I haven't posted since May --during which time a member of my family received his graduate degree from Yale, and my spouse and I travelled to Scotland for three weeks, including ten days on a small boat in the Outer Hebrides. I retired from my position as a librarian. I have been preparing our house for sale and moving to Philadelphia.
This blog began in 2010 with my views about books, e-books, and readers. Then it was on the Typepad platform. Since then I have posted sometimes regularly and other times hardly at all, migrated to WordPress, and expanded my comments beyond my concerns as a librarian. I've had hardly any readers, nor sought them. I wrote this for my own thinking, my pleasure as a writer, and modest contribution for whomever might read it. I am from the generation which does not post deeply personal remarks on a public platform of any kind, so this is neither a diary nor an intellectual autobiographical sketch. It's merely a set of remarks.
So where do I go with this now? Retirement has freed me from having to be more diplomatic about the retrograde views of the administrative leadership of my previous academic employer. I certainly don't miss the commute and the daily experience of feeling insulted and devalued by a University leadership that could find no serious money to put into a library, nor will nor imagination to do so. I don't want to settle scores, though; that's old news.
Extensible might come to mean librarianship extended and transformed in my life into something not originally intended—observations on becoming more of a writer and less of a leader. The disciplines of a librarian: thoughtfulness, order, consistency, intelligibility, might serve me well with a new focus.
Recently I read Steven Petrow's hilarious and provocative Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old. As the subtitle promises, it is highly judgmental, unapologetically honest, and sometimes very funny By the end Petrow turns much more empathetic than one might have predicted. It's a take-down, but not just a take-down. It's a mind-the-gap notice, but an entertaining one.
In my forties I once heard a wise older person say, "Be careful who you are when you're middle aged, because you only become more so when you're old." Anyone can find examples of people whose characters, as they age, tilt towards their negative traits and away from their previous more positive. That's a well-taken warning.
I do worry a bit about living away from younger people, since I spent my career on university campuses. I have already heard older people dismiss the very real mental health images of young, post-pandemic adults as mere whinging "snowflakes." I don't want to lose emotional sensitivity, flexibility, and empathy. I watched those qualities ebb in my mother as she lived with chronic pain in her later years —and pain can eat away at you. Still, plenty of people experience chronic daily pain and resist becoming judgmental. Working with young people took me out of myself, and I want to find a way to continue that appropriately.
Now that our house is on the market, and prepared for the market, I have a moment to pause and to feel retired, perhaps for the first time since August, when I officially left my post. Freedom, uprooting, moving, the space to write can be threatening, and I need to give myself some time for this transition. (And I've hardly had that time.)
Quo ibis? Quo vadis? I'm only now finding out, and I look forward to the journey through the later years of my life.
Shout-out to Mary Beard, whose blog has paralleled my own transition to retirement. (It is, unfortunately, pay-walled by TLS.) In her case it was pretty much forced by English law and academic custom. I had the relative freedom to chose my time after my spouse qualified for Medicare. I worked several years later than Mary has done, and I'm glad for it, and was ready to go all the same. Thanks, Mary!
I wrote the piece below when I was at Hope College, in 1974. I was 21. I was able to locate this thanks to the digitization of the student literary journal Opus in Hope College's Digital Commons. I wrote this in response to reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (the first time I read it! in later years I have re-read it twice). I'm not sure what I meant by it.
Für Dich
In our past we were Of our past we shall become into our own, thus:
For what we did within the dream of memory illuminates the darkened room wherein, in quiet moments, yet we meet. Our footsteps in the snow resounding through the empty light in which we were,
Or were not. Only we know where we might have gone, in rings of light; snow.
Your smile was light, and we were living, even then, our lives gone backward.
Frank Bruni in his continuing series (New York Times, March 31, 2022) "For the Love of Sentences" thanks a reader who picked up this gem from Andrew Sullivan's Substack article The Strange Rebirth of Imperial Russia. (I don't subscribe to Substack and I can't read the whole piece.)
The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of postmodern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.
My point: this is a hazard peculiar to those who cherish the modes of Christian worship characterized by the language and ceremony of past centuries. That could be many groups, including ultra-Orthodox, ultra-traditionalist Catholics, and some Anglo-Catholics (especially those of the Anglican Church in North America variety). The mainstream, Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Church where I am a member and sometimes worship has quite a number of younger regulars who are entranced by the "mystery" (a profound, mesmerizing allure?) of the re-formulated 1549, 1662 and 1928 language in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. (You better believe reformulated! No more prayer for deliverance "from all sedicion and privye conspiracie, from the tyrannye of the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities.")
The profound, mesmerizing allure to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by can lead to disquieting fantasies. When I was in a very Protestant theological seminary in the late 1970s, certain students there were agog with the antiquity of Russian Orthodox worship, aided by the venerable and slightly scary, geriatric presence of Fr. Georges Florovsky. One hastens to mention that in 1979 that Russian Orthodox church was still very much under the thumb of the militantly atheistic Soviet régime, and that the profound, mesmerizing allure was enhanced by sympathy for a persecuted minority as well as implicit assertion that Russians weren't all bad, contra the ossified rhetoric of the Cold War west.
The seeds of a profound, mesmerizing allure to the recovery of meaning from past centuries was germinating, and unpredictably came to flower in the overblown, apocalyptic rhetoric of Ivan Ilyin, and Putin's Rasputin, Aleksandr Dugin (he of flowing locks and beard). The consequences of blasting away "all the incoherence and instability of postmodern life" and resuscitating "a new collective, ancient meaning" are now obvious to all, and should stand as a warning against those who romanticize parallel, Western "recoveries" as antidote to disillusionment with the shallowness of modernity. Russkiy mir in all its glories.
