Inspired Writing - the card catalog part three

Doubting and Defending the card catalog:

     The card catalog as a physical object is outdated and unnecessary. The online catalog is much more efficient and convenient, it does not need constant, laborious update like that of the physical card catalog. The physical card catalog takes up too much space in the library that can be devoted to other things such as books or study space. The physical card catalog is heavy and chunky; its a dust magnet with plenty of drawers to act as convenient gum repositories for teenage patrons. If a card drawer is not completely full, the space behind the cards collects dust bunnies and lint, along with the occasional paper hole punched from a hole punch. Adding new space for new books to be cataloged becomes tedious, especially when a drawer is full and it's at the beginning of the alphabet.

     What can be said in defense of the physical card catalog? The card catalog as a physical object can be quite esthetically pleasing. It is a piece of furniture that can be admired for its simple lines and elegant drawer pulls. The drawers themselves are versatile and can be used for numerous household items for storage or display. For its original purpose, the card catalog kept each bibliographic card in order, where the patron and library staff could find vital information on the library's holdings. It did its job well. The physical card catalog is an important part of the advancement and organization of libraries and it in turn holds partial responsibility for allowing the public availability of literature.

Stereotypes surrounding the library and card catalog:

     The librarian has become stereotyped in popular culture with a bun in her hair and reading glasses hanging from her neck. She wears conservative clothing which reflects her uptight nature. She constantly has her index finger at her pursed lips, expressing her wish for people to "Shush!" The atmosphere in a library is quiet, and collegiate. People are absorbing knowledge, they need to concentrate, no talking please. Most libraries are cold and sterile, no need for the comforts of home because if the patrons get too relaxed, they might fall asleep. Libraries are traditionally conservative. The card catalog is seen as antiquated and outdated.

     The stereotype of the librarian can not be applied to every female librarian. Libraries are becoming more interactive and family oriented institutions. As funding for libraries becomes more popular through tax dollars, the public has more influence on the programming delivered at the local library. The stereotype of the card catalog is for the most part accurate as it has been replaced by the online catalog. Though the stereotype is accurate is harshly unsentimental.

This photo is a flicker find that was posted on the blog called "desire to inspire." This photo caught my eye because it is very unique and artistic. In this photo, the card catalog is being re purposed as an art installation from the strategically placed objects on top of the catalog to the giant wooden arm protruding from one of the drawers and grabbing onto a browsing shelf. If I were the person who put this together, I would call it "Revenge of the Barbie Doll." Because the background is so plain in this photo, the card catalog pops and the intrigue is enhanced by the outreaching arm. One can imagine the rest of the body being chopped up in little pieces and stuffed into the remaining drawers!

Concrete features of the card catalog:

     The card catalog has rounded edges. Card catalogs are heavy and hold an unthinkable number of cards or other objects like slides. It's empty drawers are dark and cavernous. Most card catalogs are honey coloured, yet take on a patina over the years of use. The catalog collects history by recording the occasional nick or ding to it's drawers or browsing shelf. Sometimes the laminate layer of wood on the cabinet becomes separated from the underlying layer revealing another surface. The drawer pulls are hard metal, usually brass or nickel and shaped like elephant noses.

Reflections on "The Stunt Pilot" by Annie Dillard

     Annie Dillard's essay "The Stunt Pilot" chronicles the reputation of Dave Rahm as a stunt pilot and as an intelligent geologist. Rahm was world renowned for his flying skills. It is clear in Dillard's essay that it takes a certain kind of person to be a stunt pilot, enduring negative G's and feeling as though you are being turned inside out. Dillard has a respect for Rahm's ability as a stunt pilot and deems it as an art form within itself, comparing his flights to the art of writing and painting. Dillard recalls her experience flying with Rahm in part as being quite magical, "Through the layer of air between the curving planet and its held, thick clouds." (Pg. 159) At the same time, doing a barrel roll in a single engine Cessna is a very jarring experience and de-romanticizes the role of a stunt pilot to a certain degree for Dillard. Inherent in this line of work is the knowledge of mortal danger every time a pilot enters a plane to perform art in the sky. "'You know your going to die at this some day'...privately he counted on skewing the curve." (Pg. 161) It seems that Rahm knew with a certain degree of acceptance that he would inevitably die by his art. After his death, Dillard recalls Rahm's flying over her house, describing it as:

He unrolled the scroll of air, extended it, bent it into mobius strips: he furled the line a thousand new ways, as if he were inventing a script and writing it in one infinitely recurving utterance until I thought the bounds of beauty must break. (Pg. 163)

     Dillard marveled at the impermanence of Rahm's work as if this fleeting element made his art an even greater treasure, just as Rahm's life itself was fleeting an impermanent. Dillard concludes her essay pondering, "What are we here for?" (Pg. 164) Ending the essay, Dillard quotes Teilhard de Chardin, "The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free." (Pg. 165) By viewing both Rahm's life and profession as a stunt pilot through this lens, it is evident that because he pushed his body and mind to the very edge of their limits, that he was fee. Death in itself is also absolute.

