Blogging@NYPL

It doesn’t happen too often, but there are some books that fall into the category known as “books I cannot read on the subway.”

More often then not these are books that make me laugh out loud, or at the very least give me watering eyes and one of those uncontrollable grins that can’t be wiped off my face. I get very subconscious and don’t want people on the subway car staring at me wondering “Is he laughing or crying?” or “Why does he have a big silly grin on his face?” or “He’s crazy.”

One of the books in this category was Jonathan Lethem’s, Motherless Brooklyn, where my fits of laughter were similar to the main character’s comical Tourette’s Syndrome outbursts. I started that book on the subway but had to finish it in the confines of my own home. Another writer whose work I can no longer enjoy during my commute to and from work is George Saunders.

David Sedaris’ entire body of work fits into this category. I recently flew to Colorado and in the Dallas airport I bought his new collection of essays When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I read the first few on the plane and had to put the book away when the flight attendant asked if I was ok. I challenge anyone to read his description of using a Stadium Pal while keeping a straight face.

They say laughter is the best medicine. David Sedaris is an overdose. I finished his book on the privacy of a porch with Pikes Peak in the distance, tears running down my face, my laughter echoing in the valley.

It’s almost the Fourth of July. Always a day for patriotism, it also serves as a time when we think about the wars that helped create this nation. And this year, we have a war that is ongoing, one that provokes many mixed feelings. A look in CATNYP reveals a spate of writing on the subject—under the subject heading Iraq War, 2003 are 383 entries alone, plus dozens of subdivisions. The available literature on the war covers a wide range of concerns, from the haunting Baghdad Journal: an artist in occupied Iraq to books on returning war wounded and those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Speaking of those wounded, their numbers are and will continue to be (until the conflict ends) large. When I was a child I was unaccountably frightened by amputees. Such fear faded with time, and was cured by the return of a childhood friend from Vietnam minus a hand and a leg. Since the war in Iraq started, sources report that more than 29,000 people have been wounded. An enormous number of soldiers, male and female, have lost body parts while on active duty.

Such a great number of wounded soldiers, especially when they return to civilian life, will definitely have an impact on our society. Their experiences and stories may well eliminate the shock and fear that so impressed me as a child. If we have increased contact with those things that once inspired fear, it is more than likely that this anxiety will be replaced by worthier emotions. I think our returning wounded soldiers will become a great source of positive inspiration. Receiving two metal replacement knees and spending two weeks in a rehab hospital back in 2006 taught me a lot about personal challenge. Imagine what our returned wounded soldiers can teach us all about courage, compassion, healing, and the fine art of getting by.

This holiday, let’s set a firm fashion, and vow to celebrate and look out for the welfare of these real American heroes. Remember, also, that our main and branch libraries will have a lot of information, online and printed, that can help us track their progress.

p.s. Their caregivers are heroes, too!

My last posting could have been subtitled “Do we own fashion or does it own us?” While I frequently dwell on fashion as a social force, it’s good to remember that fashion is also a huge industry. When I was young and employed for a year at the Fashion Institute of Technology Library, I remember thinking that I’d love to see something that might reveal the business workings of the fashion industry as a whole.

Such a publication came out in 2007. Providing case studies from the clothing trade and the fashion design syndicate, Veronica Manlow’s Designing clothes: culture and organization of the fashion industry, is precisely the sort of book I’d wished I had access to years ago.

p.s. American politics are intruding onto the runways! Donatella Versace was quoted as saying that her fall men’s collection had been inspired by Barak Obama. For a glimpse of the future, check out the Fall 2008 Milan Fashion Week.

I’m a more-or-less rational person. Anything with even a whiff of mysticism strikes me as a great yawn. And I believe dead is dead. Case closed. La commedia è finita.

Curiously, I’m also a fan of ghost stories. Contradictory? Maybe it’s that I’ve been working at New York Public Library for so long, I’ve come to feel like a ghost myself, haunting its marble corridors.

