Washington Avenue

(The Library, Part 2)

1.

The library offered sculptures.  Full sized museum quality reproductions.  I’d bring home Daumier’s Ratapoil or Brâncuşi’s Sleeping Muse or maybe a small Picasso owl.  Our apartment was half a block down Washington Avenue, the other side of the serious and imposing Masonic Center.  If I stood in the front right corner of our enclosed front porch and looked past it, I could just see the nose of Harris, one of the two lions flanking the marble steps and grand columns of the library entrance.  Easy enough to haul the heavy object home for a month until I had to return it and give somebody else a chance.  Ratapoil was my favorite and I figured four weeks was plenty fair.   If it was still there when I turned in whichever sculpture I’d most recently had home, back he’d come to cast his sidewise gaze across our living room.

That apartment was the nicest Sandy and I ever lived in.  She’d found it when she moved to Oshkosh to study art at the University.  That was a year or so before we got married.  It was spacious, the second floor of a grand old house.  The house was owned by the insurance company next door (the other side from the Masonic Center) who kept the rent low so they could write it off as a loss – they only kept it for the property, against the day they would develop it or sell it.  Small kitchen, two big bedrooms.  Large comfortable living room at the front, up two steps from the hall leading past the bedrooms and the kitchen to the back stairway.  An enclosed front porch with a tiny room off the side that served as my study (Sandy used the larger bedroom as her studio).  It was well maintained by the handyman who worked for the insurance company.  One time when we asked if he could fix the bathroom faucet that had started to drip, he replaced the sink.  After a couple years of cramped student apartments in Milwaukee, it was a dream.

I stopped in the library at least once a week.  I’d always assumed it was a Carnegie library, but discovered much later that it was not.¹  It was a manifestation of civic pride, funded by a mix of private donations and a bond issue from the city.  The grand neoclassical building opened in the fall of 1900, right around the time Carnegie started funding library projects around the US.  Had Abbie Harris and the women of the Twentieth Century Club started their push only a decade later, they’d’ve become aware of what Carnegie was doing.  They certainly would have qualified for a grant.  But they didn’t need it – and their city needed a library building commensurate with their ambitions.

By the time I landed on Washington Avenue, the old entrance, rising between Sawyer and Harris,² was no longer used.  Up until the digital age, libraries regularly and necessarily outgrew their quarters and an addition, with a new entrance, had been built in ’67.  The reading room was up a few stairs from the glass doors, through the security gates and past the circulation desk.  Tall windows, the room full of light.  Reference desk off to the side.  Toward the left, the metal racks of current periodicals, the newspapers arranged on long wooden spindles next to the couches and comfy chairs.  A shelf of new books and, prominently positioned, the bin of newly acquired record albums.³

Who, I wondered, ordered the albums?  Oshkosh is not a big town.  There wasn’t much breadth to radio – country and pop hits on AM, an AOR station on FM and maybe you could get some jazz from the tiny station at Lawrence University.  NPR was middle of the road classical only.  But every week in the new arrivals bin there were bands I’d never heard of, genres of music I’d never explored.  What is The Boomtown Rats?  Look at this cool cover with the pink and green lettering and the guy about to smash his bass on the stage!  What does that sound like?  In the alcove that held the full album holdings, arranged by genre, I explored.  Anthony Braxton’s thorny, esoteric compositions weren’t shelved too far from Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.  In a Time-Life box set I discovered Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, whose otherworldliness thrills me to this day.  The Debussy and Ravel string quartets.  The Köln Concert.  Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.  Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.  Bob Marley. 

I could’ve asked someone.  I’d had a couple of very brief conversations with Mary Oldani, the silvery haired reference librarian.  I might’ve made friends among the staff, forged connections.  But I was in the furthest depths of my pathological shyness⁴ in those days and the prospect of engaging someone in conversation when I did not absolutely have to was far more than I could manage, even on my best days.  There was the time I needed a thirty-five cent stamp.  That meant going to the post office (just a block away) and standing in line and speaking to the teller.  By the time I got to the window my face was flushed, I was sweating and clammy.  My throat was tight.  I managed to complete the transaction, but fully forty-five years later the memory makes my chest go tight.  I knew there was something wrong with me, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it.

