Thursday, February 25, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
An irregular Library regular
Corey Kilgannon/The New York Times Greg Sloane in his spot at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on Thursday
Perhaps the most regular visitor to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is Greg Sloane, who can be seen nearly every day among the dancers, musicians, actors and culture-mongers who flock to this gem at Lincoln Center. Mr. Sloane, 62, is not from the School of American Ballet or the Juilliard School or any other esteemed arts institution nearby, but he does excel at his own particular performing art: survival in New York City without a home.
It is a magnificent facility.
It is a pursuit that involves seeking a roof, a chair and some heat, maybe something clean to lean on. And this is where the library comes in. After a wash-up and shave in the bathroom, he might peruse the 12,000 titles in the library’s Reserve Film and Video Collection and select something to watch. Or perhaps he will select a recording and settle in for the day to culture himself. For the arts-minded, the Performing Arts library is one of those places that makes New York City worthwhile, with its extensive archival collection of recordings, video, sheet music and other resources. But most important to Mr. Sloane, it is open every day except Sunday — till 8 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays and till 6 other days — and he is allowed in. There are somewhat private and comfortable listening and viewing stations where one can avail oneself of the library’s resources, or just take a nap.
Mr. Sloan can invariably be found on the first level near the Recorded Sound and Moving Image Circulating Collection, next to those delving into their Shostakovich and Rostropovich. He might be nodding out listening to some Anita Baker on his headphones or checking out an older film. Maybe a Steve McQueen movie — he loves McQueen. Or James Coburn in “Our Man Flint”? Now that’s a movie. Not to say that Mr. Sloane has no use for today’s movies. He goes to the theater almost daily — to sleep. On a Sunday, he will arrive early to pay a senior or matinee ticket price and settle into a seat in the back and doze off.
The closest megaplex to the library is AMC Loews Lincoln Square, where he says the late showing of “Avatar” lets him sleep till 3 a.m. when staff members clear the theater. Recently, however, it was the police who rousted him. “They called in the cops to wake me up,” he said. “They handcuffed me and took me to the 20th Precinct and gave me a ticket. So I’m boycotting that theater now.”
Mr. Sloane is a bit scruffy, but not bummy — picture Billy Dee Williams in a rough role. There’s a way to keep oneself in clean clothes without ever doing laundry: the thrift store. “There’s no reason to go around in dirty, smelly clothes,” he said. “There’s rich people in this city who wear something once and give it away. You get anything you want for a buck or two — cheaper than doing laundry.”
Cheaper than doing laundry; like the sound of that.
On Thursday, he did look pretty styling, with his snappy bracelets and rings and his Dior sunglasses, whose lenses he replaced with his own prescription bifocals. He wore a Claiborne suede coat over a cashmere blazer with the sleeves cut off, vintage green wool Army pants and nice running shoes. He sleeps in various locations outside or sometimes at a friend’s or a girlfriend’s place, he said. “I got family in every borough, but you can’t visit your family when you’re homeless,” he said. “When something goes missing, who do you think everyone looks at?”
Mr. Sloane likes his Hennessy Cognac and Newport cigarettes. Once he burns through his monthly welfare check, he hails cabs for the party people bar-hopping in the meatpacking district. For this, he wears around his neck a yellow medallion on a chain that says “TAXI.”
Mr. Sloane grew up in the Bronx in the Patterson projects, which also produced the basketball great Nate (Tiny) Archibald and the boxer Iran Barkley. For high school, he attended the S.S. John Brown, a maritime school docked then in the East River, he said, and then served in the merchant marine on the DePauw Victory cargo ship, which delivered munitions to troops in Vietnam. He recalled spending months on the anchored ship listening to bombing and gunfire night after night. He said he was still unable to sit inside for very long without looking out windows. Thankfully, his library spot has them.
As one might imagine, Mr. Sloane sees — or sleeps through — many current movies, and he offered his Oscar predictions.
Best actor: George Clooney for “Up in the Air,” a biased prediction since he has met Mr. Clooney. Hailed him a cab, in fact.
Best actress: Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side.”
Best picture: “Avatar.”
“I hope ‘Avatar’ wins so they keep it in theaters longer,” he said. “It’s three hours long, so you get more time to sleep.”
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
This Book Is Overdue
From Wisdom to Wi-Fi: A library is no longer a mere home for books. It is a wired-up information center.
