Michael

Today’s edition of the New York Times carries a story about the problem of homelessness in the City of Los Angeles. What strikes the reader hardest about this piece is that the Times claims in confidence and without qualification that there are 41,000 homeless people surviving in a rough rectangle of rundown streets within the downtown area of the city. Nobody who lives in this town would dispute that figure, particularly not any public librarian.

Today’s edition of the New York Times carries a story about the problem of homelessness in the City of Los Angeles. What strikes the reader hardest about this piece is that the Times claims in confidence and without qualification that there are 41,000 homeless people surviving in a rough rectangle of rundown streets within the downtown area of the city. Nobody who lives in this town would dispute that figure, particularly not any public librarian. Homelessness, which social analysts have long seen as a complex of maladies, is also one of the main problems for the public library in any sizeable community. There are two main strategies for dealing with the permanently homeless, that loose but durable cadre of drug users, alcoholics and the mentally ill: exclusion, which is neither easy nor humane, and monitoring, which is costly though perhaps inevitable.

The real problem with homelessness is that its effects spread invisibly throughout a community, well beyond skid row: there is no way to gauge how much it costs a library in lost patronage, how many good librarian candidates seek other jobs rather than work in libraries which often seem like flophouses with a book collection. I have lived in Los Angeles and patronized the Central Library for about four decades. The situation has improved a bit there, but I can tell you that nobody can use the men’s room on any floor without being prepared to experience scenes and smells and sounds that have no place in a library.

Whatever we as a society failed to prevent or solve with regard to the homeless has come down with heavy result upon the public library; certainly not as hard as upon the county hospital or the courts of law, but the library isn’t built to remedy disaster, not intended to function as a storage house for broken people and shattered lives. The library is a durable institution, but it isn’t meant to bear that sort of burden. It suffers; we suffer. The whole machine works less well for everyone, and becomes something less in image, too.

We need to do something about the problem of homelessness in all its facets. Something new, because the old medicines are no match for the current ailment, and the disease is dragging down this part of the community as surely as any other epidemic. Homelessness is a library problem; it is a library cost item, it is a library patron and employee problem. Exclusion and policing are thin bandages over this unhealed wound. In this as in other areas the library must be an advocate for issues beyond its walls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/national/15SKID.html

Michael McGrorty

Dateline Los Angeles, July 12: In a move that stunned the handful of people in the United States who still read serious fiction, the Atlantic Monthly announced that it is shifting its literary editorship from the venerable magazine’s offices in Boston to the city of Los Angeles. Literary Editor Benjamin Schwarz explained the break with the publication’s other departments and its 146 year history by saying “not only are most of the Atlantic’s readers residents of California, but also that most of the most interesting writers with whom I regularly work are living in Los Angeles.”

Dateline Los Angeles, July 12: In a move that stunned the handful of people in the United States who still read serious fiction, the Atlantic Monthly announced that it is shifting its literary editorship from the venerable magazine’s offices in Boston to the city of Los Angeles. Literary Editor Benjamin Schwarz explained the break with the publication’s other departments and its 146 year history by saying “not only are most of the Atlantic’s readers residents of California, but also that most of the most interesting writers with whom I regularly work are living in Los Angeles.”
When I read this over coffee this morning I thought I was looking at the April Fool’s edition of the paper; I chuckled to myself and turned the page, expecting to find a piece about Lindberg’s having crashed in the Atlantic. Speaking of the Atlantic, I have been a subscriber to that magazine since taking over the payments from my father, who went to the big bookstore in the sky (or the ground) thirty years ago. I believe I can state with some certainty that I was the only enlisted sailor on any Navy ship of the seventies who slept with a stack of that particular magazine beneath his mattress.

