"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?"
A few weeks ago I read Joshua Kim’s blog entry The Great Remain, and thought of several responses. Joshua wonders about “some [large] number of people who work in higher education who remain in their jobs, even though they have saved enough money to stop working.” His guess is that this number considerably exceeds those who have left in the widely-proclaimed Great Resignation of 2021 (and likely 2022).
My first observation focuses on “even though they have saved enough money” —this is a condition that is hard to specify further. I’m over my officially designated “retirement age” (66) and in talking with my trusty TIAA representative, “enough” is a moving target.
I was surprised that TIAA’s actuaries suggest that I should plan for “enough” until I’m 98, or 2051. (Social Security Administration indicates estimates 85.4 years, so I don't know what accounts for the difference.) This is a lot longer than retirement planning used to consider feasible. Unless I put it all into a guaranteed annuity now (or soon), I have to consider how much more some of my funds might grow in that roughly 30 year period. This is tough: my anticipations of the next 30 years fluctuate between “growth” as the world economy shifts to a more sustainable basis, disaster (we’ll never pull off that shift), or muddling through (that shift, but only sort of). What do you think will happen?
So “enough money to stop working” is really hard to quantify for most of us except those in the upper income echelon amongst academics, who will always have enough. “Partner income” (where applicable) as a consideration is also frought: how healthy is that person? What does the partner do, and for how long?
At any rate, I share Joshua’s perception that in fact many people in academic who could retire from their present positions and present income instead choose to remain. Joshua suggested three large reasons for remaining: mission, identity, and “institutional rigidity.”
“Mission” is a tricky one, especially for those of us in private higher ed. Even at a more “liberal” (read: mainstream) Catholic institution, the concept of mission has become rather dented in the past 15 years. Does higher education in fact drive increasing social and economic stratification? Do we inadvertently contribute to an increasingly technocratic “winner take all” society and hence forced into the culture wars? Is this what I signed up for 40 years ago? My sense is that a lot of the missions of higher education (which vary significantly) have changed since the 1970s, and my own sense of participation in that has diminished.
“Identity” can be especially tricky: Joshua points out the way that in academic job and identity become conflated. This is especially difficult for the clan-like identities of academic disciplines: “I’m a sociologist, historian, virologist, medievalist.” It can be less difficult for those whose professional identities run concurrent to other significant life commitments, such as family, social service, or religious commitments. I surmise that more than a connection with a specific academic role (professor, dean, librarian, counselor), connections to specific kinds of responsibilities (teaching, research, consultation) bind identities significantly, and are expressed with reference to one’s academic clan. I know at least two retired Provosts who describe themselves as a “historian” or a “biologist,” even though neither has published in some years. Neither would call themselves "retired Provost" (assuming anyone else even knows what that means) or even "retired administrator" or "retired VP."
The loss of identity upon resignation from academia reflects the wider loss of identity all retired persons face in a society that assigns economic and moral weight to activity: working, producing, earning. I read one person, a significant leader in a growing industry who retired, who said “I went from being Who’s Who to who’s that? in a week.” Ageism and the denial of worth and even (at extreme) humanity of those who are older –especially if they are not healthy in ways that show—will become a growing social issue as Baby Boomers swell the number of retired (and has already become a more contested issue than some years before).
Finally, what Joshua calls “institutional rigidity” (I prefer “inertia”) is a push-me/pull-you. I know individuals who should retire, but whose habits and fears keep them in place, even at the cost of their own greater happiness. I know several who hang on because they know that their institutions will discontinue their positions and maybe even their departments or disciplines, after they leave, and they value their own contribution enough to want to continue to make it. The vaunted “change of priorities” as academia is “disrupted,” or whatever the flavor-of-the-month bureaucratic language is.
Institutional inertia does indeed make stepping down feel like stepping off a cliff, rather than taking a single stair step. Academic work doesn’t have to be a binary role: you do it full time or you don’t. But it has certainly evolved that way. Just try telling that to human resources departments and university attorneys. For all that some individuals refuse to retire, academic organizations refuse to make it any easier. One inertia begets the other.