So I avoided talking to the people and indulged myself with the collections.  During college there’s not much time for reading anything unassigned, so although I was reading constantly, there was almost nothing contemporary.  Bardwell’s Girl On A Bicycle had just come out from Ireland and Liddy has us read that for his Literature & Childhood class (along with Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard from 1963), but that was as recent as my reading got.  By the time I graduated I was up to date on 19^th century Russian literature, medieval English prose, the roots of modernism (Pound, Joyce, Eliot, H.D.), the poetry of the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance.  Contemporary literary fiction, not so much.

What I was hungriest for was what was happening right now – in politics, culture, the arts.  For that, the new books shelf and the new albums bin weren’t sufficient.  I needed the periodicals.  You could check out the current issues for a week, so at every visit I took some home - The New Republic, Nation, Mother Jones, National Review.  Atlantic Monthly.  Harper’s.  I’d read every word, even studying the ads.  They were windows into an intellectual world that I wanted to be a part of, that I felt I was a part of as long as I was engaged with the magazines.  There was an ecumenical voraciousness to my reading  – so much I wanted to know.  I was trying to understand what I believed, to formulate my own opinions, but every writer was persuasive, seductive.  I worried that I was too susceptible to a clever turn of phrase, that I wasn’t being critical enough.  I read more intensely, distrusting my initial impressions, questioning my responses.

I was careful with the magazines, but of course I wasn’t the only person borrowing and inevitably those issues became wrinkled and tattered during their month’s residence in Current Periodicals.  I suppose some didn’t survive the mauling, the coffee ring stains, the gnawing from the curious cat, the too careless shoving into a briefcase or bookbag.  Those that did were elevated to Bound Volumes, where they were safe from casual browsing, now to be the domain of researchers, journalists, and sophomore High School students on assignment from Civics or Social Studies, those willing to learn how to use the hard-bound Wilson indexes to figure out how to gain entry.  Using the library was a slow, physical process.

We moved to DC in ’83.  Now I had a decent job and could afford subscriptions.  I was particularly humbled by The New York Review, with its long essays, the book in hand being merely the platform from which the writer might dive in any direction. There was no subject that a good writer couldn’t make interesting to me.  As Eastern Europe was breaking away from the Soviet Union, it was the dispatches from Timothy Garton Ash that helped me understand the complex historical and political stressors at play.  Adam Gopnik’s long piece about Krazy Kat, the greatest of all 20^th century newspaper comics, took seriously the strip’s complex existential undertone and led to my lifelong fandom of that metaphysical kitty and their enigmatic creator.  The New York Review is where I first read Oliver Sacks’ amazing descriptions of the workings of damaged brains, like the patients in the aphasia lounge reacting with laughter as they watched a televised Reagan speech with the sound off.  And the letters!  Long, passionately argued, someone pointing out the flaw in the writer’s reasoning, the detail that was missed, the phrase in the letter that was misinterpreted.  And then the writer responding at length, very occasionally admitting their correspondent might have a point, but more usually evading or eviscerating the criticism.  I wanted to be a part of that intellectual debate and the reading let me believe that I was.

But there was so much!  And since I felt compelled to read every article and poem and story in every issue of every magazine I subscribed to, they crowded out any other reading time and still started piling up around me until I finally gave in and let subscriptions lapse.  I’d get it down to maybe just a couple of literary quarterlies.  Then I’d have more time for books and that would continue until I was snagged again by some incredibly inexpensive please come back to us deal and come back I would, and the magazines of one stripe or another would come drifting in again, leaves blown into the house, into my study, by the angel of history, trying to make sense of it all before being finally swept away by the rumbling rockslide of words.

Then came the internet.  The digital age.  And that rockslide of words became the tumbling, crumbling avalanche that never stops.