I might tell some of my fellow Episcopal congregants: you want to worship as in centuries past? OK: and throw in the complete suppression of women's rights and social role outside a narrow home-bound sphere, revive roaring homophobia and prejudice, and by all means re-assert property rights over other human beings. All characteristics of various Anglo-Catholic imperialist theologies of the 19th century. The past is all there, good and bad: you can't pick and choose.
Or: wisely adapt and retain your standing in modernity, with pointed and well-targeted critique of the shallows. Don't forget those previous decades or centuries, but do remember them—all of them. Before you blast away the incoherence and instability of postmodern life, consider carefully the consequences of the collective meaning that you seek to recover. The most powerful consequences are invariably those that were never foreseen.
Virginia Woolf sitting at Monk's house, before 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons, from Harvard University Library
There is another way of fighting for freedom without arms;
we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the
young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.
The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound—far more than prayers and anthems—that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead. Let us think what we can do to create the only efficient air-raid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now and then, sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away a bomb drops.
Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are fighting each other. The defenders are men, the attackers are men. Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to defend herself. She must lie weaponless tonight. Yet if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes or food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.
But to make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action. And the hornet in the sky rouses another hornet in the mind. There was one zooming in The Times this morning—a woman’s voice saying, “Women have not a word to say in politics.” There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All the idea makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men. That is a thought that damps thinking, and encourages irresponsibility. Why not bury the head in the pillow, plug the ears, and cease this futile activity of idea making? Because there are other tables besides officer tables and conference tables. Are we not leaving the young Englishman without a weapon that might be of value to him if we give up private thinking, tea-table thinking, because it seems useless? Are we not stressing our disability because our ability exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps to contempt? “I will not cease from mental fight,” Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.
The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people, fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circling there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth. It is not true that we are free. We are both prisoners tonight—he boxed up in his machine with a gun handy; we lying in the dark with a gas mask handy. If we were free we should be out in the open, dancing, at the play, or sitting at the window talking together. What is it that prevents us? “Hitler!” the loudspeakers cry with one voice. Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest, they reply. Destroy that, and you will be free.
Smoke rises over Lviv, Ukraine, March 18, 2022 Photo: linked from AP / New York Times
The drone of the planes is now like the sawing of a branch overhead. Round and round it goes, sawing and sawing at a branch directly above the house. Another sound begins sawing its way into the brain. “Women of ability”—it was Lady Astor speaking in The Times this morning—“are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.” Certainly we are held down. We are equally prisoners tonight—the Englishmen in their planes, the Englishwomen in their beds. But if he stops to think he may be killed; and we too. So let us think for him. Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves.
A bomb drops. All the windows rattle. The anti-aircraft guns are getting active. Up there on the hill under a net tagged with strips of green and brown stuff to imitate the hues of autumn leaves guns are concealed. Now they all fire at once. On the nine o’clock radio we shall be told “Forty-four enemy planes were shot down during the night, ten of them by anti-aircraft fire.” And one of the terms of peace, the loudspeakers say, is to be disarmament. There are to be no more guns, no army, no navy, no air force in the future. No more young men will be trained to fight with arms. That rouses another mind-hornet in the chambers of the brain—another quotation. “To fight against a real enemy, to earn undying honor and glory by shooting total strangers, and to come home with my breast covered with medals and decorations, that was the summit of my hope…. It was for this that my whole life so far had been dedicated, my education, training, everything….”
Those were the words of a young Englishman who fought in the last war. In the face of them, do the current thinkers honestly believe that by writing “Disarmament” on a sheet of paper at a conference table they will have done all that is needful? Othello’s occupation will be gone; but he will remain Othello. The young airman up in the sky is driven not only by the voices of loudspeakers; he is driven by voices in himself—ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition. Is he to be blamed for those instincts? Could we switch off the maternal instinct at the command of a table full of politicians? Suppose that imperative among the peace terms was: “Childbearing is to be restricted to a very small class of specially selected women,” would we submit? Should we not say, “The maternal instinct is a woman’s glory, It was for this that my whole life has been dedicated, my education, training, everything.” …But if it were necessary for the sake of humanity, for the peace of the world, that childbearing should be restricted, the maternal instinct subdued, women would attempt it. Men would help them. They would honor them for their refusal to bear children. They would give them other openings for their creative power. That too must make part of our fight for freedom. We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honorable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.
The sound of sawing overhead has increased. All the searchlights are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four, five, six … the seconds pass. The bomb did not fall. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board. The emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile. Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself by trying to create. Since the room is dark it can create only from memory. It reaches out to the memory of other Augusts—in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna; in London. Friends’ voices come back. Scraps of poetry return. Each of those thoughts, even in memory, was far more positive, reviving, healing and creative than the dull dread made of fear and hate. Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?
The searchlights, wavering across the flat, have picked up the plane now. From this window one can see a little silver insect turning and twisting in the light. The guns go pop pop pop. Then they cease. Probably the raider was brought down behind the hill. One of the pilots landed safe in a field near here the other day. He said to his captors, speaking fairly good English, “How glad I am that the fight is over!” Then an Englishman gave him a cigarette, and an English woman made him a cup of tea. That would seem to show that if you can free the man from the machine, the seed does not fall upon altogether stony ground. The seed may be fertile.