I wonder how long the “great remain” will last. Already I know of four academic library deans or directors in the small state of Connecticut that have retired in the past 18 months. I know of many others in the various clans of academia who thus far have wanted to hang on in their jobs to see their organizations through the pandemic until “things get back to normal”—and now no one knows what that will look like. Do we all face an endless parade of COVID-19 virus mutations? A whole new pandemic from a different virus or some other cause? I wonder how many will retire and leave with regret between January and June 2022, out of sheer exhaustion. The last two years have been very hard, by any measure.
I expect that most full-time positions will be filled in the future by contingent workers, whether in teaching or elsewhere, as the institutional drive for so-called efficiency, economy, and agility trumps most institution’s former academic mission. I expect that the increasing precarity, and economic and social stratification in academia between the haves and have-nots, will intensify and come to resemble the combative polarization of the culture wars. Whether I leave my own position or not, I can’t figure would whether the time is right, or will be permanently wrong beyond anything I can fix.
It's not a happy time to retire, but then, when would that be?
This past week I reflected on the unexpected convergence of two very different writers, sources, and (on the surface) topics: Katherine Karkov's book, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia, and a blog entry by (Bishop) Nick Knisely on watching the light-weight series Ancient Aliens, and its implicit (and occasionally explicit) racism.
grazie di D. DiBartolomeo, Università Teramo
Karkov's writing is pointed. “Anglo-Saxon England has always been an imaginary place.” (p.1) A loaded term, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has a history of very hazy meanings. Susan Oosthuizen notes the confusing early documentary evidence of “Old English” (sometimes also called “Anglo-Saxon”) from a mention of Englisc in Aethelbert’s law code of about 600 C.E., and in Bede, ca. 731. (The Emergence of the English, p.1) The nomenclature “Anglo-Saxon” was first used by Carolingian writers to distinguish those on the continent speaking Saxon or other Germanic languages from those in the island of the Angli. (Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians, p. 123). Conventionally the term has referred to those who lived in much of what is now England from 400 to 1100 C.E., a span of 700 years conventionally divided into three periods that exhibit marked differences. (Oosthuizen, p. 1)
The phrase "Anglo-Saxon" willy-nilly throws together disparate peoples who arrived on the island of Great Britain, roughly 400-600 C.E., from many places, including Southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Presumed cultural cohesion is very hard to trace, as is the implied assumption that those denominated as Anglo-Saxons did not assimilate readily with the majority of the island’s residents who had already lived there a long time, whether they were of Celtic, Gallic, or other origins. Oosthuizen concludes, “The apparent clarity, cohesiveness, and implied cultural identity of the phrase “Anglo-Saxon" is a chimera that shimmers into invisibility as one approaches it.” (p. 4)
Karkov’s point is that "Anglo-Saxon" as a term denoting a people, cultural identity, or even language was a construct of the educated elite of Norman England, and then thei heirs in many succeeding generations. “Anglo-Saxon England is an ultimately empty space onto and into which identities and ideologies have been written, a floating signifier.” (p.2) The island that seemed to be on the edge of the world known to Europeans (ignoring Ireland, as usual) occupied a liminal space between the known and the unknown—a true midgard—of exceptional purity that inherited an imperial dream from Roman remnants and antecedents, culminating in the conviction that the English (or Anglo-Saxons) ought to be the rightful rulers of the earth. (Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World, p. 21)
The Anglo-Saxon cultural domain continues to be re-imagined today in violent nationalist and racist ways based on a set of powerful and enduring origin legends. Those legends hold that those arrivals from the Continent and elsewhere imagined for themselves a distinctive outlook and coherent culture. Evidence of cohesion is almost impossible to find. What is found and famous, cultural works (such as Beowulf and the Franks Casket) that were originally produced for local purposes, were pressed into service generations later to justify the displacement and exile of indigenous peoples by self-referential heirs to the "Anglo-Saxons."
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. The term "Anglo-Saxon" has become an expression for what Karkov terms retrotopia.
Retrotopia "involves both a looking back to an idealized past and a metaphorical migration back to it as a means of creating particular types of modern presents." (p. 24 and following for below) (The word was coined by Zygmunt Bauman in 2017.) Specifically, retrotopia refers "to the twenty-first-century loss of hope and community and the resulting location of happiness and communal identity in an imaginary past". Such a turn emphasizes tribal loyalties and identities, texts and symbols specifically associated with heritage. More than ordinary nostalgia (itself an eighteenth and nineteenth century coinage), retrotopia "is fueled in part by the digital technologies of the twenty-first century and uncanny isolated yet overcorrected state they create." Retrotopia creates "an undead past." Karkov vividly recounts the violence a retrotopia of "Anglo-Saxon" has done and continues to do, and she is ready to burn the field down and start over. Is that even possible?—leave alone advisable?
