All you fascists are bound to lose

So... I got called a racist at work today. I told a customer who was talking on his cell phone in the public computer area that we ask people who are going to have phone conversations of more than a minute or so to continue their conversations in another area of the library. He told his correspondent that the librarian told him to get off the phone and he continued with his work.

As he left, he stopped at the desk and told me that he wouldn't mind being told not to talk on the phone if only we were more vigilant. I started to explain, "We try to be consistent --" and he cut me off. "No you don't," he said. "You don't tell black people to be quiet."

If this middle-aged white man had allowed me to finish my sentence, I would have explained that sometimes we are too busy with other customers to hop right up and inform people of the cell phone policy. But he didn't. He stomped out.

Now, of course, I had a few immediate mental retorts, starting with:

1. That is 100% not true.
2. "Reverse racism." HAAAA ha haha ha ha. I'm honored, sir.
3. I didn't tell you to be quiet, I suggested, in an EXTREMELY nonthreatening way, that you take your conversation to a specific area of the library where your conversation was less likely to distract people who are quietly working.

Now, we are not a quiet library. We do not shush. In fact, I am aware that I am frequently the loudest person in the library, due to the fact that I have a low, carrying voice and because, as a person with a minor hearing deficit, I am aware that older people and others may need me to speak clearly and maintain good facial line-of-sight. I've asked maybe three groups of people to dial their volume down a little in the past couple of years, and it's for sure that customers have asked me to do the same at least as often.

We mostly don't quibble with people talking on their phones in the library - except in the computer area. At the time when he signed onto one of our PCs, a number of people were working over there in complete silence. Sometimes you'll get a pair of people working on a resume or an online form, or homework - and we do not police their conversations unless they get unduly loud - but today, the entire time he was over there, not one soul uttered a single word.

But that was not his point.

His point was that he couldn't STAND to be reprimanded, however gently. He felt singled out. And to that I say, Oh my brother, you should stage a sit-in. JUSTICE NOW! Someone asked you to not do something you wanted to do - like swim in a pool, or go to college, or vote, or eat at a restaurant... JUST LIKE THAT.

Except no, you butt-hurt former Master of the Universe. NOTHING LIKE THAT.

And once I got home and read about 20 picture books to get the taste of that interaction out of my mind, one more mental retort came to mind:

     It must be frustrating to realize that your candidate is going to lose.

Not that my tiny experience today is an indicator of the nation at large, BUT. I have a feeling that, as a Trump presidency recedes to its resting state of farcical and distasteful premise, we will be seeing more incidents of Trump supporters lashing out, in minor to major ways. This is not the first instance of a middle-aged white man expressing undue anger at the library recently.

The candidate's willingness to spew retrograde, reactionary poison in the public arena has given these attitudes a renewed - and fraudulent - validity, and now people who follow him think it's all right and even brave to say out loud things that we've been telling them to be ashamed to even think. NO. BE ASHAMED. GO BACK TO THAT.

Just today, an imam and his assistant were murdered leaving their mosque. Do you think that the person who pulled that trigger had a Hillary bumper sticker on his mid-size piece-of-shit American car? No. That is a person who thought, for a brief shining moment, that his orange knight was going to put things RIGHT in this country. Was going to reverse the progress that has been made in religious and racial tolerance, was going to put white men BACK where they belong - as the only relevant point of view.

The end of Trump will not be the end of that point of view.

It's going to be important, in the down-stream races, especially the Congressional races, not to allow any claims that the popularity of his campaign is a mandate by a hitherto-unvoiced segment of America to go unchallenged. That segment has ALWAYS had a voice - in fact, it was THE voice for most of our history. They just weren't activated - they didn't need to be. And now, people with racist and xenophobic beliefs are a minority, and I think they've finally figured that out.

They're mad, and they're going to get madder. And we're going to have to worry that every time we ask one to adhere to even minimal behavioral guidelines, we're going to get accused of shit, berated, and complained about. GOD. What else is new?