Inspired Writing - the card catalog part two

Literary review - Amazon search results for a library card catalog in books:

1. Simplified Library School Rules; Card Catalog, Accession, Book Numbers, Shelf List, Capitals by Melvil Dewey. Observation: The author seems to be quite the Dewey Decimal nerd based on his other publications listed on Amazon. He is the creator of the Dewey Decimal system which is the system used in libraries to catalog and retrieve books.

2. Access Points to the Law Library Card Catalog Interpretation by Elzabeth Matthews

3. The card catalogs of the Library of Congress: A brief description by Barbara Marietta Westby

Observation: These books in general seem to be pretty obscure, further proving that my subject is a dying breed.

Five interesting facts about the Card Catalog:

1. During the French Revolution playing cards were used instead of index cards in the card catalog.
    http://liswiki.org/wiki/History_of_the_card_catalog

2. Library hand is a code of rules for how to create the perfect, uniform card for the card catalog devised by Melvil Dewey and Thomas Edison.
    http://liswiki.org/wiki/History_of_the_card_catalog

3. Danbury Connecticut's public library held a mock funeral for their retired card catalog.
     http://liswiki.org/wiki/History_of_the_card_catalog

4. In 1982, the editors of American Libraries magazine asked its readers to come up with creative uses for decommissioned card catalogs.
     http://www.libraryhistorybuff.org/cardcatalog.htm

5. Melvil Dewey established the Library Bureau which was "one of the most prolific makers of card catalog cabinets."
     http://www.libraryhistorybuff.org/cardcatalog.htm

Reflections on "Yarn" by Kyoko Mori

     The essay "Yarn" by Kyoko Mori expounds upon an everyday hobby that was firs thrust upon her as a home economics project, with plenty of trial and error. Reflecting on the project, she writes, "Yellow was a color I never liked; perhaps I was conceding defeat before I started." (Pg. 219) In part one of her essay, Mori chronicles her own story of knitting beginning with that home economics project.

     In the second part of the essay, Mori tells the history of knitting dating back to Egypt. This part of the essay is peppered with a myriad of facts that are at the same time disconnected and cohesive, as she weaves them together in her writing. She writes, "Mary, Queen of Scotts, wore two pairs of French stockings-one plain white and the other patterned with gold stitches-on the day of her execution; the stockings were held up with green garters." (Pg. 221) Mori takes the reader through the history of knitting from stockings to sweaters, "they did not become popular as "sweaters" until the 1890's when American athletes wore heavy, dark blue pullovers before and after contests to ward off the chills." (Pg. 221) Mori's descriptions of the history of knitting engage the reader with quirky facts and imagery, keeping the mundane far from boring.

     She starts part three of her essay comparing knitting and knitwear to having a resilience similar to that of people, more plastic and forgiving than other crafts, "As with people, so with garments: the strengths and weaknesses are often one and the same." (Pg. 222) She traces the meaning of the words "thread" and "yarn" concluding that to tell a story by way of weaving  yarn is much more engaging than a thread of fact, "It is infinitely more relaxing to listen to a yarn than to lecture whose thread we must follow." (Pg. 223) In this part of the essay, she also weaves in her own personal story of knitting, marking the metamorphosis of her style of knitting from "casual" to "formal."

     In the fourth and final portion of the essay, Mori notes that the craft of knitting was not always relegated to women. However, it did become a field dominated by women as she recounts a story about Latvian girls who lived prior to the 20th century creating a marriage dowry through the many garments they knitted. At the end of the essay, Mori concedes, "i don't know what to do with the history and the way it affects our daily lives." (Pg. 226) Through her years of knitting, she has learned to be creative and independent with her craft, yet when she attempts to make a pair of mittens for a friend thirty years after her home economics project, she has to go back and teach herself how to do it. This shows Mori coming full circle in her craft, being pleased with even the things she cannot perfect.

Frequency North Reading: Meghan Daum's obsession with finding the perfect home

Prior to the reading, I searched Amazon.com for Daum's memoir Life Would be Perfect If I Lived In That House. It seemed that the customers who did not love HGTV disliked the memoir. Going to the reading, I wanted to form my own opinion. I wanted the Amazon reviewers to be wrong.

Meghan Daum in the flesh...

She's a woman who can't seem to stay in one place for too long when it comes to houses. She describes the book as an attempt to "discover the relationship between self and place" and having much less to do with a how-to of real estate stats and mortgages.