Karkov is concerned with the rhetorical use of "Anglo-Saxon" which is (and has always been) far more loaded than simply "Old English." It is one among several, alas. In the ferment of isolated yet hyperconnected individuals and online so-called "communities," there is more than one retrotopia.
Mary Beard tangled some time ago with internet trolls who firmly believe that ancient statuary and sculpture, now often presented as white-ash marble buffed to a finish, had to have been white and could not have been painted --despite convincing evidence that the ancients painted them. Beard famously took on the trolls. Somehow the concept of painted (maybe even gaudily) statuary violates an idealized of the Romans as "white." Modern racism just does not map neatly onto the ancient world.
Donna Zuckerberg (yes, related to that Zuckerberg) devoted an entire book to the misuse and misappropriation of ancient philosophy (especially Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius) and the threat that the alt-Right poses to classical studies. A "retrotopia" of Ancient Rome or Athens presents itself as "Western Civ" but carried all kind of internal contradictions, which usually remain unacknowledged. A retrotopia of ancient Rome has to sort out its allegiances in the Teutoberg Forest (glad the Rome lost? Or sorrow?), and has to navigate around the idea that the ancient Athenians didn't want Socrates to be celebrated, they wanted him dead (or at least exiled).
Is it because the real past presents so many complexities--even for those who care not a whit for complication--that the most facile retrotopia of all imagines "ancient aliens" and recasts them as foils for the twenty-first century? This is where Nick Knisely's intuition springs to life: that the stories told on that remarkably light-weight media series are always eccentrically mis-directed, invariably privileging the big names of "western civ" (such as the Egyptians or the Babylonians, who were of course not western at all) and ignoring Meso-Americans, southern Africans, not to mention ancient Chinese or ancient Indians. (--The last despite some of Indians' so-called "Aryan" status in the eyes of some nineteenth century Germans and their racist heirs.) The best retrotopia of all is one that never has to worry about annoying questions about real people and events from the past. Imagined aliens will always outmatch the pesky realities of ancient Romans.
Closer to home:
Christians are not at all immune from the currents that point to varieties of retrotopia. It's hard not to see the Museum of the Bible (I refuse to link to it) as a paean to ancient Judea and Israel, despite the visible reminders of ancient conflicts that often resulted in nothing anyone might call "blessed." Mainline Christians might quietly sneer at the primary Evangelical audience the Museum seeks, but are not immune to retrotopian thinking and feeling as well: idealized versions of the Reformation, or idealized figures of American Christian leaders, live on in sermons and homilies Sunday after Sunday.
Vaughan's concept of Christ Church, New Haven
I am a highly ambivalent member of a parish church that describes itself as "Anglo-Catholic," a designation I really prefer to avoid. It's not hard yearning and nostalgia in an implicit appeal to a glossy, idealized vision of a distant Anglican, Anglo-Saxon past. Various Anglican identities are steeped in memory, but too often memories can be invoked as a warrant for a liturgical style that dulls the edge of many ambiguous symbols. (The Good Friday liturgy and preaching too often just ignore the tangled and tragic history of Christian anti-Semistism.) Anglo-Catholicism was built (see, Keble, Pusey, Newman, and John Mason Neale) on a highly idealized, melancholic and nostalgia vision of purity located in large part in "Anglo-Saxon Christians" in some kind of pure past. (They might be better styled: Christians in the British Isles in late ancient and early medieval times).
Linking an idealized vision of a hallowed early medieval past with markedly Reformation language is a standing contradiction. Rite I can come off as seventeenth-century English prose (Episcopal Rite I) —Milton's language— dressed up in Aethelred's robes. What exactly are are Anglo-Catholic traditions trying to evoke? 597? King Alfred of Wessex? 1545? 1559? 1612? 1662? 1928? So-called "Anglo-Catholic" liturgical commitment just do not map neatly onto any of the several medieval periods.