There are many unsung heroes of ordinary life—nurses, trash collectors, accountants—whose job it is to take care of things that the rest of us take for granted. So too the librarian, that iconic figure who long presided over a sanctuary of books and guided readers, young and old, to the treasures of a vast print culture. But the profession has undergone a dramatic transformation of late because libraries themselves are not what they used to be. Today they have less to do with books per se than with computers, films, community events and children's activities. They are, above all, public portals to the world of "information," especially the online version. In "This Book Is Overdue!," Marilyn Johnson, a former staff writer for Life magazine, takes us on a tour of the modern library and introduces us to the men and women who call it their professional home.
I am not comfortable with the concept of the quotidian being heroic. If we call these folks heroes (and I am a proud librarian), then what do we call the firefighter who runs into flames to rescue a person trapped inside?
As I'm blogging this, a call came in from a patron who wants to reserve a new book: Brava, Valentine : a novel, by Adriana Trigiani. Summary: A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity takes shoe designer and businesswomen Valentine Roncalli from the winding streets of Greenwich Village to the sun-kissed cobblestones of Buenos Aires, where she finds a long-buried secret hidden deep within a family scandal. Once unearthed, the truth rocks the Roncallis and Valentine is determined to hold her family together as she longs to create one of her own. So, do patrons get what they as for, or should they be steered to 'quality'?
Ms. Johnson's enthusiasm for libraries and the people who work in them is refreshingly evident throughout the book. In a charming if meandering style, she samples from her conversations with traditional librarians and with "cybrarians," a catch-all term for a generation of librarians intent on finding ways to integrate the old mission of the library with the new possibilities of technology.
Some librarians are positive on change, and some resist it with zeal.
A good observer with a keen eye for detail, Ms. Johnson attends conferences where librarians cast off their staid image to perform cheeky dance numbers with rolling book carts; she unearths the 'zines of tattooed librarians, who write about vegan wedding cakes and political activism; she visits librarians from St. John's University who are teaching computer skills to people in developing countries; and she interviews the founders of Radical Reference, a group that grew out of the protest of the Republican convention in New York in 2004, when the group's members provided roving reference services to demonstrators and journalists. An early version of its Web site carried the banner: "Answers for Those Who Question Authority."
Ms. Johnson succeeds in making us like librarians, but she avoids digging too deeply into the controversies roiling around the future of books and their keepers. Something seismic is happening when a culture casts off old words ("librarian") for new ones ("information scientist") and conventional ways of pursuing knowledge (reading on paper) for novel ones (reading on a screen).
Casts off seems an overly strong and sweeping term; change is occurring, and library is an academic science, but librarians and paper have not yet disappeared.
One of the more disturbing stories in "This Book Is Overdue!" is Ms. Johnson's description of the New York Public Library's decision to upgrade its image from that of a stuffy research library, replete with reference librarians whose knowledge and expertise are of incalculable value to researchers, to a place where parents and toddlers might want to pick up a DVD and a latte.
This Book Is Overdue!
By Marilyn Johnson
Harper, 272 pages, $24.99
In a poignant interview with John Lundquist, the former head of the now-defunct Asian and Middle Eastern Division of the NYPL, Ms. Johnson learns that the library's leadership feared that the institution was becoming "archaic, dead, outdated" and so restructured it to suit the times. "They want the library to be active and hip, they want us to put in a cafeteria and schedule entertainments," Mr. Lundquist tells Ms. Johnson. He worries that by jettisoning so many of the library's research divisions, administrators made the mistake of assuming "that everything is now on the Internet, in digital form," when in fact it is not.
Hardly. NYPL itself is digitizing particular collections to make them available more widely than they are in physical form. Again, the question is whether the library changes to adapt to changing demands, or if it stays unchanged and forces people to adapt to it.
The question that Mr. Lundquist tries to address, but that Ms. Johnson does not, is whether we lose something when a library "upgrades" itself: It isn't just the old-fashioned card catalog that disappears but a whole culture.
This age can hardly be the first one to face this challenge; libraries have changed before, and survived, eve thrived.
Although Ms. Johnson adopts a balanced approach to the new technology, she accepts uncritically some of the canards of our techno-positivist age. A younger generation of "digital natives" doesn't learn by listening to lectures, she reports, but by "collaborating, networking, sharing." But as several recent reports have made clear, the browsing, skimming and multitasking of this younger generation also leads to less retention of what it is reading.
The younger generation always makes the older generation rue change, and yearn for a better, simpler, more enlightened time.