At last all the guns have stopped firing. All the searchlights have been extinguished. The natural darkness of a summer’s night returns. The innocent sounds of the country are heard again. An apple thuds to the ground. An owl hoots, winging its way from tree to tree. And some half-forgotten words of an old English writer come to mind: “The huntsmen are up in America….” Let us send these fragmentary notes to the huntsmen who are up in America, to the men and women whose sleep has not yet been broken by machine-gun fire, in the belief that they will rethink them generously and charitably, perhaps shape them into something serviceable. And now, in the shadowed half of the world, to sleep.
"A funny thing happened on our way to digital utopia: we find ourselves increasingly missing reality." David Sax's 2016 book The Revenge of the Analog acknowledged that humans need to work, sell, and live in the real world—not on a screen.
One of the best aspects of living in Hamden, Connecticut, USA is Best Video --more precisely, Best Video Film & Cultural Center. Hank Paper founded Best Video as a video rental store in 1985, and organized it around his extraordinary archive of films and programs on DVD and VHS. After 30 years and the demise of the video rental business elsewhere, Paper sold Best Video to a newly-formed nonprofit local cultural center. With over 30,000 titles, and a special wealth of classic, foreign, and independent titles, Best Video had become a cultural asset that the community could not let go. It now boasts curated screenings, a local performance space welcoming local musicians including high school students, readings and literary events, and a coffee bar that has become a local favorite (in addition to providing high-quality sipping while browsing).
Hank Hoffman (l) and Hank Paper (r) in Best Video
Walking into Best Video is an experience akin to entering a good public library --friendly, unhurried atmosphere, excellent help and advice, and a wealth of interesting finds that you probably did not realize you were looking for, or missing. Although the archive supports life on a screen —once the silver screen, now the flat digital kind— that screen time is firmly anchored to the sensory life of reality.
With Best Video, your selection is not guided by what a streaming service wants to show you (often disguised as "recommendation"), or what it pays that streaming service to curate. A streaming service could never support the number and variety of independent films archived on DVD. How Best Video's films are organized is both a little confusing and delightfully idiosyncratic --categories such as "Oscar losers," films organized by directors living and dead, film noir, musical events, and of course the staff picks. If you can't find it, the staff can locate it in minutes.
Best Video enables and enhances that a rare contemporary experience --true serendipity. Films you did not know existed, or forgot about, or never heard of, or supply an interest that you're just beginning to develop. The joys of collocation are very similar to the shelves of a good public library—items both famous and obscure, sometimes right next to each other. I have become aware of how the offerings of the streaming services are channeled, guided, and limited, as well as how dreadful their search interfaces are. How arbitrary their assignments of genre or interest are.
The streaming services are an excellent example of the problem highlighted in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The shallow offerings on Netflix, Hulu, or any of the others serve the corporate interests that finance them —so that amazing material is simply omitted and by omission a viewer cannot even think to look for it. Where Carr was concerned with our withering abilities to think and read deeply, visiting Best Video shows how by analogy we are also losing the ability to view and imagine deeply. Ukrainian film such as Bitter Harvest (2017—about the profound famine of 1932 called in Ukrainian the Holodomor, in which millions died) form a sense of national reality so often lacking in superficial popular recommendations.
The film collections of larger public libraries can partially fill the void left by the death of independent video rental stores (as well as the bland chains). The best part of Best Video is sheer unpredictability —not a quality that streams to your home easily. A funny thing happened on the way to ubiquity —it turns out that place is important. Best Video is a vital third place for viewing, talking, and finding —some of the qualities that make us human.
Best Video Coffee Bar, photo courtesy of Best Video, 2020
Ash Wednesday has always been a conundrum for me. It rarely played much of a role in my own history as a Christian. Last year an acquaintance, now a bishop, wrote that in March 2021, "the Lent that never ended begins again," referring to the sudden closure churches and subsequent isolation starting the previous March, 2020. This year 2022, I might add, "the Lent that never ended begins again, again."
I was raised in a middle-of-the-road so-called "liberal" Congregational Church in Michigan. A church of GM regional middle management, local businessmen (1950s-1960s: they werealmost all men; my father was one), and agricultural commodities dealers (sugar beets!). Ash Wednesday was a small, add-on holiday for a congregation with a limited liturgical year—most characterized by what we did not do (ashes! unlike the Polish Catholics and German Missouri-Synod Lutherans who dominated the area at that time).
When I was in Princeton and later, my sense of Ash Wednesdays varied. I lurched, over a decade, from ordained Presbyterian ministry to lay membership in a medium-high Episcopal church in New York City ("off-Broadway" compared with Smokey Mary's "Broadway"). It led a socially edgy AIDS ministry in the 1980s and 1990s, and Ash Wednesday for me had varying levels of seriousness. Fast forward to the 2000s and I joined a progressive "Anglo-Catholic" Episcopal parish in New Haven that ostensibly takes Lent very seriously. With a touch of liturgically theatrical ostentation that I never found congenial. ("Anglo-Catholic" meaning what, really? pseudo-medievalist nostalgia? A 19th-century fable to justify empire?)
My church in New Haven has many important and estimable qualities: sponsoring a community soup kitchen; hosting an annual gathering of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim youth, providing a home for a "house of study" for young adults seeking a gap year of post-baccalaureate social service; reaching out to Yale students with an otherworldly, meditative Sunday compline during term. So many good things. I feel I should be more supportive, and I do what I can to support those ministries, but I'm no longer present there, figuratively and in many cases physically.
I feel utterly out of touch, so out of synch with Ash Wednesday this year. That never-ending Lent again, again. Pandemic, insatiable grievance, climate change and the collapse of nature; a live-streamed, intentionally brutal war in Ukraine, not to mention: wars in Colombia, Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, the Congo, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanamar/Burma, not to mention the Uyghurs, Taiwan, and North Korea. Much closer to home the unending cycle of urban murder. Way too many guns. This wierd not-this, not-that, in-between time that we all live in, now with the shadow of nuclear war hanging over us again.
