21st June sees the launch of Auckland Libraries’ Dark Night, a guerrilla festival of burlesque, literary, and cinematic events that question, celebrate, and challenge sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen.
Opening with a screening of Steve McQueen’s Shame, a harrowing portrait of sex addiction starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, the season includes library services in Auckland bars, author talks, and a cabaret evening including the sultry, saucy stars of Auckland Fringe Festival, Oh! Is For Opera. Read more →
I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space.
Nabokov is writing about a fictional character, but I’ve been arguing that all of us, living and dead, real and fictional, leave these kind of impressions in the world through words, images, deeds, artefacts – the kind of things which it’s a library’s job to help members of the public find and use as they see fit.
In my previous post, ‘The Mission of the Librarian’, I used an essay by the philosopher Ortega y Gasset to suggest that librarianship itself was, like the other professions, one of these puddly spaces, slowly etched by our peers and predecessors, which we get to fill with our own daily life and action.
Usually I’m more excited by librarians than libraries. Politicians like cutting the ribbons on big new builds of steel and glass, but what interests me is what services you can provide when there’s zero budget, zero resources, the politicians disapprove, and all you really have is your own imagination and initiative. I really like that R. David Lankes sometimes asks if librarianship has a future separate from libraries themselves – and I pushed pretty hard for Auckland’s librarians to go off-site and offer their services in other spaces, like comic book stores and even bars.
Distinctively geeky, distinctively Kiwi – Auckland Libraries staff in a comic book store for Star Wars Day
BUT…I have been thinking about library spaces too, since I last wrote.
I’m currently working on a couple of projects that provoked this.
This is a standalone blog post, but also the second part of some larger thoughts around archives, libraries, and how words shape who we are. Click to read the first part.
When I first started working with libraries, I downloaded and read a copy of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s ‘The Mission of the Librarian’ (PDF download). It was written in 1934, but I hoped there would be some lingering insights about libraries or – let’s be frank – cool, glib quotes that I could share in speeches or workshops to make myself look smart and erudite.
Key 23 is something I only discovered because, working in Auckland for six months, I am using a public library like a regular reader for once – borrowing books simply because they interest or excite me.
A lot of the books I’m borrowing are comics – I love the economy of storytelling and really believe, as I was telling the State Library of New South Wales last year, that this medium might hold the future of space, word, and image. Among the comics I’ve been reading is Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, which chronicles the adventures of a secret society battling extradimensional forces in the run up to the year 2000.
In The Invisibles, there’s a drug called Key 23 which makes the user experience whatever they read as real. It’s a lovely conceit, which Morrison also flips by adding the notion of a ‘fiction suit’ which (I may have got this wrong…) allows characters to travel through the world of discourse.
Dream, reality, self and other are breaking down in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles
Training as an infant school teacher brought me back to public libraries for the first time in ages. I’d stopped using them since the Internet had supplanted the local library as my source for obscure music, and I guess before that my last memory of a library was being brutally mocked by some badass teenage girls drinking round the back of one, the first time me and my best friend tried to get served in a pub underage!
As a teacher, school trips to the library were pretty anodyne – the best bit was the forced march three blocks or so from the infant school, the kids’ faces full of wonder as they held hands in pairs and went on a five year old’s adventure into the Big World of grocer’s stores and banks and traffic lights…then, the library.
It was an old building in sore need of refurbishment, overlit within by fluorescent striplights, walls painted the blank cream colour of a hospital corridor, and fitted with that curious, bristly tiled carpet forever associated with Britain’s more dismal civic spaces – probably not even the same colour throughout, with a patch of grey lingering in one corner where the fitters had run out of brown.
This is the first of a more personal series of blog posts reflecting on librarianship, archives, and the power of words.
My PhD was about the lives of refugees in their adopted countries. I learned a thing or two about libraries then – sending a mate to rummage around in the Library of Congress, visiting the archives of a working German mental hospital, and spending days amid the pungent must of London’s Senate House, where you could still find a corner to sit untroubled on the sixth floor on a November afternoon, walled in on three sides by shelves, books spread across your desk – only half of them really relevant to your topic, the others picked up on impulse or passing interest, looking down on a gloriously cold and lonely darkening winter London.
Senate House, London – The inspiration for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, allegedly earmarked as Hitler’s headquarters in the event of a Nazi invasion of Britain…
That intense sensory experience, synonymous with loneliness and hard work for me, is a memory so strong that for all its ambivalence it has taken on the quality of beauty. I can smell the vile rows of shelving which Senate House devoted to Hansard as I write this…and I kind of miss it. Read more →
Librarians in Auckland ventured into comic book stores to celebrate Star Wars Day and Free Comic Book Day by issuing memberships and loaning items from their collections. More soon, but in the meantime here’s Twitter coverage via Storify.
Although Kiwi librarians are attempting to push back with the Twitter hashtag #morethanbooks, responses have tended to focus on the fact that libraries use e-books too, and include other items like music in their collections as well.
The simple truth is, libraries aren’t about books on shelves, or compact discs, or even e-readers. Those are tools, mere means to an end.
A library isn’t just a storage space for books on shelves – it’s also a place where musicians perform; where computer software is written; where teens get to wrestle a zombie-bitten police officer to the ground while debating the ethics of surviving a disaster scenario.
Yet one local politician has said “Why not replace libraries with e-readers?” and Kiwi librarians are on the defensive, letting their enemies set the terms of the debate. Read more →
Auckland Libraries’ Anne Dickson led teen zombie hordes against a group of survivors in Tupu Youth Library
Last Friday in Tupu Youth Library, South Auckland, I ran an interactive live-action zombie event for teens on their school holidays.
The ‘survivors’, aged from 12 to 18, found themselves besieged in a meeting room while zombies feasted on hapless victims outside. Teens made barricades from furniture, used library resources to plan their escape from South Auckland, and faced special challenges including detecting potential zombie victims and even wrestling with a zombified police officer!
I have been fascinated by how and why people use space, and how subtle design can influence behaviour, for as long as I can remember.
As a teen, I merged this interest in social geography with psychology and came up with a degree in Urban Planning and Design. I was going to change the world. Improve open spaces. Create spaces people felt happy in. The reality I found was far from my planned dream. Rows of brickwork, overshadowing, trellis screens, and complaints all dominated my day. Not even I liked the spaces I was approving. Approving, not designing.
Fast-forward fifteen years. I am still an urban planner, but only in my mind. I have been trained to look at spaces, movement of people, land use, all in a certain way. I can no longer look at a space like an ordinary person. Taking my kids to the shops, the park, the library, I analyse the flow of movement through space. When I see conflicting uses, I see a design-based solution. When I see desire lines – the unplanned paths naturally taken by people in any setting – I read them.