Not to split genre hairs, but I’m not so enamored of horror stories--or movies, for that matter--particularly not modern ones, whose main purpose seems to be to dispatch as many people (frequently teenage girls) as gruesomely as possible. If I wanted to be horrified, I’d read the newspaper. I much prefer the quiet suggestiveness of the classic ghost story, whether it takes a fusty antiquarian approach or a cool modern one--as long as it’s based on the notion that the most frightening possibility is what might be lurking in the shadows. The minute we find out that the shadows contain some drooling, rat-faced thing with tentacles is when the giggles start.

Although ghost stories represent only a small, specialized niche in the world of popular fiction, the New York Public Library does not neglect it. A few years ago, while searching for quirky additions to the library’s collection, I discovered Ash-Tree Press, a small publisher located in British Columbia, which specializes in limited editions of both original and newly-edited collections of classic ghost and horror stories. Over the years, we’ve been ordering these works volume by volume, as they are published, and we currently list 95 of them in our catalog. These are works with such appealing titles as The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, The Night Wind Howls, The Rose of Death and Other Mysterious Delusions, and At Ease with The Dead (pictured above). Who could resist? One publication I was particularly glad to see--and an example of what Ash-Tree Press does so well--is The World, The Flesh, and the Devil, the first volume of the collected fantastic stories of Gerald Kersh, an extraordinarily prolific author long out of print whom I’d thought completely forgotten.

Beyond Ash-Tree Press, I have a few personal favorite ghost stories which I read again and again, whenever an unearthly sort of mood strikes me. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959) the ultimate ghost story, although no ghost actually appears. Certainly it contains the most vividly and compellingly created haunted house in all fiction: Hill House itself, not sane, stood against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. (This is also one of those rare occasions when the film version—of 1963, not the 1999 remake--is almost as powerful as the book.) “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions, is a subtle, psychological English novella about a haunting that takes place by insidious degrees in its main character’s mind and features a surprising degree of repressed Victorian sexuality. Any ghost story by M. R. James would qualify as among the finest of the traditional variety. The supernatural manifestation in these tales is often disturbingly touchable, like the presence beneath the pillow in “Casting the Runes,” that feels like “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and [. . .] not the mouth of a human being.” And finally, Robert Aickman is a particularly fascinating, if non-traditional, writer. One of his most notable stories is “Ringing the Changes," about a newly married couple (the husband, significantly, being thirty years older than the wife), who honeymoon in a small, damp seaside town where the church bells are ringing constantly, maddeningly. The purpose of the ringing, we learn, is literally to summon the drowned dead.

Which particularly frightening tales you would add to the list?

If I were cleverer, I might have saved this post for Halloween, but you don’t really need a special season to be scared. At any time, the fabric of rationality can be torn apart, plunging you down into the swirling dark, where the ghosts dwell.

Even though I have read about this flag, I don’t recall ever seeing this being flown anyplace on Staten Island. I think some people think the big hill in the background is the garbage dump. And seagulls? Not the most beautiful or noble bird in the world! Somewhat of a scavenger, I believe. Maybe it is just as well it isn’t flown anyplace! Some history:

Flag Description
From: Staten Island Chamber of Commerce

OFFICIAL FLAG OF STATEN ISLAND:
The flag is on a white background in the center of which is the design of a seal in the shape of an oval. Within the seal appears the color blue to symbolize the skyline of the borough in which two seagulls appear colored in white.

The green outline represents the countryside of our borough with white outline denoting the residential areas of Staten Island. Below is inscribed the words Staten Island in gold. Under our borough name are five wavy lines of blue to symbolize the water surrounding us on all sides. Gold fringe outlines the flag.

Dov Gutterman, 29 October 2000

Staten Island became a Borough in 1977, when the Former Borough of Richmond changed its name. Even before that, there was interest in a Staten Island flag and a contest was held in 1971 that created the elements that were finally used in the present flag. The contest design had the emblem in a rectangular form and a sun in place of the two seagulls.

