Today is my last official day volunteering in the library. I will still be helping out with the website and special events, plus I’m on the board of the newly formed Friends group, so it’s not like I’m going anywhere. Still, the weekly commitment to physically staff the library is now a thing of the past. 

As a way of saying farewell, and in no particular order except maybe autobiographical, here are my Top Ten Movie Libraries:

Ghostbusters (1984)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN8AsNDLS3c

“Peter, at 1:40 PM at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, ten people witnessed a free floating, full torso, vaporous apparition. It blew books off shelves from twenty feet away and scared the socks off some poor librarian!”

They don’t make them like this anymore. Hadley Freeman has written frequently about her favorite film, full of nostalgia for 1980s “crap science” and the New York of her childhood. Still, those of us who didn’t grow up in New York are right at home with that opening shot and closeup of one of the stone lions, whose name is Fortitude (the other lion on the south side of the steps is named Patience).

JANINE
You’re very handy. I can tell. I bet you like to read a lot, too.

EGON
Print is dead.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

I left the Hogwarts library off this list because it was just too obvious. The animated Beauty and the Beast library is almost as duh-inducing and Disneyfied as Harry Potter, I admit, but I was still a kid when I saw this and can’t dismiss something so formative. I’m not immune to the psychology of Pinterest and this did indeed influence my expectations of men: “I want to do something for her.” It’s as easy as that.

And no, I haven’t seen the live-action version yet, but here’s my post on Emma Watson’s Book Club. Also, check out the Book Fairies:

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Most of the movie takes place in the library, which is actually the school’s gym turned into a library set, thus explaining the high ceilings, balconies, and giant modern art sculpture in the center of the room. This movie came out in 1985; I first saw it at my middle school best friend’s house, probably ten years later. I remember at the time experiencing the film as this long, epic Saturday full of teenage pain and the struggle against authority. Now when I watch it, it seems so much less expansive–exactly like high school.

Major League (1989)

The library scene is actually much longer than this, with Rene Russo wearing librarian glasses and screaming “I have a much better body than she does!” in the quiet reading room of what is actually the Northwestern University library in Chicago. Reading through the script and seeing the details of the stewardesses, the paternity suit, and Miss Dairy Queen all stacked up together, I’m a little disappointed in Lynn for taking Jake back, even if he is the true hero of the film. He didn’t even read Moby Dick “cover to cover, babe.” Not really.

LYNN
Who saved Ishmael at the end?

TAYLOR
Nobody. It was Queequeg’s coffin.

 

High Society (1956)

High Society (1956) is my favorite “classic” movie. It’s a remake of The Philadelphia Story, but the cast and the Newport setting make it worth the trouble. The library is the backdrop for two songs: Frank Sinatra crooning You’re Sensational to Grace Kelly during an afternoon tour of “the playground of the rich,” and Frankie teaming up with Bing Crosby for the boozy Well, Did You Evah during her bachelor(ette?) party that evening. I love when the bar pops out of the wall and Sinatra quips: “I had a bed that did that once.” I was also thrilled when Robbie Williams and John Lovett covered Well, Did You Evah back in 2001.

Clue (1985)

More than any other library on this list, this is the one from which I will be drawing decor inspiration. The Nouveau Riche Oblige fireplace upon which Madeline Kahn exquisitely smashes her wine glass is perfect ornamentation for this film. In the movie’s murder game, the library is where Miss Scarlet kills the cop with a lead pipe while he’s on the phone (twice). The trivia surrounding this box office flop is copious, but here’s something new I just learned: Carrie Fisher was originally cast as Miss Scarlet, but entered rehab right before rehearsals began.

Wings of Desire (1987)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivnMDs2krX0

This film’s Hollywood remake City of Angels came out in 1998, when I was a sophomore in high school and just starting to learn about some sort of culture outside my hometown. The world was divided into people who liked being emotionally manipulated by Meg Ryan/Nicolas Cage and those who didn’t. I couldn’t explain why; I didn’t even know it was a remake. A screening of Der Himmel über Berlin in my college German film class helped clarify the issue. For example, one film features the Berlin State Library as a way to  access the thoughts of a raw and divided city, while the other shoehorns Hemingway and the San Francisco Public Library into a story ostensibly about Los Angeles.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

I was ruminating on libraries as romantic settings and remembered this scene, which I’ve always loved. The Square Root of Three is such a sweet little poem, and Harold’s new-wavy goth cameo is just icing on the cake.