I cannot escape the heritage of Ash Wednesday that has focused so much on individuals' sexual and petty-moral sins. Like Annie Lamott's "enemies lite," but here "trespasses lite." I'm no angel, but my trespasses in the great heap amount to a pretty small hill of beans, and my obsessing about them is just a distraction. Granted the Great Litany rehearses life as it is: earthquakes, famine flood, war, hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, contempt, violence of every kind, boundless human suffering. Nonetheless, in that classic catalogue, the sins that stick out again and again in Christian past practice: inordinate and sinful affections, and the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Complemented by a Rite-I prayer of confession with centuries-old, tradition cadences addressed to a distant emperor or peevish, bitchy Tudor monarch. It's stylistically consistent but —for me, at least—just misses the point.
Lately I have read Margaret Renkl's confession that this year ecclesiastical Lent will not count her in and Jimin Kang's I Gave Up English for Lent. I'm in broad sympathy: the Lent of self-imposed sacrifice just does not speak to "the fears I cannot shake— for my country, for my planet — and [speak] toward a stronger faith in the possibility of redemption, a more certain conviction that all is not yet lost in this deeply troubled world." (Renkl) The power of language to shape and distort reality, to live outside of English: to find "what is uniquely yours to offer" that "can be gleaned only by what you can — and have already — received from the generosity of others." (Kang)
I'm inextricably bound in this body bound for ashes—at 68, I'm accepting more and more that these are the days of my one-and-only life, and that I war born and have lived in specific time that, with me, is passing away soon. (Though not quite yet!) Inextricably bound to a world of environmental degradation—how could I ever live without plastics, carbon, and petroleum, given the daily choices I face? Sorrowful for the communities I have known that have vanished, blown away by economies, drugs, and hatred —deaths of despair. The sorrow that Patrick Laurie feels for Galloway, commodified with forest as a carbon offset for rapacious corporations elsewhere, resonates strongly for me even though my environmental and geographical location is so different.
This Lent is not an ecclesial Lent, at least not for me. I have learned from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer that the living Word, the encounter with the Word, may well (and probably will) take place far from the courts of house of the Lord. The center of our life in the periphery of our communities. the stranger unlooked-for among us. The refugee. The undocumented.
Somehow I still seek to find the practice of hope that eludes me, the practice of faith that somehow all is not lost for our world, my community, my nation. To acknowledge with Paul Lehmann the darkness of the Gospel: that the practice of love confronted with the power politics of the world is so utterly unfit, so laughably at odds with what passes for reality, that its presence transfigures the encounter on the frontier of life; another reality breaks in as a tangent touches a circle. Who would ever have anticipated the self-denying leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky? — speaking truth to power, who in the event of his probable death will become more infinitely powerful than his murderers-to-be could ever imagine.
The Lent that never ended begins again, again. Like Renkl, I feel more and more that I am an unchurched Christian. (Maybe "barely churched" is more accurate.) In the past two years, for the first time of my life, I have stopped attending worship regularly, even online. For a while, a long while, it was a hiatus not by choice. When I could choose to attend, sometimes —or often— I just have not heard the call. When I did attend it felt as worship by half-measures, too often undertaken with ever-watchful fear of contagion that allows for nothing unplanned, nothing unauthorized, inappropriate, or unexpected. Bars, cafés, and gyms were more than half-full, church not even half so. Hymns half-sung through a mask have seemed an exercise in liturgical nostalgia. I have become half-unchurched, sometimes suffused with regret, but often not. I don't know how long the other half of unchurched will take.
Lent was never an end in itself; it led on to passion and resurrection. The suffering of the planet, my neighbors, my friends, and countless others is a passion beyond description. Too many deaths, too much illness. On too many days, all seems lost for the world that I love. New life ,whenever it speaks, acknowledges wider reality beyond description. Outdoors, or with a friend, or when listening to the music so deep that we become the music. "The ploughman shall go out in March and turn the same earth / He has turned before, the bird shall sing the same song. // Shall the bird's song cover, the green tree cover, what wrong / Shall the fresh earth cover? We wait, and the time is short / But waiting is long."
David Gange's The Frayed Atlantic Edge is subtitled A Historian's Journey from Shetland to the Channel. Both title and subtitle bear plain-language meanings and metaphor.
The Atlantic edge orients the reader not to the edge of the British and Irish archipelago from the land, but from the point of view of the ocean.
Frayed carries both the sense of "things come apart," but unraveling of societies and misconceptions, and suggests Gange's desire: to re-conceptualize, to knit up the liminal littoral —in a sense to extend the ancient intention to repair the world (תיקון עולם)(tikkun olam) to repair the coast (תיקון חוֹף)(tikkun khofe) and all who live there, both human and other.
The journey is not only the ten voyages by kayak and one mountain hike (no "only" there!), but also Gange's evolving understanding of history and memory, of understanding interwoven (or frayed) interactions of environment, social history, ecological devastation, and historical ideologies.
Above all, Gange is a highly effective narrator and interlocutor, with a certain audacious charm that makes me want to join him for month of evenings in a quiet pub with pint, and just listen to him. From this American's perspective, he is one of those extraordinary British characters who accomplish something truly remarkable (in this case, a lot of kayaking under very challenging conditions) with equally remarkable equanimity, even nonchalance. All this from a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge, so no slouch.