The shift of Atlantic’s literary editor from the Athens of America to this Philistine province is a reflection of a lot of things, most of which will be bemoaned among the senior literati of the nation, the same folks who didn’t enjoy the change in format and style that occurred at the New Yorker. For those of you who weren’t watching, that particular sea-change involved such drastic alterations as the addition of a table of contents. The Sunday crossword crowd didn’t like that. Somehow they expected that magazine to go on as if it Harold Ross was still hiding Thurber in an upstairs cubbyhole. But of course, things change, and magazines are, after all, only businesses, even if they are institutions, and therefore have to pay the bills, though they would generally like to do better than that.

Thus it is that we have the Atlantic’s literary guy coming out to the coast so as to more easily do lunch with the sort of folks whose writing has increasingly graced the pages of that offering over the past few years, most of which stuff is as incomprehensible to the average Joe (including me) as the produce of the Transcendentalists was when Emerson started cranking it off.

The initial consequence of this move will be to raise a collective groan from the Old Establishment, some of whom will say to anybody in earshot that the world has gone to ruin and that Hollywood is calling the tune these days. Of course Hollywood is calling the tune: it’s been practically the only paying gig for writers who wanted to eat with regularity since Chaplin was tripping over his cane. Hey, that’s why I’m out here, waiting patiently for Ben Schwarz to find me reading my obscure little novel at the counter of a drugstore and lift me from this life of drudgery.

Michael McGrorty

References: http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-et-rutten12jul12.column

The Old Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/nov1857/nov1857.htm

And the new:
http://www.theatlantic.com

Tonight, as I sat around getting tired enough to go to bed, I read a little story in the New York Times that rather puts the library employment situation in perspective. The dateline of the piece was Jefferson, Wisconsin, and the subject was wage givebacks by packing plant workers at the Tyson Foods sausage plant in that little town of 7,500 souls.

Tonight, as I sat around getting tired enough to go to bed, I read a little story in the New York Times that rather puts the library employment situation in perspective. The dateline of the piece was Jefferson, Wisconsin, and the subject was wage givebacks by packing plant workers at the Tyson Foods sausage plant in that little town of 7,500 souls.

It seems that Tyson’s management, which is to say the folks who represent the stockholders, are insisting on the reductions in pay and benefits for the same reason dogs chase their tails: because they can. They can because the endless cycle of catch-up and fallback that we call our economy is presently working in favor of the employer. Though profits at Tyson are good, they are not good enough for the company. Tyson is seeking to drop starting pay to nine dollars an hour from eleven, and cut the maximum wage to ten dollars from thirteen. That, and they are demanding more worker contributions to health care and retirement.

Perhaps you have never worked in a factory; maybe you have not labored in a packing plant. Thirteen bucks an hour is what we pay some people in our libraries, but they aren’t doing that sort of work in Jefferson, and nobody would argue that they are. You can lose a hand in a packing plant, or an eye, and even if you don’t, you go home tired as hell every night and it’s a lot noisier and nastier than any library you’ve ever worked in. And rural Wisconsin isn’t so cheap to live in that nine bucks an hour is good money. Nine bucks an hour isn’t good money anywhere north of El Paso.

They are getting the shaft in Jefferson, Wisconsin, right now. Some of us are having a hard time these days who work in libraries, too. The difference between Jefferson and wherever you work or would work if you could is at once great and almost insignificant. Give that some thought, and don’t forget about it when the cycle turns and you’re doing well enough so that you don’t have to worry about the end of the month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/11/national/11LABO.html?hp

Michael McGrorty

Dear Fidel,

You’ll forgive me for not referring to you as ‘Excellency.’ I always thought that was a bit of a stretch for a socialist, anyhow. At any rate, I would like to take a moment or two of your time to thank you for your service to the American Library—the one with the capital ‘L.’

Dear Fidel,

You’ll forgive me for not referring to you as ‘Excellency.’ I always thought that was a bit of a stretch for a socialist, anyhow. At any rate, I would like to take a moment or two of your time to thank you for your service to the American Library—the one with the capital ‘L.’
Fidel, old friend, you have no idea how much good you’ve done for us here in the library business. I’m not sure about the circumstances down there, but some of the folks up here got to stewing pretty hot over some private libraries, or collections of books or something down there, and it made for a lot of fun during the latest ALA convention.