That said, the roots to retrotopian longing run close to ecclesial nostalgia, but not simply. Retrotopia is well beyond the dignified melancholia of the type purveyed by Henry Vaughan (1845-1917, the architect of Christ Church, New Haven, and portions of the National Cathedral). Retrotopia is a fever-dream incubated in digital toxins. But it feeds off of a cultural nostalgia that is first cousin to the ecclesiastical nostalgia all too present in many ecclesial traditions (—not just Anglo-Catholic, Episcopalian, Anglican, or whatever you want to call it).
It behooves academic scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin literatures, medieval languages and literatures, and church historian sof several eras to beware of the mis-appropriation of important Christian symbols and discourse by those who simply cannot abide defenestration from a white Christian castle of supremacy. Historical study can curdle into nostalgia, nostalgia into retrotopia, and retrotopia into fascism. It can happen here.
Serendipitous scholarship recently led me to the work of Daniel Lord Smial, a Harvard professor of history who focuses upon "the history and anthropology of mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600" (his OpenScholar site), and particularly upon Marseille in the later Middle Ages. His interest in medieval material culture has guided his work with colleagues to create DALME (The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe), a database which enumerates, classifies, and collocates material and documentary evidence.
Smial's 2008 book On Deep History and the Brain initiated considerable discussion on the framing of general history as well as the impact that framing might have on medieval eras and subjects. Smial and anthropologist Andrew Shryock's subsequent Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011) further envisaged a complete account of human experience from the palaeolithic period until the present, and invited scientists and historians (humanists) to join in relating human history since about 4000 B.C.E. to "pre-history" (a questionable term that usually means the period of human history before inherited texts).
In On Deep History, Smial notes that the term "document" means (in its Latin root) "that which teaches" (a slight stretch from the OED entry for "document" as lesson, proof, instance, specimen) that came to mean a written instrument of some kind. Employing both the neurological reality and the historical metaphor of "the brain," the documentary divide between "prehistory" and textual history is at least interrogated if not yet entirely abrogated. Human neurophysiology is a constant interplay between evolutionary adaptions, evolutionarily unanticipated exaptations, and cultural developments that both take advantage of and further neuroplasticity, the ability of brains to adapt to new circumstances and unforeseen challenges. An exaptation is "a trait, like the large cognitive [human] brain, that evolved to serve some function but subsequently became available for entirely different purposes." (p. 127) (Exaptation is also a word that my spellchecker fails to recognize.)
On Deep History applies this line of thinking to psychotropic "mood-altering practices, behaviors, and institutions" which alter human experience and social, observable interaction. Mood-altering activities (not just those of humans: think of cats and catnip) and substances (alcohol, drugs) in specific cultural contexts interact with human neurophysiology (but never in a reductionist or "nothing-but" sense). Psychotropic mechanisms can be sorted into two broad categories: "tele-tropic" are "the various devices used in human societies to create mood changes in other people—across space, as it were (hence the "tele")." (p. 170). Their counterparts "are the mechanism that influence the body chemistry of the self, which we can call autotropic." The first are embedded in social practices; the second in specific individual behaviors.
Neither category necessarily must involve the physical ingestion of actual substances: an example of the "runners' high" -- "long distance runners can suffer withdrawal symptoms if they stop running, because their bodies are missing their daily does of endorphins."(p. 175). Religions can be regarded as using tele-tropic social mechanisms to induce or privilege certain kinds of behavior, such as meditation and prayer, which can be individual, communal, or both.
Smial is at pains to point out that evidence must be cited and evaluated very carefully. On Deep History is in no sense an invitation to simplify and anachronize. Unfortunately Smial tends towards simplification for the sake of argument. One example is Smial's own work on fama and reputation in medieval Europe, an extension of Robert Sapolsky's linking of primate grooming with post-lithic social gossip: a grooming, community-building mechanism that can relieve conflict and stress. Smial extend's Sapolsky's linkage by suggesting that gossip, one of "a huge array of other mildly addictive practices that are so marked a feature of many Postlithic societies," (p. 177) is an example of the kind of practices that states, societies, and religious systems spend so much time and energy seeking to regulate.
Christianity, for example, is remarkably consistent in its tendency to render as sin a range of autotropic practices—sex for fun, masturbation, gossip, alcohol. These autotrophic mechanisms, in some sense, "compete" with the effects of certain Christian teletropic practices, such as liturgies, rituals, prayer, and confession.
p. 177-178
This is disappointingly oversimplified. I am not objecting simply because Smial cites Christianity. Some versions of Christianity (Catholicism) have certainly objected to all four of his examples. (He might have cited ultra-orthodox versions of Judaism to the same effect.) Rather, could Smial also have cited those non-religious, social, teletropic practices that compete with "authorized" (or at any rate encouraged) Christian teletropic practices? such as:
money-lending (competes with some Christian teachings regarding charity),
hospitality regarding the poor (competes with other patterns of social power), and
Christian prayers for the dead (competes with other kinds of social practices regarding memory and the dead)?