"The significance of coasts is consistently underestimated," Gange writes, and "this book sets out to put some of that imbalance right." (p. ix) Structured by region and course of 13 months, Gange's narrates both the consistent factors in the regions from Shetland to Land's End in wind, waves, and rocks, and divergence, how differently the various island and coastal cultures that have adapted to these consistent factors. The first half of the book focuses upon kayaking, and the physicality of coasts and waves, smells, sounds, sights.
Gange is distant intellectual heir to G. M. Trevelyan, who believed strongly in history informed by muddy boots, and who composed an essay Walking and called his legs his two "doctors" (meaning physicians or teachers or both?). After Trevelyan, Gange traces a line of thinking through Archibald Haldane (The Drove Roads of Scotland, etc.), although both his and Trevelyan's brands of romanticism were implicated in varying degrees in the imperialism and centralizing cultural mindset of the Anglo-Scottish aristocracy (and which sponsored the devastating enclosures across Scotland). A different set of forebears, a generation or three removed, are Alastair and Ninian Dunnett, who wrote the kayaking classic The Canoe Boys in 1934, sending serial reports to The Daily Record (newspaper) of their progress and discoveries—among which were that the vigorous communities on western coast of Scotland were not so remote and backward as the imperializing rhetoric of progress had claimed. A later, similar, intellectual and athletic example is Brian Wilson's Blazing Paddles (1988). Make no mistake: what the Dunnetts, Wilson, and Gange (and others) have done qualifies as an athletic feat: one has to be in superb physical shape to withstand the rigors of the maritime conditions. (The galleries of photographs in the book's related website bear abundant witness to the challenges.)
Gange writes more immediately in the aftermath of Barry Cunliffe's Facing the ocean : the Atlantic and its peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500 (2001 and later). Cunliffe's book occasioned some debate among historians (earning an appraisal as "outlined more in romantic phrases . . . rather than in the measured language of science reporting the rigorous testing of hypotheses" from Malcolm Wagstaff, EHR 117:301). Cunliffe's work remains a "clear exposition" of the continuities in ancient seacoast cultures, as well as their differences, and Gange does him one better: rather than facing the ocean, Gange is on it, facing the shore.
Gange's book is neither under- nor over-theorized, and as he promises on page x, the balance shifts from kayaking, and the smells, sounds, waves, and winds of the coast to "historical research, literary criticism, and argument." Never tendentious, Gange bravely and critically reads poetry, feminist and post-imperialist theory, and socio-political argument in a fashion that might be called post-modern were it not so readable (unlike so much post-modern writing). He writes a personal journey as a historian, neglecting neither his discipline nor the personal memories and hopes, and hospitality of those he meets. (Arriving in a small community on a kayak is a great way to spark conversation at a far deeper level than any ordinary tourist or visiting scholar.)
This book's combination of history, literature, theory, environmental sciences, and physical achievement may not earn kudos from those historians focused exclusively upon documents and the "rigorous testing of hypotheses," nor those administrators and politicians who bludgeon creative academics with required impact evaluation in the Research Excellence Framework. (One might take all those ratings and throw them overboard, along with their administrators and politicians, somewhere north of the Shetlands.) Gange's graceful combination, nevertheless, achieves an uncommon synthesis and evokes in this reader a strong desire to learn more.
There is too much in Gange's book to summarize easily, and his chapters bear re-reading (or an experiment: reading the chapters in reverse order). His epilogue, "The View from the Sea," both looks forward to further study, and expresses how this journey changed him personally after a year of writing and teaching back in Birmingham.
"What I missed most was immersion in constant movement: the world view from the low of the wave. I missed the sense of being part of a vast, coherent dynamism. Indoors I was sometimes unsettled (a condition I could only refer to as 'the bends,' since it was caused by coming up from the sea) and sometimes resort to a sleeping bag in the garden among the foxes and green woodpeckers. Never before had I so welcome rain: a good cold soaking was the best medicine of all." (339) . . . . "I wondered how much the journey had changed me otherwise and thought again of the ragged map of Britain whose every western indentation now conjured a story, an emotion or a physical sensation. I realised that immersion in these worlds had not, as I'd expected, cured me of my romanticism. . . . It isn't romanticism that needs to be cleared from perspectives on these places, but the assumption that these communities somehow below to the past, not the future, and are merely hazy places to escape to." . . . "The journey had shown me that a romanticism which delves into the natures of humans and their fellow species, finding wonder while rooted in the real, might not be so naive after all." (346-347)
In The New York Times recently (December 24, 2021), Julie Lasky (real estate beat) wrote about Reid Byers of Princeton. Reid wrote The Private Library . . . : The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom, because he found no other books specifically about private libraries about experiences of creating and using private, domestic libraries and why some people continue to build, curate, and preserve them. (See also The Times' slideshow.)
Byers' term "book-wrapt" extends the meanings and connotations both of the homophone rapt (as in enraptured) and wrapped as in surrounded-by or encased-in. A well-curated library "should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit . . . it is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center." In contrast to a living room without people (a room without the living), a library without people casts a spell. "I like to be in a room where I've read half the books, and I'd like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years," Byers says in The Times. (Think of the Japanese term tsundoku--books that remain unread.)
David Atlas (The Atlas of New Librarianship) writes, "I have long contended that a room full of books is simply a closet but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library." (p. 16) While I have long appreciated Lankes' reminder that librarians are the key to libraries' purpose, I have also long felt that Lankes is gliding over something important in a bid to re-assert librarianship in the face of digital complacency. (The sense that "everything is going digital" and "software is eating the world," so why bother with anything else? —a sense especially promoted by anyone selling anything digital.) What is Lankes' missing? The center of libraries' fundamental identity: libri -- books. From scrolls to codices to streaming text, books have been the distinguished feature of libraries for millennia. (I cannot restrict "book" to mean "binding.")
