5 posts tagged “libraries”
The Age of American Unreason is about the dumbing down of the United States in many areas: belief in creationism
She laments the passing of middlebrow culture, which encouraged non-academics to better themselves with good reading. As a librarian, I'm also sad to see the end of that era, and to see how uninterested the library community is in preserving it. These days, the public library culture is mostly about mass-marketing and giving 'em (the presumably stupid public) what they want, meaning what the publishers tell them to want. Read your James Patterson and like it, you dumb slob, because the library is going to buy 20 copies. Meanwhile, we're discarding our Michener books (Jacoby looks fondly on those fat middlebrow tomes) because they don't circulate enough.
God bless the folks at Sports Illustrated. They decided to do libraries a favor this year and not send them the swimsuit issue. They didn't tell us they weren't sending it, and they didn't offer any kind of credit for a missed issue, and they didn't ask our opinion. They just didn't send it. Clean, simple.
Truth be told, the swimsuit issue is a royal pain. It's prone to being mutilated, stolen, and taken in the restroom (ewww). But it's our royal pain, and who the hell do these suits think they are to make our collection development decisions for us? We called to complain, and will do our best to get this issue on our shelves. For the sake of the articles, of course.
Weird. Here's Ms. Sensible Shoes fighting for the right to objectify women. It's a complex world.
In all my years as a librarian and an Internet maven, I've never had an occasion to do a Google search on the keywords "newbery award scrotum." But I wanted to catch up with the controversy over this year's Newbery winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron and Matt Phelan. A passage in the book recounts an incident wherein a character's dog is bitten on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. Thankfully, the dog lives, but apparently the mere use of the word "scrotum" has given some school librarians the vapors, and they're refusing to buy the book for their collections.
Give me a break. If a ten-year-old kid has not heard the word "scrotum" before, there is a serious problem with his or her education. And while I recognize that school librarians have different selection criteria from public librarians, I don't see how any rational selection policy would mandate the exclusion of a book because of an incidence of one perfectly normal little word.
So, scrotum, scrotum, scrotum, scrotum. Ban ME, ya bozos.
Last week my library had a public showing of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary about global warming. The discussion after the film was basically hope versus despair. Do we have a future? What can one person do? How can we fight the power? The next morning, a patron called and me and suggested the library do a workshop on exactly what one person can do, not just on global warming but on social change in general.
This is exactly what libraries should be doing - providing a forum for people to connect with their community and become civically engaged. I have a little committee formed - I'm tempted to call it a cell -- to plan our program and change the world, one alderman at a time if necessary. I AM SO JAZZED. I love my library and I love my patrons.
I run the book discussion group at my library. Based on the stories I hear from other librarians, I am very lucky in that the participants in my group are reasonably sane and pleasant. I don’t have any of the toxic book-group personalities like the Nonstop Yammerer, the Pretentious Blowhard or the Persistent Naysayer. I do wish the group were more diverse. I have mostly senior-ish white women, with one brave guy who doesn’t take it personally when the entire group jumps on him for using “he” as a generic pronoun. There was a young Latino male who came for awhile, very insightful and interesting, and when he stopped coming to the group, I showed up at his door and offered sexual favors if he would stay. I guess my sensible shoes were not alluring enough.
Anyway, it’s a good group, but it’s still a big fat pain, and for one reason: I have to read the fucking book. I like to go by Nancy Pearl’s rule, that if the book doesn’t grab me by page 50 I move on to something else. But this is my job, so I don’t have that option. I have to read every slow, ponderous, dense, difficult book that I foist upon my patrons. And it’s even worse when the books I really want to read are winking at me from my nightstand.
OK, it’s not really so bad. I usually like the books we’ve chosen. The one for February is a toughie so far, though, and I felt like whining. Thank you for your indulgence.