2.

It was the beginning of living the inbetween.  Like many librarians, I was an early adopter of the new technologies, eager to see what I could make of them, but highly skeptical of the boisterous claims of the technoevangelists.  Those who adored the internet were convinced it would usher in a new enlightenment, fueled by the wisdom of the crowd.  Everybody’s opinion would count.  The gatekeepers would be circumvented.   Everyone would have a voice and they would achieve incredible advances in the arts, culture, and politics.  The sooner everybody was online and talking, the better off the world would be.  That these acolytes were historically ignorant and generally clueless about the way “the crowds” become “the mob” in real life seemed obvious to me.  I’d come to understand that new technologies only rarely replace old ones, and then only after a considerable passage of time.  Movies didn’t kill live theater, records didn’t kill live music.  Ranchers still use horses for rounding up cattle, despite all the displacements the internal combustion engine has caused. 

The Kindle came out in 2007 and soon the technophiles were gleefully proclaiming the imminent demise of print.  But the printed book is one of the most powerful and robust technologies ever devised, and it would take more than the vividness of screens to consign it wholesale to the past.

In 2010 Josie turned five and the debates around print versus e- were hot.  That was the year we first got iPads and one of the first apps I put on mine was the brilliant The Monster At The End of This Book, the recreation of one of the best little kids books ever written and one of her favorites.  She loved the app but it soon became apparent that it hadn’t replaced her (already) worn hard copy.  They were different experiences.  Had I told her that ever after she could only have one, I don’t know which she’d’ve picked, but she certainly would’ve been appalled at having to make the choice.  Why can’t we have both?  It wasn’t a competition.

Once, when I picked her up from day care and we got back to the house, she decided we were going to sit on the couch and read for a while.  She settled in with Charlie Parker Played be Bop, but when I reached for my laptop, she scolded me, “No, get a book.  A real book.  One you can touch!”⁵  Sometimes touch was what you needed.  I experimented with digital books, but it wasn’t satisfying, it didn’t provide the full experience I was after.  I missed the feel of the pages, the character of the chosen typeface, the heft of the volume.  I’ve always written in and underlined passages from the books I read and while it was easy to do something similar in the e-version I missed the tactility of the pen, the look of my own cramped handwriting.  These were all parts of “reading” that mattered to me.  Josie was right about touch.

We read differently when our purposes are different.  So if I was reading just for information, digital could be sufficient.  As newspapers and professional journals moved online, I followed.  And despite my avowed preference for print, it turns out I was just as susceptible as any other little hamster to the desire for that dopamine hit that’ll keep me clicking for another yummy morsel, even when I know there’s little nutritional value and if I don’t stop, it’s just going to make me sick.  When the deluge was just beginning we referred to it as drinking from a firehose, but I was partial to Nicholas Carr’s metaphor, that what we want is the needle in a haystack, but the internet gave us a haystack full of needles – so much that grasps our attention for the moment, diverting us from seeking out and finding what we really need.⁶ 

I tried to do social media, but I wasn’t any good at it.  My thoughts won’t come out in isolated bites.  My brain is wired for dialectic.  The ping-ping of comments and reactions to comments is great for expressing outrage and derision, or for sharing fun bits with your friends, but useless for improving understanding.

So I struggled, as I know many do, trying to limit my online reading time.  It wasn’t just the time suck; it’s that the experience was so wanting, the skim across the slippery surface of content, the content itself so often devoid of sustenance.  Why am I spending time on one more listicle!?  One more quiz cleverly designed to provide more of me to the marketing generators just behind the scenes?  The algorithms understand so well how to keep me intrigued, how to keep me clicking on just one more.