The present flag was adopted in early 2002 (I’m still looking for the exact date) and has the Borough emblem in an oval form centered on a white flag. It consists of the island and it’s buildings as seen from the Staten Island Ferry with two seagulls flying overhead, and some waves down below. In between the island and the waves is the name “STATEN ISLAND” in gold letters and the entire emblem is surrounded by a gold oval.
Dave Martucci, 24 November 2002

The flag was in official use on January 1, 1998, at the latest. I’m looking at photos of the inauguration ceremonies of that day now. The seal is more elongated, and almost pointed at the edges (think football). The water takes up a bit less than half the seal, the words resting on the center line. “Staten Island was formerly officially named the Borough of Richmond. It is still the same geographically as the County of Richmond, but it is unknown if the County (or any of the NYC Counties) has a flag.”
Nathan Lamm, 1 December 2002

On this site:
http://www.gothamgazette.com/searchlight2001/straniere.html is an interview with Assemblyman Robert Straniere in which he speaks about the Staten Island flag. I have also traced the legislation he is proposing. Here is my summary:

The flag is the result of a contest held by Borough President Connor in 1971. It has flown over the Staten Island Advance and Chamber of Commerce buildings, and is on display in City Hall and Staten Island Borough Hall. Only the Borough flags of the Bronx and Brooklyn are referred to in state law. The flags of Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island are omitted. So Assemblyman Robert Straniere has introduced a bill into the State Assembly, and his colleague State Senator John J. Marchi has introduced the same bill into the State Senate, to make the Staten Island Borough flag official in state law. Why? In Assemblyman Straniere’s own words:

“So I have a bill in to make the flag that has existed for thirty years that few people know about the official flag of Staten Island, and actually I’ve been taking every opportunity to describe the flag and present the flag. The flag also is a symbol of our borough, and the makeup of the flag tells a lot about our borough.”

Here is a link to the assembly bill, introduced in 2003; the Senate bill is identical. Note the official description is exactly the same as before, except the seal is introduced as “the seal” rather than “a seal”, implying that it is -the- official seal of Staten Island rather than just a seal on a flag, but this innovation may just be a typographic error. The bill is slowly working its way through the legislative mill and I rather expect it will eventually pass unopposed, but it has not come to a vote yet.

Richard Knipel, 27 July 2004

It appears that the Staten Island flag may not fly anywhere in the borough, at this time. It doesn’t fly above Borough Hall or the SI Chamber of Commerce (at least not above the main office on Bay St.) Today I drove by the main building of the Staten Island Advance (our local newspaper) and it doesn’t fly there, either.
Thorsten, 13 August 2004

The next Mulberry Street Branch Library Book Discussion Group will meet on Monday, June 30th, at 6:30 PM. This month's title is Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. For more information on future meeting dates and book titles, click here. The Mulberry Street Branch is located at 10 Jersey Street, between Mulberry and Lafayette.

Back in 1993, the Library held an exhibition called “A Change of Clothes: Femininity, Fashion and Feminism.” I was looking at the brochure the other day, and found something written there that piqued my curiosity.

“Three important concepts—femininity, fashion, and feminism—can help us understand the origins of modern dress. First, there is a historical relationship between a woman’s outward appearance and her essential femininity. Second, western society promotes fashion as a worthy pursuit for women, drawing them into a world of self-imposed rules and regulations based on imitation, conformity, and consumerism. However, current clothing modes and styles have been radically affected by 20th-century changes in women’s status, employment, and social mobility. Third, in recent years, feminism (a misunderstood and maligned concept even today) has challenged long-held assumptions that women and their apparel have a subordinate role in society.”

Fifteen years later, do these words still ring true? We’ve just had the first woman candidate for American president campaign long and, ultimately, fruitlessly wearing pants more often than skirts. Yet fashion is seen as a support to many women’s dreams—just look at the success of “Sex and The City.” At the same time, however, feminism also seems to have become more of an ambivalent option for many young women. What do these developments, seen from the perspective of 2008, say about how far women have come in society?

And what about the “18 million cracks” in the glass ceiling that Hilary Clinton referred to in her concession speech?

Everyday here in the Milstein Division, we get questions from all over the city and around the country about the history of New York City. Questions range from the very specific, “What was the weather in Manhattan on May 7th 1864?” to the dauntingly vague, “My great-grandfather lived in New York, his name was Patrick Murphy. Could you send me information on him?” Fortunately, the library’s collection of reference material on New York City history is astounding and rare is the question that goes unanswered. But for those who don’t have direct access to our print collection and are interested in researching the history of our great metropolis, I invite you to a free research class at the library this week.