We could use a bit of fun up here these days. We’re in the middle of one of those regular downturns in Capitalist affairs that Marx referred to—you know, the signposts on the road to our inevitable decline. To top it off, the government (mostly dupes and lackeys of the profit system, as I’m sure you are aware) has decided to mess with us to the effect of—but I’m sure you read the papers. Let’s just say that the Patriot Act and CIPA have not made it a good summer for those of us laboring in the stacks. So we needed a diversion. You folks gave us one, and we’re grateful.

We have this thing about Freedom up here. This, like the Library, is another of our Capitalized concepts. By way of reference, our leaders deal with the Freedom idea pretty much as you do with the term ‘liberation;’ it fits in nicely where we want it to and acts as a stopper in any argument. You know how this goes: you’re in the middle of a three-hour diatribe before a captive audience in the National Assembly and just when they start looking at their North Korean Rolexes you dust off an old story about liberating Havana and their eyes light up with the old fervor. At least if they want to keep their jobs, they do. Here we have the same thing: The President’s pollster reports that nine out of ten likely voters consider him a fumbling imbecile, and pretty soon thereafter his speechwriters are inserting ‘Freedom’ in every other paragraph. When we can’t convince enough people that we’re working for Freedom on the home front, we go Liberate the peoples of distant lands so they can enjoy the fruits of Freedom. You know: Grenada, Angola. Places like that.

Given the difference in our political perspectives it was inevitable that we would clash over the issue of libraries. What was unlikely was that it would ever actually come up, but given enough typewriters and enough monkeys, eh? Well, we aren’t in any danger of running out of monkeys and here in the land of Free Expression (another of our Freedoms) the issue of those little private book collections took on a huge significance, becoming a collision point where your version of the F-word and ours met and butted noggins.

I’m sure you have your regular Party Congresses down there; we held one in Toronto, and it looked to be a bit threadbare after the SARS scare, so some of the folks glommed onto this Cuban deal, perhaps to forget about other things. The press (another of our Free Institutions) grabbed onto the issue and ran with it. Right away this little squeaker of a topic became big news.

Funny how this all worked up. It seems you jailed a bunch of folks for accepting money from the U.S. government to start book-loaning collections. Apparently that’s some sort of crime down there, an act of subversion. Up here where Freedom reigns, the federal government gives money to libraries so that people can read whatever they want, subject to certain minor restrictions under the Patriot Act, CIPA and other laws which ensure that things don’t get too free—but you know how that goes. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. I mean, how would we feel if the Cuban government sent money to public libraries in some of our inner-city slums? Damn right we’d be insulted. Your people don’t have any more right telling us our business than we do yours. Besides, giving money away to libraries without restrictions sets you up for all sorts of grief, as you have seen. Just be glad you don’t have a lot of yammering provincial libraries to deal with.

Having given some time to this issue, I think the best solution would be if you would just let your libraries be free to do whatever they like. Let them lend whatever books they want. It won’t cause any real problems for you. Most of the titles on your banned list come from this country anyhow, and there’s always the little filter of that embargo we have on trading with you folks. Hell, if we can keep you people driving 1953 Buicks and using the same hypodermic twenty times, do you think we’re going to load you down with Catcher in the Rye? No Sir. You won’t find any more bad books coming over than you do penicillin. Besides, and as you’re fond of reminding us, the whole thing is motivated by money, and your checks don’t clear the bank. You think any of those book distributors is going to extend credit to a guy who nationalized the oil industry? You really don’t have anything to worry about.

So the thing pretty much worked out to everybody’s benefit: Up here in the land of Freedom we got a chance to thump our chests on all sides of the issue, and then everybody went home to face their shrunken budgets and Internet Filtering and all that other boring stuff. Thanks again for the diversion, and let me know if you need any ideas about your library system. Last night I had a brainstorm that could really raise your ratings on this issue: Have you ever thought of marrying a librarian?

Don’t be a stranger, Comrade.