Later, Ms. Johnson dismisses as "old-fashioned" a speaker who expresses concern about modern society's dependence on technology, even though the question he asks about our many gadgets—"Have they freed us for more quality moments, or simply made us busier?"—is surely a reasonable one. A library whose main appeal is the presence of free wi-fi and movies is exchanging one community function (encouraging the consumption of the written word) for another (encouraging the consumption of images).
The library I work in has many books, and few patrons. It has wi-fi and DVDs, MP3 ebooks, books on CD (cassette tape now an anachronism, and nearly obselecent). And yet it is underused. TV was criticized in the age of radio programming and movie theater attendance. VHS tapes were criticized in the TV age. It is an endless cycle.
Even Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, recently told the Davos World Economic Forum that he worried about the loss of deep reading skills. "As the world looks to these instantaneous devices," he said, "you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines, and so forth." Ms. Johnson's chapter about the New York Public Library ends with a description of twentysomething New Yorkers filling one of the building's grand rooms to watch a video series created by the library. As they plop down before the large screen, Ms. Johnson is optimistic, likening the crowd to "large children, gathered around a virtual rocking chair for story time." This "fresh crowd" is "new, alive, and up-to-date, playing with new media," she writes. "That's the future of this library." If so, how sad—for readers and for the excellent librarians who might guide them.
Woe unto us.
Ms. Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.
There are many unsung heroes of ordinary life—nurses, trash collectors, accountants—whose job it is to take care of things that the rest of us take for granted. So too the librarian, that iconic figure who long presided over a sanctuary of books and guided readers, young and old, to the treasures of a vast print culture. But the profession has undergone a dramatic transformation of late because libraries themselves are not what they used to be. Today they have less to do with books per se than with computers, films, community events and children's activities. They are, above all, public portals to the world of "information," especially the online version. In "This Book Is Overdue!," Marilyn Johnson, a former staff writer for Life magazine, takes us on a tour of the modern library and introduces us to the men and women who call it their professional home.
I am not comfortable with the concept of the quotidian being heroic. If we call these folks heroes (and I am a proud librarian), then what do we call the firefighter who runs into flames to rescue a person trapped inside?
As I'm blogging this, a call came in from a patron who wants to reserve a new book: Brava, Valentine : a novel, by Adriana Trigiani. Summary: A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity takes shoe designer and businesswomen Valentine Roncalli from the winding streets of Greenwich Village to the sun-kissed cobblestones of Buenos Aires, where she finds a long-buried secret hidden deep within a family scandal. Once unearthed, the truth rocks the Roncallis and Valentine is determined to hold her family together as she longs to create one of her own. So, do patrons get what they as for, or should they be steered to 'quality'?
Ms. Johnson's enthusiasm for libraries and the people who work in them is refreshingly evident throughout the book. In a charming if meandering style, she samples from her conversations with traditional librarians and with "cybrarians," a catch-all term for a generation of librarians intent on finding ways to integrate the old mission of the library with the new possibilities of technology.
Some librarians are positive on change, and some resist it with zeal.
A good observer with a keen eye for detail, Ms. Johnson attends conferences where librarians cast off their staid image to perform cheeky dance numbers with rolling book carts; she unearths the 'zines of tattooed librarians, who write about vegan wedding cakes and political activism; she visits librarians from St. John's University who are teaching computer skills to people in developing countries; and she interviews the founders of Radical Reference, a group that grew out of the protest of the Republican convention in New York in 2004, when the group's members provided roving reference services to demonstrators and journalists. An early version of its Web site carried the banner: "Answers for Those Who Question Authority."
Ms. Johnson succeeds in making us like librarians, but she avoids digging too deeply into the controversies roiling around the future of books and their keepers. Something seismic is happening when a culture casts off old words ("librarian") for new ones ("information scientist") and conventional ways of pursuing knowledge (reading on paper) for novel ones (reading on a screen).
Casts off seems an overly strong and sweeping term; change is occurring, and library is an academic science, but librarians and paper have not yet disappeared.
One of the more disturbing stories in "This Book Is Overdue!" is Ms. Johnson's description of the New York Public Library's decision to upgrade its image from that of a stuffy research library, replete with reference librarians whose knowledge and expertise are of incalculable value to researchers, to a place where parents and toddlers might want to pick up a DVD and a latte.
This Book Is Overdue!