Book-wrapt captures the setting out and re-centering or entering-in that a good library provides for its humans. Librarians are, above all, library people. Were books suddenly magically and mysteriously removed from human habitations, librarians would lack their primary referent—one wonders even whether the term or function would any longer be intelligible.
Academic librarians have become aware of a paradox: students do not particularly like library spaces where there are no books. The bookless library of Applied Engineering and Technology at the University of Texas (2010) remains an outlier (though most engineering and technology libraries have drastically weeded print collections). In 2009 the Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, MA intended to remove all its printed materials to become an all-digital library for the 21st century, but after a change in leadership (!) a librarian was engaged in 2014 to re-balance the library's collections and restore print resources. Surveys and studies of user experience have shown that students do want books, at least in the background.
On the other hand, print circulation everywhere is far less than 2002 or 2012. Students seem to want books in libraries, but don't particularly read them. Younger Americans do seem to use libraries and know about them, as much as do older Americans, but follow typologies similar to those of other ages, from distant admirers to library lovers. (Those Pew studies were published before the rise of marked anti-intellectual distrust in some sectors of the American population.) I have not yet seen anyone solve the apparent contradiction: if younger Americans use libraries at rates exceeding or similar to their elders, why is academic library circulation of printed books down? I believe it may be because of different kinds of uses of different genres of books: academic books are rarely meant to be read cover-to-cover, unlike popular or literary fiction (whether textual or graphic).
I suspect that the term "book-wrapt" might give a hint about why students want books in libraries, but don't actually use them (whether internally or circulating).
When students enter a space with many books, they are seeking a space to get and keep themselves on task: they manage technology carefully, especially at crunch time. In a built environment wrapped in books, these students can become enrapt in their work. I suspect students like the backdrop of books because it reminds them of possible personal journeys. As Reid Byers says, masses of books represent "delights that we hold in possibility." Books represent explored worlds, roads not yet taken. (—or never to be taken?) Students want the company of books because in their spell they become re-centered: they are both setting out on tasks and and coming back to a sense of themselves as students and not just consumers or customers.
My insight might strike some as simple-minded romanticism. On the contrary, I have seen students remain remarkably on task in libraries. For at least some students, the books physically represent the learning they would like to achieve (whether achieving simply for a grade, a career, or genuine learning for the sake of growing up and coming home in the world). The books are somehow talismanic of their better selves.
The books represent relationships with the outside world, with history, with what many students would like to become. Those who see students as merely "revenue units" will never understand this. The symbolic power of books and libraries is easily underestimated but nonetheless potent, as every aspiring authoritarian and dictator knows. The enduring portent of book-burnings and the novel Fahrenheit 451 are a mirror image of book-wrapt. A library without books would turn its users into academic refugees—and maybe that is the intent of reductive and disruptive digital capitalism. As ever, books somehow slip the net, and with them their readers.
Disclosure: I have known Reid Byers although I doubt he would remember me. I knew his father, Arthur Byers, who for many years was Secretary of Princeton Theological Seminary. Reid was educated there as a Presbyterian minister several classes before me.
Image: Theodor-Heuss-Haus, Feuerbacher Weg, Stuttgart-Nord Arbeitszimmer von Theodor Heuss (mit einer Auswahl seiner Bücher) Public domain in wikimedia
(This post continues thoughts prompted by Prof. Mary Beard; see my previous post for context.
Up close and personal, card catalogs were less loved by those who created and maintained them than by some (or many) of those used them. Nicholson Baker's celebrated articles sought intentionally to denigrate librarians who were well aware of the shortcomings. Less expert users asked for—and often received—a lot of help using card catalogs. They were subject to all kinds of degradation, including a few obnoxious professors or other users who simply ripped out cards rather than write notes about which books to search for in the shelves. By far most card catalog users were respectful, but some weren't and they caused other users and librarians hours of trouble. Somehow Nicholson Baker and others just don't want to remember what working daily with a card catalog was really like --the bad with the good.
Nicholson Baker's celebrated take-down of newspaper digitization was even more precious. Librarians who had to work with old printed newspapers day in and day out often hated them for good reasons. Printed on cheap, acid-based paper, most newspapers quickly deteriorated. As they deteriorated, they gave off motes of dust that included nearly microscopic bits of acidified paper that bore inks with ingredients such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and titanium. A large room full of old newspapers (often located at a basement level) was a mildly toxic environment, toxicity intensified by paper mold. Digitization of content undoubtedly obliterated or obscured some content, but was the only practical alternative to substantial structural, conservation, and labor costs. Baker has apparently preserved many newspapers in his home. I wish him well; I wouldn't set foot in the place, no matter how gracious (or hostile) he might be.
Back to card catalogs: what was lost in the transition to digital catalogs? (—with a pit stop for microfiches.)
In a word, contexts.
A reasonably current academic library collection in a given subject, in the card catalog era, could offer a fair (though not exhaustive) representation of monographic publications. (Journals, manuscripts, archives, and special collections far more variously.) When a user found a run of cards by an author, or particular work, or subject, the size of the run (sometimes helpfully marked by separator cards) could given an impression of amount and range of scholarship. For students, this could be instructive, such as "I've never heard of Plotinus, but here's a large run of cards by or about him." A run of author's works (collected or in summary) was visible in a way not apparent by citations on a screen.