Michael McGrorty

Fourth of July again: a day for barbeques, lemonade and speeches. I’ll keep this one short so that you can get back to your recliner.

Fourth of July again: a day for barbeques, lemonade and speeches. I’ll keep this one short so that you can get back to your recliner.If the racket on the local listservs is any indication, it is becoming clear to some of our friends and colleagues exactly what this CIPA decision means; it is not simply a directive to resolve a difficulty over a legal issue. Know the thing for what it is.

Coming on the heels of the Patriot Act, it is another incursion into the right of individuals to use and obtain information; this alone would make it anathema to the librarian, but there is more: in a time when government is letting libraries wither, languish and starve, it is an insulting attempt to manage the operations of libraries which otherwise would have been left to limp along, respected in word and abandoned in deed. We have gone from the pan to the fire: perhaps the heat will waken us to our role and responsibility.

‘Ye shall know them by their works.’ That applies as much to librarians as to those who would shackle us. I am one of the new generation encouraged to become librarians by the opportunity and at the invitation of the old breed. We look for signs from you, especially in this most serious matter, as we stand on this cusp which might be a brink; we are concerned about many things: certainly we want to work in this profession; naturally we want to rise, but we also wonder if there will be a profession waiting for us, and not merely in the sense of jobs, but by way of its having passed into a mechanical operation, robbed of discretion, the grace and glory of service through an unwise obedience to dictates which go against the grain of its principles.

We wait and watch and wonder; we hope for signs and the rise of leaders.

Michael McGrorty

I spent a good part of this afternoon wandering through the jungle that my garden has become since spring’s bloom gave way to the summer heat. Southern California may seem like a gardener’s paradise, but the flip side is that there is very little downtime. The good news is, things grow all year. This is also the bad news, especially since some of those things are weeds. With no winter to kill them off, the perennial varieties go to town on whatever schedule suits them, and the annuals come up as they please.

I spent a good part of this afternoon wandering through the jungle that my garden has become since spring’s bloom gave way to the summer heat. Southern California may seem like a gardener’s paradise, but the flip side is that there is very little downtime. The good news is, things grow all year. This is also the bad news, especially since some of those things are weeds. With no winter to kill them off, the perennial varieties go to town on whatever schedule suits them, and the annuals come up as they please. Weeds are a puzzlement, a sort of negative wonder: they grow faster than any desirable plant and seem to survive on practically nothing. My main defenses against them consist of the wildflowers I plant every year and a little book that I ran across in a library, and liked so much I just had to buy a copy for myself.

The wildflower part of the equation consists of maintaining a field of various varieties instead of a lawn on three sides of the house. If you do it right the flowers crowd and starve out the weeds before they can take hold; apart from that, you can have something blooming all the time; select the wrong types and you get a ‘flash bloom’ that becomes a dry thatch for nine months of the year. Neighbors do not like that effect. Some of them may, after a glass or two of wine, suggest that you are lazy, or worse.

The other part of my defense against weeds relies heavily upon a single volume, Weeds of the West, without which I would be worse than lost. If there is a book that I use more often than this one it would have to be the dictionary. As a reference book this one rings all the bells; it is practically perfect for its purpose.

[Just what makes a weed? According to the authors of this book, “A plant that interferes with management objectives for a given area of land at a given point in time.” They might be talking about certain librarians there, now I think on it.]

You may be wondering why it is that a person would need to know any more about a weed than that is was a weed, and therefore subject to destruction. The answer to this is that eradication isn’t as simple a thing as simply swinging a hoe. Some of the little devils will persist unless dug out root and branch; others you can simply tread upon and forget. Weeds are also a good indication of soil type, quality and condition. They also let you know if you’re watering enough, or too much.

Right now I have about two dozen of the illustrated pages of this weed book tabbed—that is approximately the number of the varieties I run into on a regular basis, just beyond the front door. Most of them are foreign invaders, opportunists who came in on some settler’s heel or in a sack of contaminated grain. Anybody who has seen western movies is familiar with the tumbleweed, Salsola iberica, a Russian stow-away which the book describes thus:

“Seeds are spread as mature plants break off at ground level and are scattered by the wind as tumbleweeds. Rapid germination and seedling establishment occur. . . since introduced in the late 1800s, it has become one of the most common and troublesome weeds in the drier regions of the U.S.”