I tried to compromise.  Despite the intoxication of the broken bit of phrase “information wants to be free” the most intriguing prose was still to be had only by subscription.  By 2020 I’d let all of my magazine subscriptions lapse, but if I was going to be reading on my phone, couldn’t it at least be with the periodicals that had sustained me over all those years?   They all had digital versions now and tentatively I subscribed again to The New Yorker and The Atlantic, telling myself that in the online world I was under no obligation to read every word of every issue.  Indeed, since the periodicals, under considerable pressure from all of the attention-seeking ad-driven “free” content online were now updating their sites daily, it would have been impossible in any case. The voraciousness of my youth had to be tempered, I needed to be selective.  Still letting my curiosity run, but perhaps not quite as loosely as it once had.

Then I started getting emails offering ridiculously cheap introductory subscriptions for The New York Review.  A year for twenty bucks – one-fifth of the usual annual rate.  As I was filling out the form I saw that print+digital was the same price as digital only.  So why not?  I had such fond memories of those oversized newsprinty paper pages, the David Levine caricatures, the full page publisher ads announcing the latest books.  It’d be fun to have them around again, although I definitely would not let them pile up and I would not try to read every word.

Once the paper copies started arriving I could directly compare the online and print reading experiences with the same material, in the same setting⁷.  Same article, same author. Fundamentally different experience.  With print I read a little slower, with more focus and intention.  The page absorbs me, anchors me. Here’s a piece about Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, their long partnership and unconventional marriage.  Read online and the temptation’s irresistible to shift away from the article to look up more about Camera Notes, the Camera Club’s influential journal.  Here’s a mention of Clarence White and Käsebier – who are they?  Let me find out before I go on.  And those lookups lead me to others and now I’ve lost the thread of the article altogether.⁸ Print helps me resist the urge, strong though it is.  I turn off my phone and make handwritten notes of those things I want to look up later.  Even though I know I’ll toss the thing into the recycling bin once I’m done (no more piling up of unread issues), I’ll underline and add more notes, engaging with the piece and the author behind it, as if my pen had a direct line to their keyboard, and we’re engaged in conversation.  The heft of the paper matters.  And this, even though managing those large pages with these crippled hands is far more difficult than just scrolling up the screen.

I was raised in the world of things.  Things you can touch.

3.

After supper when I go to the living room, sit in my comfy chair, turn on the lamp and sit with book in hand or rattling those big pages of the New York Review, fountain pens and sticky notes at the ready, I’m not claiming that this experience is better than Lynn’s as she reclines on the couch, iPad nestled against her upraised knees.  It’s only my own preferred experience.  Nothing more than that.

If we humans survive our climate catastrophe, manage to keep the dogs of war from unleashing the WMD, and the digital world fails to collapse, then it may be that one day the reading of physical books will become a niche pleasure, gone the way of opera or poetry written down or those hard working horses on the high plains, beloved and cherished by a dwindling number of devotees.  There will be loss, and the people who come from the world of things will have pity on those who have no interest in those tactile joys, believing that their world of things is indisputably better.  They’ll be like the scriptorium monks of old, shaking their heads in dismay at the new generation’s foolhardy fascination with printed books.   

We were clearing out some of our bookshelves, packing up some kids books to give away, and I pulled out the three that had been Josie’s most favorite, thinking she might want to keep them.  I pictured them as mementos, carefully nestled on a shelf in her bedroom.  When I showed them to her she enjoyed seeing them, but when I asked if she wanted to take them, she shook her head.  She is amused at the little treasures on the shelves in my study.  She does not live in the world of things.  Her world is stranger than I can imagine, her delights mysterious and sometimes incomprehensible to me.  But the sense of loss I feel at the diminishment of the world of things is my loss, not hers.

Lynn and I are tucked into a curtained alcove at the Oxford Grillehouse with Josie and her college roommate. To me, it’s just the four of us.  But they have their phones on the table and from time to time pick one up, maybe tap something, maybe send someone a picture.  The shift they make is seamless.  I never feel they’re not being fully present to us.  They use the phones to bring other people in, not to shut people out.  Imagine you’re in a restaurant with a dozen people, gathered around a long table.  Most of your conversation is with the two or three people right around you, but one of them may turn away to make a comment to someone just out of your earshot.  In Josie’s world, the conversation isn’t among just the four of us sitting at the table – it includes all of those other friends floating in and out of the conversation who are just as present, even if present in a different way.