The Cock Up

What the fuck even is this?

I just read a review of D. Watkins's new book The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir in the New York Times Book Review. The reviewer is a guy named Jason Parham, senior editor at a magazine called The Fader. And it is one of the worst reviews I have ever read - not bad in the sense that it excoriates the book, but bad as in I finished the review thinking that the reviewer probably liked the book? but might not have thought it was well-written? but I couldn't tell? And somehow he manages to be patronizing even while expressing solidarity with the author.




So let's back up. I should start by saying that I don't know Dwight Watkins, although our paths have crossed. I have a definite memory of meeting him. Maybe it was back when I helped run a coffee shop in SoWeBo, an arty neighborhood embedded within a crack neighborhood. It might have been at the library. I'll be honest - what I really remember is not wanting to read his stuff. Because of the jobs I have had, people sometimes tend to assume that I am into angry poetry and gut-wrenching personal narrative. But I mostly read children's books and sci-fi, and before that I mostly read about diseases.

But Watkins is from Baltimore, and the book is about growing up here, choosing the drug trade over college, then rejecting the drug trade in favor of becoming an educator. And I do know Baltimore. I did live in neighborhoods where I observed the drug trade out my window and on my stoop, and I work with young men incarcerated for playing their part in the business they grew up around.

The DEA raiding the crackhouse next door to the coffee house,
shot from my apartment upstairs.

The other thing I know about is reviewing books, and this review is absolutely mystifying.

We start with two paragraphs of the familiar refrain "Baltimore I Love You But You're Breaking My Heart," referencing Nina Simone's 1978 album "Baltimore," Freddie Gray, and "The Wire." Yup, that's where D. Watkins lives. In case the title "The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir" was confusing to you.

Then three paragraphs of summary. Three paragraphs - that's a column and then some. I often find NYT reviews to be heavy on summary, so maybe that's an editorial guideline.

And then finally we get to criticism. And here my real problems begin. "I could have written at length about Watkins's lean, casual prose and how it was difficult to sustain throughout... but I would have missed the book's larger aim." What is that? Is he saying, 'Don't think I didn't notice this flaw, and I'm going to mention it because you might have a problem with it - but I'm not going to give evidence of it, and by the way if it bothers you, you're missing the point.'

That's not the way to do that. Good books with important 'larger aims' can have flaws, and it does not take away from those aims to actually give examples of the flaws and let the reader decide whether the flaws will distract from the reading. But the above sentence, along with an earlier drive-by slap: "Beyond identifying some of the book's technical faults..." gives the impression that the book is poorly written. But important! But poorly written. What does this guy think he's reviewing, a slave narrative? Dwight Watkins has two masters' degrees, including an MFA. If there are problems with the prose, critique the man like you would any literary author.

"I never set out to be a part of that life," Parham quotes, "but that never stopped that life from setting out to be a part of me." I mean, I'm no expert, but in my opinion that is in fact EXCELLENT prose.

And then there's this: "And because storytelling can function as catharsis for black writers, there is a measure of value in the book's publication... Words, for me and, I assume, for Watkins, are a means to personal deliverance." I must be misinterpreting this. Because it looks to me that Parham is saying that the value in publishing this book is the catharsis it brings about for Dwight Watkins.

I just want to know if the book is readable, accessible, and well-paced. I'd like to get copies for some of the incarcerated dads I work with at the county detention center, who, if they see themselves on the page, see themselves glamorized in thug life fiction or villainized in everything else.

Parham takes "other reviewers" to task, supposing that they might stick labels on the story or its prose (hey, here's an idea, guy - wait to make such accusations AFTER someone has actually done such things), and says "that would have misinterpreted his testimony, offering a shallow and one-sided distortion." Instead, Parham suggests that we, "as readers and as critics, mine deeper." This is where he offers that dig at Watkins's difficulty sustaining his "lean, casual prose," and I think he means that we are to look past the writing in order to discern "Watkins's belief in the telling of black stories, in their ugliness and their beauty."