The Square Root of Three by David Feinberg

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

Has quietly come waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

Party Girl (1995)

Sorry about the quality of the video–this movie can be hard to track down. It’s one of those films I reallllly wish I had seen earlier in life. Club kids and Lebanese street food are things I should have been exposed to sooner, and the whole Dewey-Decimal-meets-beats-and-decibels juxtaposition of books and records makes me smile. The movie came out in 1995; I probably didn’t see it until 2012 or so, and I ultimately got around to it because someone used this quote from Mary:

“I would like a nice, powerful, mind-altering substance.
Preferably one that will make my unborn children grow gills.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

And here we are, back where it all started: the 42nd Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the Central Building set the scene for many beloved New York stories. Carrie Bradshaw planned an ill-fated wedding there, and her literary predecessor, Holly Golightly, declared “I don’t think this place is half as nice as Tiffany’s.” Patience and Fortitude make an appearance in the original novella, which makes me appreciate the callback in the film:

“Late one afternoon, while waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence. In the end I did neither, but concealed myself some tables away from her in the general reading room, where she sat behind her dark glasses and a fortress of literature she’d gathered at the desk.”

Three Bonus TV Libraries

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)

This is a tough one because the library is the literal center of the first three seasons. It was pointless to pull a scene because so many of them take place there. I am new to the Buffyverse and have no right to criticize, but this is probably the worst use of a library in fiction. It serves as a place to either do research or listen to a long expository speech from Giles. I’m reading that the cast and crew hated these scenes because there was nothing to do, and I feel like that is a very cliched dismissal of libraries as dry and boring. Part of the problem was that NO OTHER STUDENTS EVER USED THE LIBRARY. Libraries should be vibrant and vital to the community, not just a clubhouse for the Scoobies. Even The Magic Box had customers.

I got really excited in the last season, when Buffy welcomes the Übervamp to Thunderdome, because Xander explains they are at the “future site of the new public library, opening up May 2003,” which is when the series finale took place. I thought we were laying the scene for a battle royale in the public library; alas, it took place back at good ol’ Sunnydale High. Still, I cried.

Veronica Mars (2004-2007)

Veronica’s work-study job gives her a central location to serve as a base of command on campus. She also gets to flex that mighty intelligence by mastering the library’s classification system. (Dewey or Congress? Inquiring minds want to know.) She quickly calls up “Third floor, aisle nine” on a fairly obscure reference question, and she does it straight from memory after only working in the library for one full episode.

[Beginning of episode 3.2; Veronica is applying for a job at the campus newspaper.]
VERONICA: I’d take any assignment. If I don’t get this job, the fine people in financial aid have a completely undesirable position in the library all picked out for me.

[End of episode 3.2]
VERONICA VOICEOVER: So it looks like my work study job will be in the library.
My journalism career over before it even really began.

Still, by the next episode, she gets to have the sexy library scene with Logan, so it’s not that bad. This scene got Regina Spektor’s Fidelity in heavy rotation on my Spotify.

Orange is the New Black (2013-    )

The literary references are what got me started on OITNB. My boyfriend asked me about Atonement and explained how Piper had spoiled it for another inmate. I love the ever-growing list of books mentioned on the show…

Support your public library… and try not to give the librarians too much trouble!

Sarah Jessica Parker is getting her own publishing imprint!

The library in my town is officially named the Eula Hunt Beck Florence Public Library. While I have reservations about the SEO confusion (Eula and Florence are both traditional female names, while Hunt and Beck are verbs) the name was intended to honor “Sis” Beck, the reigning matriarch of our town’s banking dynasty. She has made many notable contributions to this whole region of Texas, and has probably done twice as much anonymously. Plus, she’s always been nice to me.

A woman came into the Eula Hunt Beck Florence Public Library today brandishing this book. It’s a well-loved 1980 custom publication of local history printed by Nortex Press in Burnet, Texas. (!) Nortex Press was part of Eakin Press, which has since been acquired by Wild Horse Media Group in Fort Worth, which is doing some interesting stuff…but once upon a time, they were publishing books in Burnet friggin’ Texas!

I can’t be the only one who looked at that cover and thought Willie Zell Ray Hunt must have been a warlock. 1768-1980?!? Dude was 212 years old! Alas, it’s just the time period researched in the book (which kind of looks like an old hymnal, no?).

Willie Zell Ray Hunt was actually a woman, and, according to her obituary, a midwife. Though not quite 212 when she died, she did live an impressive 94 years and published a book at the age of 77. She is buried in Maxdale Cemetery and was survived by two daughters, one of whom is Eula Lea “Sis” Hunt Beck.

I found this article about the use of color in text on Longform last night, and I wanted to share it here because it explores the e-book incunabula era we are currently living through. I’ve tried to keep up with developments, but as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, no one knows what is going to happen. You can never tell which new technology or product will truly innovate and cause a paradigm shift in the way we read. The only thing we know for sure is that change is inevitable:

Today many of us read primarily on screens–and we have for years–yet most platforms have focused on using technology to attempt to recreate text as it appears in books (or in newspapers or magazines), instead of trying to create an optimal reading experience.