Individual cards could also communicate meanings in an almost tactile manner. Was a card well-thumbed? (—smudged by frequent contact with fingers.) Where cards were filed under an author's last name, did that last name change? (—because of marriage, divorce, immigration, honorary or aristocratic titles, etc.) Were some cards much more thumbed than others? Did that suggest books that were popular, or ignored? Were corrections typed or inked in, death dates added, and what about the see: and see also: references? Did the same work show differences in British and American editions? (—beyond spelling)
Online searching leads easily to the "keyhole" result: I found one thing that I'm looking for online, and remain unaware of a considerable number of resources (some potentially very helpful) which did not come to the surface because of the vagaries or keywords. Discovery services and AI-aided searches (Yewno) haven't yet overcome this. A user confronted with a three-inch set of cards by or about Iris Murdoch is less apt to settle for just one text or resource, and hardly merely the first five cards (equivalent to the first five Google search results).
Librarians, and occasionally users, added handwritten notes, some officially and others much less so. Some were in "library hand" (the official standard for handwritten information), others were less legible in various comments, sometimes underlines: "2nd ed." --! or: "Vol. 3 never published." Occasionally: "Ask librarian." Readers might introduce editorial comments, which while discouraged were impossible to prevent. I remember seeing the author card for William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale marked with red pencil: "Bullshit." At Firestone Library, a few cards author cards for F. Scott Fitzgerald were noted, "University Cottage Club." At Speer Library (Princeton Theological Seminary, home of many students of John Calvin), the wonderful cross-reference card "See, Holy. See: Holy See." was marked in early 20th-century pen, "That seeing they may see, and not perceive." (—a reference to Mark 4:12 in the Authorized Version.)
These notes could have a down side: hostile remarks about racism, integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr., or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Joseph McCarthy. In the U.K., I suspect that Margaret Thatcher might have received similar treatment had not the rise of digital catalogs prevented it.
In a card catalog, a user could more readily get a sense of the run of centuries-old scholarship on some subjects: the successive translations of Augustine's Confessions, or Dante, or Petrarch, for example. One might also glean insights into local scholarship: famous scholars who served their universities on committees, or as Deans, Rectors, or Wardens, or who even participated in local politics. This was particularly true in the mental interaction of the catalog with the shelves (stacks): physical co-locations that were enhanced or obscured by cataloging.
Card catalogs also encouraged library serendipity: the user seeking one thing but finding another, as well as surprises for the uninitiated: the undergraduate who discovered that the editor and author G. E. M. Anscombe was female, or that Jack Lewis was also C.S. Lewis. As indirect teaching devices, card catalogs ensured a slower pace of searches and research that had the effect of leavening the learning processes, as well as sometimes frustrating the learner. As a librarian, I could not count the number of times I was interrupted (while filing cards) by users who needed help, and those encounters frequently led to various kinds of both library and subject instruction. In my experience, users frustrated by online searches (searching has always been frustrating!) are far less apt to seek help, but just live with partial or unhelpful results.
As social centers for both librarians and users, card catalogs encouraged interaction in the web of library support that was so crucial for young scholars. Invariably three users and a librarian would converge on one drawer, or set of drawers, at a time, leading not only to patient negotiation and cooperation, but acquaintance. Searching an online catalog is a much more individual, even lonely, experience.
I very much wish that 21st century academic libraries could develop better and clearer ways for young scholars to interact with each other and their mentors. I agree with Prof. Beard: the web of library interaction has suffered, because of technology, economies, and the drift of digital culture suggested by the new verb "to friend." Alas, there is no going back, but social serendipity might strike again. The readiness is all.
Prof. Mary Beard has again spurred me to thoughts and second thoughts about librarianship (see September 3) -- this time about card catalog. (NB She spells the word in the traditional British manner; I follow the American custom of dropping the final -ue.)
In her always stimulating blog A Don's Life (paywall) she wrote a few days ago about the agonies of migrating her e-mail from a previous system (Hermes, a successor to Eudora) that worked pretty well to Microsoft Outlook. As a veteran Outlook user (both the installed app and the web version), I sympathize. "It repeatedly deletes emails in mid-composition" (—so I think she is using Outlook via Office365, but I'm not sure). Heaven knows that anything Microsoft is bound to cause trouble, probably more than it's worth. "No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" is undoubtedly true of campus IT departments, but its users are bound to be less happy. The law of unintended consequences holds true for Microsoft as anything else: As the system grows more complex, it grows unwieldy. (I can wax nostalgic about Sendmail that used to be part of freeBSD, but I desist.)
The same frustrations continue when Prof. Beard encounters her bank's allegedly upgraded online system: bank online systems are notoriously opaque and seem to be designed to frustrate the customer. Providing "better customer service" leads back to the law of unintended consequences.
Which brings our good don to library "catalogues."
It is all uncannily reminiscent of the demise of library card catalogues twenty-five or so years ago. For those of us fighting to preserve the old-fashioned card catalogue, or even the older-fashioned guard book, it was a losing battle. There are certainly advantages to an online catalogue (you can search it from anywhere, for a start, and you can introduce different search terms, and so on; I am not blind to these). But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue. When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method (just like there are losses in the voice-recognition banking system)?
Many of us have been through various iterations of this. Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art? A bit of humility on the part of the cyber-planners would not go amiss. I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites, and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues. Last laugh …
Much of this hits home. I have been a librarian throughout the period of digitization (1980s), first of library catalogs, then of journals and books themselves. (The latter much less far along than the former, thankfully.). There was too much ridiculous boosterism over the decades, especially in the 1980s, and a good bit of techno-cultural imperialism as well. Too many firms had too much to sell, and over-sell. To every era its excesses. Even a smidgen of humility was lacking.