Oh man. That is the best you can do? Cataloging this memoir under a hashtag? Like #blackstoriesmatter? Two sentences are quoted in the final paragraph of the review: "I was depressed with my friends and the decisions they were making. I couldn't do anything to save any of them." So shut up, reviewer. You are not doing any favors for a book that looks, in fact, very good.

Women: suck it up

So I was lying in bed the other day really not wanting to get up, and Morning Edition was playing on my husband's LEGO clock radio, and Steve Innskeep and Mara Liasson were talking about the Republican primaries. As if there's anything else to talk about, like, say, that Thurgood Marshall's elementary school caught on fire this week and Dilma Rousseff might get impeached.

Here's an excerpt:

INSKEEP: Has Trump's trouble in the last week or two caused any change in the sentiments in upstate New York?
BRIAN MANN (North Country Public Radio): I kind of expected to hear that, maybe hear some of his supporters here in New York kind of edging toward the door. But as I talked to my neighbors and people around upstate, I just didn't hear that. I reached out last night via Skype to Sue MacNeil. She works at a local hospital, and she's chair of the Republican Party in Fulton County, N.Y., a few hours west of here. And she told me, you know, that people who are put off by Donald Trump's coarse talk, especially about women - she says they're just wimps.
SUE MACNEIL: If you can't stand the heat, then gosh darn it, get out of the gosh-darned kitchen. I grew up with two older brothers. And I learned a lot from the family that I grew up with. And if I couldn't take it, then that was my problem. And talk about political correctness. Women, suck it up.

Needless to say, THAT got me right out of bed. I mean, I was either going to get out of bed and put some pants on or roll over and pull the covers up and hope for death. And Sue MacNeil has been ringing in my ears ever since.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Cooks a Meal

My son needs to bake a pie for his 8th grade class's Pie Auction. 

Why this strikes me as like the last and final blow, the pinnacle, the ultimate "we've got to have WHAT by Monday?!" in ten years of "Students must have X by Monday" - paint smocks, comfortably a dozen batches of cookies and cupcakes, multiple tri-fold presentation boards, a clipboard, camping equipment, and costumes representing John Wilkes Booth, Ravi Shankar, a tropical fish, and British composer Henry Purcell - I can't really say.

But it irritates the shit out of me. Maybe it's because I can't bake a piecrust myself.

Anyway, the Pie Auction is described as a hallowed tradition of this private school that the boys have been attending for middle school, middle school representing for me the three years in a young person's life that most closely resemble hell, and so we paid good cash money to put them somewhere with 275 years of experience keeping kids basically on the rails. (*ignoring ignoring ignoring my friends who went there themselves and their fond memories of skipping class to smoke cigarettes at the Dunkin Donuts or pot down at the creek*) (*that was high school anyway, they assure me*)

And the flyer for the Pie Auction allows for "savory pies." Which is good, because my 8th grader is a savory guy. Ha. Ugh. Anyway, he's better with meat than with desserts. Hm. That's also kind of ugh. Here's a story:

We're sitting at dinner one night maybe 6 or 7 years ago, Ez was about 6 and Milo maybe 8. The subject of pie comes up, who knows how. Ezra asks, "What actually IS a pie? How do you make it?"

I start to answer. "You roll out dough flat and put it in a round pan..."

And then Milo chimes in. He's like me - he likes to have the answer to things, and is generally unconcerned with the limits of his own knowledge or authority on the subject at hand. "And then you put in the filling - the meat or jelly - and then more dough on top."

Bob and I looked at him. "Meat and jelly?" Bob asked.

I turned to Ezra. "Please keep in mind that your brother has never made a pie."

"He may have never eaten one," added Bob. "Or seen one on TV," I said.

So this is going to go well.