In other words, why is masturbation necessarily a more autotropic practice than private prayer? Is gossip really so morally neutral as Smial seems to suggest? If alcohol competes with "liturgies, rituals, prayer, and confession," why does the Christian liturgy (as well as Jewish ritual practices) specifically include wine, and why do Christian (and Jewish) attitudes towards the consumption of alcohol vary so widely? Why the Kiddush on Sabbath evening? "—Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine." Alcohol in Christianity and Judaism is not just one thing.
Smial's suggestions regarding religious teletropic and autotropic practices are fascinating, but (to repeat), the evidence has to be treated very, very carefully: not because of ideological sensitivities, but because it can easily be pressed into extraneous argument for or against something outside of the scope of the subject. If Smial wishes to question Christianity, he is by all means welcome to do so: the more the merrier. But not by mis-using historical evidence when he presents himself as a historian.
Smial's On Deep History --both the book and the concept-- re-frame cultural and religious history in a manner that is both fascinating and fruitful.
In my own area of research, much might be learned by regarding early medieval Christian liturgies in the context of multi-lingual, multi-cultural early medieval societies with widely varied heritages and influences from both the ancient Roman world and the world beyond Rome's widest borders (especially to those interested in Roman frontier zones, both during and after Empire).
The concepts of neuroplasticity and the exaptions occasioned by developing societies can offer new analytic insights into both early medieval societies, and modern multi-lingual-cultural-perspectival societies. The evidence as always has to be treated with the greatest care. We are in Smial's debt that he started this conversation.
I sit in my study at home, and the combination of some bargains on AbeBooks and the digital world means that I don’t spend hours biking from one library to another, waiting for books to “come up”, standing by the photocopier etc etc. The new system is convenient, cost-effective and I love it. But I do sometimes wonder about its effect on the general world of the library. My early academic career was based in the bricks-and-mortar library. It was where I got my books, but it was also where I got many of my friends and the people to talk to about my (and their) work. I didn’t need wellbeing classes (I have to confess that the phrase “wellbeing” has precisely the opposite effect on me!). I had the day-to-day support network of the library. (It wasn’t all quite so virtuous, but that is another story, for when I retire, folks.)
There is also what it does to the staff and the whole infrastructure of the library. I rather dread that the library will become the “treasure house” of some precious, rare books – while everything else is done “off-site” or “online”. And I dread that there will be whole cohorts of staff who, instead of doing the admittedly tough job (but with human contact) of fetching books for readers, and of reshelving, are in the bowels of the basements doing wall-to-wall scanning.
—Mary Beard, A Don's Life
Prof. Beard writes about "scan and deliver" services for physical books otherwise inaccessible due to restrictions necessitated by the pandemic. Such services have become ubiquitous and many will probably survive the return to "normal" (whatever that word may come to mean). She fears that "there will never again be the kind of 'library culture' that I grew up with.
I believe I understand and can sympathize with many of Prof. Beard's fears. I'm a couple of years older than she, and given different retirement rules in the U.S., I'm still on the job for another academic year as a University Librarian of a small, regional, Catholic university of no particular consequence, that specializes in pre-professional and professional programs and is only slightly similar to Cambridge. I was educated in American liberal arts colleges and graduate schools in Classics and the History of Christianity, doubtless not to the level of Oxbridge scholarship, but with just enough familiarity to have participated in a library culture similar to what Prof. Beard remembers when I was in Princeton.
I've been in librarianship since professionally since 1985. In 1981 my first library staff job was typing catalogue cards at the Institute for Advanced Study Historical Studies Library. I have witnessed the disruptions of library services and scholarship in the ensuing decades, from the first generation of computerized catalogues and integrated library services to contemporary discovery and AI services.
I'm not about to claim that the "library culture" of which Prof. Beard so capably writes was neither so supportive, nor so good as it really was. (In my case, at least.) The library and information technologies of the time really did inadvertently foster a sense of collegiality and supportive community spirit. Those technologies—printed books, card catalogues, seminar rooms near relevant collections, in-person services with library staff of all kinds—enabled me to finish papers and degrees and often enjoy the process. Although it has become fashionable to claim that such technologies were based on the reality of "print scarcity" (such as: only one reader per book per time), it can be said equally that such technologies fostered collegiality, sharing, and personal contact on a day-to-day basis. How many times did a professor recommend a book which he or she had already checked out, often sitting adjacent? —so that when I had searched for the book and learned that it was in circulation, I had to ask him or her for it? Inconvenient? certainly. Personal contact? Definitely —even when personal contact was not always pleasant.
My only point is that present and future digital library technologies could (or perhaps do) foster collegiality, personal community, and supportive community in different manners from the past.
For example, in the 1990s I was working up a dissertation on the early works of an obscure Carolingian bishop. With present digital means, I might have learned that a German in Munich, an American in Toronto, and a professor down the road (in Trenton, N.J.) were working in different ways with the same author. Given the realities of the time, I learned about the last of those through our mutual acquaintance of a professor in Princeton. I learned about the second author when his presence at the Institute for Advanced Study facilitated an official invitation that he become a member of my dissertation committee. I learned about the first (the German in Munich) only after he had published a book that challenged some of my working assumptions. Digital technologies might have facilitated significant interaction with these scholars more quickly; the participation of all of us in digital networks might have given a chance for mutual discovery.
The library culture of the latter 20th century certainly was not always "virtuous" (Prof. Beard's term). There were some very real downsides. Much of the library work of the pre-digital eras was tedious and encouraged a mentality of slavish conformity to obscure and sometimes obstructive rules (both the formal: cataloguing; and the informal: we don't ever ask University Library X to supply anything via hand-written interlibrary loan requests on paper ALA forms, because we don't like them). At times, the former library culture formed a kind of dystopia utterly opaque to scholars and readers on the outside, but very much limiting their work in a manner of which they were unaware.
Libraries as cultures will continue to evolve, and not necessarily towards a dystopian future of cohorts of basement-dwelling, low-paid staff scurrying about the bowels of the treasure house. Neither heaven nor hell is likely.
Libraries are and will remain services, spaces, and resources—and online books, journals, and digital scholarship of all kinds will never be exactly obvious for everyone to find. The nature of learning is that its trails of evidence and citation are intricate and intersect in odd ways at unpredictable moments.
The "day-to-day support network of the library" will only disappear when humans are entirely removed. Perhaps that will happen in a distant someday, but not soon (despite administrators' and funders' concerns about productivity, cost, and impact—whatever those terms might mean).
Library users (readers, patrons) will continue to seek the level of support that they desire. (Some never wanted to interact with anyone else at all under any circumstances—the social loners or sociopathic misanthropes will always be with us.).
Those who really want support will, I truly believe, be able to find it from the same sources as always: peers, unexpected companions, acquaintances in other disciplines, unanticipated friends at a distance, and intelligent, informed, libraries oriented to both service and scholarship. Library readers (users, patrons) will cultivate the same good will and good humor from those staff who retrieve off-site materials, or who manage to locate or gain access to unsought but pertinent online resources.
Is outlook too sanguine or or sunny? I hope not. Libraries have been around a long, long time. I have had to explain to Provosts and Deans given to excessively short-term thinking that the temporal horizons of librarianship is decades if not centuries, and not only the next quarter or fiscal year. Matthew Battles (Library: An Unquiet History) reminds us that libraries, as centers of culture power, prestige, and legitimacy, have been targets for destruction from organized armies, terrorist organizations, and not-so-benign neglecters —as well as scheming academic administrators. Libraries have nevertheless survived, as have their users, and while the support networks they have fostered for scholars have sometimes (and tragically) gone into eclipse in evil times, they have re-emerged when times, technologies, and powers change.
Prof. Beard anticipates retirement from active faculty service, about the same time that I anticipate retirement from library leadership. It's hard to say good-bye and Godspeed without fearing decline, both personal, academic, disciplinary, and institutional. Without those good-byes, there can be no hello to another kind of work and life. I look forward to reading what Prof. Beard will write in the coming decades, from perspectives and prospects.
Thank you to Prof. Beard for consistently informative and provocative thinking over the decades. With more to come!
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) 