Wednesday August 6, 2008 at 6PM
Jefferson Market Branch of The New York Public Library
425 Avenue of the Americas
NY, NY 10011
212-243-4334

Presents the Penguin Classic Book Centennial Celebration:
Jose Garcia Villa’s Doveglion

Known as the “Pope of Greenwich Village,” Jose Garcia Villa had a special status as the only Asian poet among a group of modern literary giants in 1940’s New York that included, E. E. Cummings, Mark Van Doren, W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and a young Gore Vidal. But Beyond his exotic ethnicity, Villa was a global poet who was admired for “the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems” (Marianne Moore). Doveglion (Villa’s pen name—for dove, eagle, and lion) contains Villa’s collected poetry, including rare and previously unpublished material.

JOHN EDWIN COWEN, Editor—(Professor of Literacy, Fairleigh Dickinson University) and LUIS H. FRANCIA, Introduction Essayist—(Professor at the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute at New York University)—both widely published poets, authors, critics, and former students of Villa’s—will read and each give a personal analysis of this major Filipino-American’s poetry, including Villa’s technical innovations, his deeply spiritual, divine and uplifting lyrical poems as well as his playful caprices, aphorisms and unpublished writings appearing in this volume.

Recently the Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy has acquired close to fifty books of historical photographs from locations across the United States. Photographic books are not uncommon but generally focus on large cities like Chicago, New York or Los Angeles. This series, however focuses on smaller cities like Omaha, Nebraska and Knoxville, Tennessee. Come visit us and take a look!

The weekend before last, I saw the Roundabout Theater production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an adaptation by Christopher Hampton of the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The production was fascinating, the acting generally superior, and I’ve been smitten with Laura Linney since Tales of the City. . .but I’d forgotten since I first encountered it what a nasty story this is. Not that anything involving two bored French aristocrats who concoct sexual games in order to degrade and humiliate their victims could be anything but nasty. Still, at least in fiction, French aristocrats seem to make the best libertines. (Americans can sometimes be libertines, but they generally lack the requisite je ne sais quois. I’ve heard rumors that there are even libertine librarians, but I somehow doubt it.)

I discovered the illustration below in our Picture Collection. It’s actually a compelling piece of evidence for the point I’ve made previously about feminine body types and the start of the modern era.

This advertisement for dress patterns from the early 1930s boldly states: “Look Slim.” The elongated line that appeared in the 1920s is carried to new lengths here, even as the hemlines remain decorously modest. These garments are an early version of the shirtwaist dress with its clinched belt. The drumbeat of advertising and exhortation to women began in this period and continues today. Previously, looking slim was an implied option. A caption on this ad says “Little women and larger-hip frocks,” proof that the clothing industry—and contemporary values—had already decided thin was desirable. An eye-opening look at the slippery road from this point on can be found in Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth.

During the weekend of June 7th, the National Park Service literally moved the home of Alexander Hamilton, known as the Hamilton Grange National Memorial, two blocks over to the hillside corner of St. Nicholas Park.

The federal style country home built by the architect, John McComb Jr., was completed in 1802 and named "The Grange" after the Hamilton family's ancestral home in Scotland. Though this is not the first time that the Hamilton Grange has moved…in 1889 it was moved from its original location in upper Manhattan to Convent Avenue. The decision to relocate the home once again stemmed from the neighboring buildings that sandwiched the Grange and towered above it. Alexander Hamilton's "Country Home" on the Move in New York City

With all of our concrete and asphalt spaces, it is sometimes very difficult to find refuge from the summer heat in New York City. As a child I envied my neighbors in the apartment building across the street which had a pool. It was surrounded by a fence high enough so that you could only see swimmers plunge off the diving board. If only I had known then of the free public swimming pools scattered through all of the five boroughs!

“Cartographic materials” and “cartographic resources” are phrases that we use in the map library world to describe a whole gamut of map-like information sources. Elevation profiles and geologic sections are particular types of cartographic materials that represent vertical planes, perpendicular to the earth’s surface, in contrast to the typical horizontal-surface representations commonly referred to as maps.

