Happy New Year!
I only managed two of these this week (as well as finishing The Man Who Spoke Snakish, which was every bit as heartbreaking as I expected it to be but left me feeling bittersweet rather than bleak).
Class and Librarianship, although a slim little book, took me a bit to get through and made me think a lot, which of course was both the intent of the authors in writing these essays and my intent in picking it up. Some of it dealt directly with practicalities of service in public libraries to financially struggling and class-marginalized populations. More of it had to do with the profession itself, the idea of “the profession” and the power dynamics between the front lines, administration, and the librarians in the middle. How personal ambition and professionalization in LIS education pushes us toward alliances with administration, leadership, and stakeholders, which puts us in a challenging position with the paras and clerks and volunteers who are our allies of circumstance on the floor, and how to leverage class consciousness to navigate those tensions. It’s a lot to chew on, and casts into sharp relief some hard decisions I want to make about the direction I want to go in my career.
Browsings, on the other hand, was lighter than I expected it to be. I was expecting a more deep-delving memoir; in fact it’s a year’s collection of Michael Dirda’s mostly lighthearted weekly columns in The American Scholar, ostensibly about being a book collector and reviewer but tangenting off into topics ranging from growing up in working-class Ohio to hiking Rocky Mountain National Park to current events (his essay on the Aurora theatre shooting is harrowing) but always coming back to rambles in used bookstores, to friendships formed around books and the book community, and the obscure science fiction and adventure genre fiction that he loves so much (there’s one essay dedicated entirely to the highly specialist small presses that republish and revive the popular fiction of the 1880-1920 period). Dirda is funny and humble and thoughtful, and Browsings was just an unexpectedly delightful way to unwind for a few evenings and the end of a long, difficult year.
Re-reading of Encounters With the Archdruid will have to be bumped for a little while because I had a mass of library holds come in, and several of those are new releases with hold lists. (Isn’t that how it always is? I have a house full of books I’d love to find the time to read but the library books come first.) I started The Book in Society this morning, and it and Writing the Other are at the top of this week’s pile.
———–
Some people keep commonplace books. When I was in college I wrote longhand notes when I wanted to remember things, and I haven’t done that in a long time but I want to retain more of what I read and reflect and re-engage with it. So sometime last year I started writing quotes that I wanted to hold onto on 3×5 cards. Some of the treasures;
There’s this concept of suffering central to so many of us as whatever, activsts, organizers, anyone trying to change the world… so much of how we get pulled into community and kept in community is a solidarity around our suffering, and that is not liberatory. – “The Legacy of [Audre Lorde’s] Uses of the Erotic,” in Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown and Cara Page.
Dealing with wicked problems is not just about showing up and building houses, giving things away, or delivering any direct service – even if you’re in the community for the long haul. You have a moral imperative to build capacity, to enable the community to solve its own problems, lift itself up. If you’re not helping the community build its ability to improve either its skills or its support network, you’re not making a difference. – Ryan Hubbard, in Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, Jon Kolko.
Space does something to the vision. It makes the country itself, for lack of human settlements and other enhancements to the illusion of human importance, into something formidable, alluring, and threatening, and it tends to make human beings as migratory as antelope. Literature reflects this necessity… Look at any book that is western in its feel… and you will find that it is a book not about place but about motion, not about fulfillment but about desire. There is always a seeking, generally unsatisfied. – “Coming of age: the end of the beginning,” in Where the Bluebird Sings to Lemonade Springs, Wallace Stegner.
Maybe wayfinding is an activity that confronts us with the marvelous fact of of being in the world, requiring us to look up and take notice, to cognitively and emotionally interact with out surroundings whether we are in the wilderness or in a city, even calling us to renew our species’ love affair with freedom, exploration, and place. – Wayfinding, M. R. O’Connor
To see things is to enhance your sense of wonder both for the singular pattern of your own experience, and for the meta-patterns that shape all experience. All this suggests a useful working approach to making art: notice the objects you notice. (e.g. read that sentence again.) Or put another way: make objects that talk – and then listen to them. – Art and Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland
The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done. – Art and Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland