The Questioning Librarian

In one of his final essays , Oliver Sacks wrote about what he felt after an accident left him dragging himself down a mountain with a broken leg. Memories of all sorts came to him, but he described an overwhelming feeling of gratitude through them all. It was surprising to read about, and I very much doubt that, were I in the same situation, gratitude is what I would feel. Being positive has always been hard for me. My mind latches on to what's wrong, and tends to dwell on it excessively. This is by no means unique to me; the human mind seems adept at remembering negative events, to the detriment of happier thoughts.  It is a terrible way of thinking about life, viewing it through this particular glass. There is, after all, much to be grateful for, even when things often seem so abysmally dark. Sacks was reflecting back over eight decades of life; I have nowhere near that amount of time to reflect upon, but even looking at the past few years is enough. It is hard for me to ima...

A Syrian refugee, photo from the U.N. Refugee Agency I was finishing reading a new book on the Armenian genocide just as the anti-refugee sentiment began its upswing. The actions were different, but the basic instinct behind it--a fear and hatred of those different from ourselves--was the same. Often, our default instinct is to be suspicious, and hostile, towards those who are outside of our group. It's a habit that seems common, but it remains disturbing to see it in action just the same.  Send them back, lock them out, take care of our own first. And those were just the mildest sentiments anyone could hear. There was certainly anti-refugee sentiment before (right-wing groups warned of the President admitting "10,000 Muslims" into the country), but the tenor ratcheted up after the attacks in Paris. The very same people who make a habit of never helping anyone suddenly were overcome with concern for the homeless in our country, for veterans, when before they de...

While I tend not to read many books on the bestseller list, I was intrigued by a lot of what I was hearing about Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I read it in just a few short days, and in large part it lived up to the hype. Yet I had two criticisms of the book, the first of which was that the idea of speaking to your possessions, including thanking items you are about to part with for their role in your life, seems like a bit of nonsense. Kondo believes that one's possessions have energy, and sending positive energy their way will result in your belongings supporting you in turn. She even, she writes, greets her home verbally at the end of the day. If it works for her, and for her clients, I cannot object to it, but it would feel strange in my own life. The larger criticism is that, while I appreciate her advocacy of decreasing clutter and being more mindful about your things, she barely touches on stemming the inflow of new possessions. Towards th...

We've come to expect that many of our politicians are going to be hypocritical in some aspect of their lives. Whether it is a "family values" politician like Louisiana's David Vitter being caught with prostitutes, or candidates who pledge to be honest being netted in corruption stings, revelations of hypocrisy are so frequent that they hardly even seem to merit a shrug. Yet there is at least one type of political hypocrisy that, no matter how often it happens, we should be paying attention to. Hypocrisy in any form is contemptible, but hypocrisy on matters of economy affects us all. This issue was brought to mind this week with the entrance of Rep. Paul Ryan into the race for Speaker of the House, one of the most powerful positions in the nation and third in line to the Presidency, after the Vice-President. Paul, often held up as a reasonable man in a party gone off the deep end, is well-known for his proposals to reform Social Security, which usually involve...

I was intrigued when I came across a review of a forthcoming book that sought to reconcile the seemingly contradictory legacies of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A few months later, I borrowed a copy and was enthralled by what the author had to say. Greg Grandin, author of well-received books like Fordlandia and Empire of Necessity , tackles the thorny issue of one of the United States' most notorious diplomats in Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman .  Drawing on newly declassified documents, Grandin's portrayal of Kissinger is far from complimentary. While giving him credit for his role in helping to normalize relations with China, and in brokering an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union, the majority of the work zeroes in on acts that were an outgrowth of Kissinger's own philosophy of history, as outlined in his undergraduate thesis. Decline, Kissinger wrote, is not inevitable in a great power, s...

One of our favorite national stories is that of the self-made man. This mythos infiltrates much of our culture, from the novels of Horatio Alger and our delight in the success of people like Andrew Carnegie to its less savory forms--our critique of the poor for their perceived failings, and the joy of a large swath of the population whenever a politician takes aim at "handouts" for those they judge to have simply made bad life choices.  This mythos declares that everyone's fortunes are the result solely of their own hard work and choices, regardless of circumstances. The rich deserve what they have earned, in this story, and the poor deserve what they have gotten. The narrative is a powerful one, and we view many of the issues facing our society through this lens. Why should we help the poor, some demand to know, when they need to just get a job, an education, work harder? Why should we allow a modest tax increase on the rich, others ask--why punish them for their ha...

A few weeks ago, I was stuck in the airport, my flight delayed by five hours. While I tend not to read many ebooks myself, on that Friday, however, I was very glad to have remote access to my library's online collection to ease the boredom of the wait and the subsequent flight. Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars was a book that I had meant to read a while ago but never gotten around to, and it proved an engrossing read. Just over a century ago when the nations of Europe declared war on one another, much of the populace broke out into spontaneous celebration. Cheering crowds gathered before the royal palaces in Germany, Russia, and Britain. It was a war that many in Europe had expected for years, war's outbreak an event that had been both feared and longed for. But not everyone was cheering, and it is the dissenters to the war that Hochschild focuses much of his attention on. While men like Rudyard Kipling celebrated the war as heroic, others like Bertrand Russell sp...

Writing in 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes made the assertion that the progress of technology, and the automation of work, would lead to a point in time where workers would put in about fifteen hours per week, with three hour work days being a normal part of society. Keynes was hardly the only thinker to predict a future of leisure for humanity, where we were freed from the necessity of excessive toil by the machines we created. Yet this future failed to materialize, and it seems that we have even less leisure time than we used to. Why is this? Sociologist Craig Lambert asserts in his new book Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day , that part of the answer is the rise of "shadow work."  The author chooses not to focus on the increasing amount of time Americans are putting in at work, nor an economic system that requires many poorer workers to spread their time across two or three different jobs, but instead on the hidden trends that erode wh...

For anyone interested in human evolution as I am, and the enduring question of why modern humans survived and Neandertals did not, the new book by anthropologist and retired Penn State professor Pat Shipman is an essential read . While the last few years have seen a number of excellent books on the question published, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction ,   brings a new perspective to a diverse array of evidence from ecology, paleoanthropology, and beyond. Shipman begins with her assertion that modern humans are best viewed as the most successful invasive species that our planet has ever seen. Using the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park as an example, she relates the science of what happens to an ecosystem when a new top predator is introduced. Not only does this new species increase competition for limited resources, these invaders often deliberately target their closest competitors, as wolves did with coyotes in Ye...

Last week, I finished the newest work by David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, considered the final volume in his trilogy about the history of slavery. While the entire work was interesting, from his discussion about the complicated process of abolishing slavery, to the colonization movement in the United States, and the status of free blacks as a window into how slaves were viewed, his thoughts on the larger question of moral progress and human history in the conclusion were most interesting to me. While it is hard, he writes, to look at the blood-soaked history of the 20th Century and imagine that we are making moral progress, the abolition of chattel slavery in the West stands as a shining example of this very idea, that within roughly two hundred years we ended a practice that had been accepted for thousands of years. The question of race in the United States is, however, another matter entirely. Davis begins with a discussion about the an...

An ISIS militant destroys a statue in Nimrud Last month, the civilized world was horrified at the sack of yet another site of historical significance, as ISIS vandals bulldozed the city of Nimrud in Iraq, once a center of power in the Assyrian Empire. It was hardly the first time they had acted in their quest to destroy "idols," nor are they the only group to have taken similar measures. The Taliban in Afghanistan took dynamite to the great Buddhas of Bamiyan, reducing the 1,700-year old statues to rubble. These groups may cloak their destruction in the guise of following their religion, but this contempt for the past is a hallmark of many totalitarian ideologies. The Chinese government denies the massacre at Tienanmen Square, where an unknown number of Chinese citizens, possibly thousands, were killed, and actively blocks Internet content referencing the incident.  Even more shameful are the historical whitewashings of supposedly non-totalitarian governments an...

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a conference on Social Thought here in State College. The event began on Friday evening with a keynote address by noted sociologist Frances Fox Piven, a fitting choice for a conference with a focus on inequality given her work on poverty in the United States. Just as interesting as her address were a number of papers presented by current grad students and faculty the next day, on topics as diverse as the "Sunflower" Movement in Taiwan, the rhetoric of the C.I.A.'s kill list, and Sojourner Truth's conception of equality. It was incredibly heartening to see so much bright young talent, but what was less heartening was Piven's statement the night before that no matter how brilliant a grad student may be, the likely future of most will be the serfdom of permanent adjunct status. Piven lamented the attack on universities, pointing out the role of states in gutting financial support, in administrators creating ever-...

My first job as a librarian was in the city of Uniontown, the birthplace of George C. Marshall. Reminders of the general's presence were everywhere, from the plaza dedicated to his memory to the portraits that rested in the library, including one hanging directly across from my desk. Two full shelves were dedicated to various biographies of Marshall, all of them laudatory, including one whose very title declared Marshall "A Hero for Our Time." It was then with great interest that I came across a new biography by historians Debi and Irwin Unger, which promised to paint a more balanced picture of the general's life and achievements. While not denying his successes, the authors are quick to point out Marshall's many flaws. While he deserves acclaim for overseeing the military buildup in the war, the training of American soldiers was grotesquely inadequate. Lauded as an exceptional judge of character, the Ungers assert that the real record speaks otherwise. His...

When I began my tenure as a library director, one of the things that caused me the most trepidation was the thought of putting together a budget. When the time came, I did the best I could with no financial training and as much knowledge about the finances of the library as I could gather. I made sure to check the budget with anyone who might know enough to give constructive comment. Remarkably, it held up rather well in the following year, and it was far less stressful to put together the next budget. But it should never have been this way. This experience, and subsequent work with others in the field of library and information science, revealed a glaring oversight in how librarians are trained. I cannot speak for graduate programs other than my own, but the lack of training in basic finance is not only a surprising lapse but a disservice to the field as a whole. How can we be expected to effectively lead our organizations if we don't have the training we need to thrive? How ...