Now, if that doesn’t get your pulse racing, you probably pay somebody else to spade your petunias. Fortunately for me, I managed to compare the odd little seedlings of that Russian transplant to the mug shots in the book before my garden began to look like the outskirts of Tombstone. I have not been as lucky with others, most of which were creatures whose character I misread, believing them to be annuals– minor disturbances, rather than deep-rooted, long-lived perennials who had come for a free lunch and stayed for dessert. I will say no more on this other than that I am now aware of at least a dozen weeds which appear to be no more troublesome than the common dandelion, but which require a backhoe to successfully eradicate. For the record, I can tell you where to rent one.

If I had to make an argument for this book I would say that your gardening patrons will either need it without knowing or waste time looking for Redstem Filaree in other books that won’t contain a whit of useful information. Worst of all, you could be working the reference desk on a Saturday afternoon and have some lady rush up with a plastic bag full of some itchy-looking hay and expect you to figure it out without a reliable guide. You already have dozens of volumes on flowers; why not something on weeds?

Weeds of the West
by Tom D. Whitson (Editor) Paperback: 628 pages ; Publisher: DIANE Publishing Co; 9th edition (June 2000) ISBN: 0756711827 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0756711827/qid=1057274354/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-2074521-9684011

Weeds of the West has a few useful sisters out there:

Northwest Weeds: The Ugly and Beautiful Villains of Fields, Gardens, and Roadsides
by Ronald J., Taylor ; Publisher: Mountain Press Publishing Company; (July 1990) ISBN: 0878422498
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0878422498/002-2074521-9684011?v=glance&st=*

Weeds of the Northern United States & Canada: A Guide for Identification
by France Royer, Richard Dickinson Paperback: 472 pages ; Publisher: Lone Pine Publishing; (April 1999) ISBN: 1551052210 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1551052210/ref=pd_sim_books_3/002-2074521-9684011?v=glance&s=books

Weeds of the Northeast
by Richard H. Uva, Joseph C. Neal (Contributor), Joseph M. Ditomaso (Contributor) Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr; (April 1997) ISBN: 0801483344 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801483344/ref=pd_sbs_b_1/002-2074521-9684011?v=glance&s=books

Common Weeds of the United States
by United States. Agricultural Research Service., U S Dept of Agriculture, United States ; Publisher: Dover Pubns; (November 1987) ISBN: 0486205045 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0486205045/ref=pd_bxgy_text_1/002-2074521-9684011?v=glance&s=books&st=*

Weeds
by Alexander C. Martin, Jean Zallinger (Illustrator Paperback: 160 pages ; Publisher: Golden Books Pub Co (Adult); (August 2000) ISBN: 0307243532 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0307243532/ref=pd_sim_books_1/002-2074521-9684011?v=glance&s=books

Michael McGrorty
(and you thought your husband had a boring hobby)

I ask that the readers of this service beg my pardon for a digression from the usual line of library topics in order to assist me with a personal difficulty. Today, while I was minding my own business a disaster befell my household.

I ask that the readers of this service beg my pardon for a digression from the usual line of library topics in order to assist me with a personal difficulty. Today, while I was minding my own business a disaster befell my household. This morning’s sun lit the eastern sky with the promise of a pleasant summer day: I went to the gym as usual, and then as is often my habit, to the library; I go to libraries even when I don’t have anything special in mind, simply because they please me so much and moreover set the day off to a good start.

After that a cup of strong coffee and a Danish, and the short ride home up the hill. Unbeknownst to me, a peril was lurking in my neighborhood, waiting to put an end to the peace and tranquility, even to the very way of life I had known for decades. There, at the end of my driveway sat a delivery truck whose contents—well, I will let the reader decide for herself.