During the reading I laughed a little during certain sections but I was not sold on her memoir. A lot of it probably has to do with her delivery and not her writing. I know this to be true, having read potions of her short story collection My Misspent Youth. She is witty and funny, sucking you into the story. However at the reading I thought to myself, "is this the same Meghan Daum that had an e-mail romance, explored the evolution of air travel, and the subculture of polyamory?"

I think my issue is that the writer's persona did not seem to match the person. Not that this is anything to fault her with. The persona of the writer should be different from the human being, it's how we protect ourselves. I guess I was surprised by the gap.

The topic of the reading reminded me of our own Megan Fulwiler's essay, A Home of One's Own. In this essay, she explores the adventure that is buying a home as a single woman and learning to become a Ms. fix it. Her writing about this life transition traverses the same topic within a tighter space. This time, I believe the old adage is true, less is more!

My Eulogy for the Library Card Catalog (Part I)

 card catalog: traditionally used to store index cards containing information about the location and other vital information about a book or periodical including title, author, call number, ISBN, etc..

Card catalogs were the primary way of organizing, finding, and keeping track of the contents of a library that were available for patrons to check out.

There was a time when one could not write a research paper without the use of a card catalog.

Card catalogs once filled multiple rooms in university libraries.

It has only been within the past ten years that they have been removed from libraries all together and are now considered entirely obsolete, replaced by the computer which is incidentally, much more likely to breakdown and falter.

Card catalogs come in many sizes but no matter what size, they all seem relatively large to an average human being.

To a bibliophile like myself, they are a beautiful piece of literary history, having held the information of timeless literary works. Some of which, for better or worse, have shaped the literary cannon we know today.

I personally own a card catalog whose original home was in the Yale University Art Library in New Haven. Its original purpose was to hold projector slides.

As you can see, the card catalog had versatile uses in its beginnings beyond that of housing the index card and now that it is being considered "obsolete" by the outside world, there are far more uses for it than ever before.

I have seen card catalogs used as wine storage.

Just as there are different designs in the drawer dimensions of the card catalog, there are different drawer pull styles. My personal preference is called the "elephant nose" however, for better or worse, one of the drawer pulls on my card catalog is called a "stub nose," a little less elegant, yet not lacking in personality.

I have named my card catalog, just as I named my vintage metal clarinet (Waldo-which I made into a lamp). The name of my card catalog is Elihu, named after Elihu Yale who was not the founder of the university, however deemed rich enough to have considerable influence.

Elihu sits proudly in the corner of my living room, an ever-present conversation piece.

There is certainly more to be discovered about the card catalog. I look forward to diving into research.

I would like to know who invented the card catalog and perhaps what people did in libraries before card catalogs.

I am curious as to whether or not there is a small subculture of bibliophiles like myself who find something attractive and alluring about the card catalog, its history, and its future.

Selected Writings of Meghan Daum (Part III)

The following is my reflection on the essay "According to the Women I'm Fairly Pretty" from My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum.

In this essay, Daum explores the subculture of polyamory as well as the religious connections the Ravenhearts associate with their practice of polyamory. The Ravenhearts belong to the Church of All Worlds. The religion seems to be based partially on polyamory and partially on mythology and gaming, akin to Dungeons and Dragons. Attending conventions revolving around gaming is a regular practice for the Ravenheart family.

The Ravenheart family is accredited with coining the phrase polyamory meaning "many loves." However, it is believed that polyamory has been put into practice long before there was a word to describe it. The Ravenhearts see polyamory as something that "permeates every aspect of our lives." (pg. 110). While Daum was spending time with the Ravenhearts she observed,

"It would seem that to become a Ravenheart you'd also have to meet a need that no one else is meeting. The idea that different people fulfill different needs, sexually and otherwise, is an almost constant refrain in the household...You don't have to be in a poly relationship to understand that people have different needs sexually..." (pg. 117)

This creates a competition of sorts to stay within the polyamorous unit because if you don't fulfill a certain need, you become obsolete. For the majority of Americans who exist outside this subculture, whether they are monogamous or not, sexuality can still be expressed and gratified without the need for polyamory. Daum points out that,

"It's not their polyamory I have a problem with. It's their forced iconoclasm. It's their paraphernalia. it's the fact that they don't seem to sleep with anyone who isn't just like them." (pg. 123)

I agree with Daum's statement about iconoclasm. How many sexual partners a person chooses to have is their business, but when mixed with iconoclasm and mystical religious values, it seems more and more like an occult than a freely chosen lifestyle. The Ravenhearts seemingly practice polyamory to fill certain needs and voids in their life while the mainstream world uses other outlets to fill voids, through not just their sexual partner, but through friends, family, coworkers, therapists, etc..