-James Hamblin, The Atlantic

A key word here is “optimal.” It’s not about adding bells and whistles to a text just because you can; it’s about truly improving the experience. I am fascinated by this color gradient idea because it’s an example of someone questioning our basic assumptions and challenging the way we’ve always done things. It reminds me of the part in The Giver when Jonah notices something odd about an apple, which turns out to be the first flash of color in his black-and-white world. If something as familiar to us as color has never occurred to Jonah, it leads the reader to question: what other dimensions or qualities are out there that have never occurred to us?

Books have been with us for so long that we forget PRINT IS A TECHNOLOGY. Page numbers, line lengths, the return sweep, and black ink are all efficiencies we developed as we collectively learned to read mechanical text. It wasn’t always like this, and it won’t always be like this. We just kind of got used to it over the past 500 years. Print became the technology of knowledge, and it’s so ubiquitous we don’t even realize it.

I was looking into OpenStax, the open source textbook initiative at Rice University, and that led me to Bookshare, which helps people with print disabilities stay on course in their education (watch the video; it’s cute). But think about that term for a minute: print disabilities. Our entire cultural foundation is so grounded in print that not being able to cope with it is a disability. We basically decided 500 years ago that if your eyes or brain did not take to our tiny rows of black letters on white background, you were going to fall behind. And in a way, that’s ridiculous… but you see the same thing happening now with digital literacy.

It took 50 years for print incunabula to make the adjustment from manuscript culture and settle into the form we use today. I do wonder if the adjustment will happen quicker in the Information Age, or if our brains still need a generation to catch up to major changes. I am really excited about everything we’re going to be able to do with e-readers. As the article says:

The task now is to make digital reading better than reading in print.

This isn’t the a-ha moment for me; I’m not going to go invest all my money in Beeline because I believe so much in color gradient text. I hope it becomes more common and helps a lot of people; it’s just, for me, this isn’t the magical, feel-it-in-my-gut, transformative innovation that cuts to the very core of why I love books. But it shows that there are people out there working on it. And someday, someone is going to develop something that makes me see that, oh yes, the apple is red, and there is so much more we can do with our knowledge.

I’ve been meaning to get to this for about a year now, and the day that would have been her 100th birthday is an excellent day to start.  

Today marks the final issue of Bookslut, the end of fourteen years of books coverage and a brand of irreverent blogging that always assured me it was okay to be a little bit of a weirdo. The founder and life force, Jessa Crispin, is moving on in her writing career, having already released two books in the past year. The Dead Ladies Project is without a doubt the best travel book I have ever read, and while I haven’t gotten to The Creative Tarot, I did get a personal reading from Jessa and love how she approaches tarot cards as a conduit for storytelling. As much as I’ll miss my favorite blog, times are changing, and Bookslut’s Wake is Friday night at Melville House if you happen to be in Brooklyn.

In the spirit of reaching out for something new, I started Chantix today. I am fully prepared to hate everyone and everything, so I skipped the gym and traded gossip with the mean girls from work for a nature walk with my dog. My playlist these days is solid Prince, another life force who always assured me it was okay to be a little bit of a weirdo. Little Red Corvette plays a particularly humorous role in my personal history, seeing how I was six months old when it was released and grew up claiming a favorite song that contains nuances I could not possibly understand until much, much later. 

Even today, as I was staring at the built-in lyrics scroll on the Amazon music app (yes, Amazon, but we all know he had his music locked down exactly where he wanted it) I finally noticed that the gasped/growled line I always took as “Girl, I’m gonna dance like I never did” is actually “Girl, you got an ass like I never seen.” I was on the homestretch of a two-mile walk as I realized this, and I have not laughed so hard in months. It was Prince letting me know he still loves me, and that I should never, ever forget how raunchy he could be. It also gave me a little pride, knowing the Purple One’s shoutout to fat-bottomed girls had been there all along; I just had to love myself enough to find it.

Sometimes a presence can be so ubiquitous that it almost fades into the background, like Shakespeare’s phrases in the English language, or the book with a well-known cover used as home decor, or a song so universally beloved that it makes a millennial stop and say, “I didn’t know Prince sang this.” I’m the same way with the header image on Bookslut.com. It’s like I became numb to it, forgot to consider what someone looking over my shoulder would think or whether or not the website would be deemed Safe For Work. Until today, I hadn’t realized that I’ve spent the past fourteen years with a little squiggly drawing of the Bookslut’s ass lounging at the top of my browser.