The delivery man said, “I have a large box for your address.” With that he proceeded to the rear of his vehicle, lowered a ramp and rolled off a hand truck upon which sat a corrugated vessel no smaller than the Titanic whose side was emblazoned with an electronics manufacturer’s logo. I fell immediately into a sort of shock; though I had expected this, the actual arrival was altogether too much for me to absorb. The man pushed his burden up the walk, then hefted the box into my living room. I signed some papers, and became the custodian—I shudder to say ‘owner,’ of a television set, the first one beneath any roof of mine since I was in knickers.

A while ago my wife, she of the traveling business dodge, sent me an email informing me that she had, through the accumulation of certain mileage points, gained enough credits to choose herself virtually anything from a particular catalog of amusements, one of which turned out to be the aforementioned television. It turned out that she desired this television badly, mostly for its ability to play DVD movies. Wife does not often ask for things; when she does it means she wants them badly. Being as I am a good husband (and being as I have not brought any bread into this home since beginning library school two years ago) I thought the better response would be to go along—perhaps she would forget.

She didn’t forget. I forgot, until today. Until this day I had not owned a TV set; not seen a single episode of Seinfeld, Cheers, Baywatch or any of that other dreck since before I left home for the navy in 1974. I had my own dreck in the form of televised baseball, but I managed to keep the shame of that pastime in the tavern where it belonged alongside my other favorite vice, to be enjoyed sparingly, then left behind and denied the next morning if I were questioned.

Now the devil inhabits my own home. I have been one of those people who blame television for a good proportion of the ills of society, especially the inability of ordinary folk to listen without interrupting and the tendency to require information to be digested into very tiny bits. If television doesn’t make idiots it certainly caters to them—and now I’m feeding that particular dragon, and a big one he is. The thing resembles nothing so much as a refrigerator fallen upon its side; there are smaller screens at drive-in movie theaters. I can’t move the thing by myself, not so much because of the weight, but owing to the fact that it is bigger around than a circus elephant.

I wanted very much to hide the thing somewhere, but can’t. When I can I’m going to shove it away in the spare bedroom. That way visitors won’t know we have one—I feel rather like a moonshiner or the proprietor of a crackhouse. But I wonder: why should I? Pretty soon I’ll probably get used to the thing. In no time at all, I’ll be watching fourteen year-old call-girls pouring out their hearts to Oprah, or following the soaps; I’ll be able to talk with authority at the water cooler about whatever bloody cop show is getting the ratings. If I want to impress a fellow watcher, I can always mention that I saw something on PBS, whether I stayed awake to the end or not.

As for the library, I would imagine my focus on that that will recede into the distance as my mind is taken over by commercial programming and the latest in recorded home entertainment. Perhaps I can find a library with a good selection of recent movies to fill the hours I might have wasted on those grimy old books.

And so, I have fallen after all these years. I suppose, like Adam, I could blame my wife for the loss of Eden, but that won’t make it any simpler to live in this brave new world.

Michael McGrorty

This has been an interesting year for California librarians. The recent Supreme Court decision regarding CIPA comes as the latest smackdown in a series which has included severe funding cutbacks and a continuing wrangle over the effect of the Patriot Act. For a library student, these past few months have served as a living laboratory of the connections between publicly-funded libraries and the larger society.

This has been an interesting year for California librarians. The recent Supreme Court decision regarding CIPA comes as the latest smackdown in a series which has included severe funding cutbacks and a continuing wrangle over the effect of the Patriot Act. For a library student, these past few months have served as a living laboratory of the connections between publicly-funded libraries and the larger society. The more interesting term papers and theses will be written about the federal government’s incursion into the contents of library records, but the heavier consequences will come from the duller impact of funding shortfalls. Perhaps some clever student will take a long look at the situation and conclude that the CIPA problem and the diminished state funding of libraries represent the same difficulty in differing form.

At first glance CIPA seems to be a problem of censorship, or more properly, of the assumed right to use the Internet without interference. That is the situation on its face, but the deeper reality comes down to a funding problem; as the saying goes, it always comes down to money.

