664: The Room of Requirement
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The man walks into the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library one Monday earlier this month. He's a balding gentleman named John Peters and he's looking for books by the Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci. He's a Italian radical. And what I'm seeing is everything has been taken out several years ago. I'm wondering, are these stolen or have somebody, and I know of one case of this, deliberately not wanted people to see these books. If this is a conspiracy to suppress the 20th century's greatest theorist of cultural hegemony, it is not a very effective conspiracy. It takes the helpful librarian less than two minutes to find. On the shelves of the fourth floor, a book of Gramsci's selected political writings. So here's the call number, so that's how you find it on the shelf, okay? Five of us went to libraries around the country that day, including at the reference to us. And one of the things that we found everywhere were even tempered, unflappable librarians. Like at the Palo Verde Public Library in Phoenix, a library user named Cindy in a ruined sweatshirt and fanny pack broke into song to get the librarian to understand exactly which Amy Grant Christmas album she wanted. Mary, did you know? Did you play before? I heard the song. That same day on the Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana at the Medicine Spring Library, a woman asked the librarian, Aaron Leframbois, if they have anything on the motor keeks, the traditional women's society in the tribe. You know, I don't know if there's anything actually written about motor keeks. Yeah, one of my aunties is in there, and so, like when I got my Indian name, she sang me an honor song from the motor keeks, so it was really amazing. So I'm thinking these might, I mean, you might have to search a little more. They look for books together, and don't find much. The books are written mostly by non-natives, and then, which, can I say, a good example of cultural hegemony. Same afternoon on the other side of the country in the Jackson Heights branch of the Queens Public Library in New York City. Upstairs in the children's section, high school kids hide out on the floors of the stacks, a teenager by the computers, downloads, and immigration form, I suppose for parents. This is everybody says the most ethnically mixed neighborhood in Queens, with books in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Urdu, Hindi, and more. Two happily confident third graders, named Catherine and Adam, friends from the library's after school program, Stacks, walk up to the librarian with a request. So I want to know, I want to know if any books have words but no pictures. Yes. Words but no pictures. Yeah. Most of our books have at least a little picture. Even the chapter books have drawings at the start of each chapter, the librarian explains. The kids don't know that this is acceptable. Not ideal, but acceptable. I want to have a book with a challenge reading because, do you know, I'm almost fifth grade? I'm going third grade. I'm going third grade. I want to really challenge. I want a challenging one. And I think I know there's a one here. You need to go to the front over there. The marches that librarian towards the books for older kids. Best as I could figure out, Adam somehow got into his head that day that he just had it with picture books. And then as soon as he said this, Catherine was like, "Oh, me too." Though, once Adam walked away, she told me it was her own independent decision. It's that now that I'm bigger, I don't want to really have more like pictures. I want to mostly just use my imaginations for reading. Phoebe used the library for so much more than books, though. And just that one Monday, the five of us who went out to record, we witnessed a woman printing out fires to find her lost dog. We witnessed old people getting help with their email. One librarian told me that in her job, you really get in touch with just how many people really do not know how to use computers at all. We saw homeless guy research apartments he might be able to afford. We heard about power tools you could check out to do your home improvements when you have a place and lights for seasonal effective disorder you can check out. A librarian got on the phone and then arranged for a patron to get a new walker.
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