When I was 15 and my Mom was fed up with me tying up the family phone talking to my girlfriend, I went with a pocket full of quarters five blocks to the nearest phone booth.  I needed the quarters because it was a long distance call even though she lived just nine miles away.  Growing up, my friends came from the schools I went to, and I struggled to stay in touch when I moved on.  On Washington Avenue, to find new music, or to keep track of those intellectual debates, I needed to rely on the collecting talents of the librarians down the street.  Who and what I could reach were constrained by the immutabilities of space and time.  I describe all this to Josie.  She grins crookedly, shakes her head, says, “Crazy”.  Since she was in middle school, her friends have come from every school in the metropolitan area.  Now they’ve scattered even more widely, but she’s in touch with them constantly.  Most of the music that’s ever been recorded is available to her in an instant. Two Christmases ago we gave her a Crossley phonograph and a Billie Eilish vinyl record.  “How does this work?  Why is it on two sides?” She found it interesting, perhaps.  But useless.

I live on the inbetween.  Daily I wade in the internet, a world whose operations are black box mysterious, where distance is easily surmountable and time is compressed and elastic, each moment of the last hundred years easily within reach.  Sometimes I plunge into it with both arms, sometimes with my whole head, come back out gasping for air, overwhelmed.  I retreat to the world of things, the books and pens that I’m most comfortable with.

Josie swims confidently in that digital sea and without giving it much thought.  Friends a thousand miles away, a book she is currently passionate about, the chat that her besties are having about the terrors of the upcoming semester, the mid-forties music her latest fave has recently claimed as a huge influence, the ready advice of her Mom – they’re always within a flick of the wrist.  It has always been that way.

It’s been said that fish are unaware of the water in which they swim.⁹  Maybe that’s true for some, but surely there are those who relish the sensation of the underwater eddies against their silvery slivery bodies, who know where the clearest water is, or the caverns where the light sparkles as it makes its way into the dark.  They can tell which currents signal danger or excitement.  Sure it’s a dangerous world and little fishies can get lost and come to harm.¹⁰  But because those dangers are unfamiliar it’s easy to forget that it’s never been any safer here on land. 

Of course it was Josie who reminded me that sometimes you need the things you can touch.  She certainly hasn’t abandoned them altogether, even if she doesn’t have the emotional attachments I do.  For Christmas this year she asked for the Hunger Games books, which I was thrilled to buy.¹¹  She lives on the inbetween as well.  But she knows the sea so much better than I do, is far less shocked at the ugliness she finds, knows which grottos to avoid, what risks she’s willing to take.  I trust her. I will always be most at home on the bank, watching as she swims gleefully off, comfortably leaving the land behind, water welcoming as air.

1. My hometown library was, that modest building that sat near the western tip of the Island, just a short walk from the house I was raised in.

2. Named for the aforementioned Mrs. Harris and former US Senator Philetus Sawyer, the two key sponsors.

3. From scraps of memory I can construct a mental image of what that main reading room looked like.  I assume the image is full of inaccuracies, although certainly true enough for my purposes.

4. I only learned decades later that my situation then, and even now to some trailing degree, is a condition called “selective mutism”.

5. Feel free to take a brief detour from my essay for this wonderful comic from Unshelved.

6. Nicholas Carr

7. Comfy chair in the living room after dinner with a glass of wine.

8. Remember when libraries started replacing card catalogs with electronic ones and people bemoaned the supposed loss of serendipity?  There wouldn’t be those happy accidents of finding cards for interesting books you didn’t know you were looking for as you were flipping through, or finding the books themselves while browsing the shelves.  This never made sense to me – with hyperlinks we’d be drowning in serendipity.  And so it has come to pass.

9. David Foster Wallace.

10. Is Instagram Causing Poorer Mental Health Among Teen Girls?

11. I bought her first books for her the Christmas just before the Valentine’s Day baby was born.