There have always been anti-intellectual elements in our public life; both Richard Hofstadter and Susan Jacoby have chronicled the waxing and waning of anti-intellectualism in the United States in the past two centuries. What is disturbing is to see that, for all our knowledge, our technology, and the progress we have made, anti-intellectualism is on the rise again. While we have always seen sniping at the edges in the ongoing battles over teaching evolution, and climate change, many of the recent battles have been attacks on education itself, and the very idea that education has value for its own sake. The attacks on education have come largely from the Republican Party, often in the form of deep cuts to both K-12 education and higher education. Sacrifices must be made, the governors and legislators solemnly declare, but those sacrifices never seem to come from those who can afford to make them, nor are they equally distributed. Pennsylvania's now-former Republican gove...

I realized this week that I've given up on my early stories. I've been writing since I was in fifth grade, but I hit my stride in high school, churning out story after story, some short but with several longer works each clocking in at around two hundred pages typed. While I knew that the writing itself was not the best, I cared deeply about some of the characters I created, and the stories mattered to me. They matter still. I always thought that I would go back and take up the storylines again, re-write them to be worthy of being published. Slowly that thought has eroded away, and now I no longer want to revisit them. Writing them was practice. Even if I were to become a wildly-successful novelist, those early stories should never see the light of day. I wouldn't want them to, for that matter, as they do not represent my best efforts. These stories are alive only to me, and just barely at that. I wonder how many other stories share the same fate--to have their author spen...

A pair of Republican would-be presidential candidates outdid themselves this week, trying to explain how freedom was best served by allowing parents to skip out on vaccines for their children. For Rand Paul, the legitimate health concerns of many parents were far outweighed by the need for irrational, wooly-headed parents to be able to exercise their anti-science thinking. "It is an issue of freedom," he declared . Paul, under serious fire for his comments, attempted to backtrack later on, and in fairness other Republican leaders condemned him for his statements. Yet the stance of Chris Christie and the younger Paul on vaccines are a reminder that many on the Right have very strange ideas about what constitutes "freedom." The idea that parents should be free to allow their children to become carriers of preventable diseases like measles is hardly the oddest notion coming from the self-proclaimed standard-bearers of liberty. The Affordable Care Act was governm...

In reading the new biography of George C. Marshall, I found my thoughts drawn back to the place where I had my first library job, Marshall's hometown of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. A co-worker and I were talking at lunch about places we'd lived in the past, and I wondered if I was allowed to feel nostalgia at twenty-six, or whether that somehow seemed too early. I can't explain the feeling, because in many ways the months spent in Uniontown were the worst of my life. While I loved my co-workers, the ugliness and poverty of the place depressed me, the tightness of my financial state constantly gnawed at me, the reality of life after graduation clashing heavily with what I had hoped would come next, and I found that my natural tendencies towards melancholy and self-pity bottomed out into complete and endless depression.  I had a similar feeling of nostalgia last week when I was browsing the Earth and Mineral Sciences library on Penn State's main campus. It drew me back ...

A few weeks ago, I came across an essay by the late Marina Keegan, a beautiful piece of writing marking the end of her time at Yale. " The Opposite of Loneliness " is an exploration of the uncertainty of the transition from college into life afterwards, and so much more than that, yet I was struck particularly by a line within. In disparaging the idea that once you leave college it is too late to change anything, she remarks that "We're so young. We're so young . We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time." Yet sadly, Keegan had very little time; she died in a car crash not long after her graduation. I admire the essay, and know that the line I cite is in service to the larger point of it. But I disagree. You don't have all the time in the world, even at twenty-two, even if you live to be ninety. The worst thing, the absolute worst, that you can do to yourself is to in any way justify your life by saying there is still plenty of time.  ...

Last evening, I was listening to Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, whose music is a delight to hear. Most recently, he composed the soundtrack to the film The Theory of Everything , but I have known and listened to his alternately haunting and moving music for years before that. His powers are on full display in his Fordlandia album, music inspired by the failed experiment of Henry Ford, such as this extended piece below. It made me wonder just what it is about the character of Iceland that has crafted artists like Johannsson, like Sigur Ros or Olafur Arnalds. For that matter, what was it about Russia that crafted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Not too many years ago, some doyens of English literary criticism insisted that the work of an author was to be analyzed without the context of the author's life, which would also exclude considering the larger culture at the time. This was a paltry view, to my mind, for we are products of our culture and do not exist independently of ...

Increasingly, the economic news has been better and better. Unemployment continues to decline, to a current low of 5.6% , while the stock market has never been higher . Officially, the recession ended a few years ago . Yet the pain of the recession hasn't abated for the many millions who remain unemployed, including a large number of unemployed millennials, whose unemployment rate stood at 15% as of September 2014, especially those who have lost unemployment benefits. It does not lessen the pain of a family with two working parents, struggling to get by, who have had their SNAP benefits cut by Congress. The nearly one in four children in this country who live in poverty don't care a bit about how high the stock market has gone. The schools, universities and libraries across the country that have seen sharp cuts in funding can take little solace in decreasing unemployment, as they come up with increasingly creative ways to keep the lights on. The disconnect between politi...