"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method?" I knew librarians who were haunted by the losses, and I can remember numerous personal conversations. Those confutations never reached print because of the prevailing orthodoxies both within and outside the profession.
I remember feverish rebuttals and whispered partial agreements with Nicholson Baker's celebrated and idiosyncratic "Discards" essay in The New Yorker (paywall) in 1994, expanded in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001. Baker's counter-assault borders on the airing of personal grudges, and in twenty-year retrospect strikes one as alternately prescient, precious, and privileged to the point whining. (I do enjoy linking to the OCLC record for Baker's book, a bit of bibliographic snark.) The contretemps up to 1998 is nicely assessed by Cox, Greenberg, and Porter in "Access Denied: The Discarding of Library History" (JSTOR); see also a bibliography of responses compiled by the Association of Research Libraries. (FWIW the Wikipedia article isn't bad.) Baker's polarizing polemic over-determined what might have been more useful discussions.
Several personal observations from that period and since:
"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses . . ." introduces a straw person. Such a figure is all to easy to ridicule when a considerable majority of librarians are trying to cope with the vagaries of any kind of bibliographic technology (including cards) while responding as humans to humans and their needs. I've met almost stereotypical "high-tech" librarians in years past, but fewer rabidly enthusiastic as time goes on. The bloom has been off that rose for some time. Most librarians are by now too experienced with the vagaries of information technology to be fooled easily.
So-called "known item" searches are undeniably frustrating with almost all of the library service platforms. Librarians are the first to know those frustrations, since we spend a good deal of time searching for known items (to make sure we haven't already purchased them, for one thing). "But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" —unless, that is, you're not sure of the spelling of the author's name, or its "authorized" form, or you get the first word of a title wrong. If you're looking in a card catalog that isn't too large, the problem isn't too large. If you have a very large card catalog (like I knew at Firestone Library, Princeton University), the desired bit of information might be drawers away. Not to mention the vagaries of conference proceedings, technical reports, and series titles.
I used to file catalog cards, knew the ALA filing rules backwards and forwards, including a few local exceptions. The placement of the "main card" (usually the "author" card) was the most important, because that had the full list of "tracings," or the other cards in the set: as necessary the title card, uniform title card (especially for translations), series title card, series corporate author card; the subject-heading cards usually went into an adjacent "subject catalog" because the authorized Library of Congress subject headings could become so complex. Any of those cards could be misfiled; student files would typically leave their file cards "above the rod" so that their work could be reviewed, and when they became expert enough they could be allow to "drop the cards" or "pull the rod." I became expert enough that at Butler Library, Columbia I was entrusted to file "New York" author and title cards, distinguishing carefully between New York State, County, City, University, New-York Historical Society (that hyphen was important), among others.
"But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" --if the card has been correctly filed! My digression above is simply to point out some of the numerous points that could go wrong.
"Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art?" Thankfully the era of microfiche catalogs is long gone. This early 20th-century technology turns out to have been a transitional format although that was not realized at the time. Microfiche catalogs were undoubtedly worse than card catalogs --the only benefit they produced was for a library, that it need sort cards only once. For users, microfiche catalogs provided all the headaches of cards and microforms in one demonic package. Microfiche catalogs were a supposed economy that undoubtedly was never achieved due to the costs of the technology and distribution—the very definition of a false economy.
It is incredible to think that library computer automation was once sold as "money-saving." In salary terms, probably this was true, because a significant number of low-level employees could be re-assigned to other tasks, or cut. Remaining professional-level employees ultimately cost more (they became even more skilled), as well as the new employees (technical support) that the new systems demanded. Online catalogs have produced results that card catalogs could not produce, but they have not saved money. That was always a false argument, especially in the long run as systems needed to be updated, migrated, and secured.
"I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites,and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues." Well, the good professor will be left in a damp, dark, and completely unventilated library (except for openable windows, not always a building feature). No card catalogs will be resurrected: academic libraries are now just too large. In the event of society-wide, massive and distributed power failure, a great deal of journal and monograph content will simply vanish, at least for almost all users. That is truly worrisome. The remaining print collections will be too large to produce another card catalog at a time when society and universities will doubtless have quite a list of far more pressing problems. There really is no going back. The apocalypse may feature books, but not catalogs.
I was reminded of the irrevocable character of historical change a few months ago when I visited the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut. Once New London was a major shipping and trans-shipment point with excellent natural mooring (with a draft too shallow for later times). Now the small city is dominated by a college, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and Electric Boat and related industries (EB across the river in Groton; it makes submarines). Lyman Allyn was a wealthy merchant and his daughter left the manor house, art collection, and substantial bequest. The Museum library now means essentially a large room for presentations (and yoga sessions), but the actual books of the library are still located on the inset shelves, including the card catalog. A real card catalog with a substantial portion of the tangible collection it represents, still intact and on site! It was a beautiful experience to work through a drawer of cards again, but with a catch: I doubt that anything has been added to this library since the 1980s. I am certain that over the intervening years some books have been lost. Nevertheless—there it was, a real card catalog that turned a room with with a lot of books into an actual library. The only thing missing, sadly, was a living librarian. Should anyone begin to work with the collection again, there will be no recourse but to verify its contents with reference to online databases (even informally, such as LibraryThing).
A second blog entry asks, "What was lost when catalogs were transitioned from cards to computers?"
David Gange's The Frayed Atlantic Edge is subtitled A Historian's Journey from Shetland to the Channel. Both title and subtitle bear plain-language meanings and metaphor.
In The New York Times recently (December 24, 2021), Julie Lasky (real estate beat) 