Failure to comply with CIPA will result in loss of funding under the E-rate and LSTA programs. It is natural enough and certainly necessary to oppose CIPA on this basis, but when all is said and done, the matter’s core lies a layer deeper than this.

The potential or actual loss of federal funding through non-compliance with CIPA is not the illness itself but a symptom of the same malady which plagues public libraries: dependence upon variable funding schemes, reliance upon a sort of serial beggary in order to pay for things which ought by reason and right to be regularly funded by some agency of government. The library in many localities is held together with a ragged net of grants, special programs and donations laid upon a base of ‘regular’ funding which experience (and especially recent experience) shows is about as reliable as rain in the Sahara. These programs, supposedly intended to put icing on the public library cake, are too often relied upon to make up the batter; the process, as anyone who has sweated over a budget knows, involves a desperately ingenious sleight of hand; the public sees a Potemkin-village library and assumes all is well, but the staff know otherwise, and the sweating never ceases.

Your larger library systems keep somebody on board simply to chase down grant money; the smaller ones do what they can to plead poverty or some other element of uniqueness or singular intent to qualify for the largesse of some private foundation or public entity. This is not the way to run a library. The process is not only unreliable but pits one institution against another in a sort of beauty contest, a musical chairs arrangement that ensures losers, bleeds the resources and energy of the library and diverts attention from the real problem. Right now many of our libraries are participating in a lottery; their opposition to CIPA arises as much or more from the government’s threat to ban them from buying a ticket to the next drawing as from any revulsion over the loss of civil rights. This is wrong; we have come to a bad place and should expend some energy trying to get out of it.

The solution to this is to work toward the creation of a genuine and universally understood per-capita standard for library funding which would function as a reliable, permanent reference mark and floor of support. Even if the level initially set was below current funding, the adoption of a universal concept and a design for funding would form the basis for increases and eventual adoption of a higher permanent standard. Only a fool would underestimate the difficulty of such an endeavor on the statewide level, but we would be more foolish to continue on the current path, playing a sad lottery in order to support this most worthy of publicly-funded institutions.

Michael McGrorty

I admit with no reluctance to a certain weakness for old books. An old book contains two stories: its contents and whatever tales its users have attached to it over the years. Sometimes I like a book because of the way it has worn: like an old shoe or a favorite hat, books break in and become comfortable; their spines relax and their pages lie flat without effort; they smell of someone’s home—they carry the memory of the owner’s hair, his cigar, her perfume, the particular dust of the place, the residue of curtains or carpets or hardwood shelves or sometimes the faint aroma of a musty attic trunk. I look for books like that, sniff and feel for them like a hog searches for a hidden acorn, and for the same reason.

I admit with no reluctance to a certain weakness for old books. An old book contains two stories: its contents and whatever tales its users have attached to it over the years. Sometimes I like a book because of the way it has worn: like an old shoe or a favorite hat, books break in and become comfortable; their spines relax and their pages lie flat without effort; they smell of someone’s home—they carry the memory of the owner’s hair, his cigar, her perfume, the particular dust of the place, the residue of curtains or carpets or hardwood shelves or sometimes the faint aroma of a musty attic trunk. I look for books like that, sniff and feel for them like a hog searches for a hidden acorn, and for the same reason. As a result my house occasionally resembles an old bookshop. In order for it to function as a home, the woman who functions as my wife will sometimes request that I transfer certain of my selections to the care of others, permanently. I suppose the solution to this situation would be to reduce my intake of new old books, but that discipline would be difficult if not impossible to maintain, and the added burden of the enforcement would work a hardship upon my wife.

I have found that the best places to obtain new material for my ever-shifting collection is at library book sales. Public libraries discard quite a few good old books. It isn’t that they don’t care about books; quite the opposite. The librarians care more for the books than the patrons, but the nature of the library is such that it continually replenishes its supply; it is not an archive nor a museum but a collection for use by a public whose tastes change and whose appetites are constantly whetted by new releases from the publishing world. What this means of course is that many a worthy title goes out to the Friends’ book sale, and sometimes to my hands.

