words like "best" in studies devoid of experience and soul is a fool's game. A folly that will leave you drinking sand, thinking that if it is damp enough it will quench your thirst.

How to donate books to your library

 You have some old books from the 1970s festering in some corner of your house. You thought you'd like to give them where they might be wanted and/or you figure you better do something with them quick before they liquify. You have heard your local library might take these books, but assume the whole donation thing would be far too complicated to manage without some sort of guide. 

This is that guide!

Just follow these four simple rules:

1. Libraries vary. Call your library and see if they want your books. We libraries still have phone numbers and are elated when you call us. And most of us take book donations. At my library you can just bring them in any time we're open. We will at minimum pretend to be delighted to receive you and your old books.

2. Simply pack up your books in manageably sized bags and boxes that you don't need back. Over-stacking them in bags that are falling apart will give us a unique opportunity to suffer together. Alternatively, you can put your books in bags and boxes and tell the person who you're giving them to that you need these bags and boxes back. This latter method is good if you are sort of an awful person.

3. Don't get all precious about your books. Just toss them in the box. Though we're happy to have them, none of them are terribly valuable. Except, wait, is this The Big Sleep? Holy mother of god, it's the first edition! I can't believe I am touching this! Thank you very, very much! I will never forget you! What you have done today here, well, my god, I am speechless!

4. Finally, always, always, make demands on us in inverse proportion to the quality and value of your donation. Donating a bunch of brand new books and movies we have long waiting lists for, maybe some beautiful art books to boot? Then you should insist that you need nothing, that we're the ones doing you a favor by putting them to good use. Donating mildewed and forgotten bestsellers of the 80s and 90s that appear to be infested with beetles? Insist that people come out to your car to carry them in. Demand a neat and thorough receipt. And be sure to complain later to the branch manager that we didn't seem thankful enough. 

We were thankful. We were merely afraid of losing control of our emotions.

Still confused? Call me at the library. You'd be surprised how long and at what level of detail I am willing to answer your questions. Especially if you're thinking of bringing us The Big Sleep. Wow.

After holding its breath, the library opens

At a large and busy library like my own, there are occasionally great surges. Some of these surges are on the check out side. The summer reading program brings in large amounts of people on its momentous Saturday, and a forecasted weather event that is supposed to cripple the city sends a mighty throng in, desperate to swaddle themselves in dvds and reading material against the imminent disaster. On the return side of things the great surges are dominated by the effects of the rare days we are closed. My library closes for a whole day, like it did yesterday, only 10 or 15 times a year, and a closed day is like a bubble, pushing everything to the far side of it. The day after a closed day, like today, we get, roughly, twice as much stuff back than is usual for a day. Two days worth of check outs share one due date and one work day. Also, because it is the first day after the weekend we get three days worth of deliveries because we do not get deliveries on weekends.

It is a lot of stuff!

And while I have no great love for this vast intake of items, it always fascinates me. It sort of makes visible our great circulation digestive system. Normally stuff comes in and moves through, sometimes carts are full of books, or bins or boxes, but it is pretty well distributed. Put under the great stress, though, of an epic return day, all the elements of our system become visible in high relief, and I enjoy watching the great glut of material work its way through to the shelves. What it always reminds me of is a picture in The Little Prince. I will reproduce some vague version of it from memory:

If I recall the little prince asks people what this is a picture of. Of course, it is a picture of an elephant in a snake:

This is how I picture all our materials running through the system, as a big bulge. First there are bins and boxes and carts and piles all waiting to be fed into the machine. Then all the materials start to work into all our loader bins until we are out of empties and every bin is all swollen and full up and we are desperate. Then those bins start to get emptied into cart after cart until there is a sea of carts of books and everyone needs empty carts but no one can find them! Then they start to go out to the shelves, book by book, until the shelves are packed tight and we cannot find room for them. 

It all takes days and days, sometimes a whole week if we keep on being busy. And just like with a snake digesting an elephant you can see the whole huge swell of it moving through the back area of the library. But, of course, is is not an elephant in there. So I picture it like this:

If you were hoping I had something illuminating and profound to say about all this I am afraid I must disappoint you. It is not all epiphanies and fireworks here at the library. A lot of the time it's just, uh, a snake, er, digesting books. Well, I have pictured it that way for years. And I thought it was time to show you.

The library is closed

I have been in the library when it's closed. It is lovely, hushed, and smooth. You can look out the windows and see the people come. Even though it is a Famous Person Holiday they drive in to the parking lot. And even though the parking lot is eerie and nearly empty they get out of their cars. And even though there are big door signs that say "Closed for Holiday" they pull on the doors. And even though the glass doors are soundly locked they cup their hands and peer in. And even though it's mostly dark and vacant they knock. And even though no one comes they linger. It is one bitter pill.

I do not scoff. It is our nature to hope that what we wish to be true is true, even if all signs point otherwise. God watches over us all. People are basically good. I returned that book on time. I have a dream.

We might as well try.

Funday

Due to some sudden impulses to make pictures for my blog, write lengthy posts, and pursue elaborate projects like The Last Harbor Library Blog, I have been running uncharacteristically close to my morning deadline. More than once this week I have been at work, late at night in my chilly basement, wrapped in my great faux sheepskin blanket like Honore Balzac (I upgraded from Victor Hugo), typing and drawing to get a post ready. So when I was thinking about this post, which needs to go up pretty soon, I had a sudden desire to sort of complain.

I like to complain. But I will not complain here. For one thing, complaining is one of those things that the less you do of it the more power it has. I would like to save up. For something really big. Also, why would I complain about needing to write my blog, which is optional, compelling, and interesting to do? I think it is a reaction to stress. I think the stress comes from thinking this has to be good. It does not have to be good. It just has to be fun. Fun fun fun! Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!

Of course fun is a strange word. I can be very orderly about fun. I have one room in me for fun, and everything is carefully placed in there. I am not terribly neat and organized, but boy, in that fun room everything is stacked, stored, and scrupulously labeled. Often I would rather organize the things in my fun room than actually romp around with them. I stand officiously at the door of the room, managing the traffic. "You can come in. You cannot. And what makes you think you belong in fun? You do not look like fun." I have even been inclined to turn away this blog when it comes knocking at the fun room door. "Oh no." I say "You are compelling, interesting, essential. Wouldn't you be happier over in the Super Important Room?" And the blog listens to me because I am in charge of the fun room.

But I have been thinking I do not know so much about fun. I am not well employed as the librarian of the fun room, its concierge, valet, maitre d', and bouncer. I am thinking I should throw open the doors of the fun room! Fling open the windows. If some of the stuff in there wants to go out it should go out. I don't want prisoners in the fun room! How can that be fun? And if something wants to wander in, well, why not let it in. It might be interesting to see what these strange things do in the fun room. It might be fun! But whatever it is, I am thinking fun is not a category, it does not herd well, it suffers under compulsion, it shies and quails at command, instruction, and over forceful direction.

And yet too, it bursts into flower in the strangest places.