Here are a couple of examples from the NYPL Digital Gallery that show the added dimension that profiles can provide for an understanding of the New York City environment. Click on the images to connect to them in the Digital Gallery, where you can enlarge and zoom into them.

Profile of the twelve avenues in the city of New York

[Profile of] Tibbits Brook route [of Croton Aqueduct from the Harlem River to the Battery in Manhattan]

(Note the distributing reservoir on the crest of Murray['s] Hill, the site of NYPL!)

Residents of New York City, members of a metropolis that somehow simultaneously operates as a small village, are all familiar with certain “characters” who frequent public spaces. Today it is the “Naked Cowboy” one can find entertaining the tourists in Times Square, the affable gentleman selling vegetable peelers in Union Square, or even the kids who perform gravity-defying acrobatics on the A train. A similar character who was surely familiar to many in the streets of NYC during the nineteen-teens through the nineteen-thirties was Kitty Marion, hawker of the Birth Control Review.

As we get into the twentieth century, events reveal themselves that show just how important a role blacks begin to play in popular culture and the arts. Josephine Baker and American jazz musicians wowed 1920s Paris, and Europeans enthusiastically swayed to the beat from across the Atlantic. From zoot suits to hip hop, we owe black musicians, entertainers, and artists a debt for their contributions to contemporary cool.

Fortunately, scholarship since the 1980s has been at work to rectify the omissions of the first major publications on Art Deco. Just as we’ve learned how African tribal art animated the works of the early Modernist painters and sculptors, so do we now get more information on the people who helped make it the Jazz Age. In 2006, the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth, an exhibition, Josephine Baker: image and icon, paid homage to her legendary career.

Have "modish travelling-costume," will travel! (Image from NYPL Digital Gallery)

Connecting with enthusiastic craft-loving people is a big part of why I enjoy teaching my Handmade Then and Now class at the Library. And this weekend I will have the good fortune of talking with even more yarn devotees at Knitty City, where I've been invited to teach knitters and crocheters how to get the most out of the Library's collections. I'm more than glad to take my little Handmade show on the road.

Knitty City is a bright and cozy shop on the Upper West Side. It is brimming with books, yarns, hooks, needles, patterns, and friendly staff. The staff is knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and very welcoming. They know their fiber arts and have given me great advice and encouragement on sock making and yarn choice. In my class I will provide helpful hints on navigating New York Public Library as a whole, I'll share tips on searching for patterns (both new and vintage), and I'll bring along some examples to share. And if I've gotten far at all in my first attempt at socks (I'm following Cookie A's Hedera pattern, I'll bring my work along to share with you all. So please bring your own knitting too, and join us!

Saturday, June 21, 1:00pm
Knitty City
208 West 79th (between Broadway and Amsterdam)

A popular collection in the NYPL's Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and one of my personal favorites, is the county atlas series, most of which was published following the passage of a federal law commemorating the centennial of the United States. We have recently digitized 43 atlases covering New York and New Jersey from our collection of more than 420 titles printed before 1900. See this page for a list of digital holdings from this series.

Their pages are filled not only with wonderfully detailed maps on the national, state, county, township and city level, but also with interesting, flat perspective engravings depicting local business districts, prominent estates and farms. Business directories sometimes accompany the map pages that, along with the drawings, provide a glimpse into local social and economic geography of the 19th century. They also give us an idea of who provided funding for the production of these subscription based publications.

Over the last few months, I've noted the recurrence of news and feature article about the recession-proff nature of cosmetics, and lipstick in particular. One story, in the May 1 issue of The New York Times, speaks of purchasing cosmetics and lipstick as a way to have an indulgence when on a tight budget. "Hard Times, But Your Lips Look Great"
also confirms what I've long suspected: lip gloss has over taken lipstick in sales. But the beauty brands are tenacious in their conviction that belt-tightening will not include their products.

Read My Lips isa marvelous review of the history of lipstick. Coming of age when I did, I've always been wary of lipstick's benefits. A devotee of eye shadow, I never acquired the same taste for mouth color. The stuff just wears off too fast.