By Marilyn Johnson
Harper, 272 pages, $24.99
In a poignant interview with John Lundquist, the former head of the now-defunct Asian and Middle Eastern Division of the NYPL, Ms. Johnson learns that the library's leadership feared that the institution was becoming "archaic, dead, outdated" and so restructured it to suit the times. "They want the library to be active and hip, they want us to put in a cafeteria and schedule entertainments," Mr. Lundquist tells Ms. Johnson. He worries that by jettisoning so many of the library's research divisions, administrators made the mistake of assuming "that everything is now on the Internet, in digital form," when in fact it is not.
Hardly. NYPL itself is digitizing particular collections to make them available more widely than they are in physical form. Again, the question is whether the library changes to adapt to changing demands, or if it stays unchanged and forces people to adapt to it.
The question that Mr. Lundquist tries to address, but that Ms. Johnson does not, is whether we lose something when a library "upgrades" itself: It isn't just the old-fashioned card catalog that disappears but a whole culture.
This age can hardly be the first one to face this challenge; libraries have changed before, and survived, eve thrived.
Although Ms. Johnson adopts a balanced approach to the new technology, she accepts uncritically some of the canards of our techno-positivist age. A younger generation of "digital natives" doesn't learn by listening to lectures, she reports, but by "collaborating, networking, sharing." But as several recent reports have made clear, the browsing, skimming and multitasking of this younger generation also leads to less retention of what it is reading.
The younger generation always makes the older generation rue change, and yearn for a better, simpler, more enlightened time.
Later, Ms. Johnson dismisses as "old-fashioned" a speaker who expresses concern about modern society's dependence on technology, even though the question he asks about our many gadgets—"Have they freed us for more quality moments, or simply made us busier?"—is surely a reasonable one. A library whose main appeal is the presence of free wi-fi and movies is exchanging one community function (encouraging the consumption of the written word) for another (encouraging the consumption of images).
The library I work in has many books, and few patrons. It has wi-fi and DVDs, MP3 ebooks, books on CD (cassette tape now an anachronism, and nearly obselecent). And yet it is underused. TV was criticized in the age of radio programming and movie theater attendance. VHS tapes were criticized in the TV age. It is an endless cycle.
Even Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, recently told the Davos World Economic Forum that he worried about the loss of deep reading skills. "As the world looks to these instantaneous devices," he said, "you spend less time reading all forms of literature, books, magazines, and so forth." Ms. Johnson's chapter about the New York Public Library ends with a description of twentysomething New Yorkers filling one of the building's grand rooms to watch a video series created by the library. As they plop down before the large screen, Ms. Johnson is optimistic, likening the crowd to "large children, gathered around a virtual rocking chair for story time." This "fresh crowd" is "new, alive, and up-to-date, playing with new media," she writes. "That's the future of this library." If so, how sad—for readers and for the excellent librarians who might guide them.
Woe unto us.
Ms. Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Who dat?
No, not the New Orleans Saints (who won the XLIVth Super Bowl yesterday, 31-17), whose fans made that phrase their motto.
Island Trees Library called, looking for the book Give us this day, written by Sydney Stewart. He was a survivor of the Bataan death march. His obit starts:
Sidney Stewart, a survivor of the Bataan death march and three years in Japanese captivity in World War II who wrote the highly praised memoir ''Give Us This Day,'' an account of how the prisoners endured their intense suffering, died on March 18 at a hospital in Paris. He was 78 and lived in Paris. The cause was complications from emphysema contracted by inhaling coral dust while laboring as a prisoner of war, said a colleague, Dr. Abby Adams-Silvan of New York.
Normally, having looked at the table of contents, I would have processed the book. But in checking the hold so I could fill out the correct routing slip, the patron's name caught my eye: Richard Conte. Not the Richard Conte who starred in House of Strangers (that I watched this past weekend) and as Barzini in The Godfather, but a namesake. Still.
Island Trees Library called, looking for the book Give us this day, written by Sydney Stewart. He was a survivor of the Bataan death march. His obit starts:
Sidney Stewart, a survivor of the Bataan death march and three years in Japanese captivity in World War II who wrote the highly praised memoir ''Give Us This Day,'' an account of how the prisoners endured their intense suffering, died on March 18 at a hospital in Paris. He was 78 and lived in Paris. The cause was complications from emphysema contracted by inhaling coral dust while laboring as a prisoner of war, said a colleague, Dr. Abby Adams-Silvan of New York.
Normally, having looked at the table of contents, I would have processed the book. But in checking the hold so I could fill out the correct routing slip, the patron's name caught my eye: Richard Conte. Not the Richard Conte who starred in House of Strangers (that I watched this past weekend) and as Barzini in The Godfather, but a namesake. Still.
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