The other day I came across a small gem which had been donated to a library near me, but never saw a day of life on the shelf. One of the staff probably gave it a glance and decided it didn’t merit space. That is too bad for the library, and quite good for me.

The book is not really a book but a periodical. By way of title it is Evergreen Review, volume 1, number 2, which emerged from Barney Rosset’s Grove Press in 1957. The serious student of modern literature will by the conclusion of the last sentence have begun to feel the hairs arise upon the back of his neck; for the rest of the world, a brief explanation is in order.

The Evergreen Review was a little project of Rosset’s fertile mind; Rosset brought D.H. Lawrence’s lively story about Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper to the American market (and the courts) as well as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer; Grove Press existed at the bright and dangerous cutting edge of publishing from 1951 to its demise in 1985, and it was only natural that Rosset would undertake a magazine to showcase the newest bright (and dark!) lights of the time. Hence the Review, whose first issue showcased Rosset’s pals Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett and Mark Schorer, among others in 201 provocative pages.

The second issue, which rests in my lap, bore the title ‘San Francisco Scene,’ and featured a jostling crowd of Beats and fellow travelers: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl appears here, along with work by Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It is quite something even at this late date to flip to page 137 and imagine an impressionable young man absorbing these lines, obtained for one dollar American, while sucking on a Galois in the espresso-stained gloom of some college-town coffeehouse:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix . . .

That line alone is probably responsible for half the English majors of my generation, not to mention quite a bit of the most sincere form of flattery, most of which stunk badly in comparison, but that’s life: Ginsberg is as vulnerable to bad imitation as Hemingway or Shakespeare or anybody with a distinct style, and that, of course, he had in spades. There is a photograph of him in the gallery which begins on page 65, appallingly young in denim shirt, nursing the inevitable dying remnant of a flattened smoke between his fingers, staring into the camera and our souls, not a gray hair on his head, frozen in time here on these pages, which scholars will turn and read and marvel at when our grandchildren are long in their graves.

Not far before the picture gallery there is a piece by Ralph J. Gleason, ‘The San Francisco Jazz Scene.’ Gleason’s writing style was forged at the old Chronicle and honed in the dim light of cigar-box clubs; his piece begins “San Francisco has always been a good-time town. For periods it has been a wide-open town.” This is more than a music review; it is witness-journalism mated with the spare style of the noir novel, and Gleason made it work for himself and us through a career that spanned musical light-years in terms of the changes he witnessed and wrote about first-hand. Gleason would one day join Jann Wenner in founding Rolling Stone magazine; before that he would be an early champion of Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis and Bob Dylan. He lived fifty-eight years by the calendar, and he was about forty and in his prime when this piece found its place in the Review.

Jack Kerouac gives us a sample of himself in ‘October in the Railroad Earth,’ whose opening sentence runs nearly the length of a page and rambles like a dope-smoking street bum through an edgy film loop of San Francisco in a long moment that took place just back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend. This is Kerouac before the booze sets in; in the same year he will become famous from the publication of On the Road, and be unable to deal with all that. I would quote you some of this, give you some idea, but he doesn’t use periods any more than a hurricane and I wouldn’t know when to make it quit. Go see for yourself.

And so it lies here in my lap, this gem of a discard, mine for two bits to do with as I please. Right now I have been pleasing to try to describe this faded little magazine without implying somehow that the library from which it was obtained might better have thrown a call number across its narrow back and let another generation of youth become polluted by its content, but I’m not going to suggest that and if they want some of this they can probably get it on the Internet, if they can find it by themselves.

Michael McGrorty

Michael McGrorty has Library Unions: a Matrix for Evaluation on the California Library Association site.

He says evaluating library unionism has always forced the viewer to abandon certain conventions at the start of the undertaking. The library is a different animal than the typical run of union shop, even in the public sector, and even against the background of somewhat analogous operations like the public school.