notes from norwich

Libraries are museums of the mind and heart--and help us learn how to use our own mind and heart to sift through the world’s information

Mon, 31 May 2010 10:44:24 -0400

Libraries are part of the foundation of a community. I'd add that they are among the most important bedrocks of civilization itself.

A bold assertion, I know.

But you often read it said that more knowledge has been lost in the destruction of the world's great libraries--Alexandria, Egypt is the best-known--than we possess now. Libraries are the keepers of the world's recorded knowledge and wisdom--from simple how-to-do-it books, to the biographies and memoirs of the greatest thinkers and leaders the human race has produced.

Libraries are a filter, if you will, because not every book, video or photograph published is allowed into the collection. Reasonable, very smart and informed people determine what is likely to endure and be of interest to readers in the future. As a culture we more-or-less agree that professionally trained librarians are informed, unbiased people with critical thinking skills.

Of course we can’t presume that smartness or information played any real role in the Texas School Board’s recent selection of that state’s “officially sanctioned” school textbooks. The state buys so many textbooks that its order determines what publishers offer the rest of the country, too. For years Texas has pumped its conservative religious agenda into the rest of the country through our children’s textbooks.

None of the school board members was qualified to determine for millions of American school children how this country will speak of something that is seared into the American memory and continues to haunt our efforts to live as a people whose skin color doesn’t determine how “American” we are: the African slave trade.

For the Texas School Board the shameful blot on America’s history in which human beings were enslaved to make white men rich, the degradation heaped upon the descendants of those kidnapped, enslaved ones, required a little linguistic sleight of hand. “Slavery” is too . . . indelicate for their delicate Christian sensibilities. Their brilliant solution to make it not quite so discomfiting for Caucasians? Call it the “Atlantic Triangular Trade” instead of slavery.

We see in the Texas School Board prime examples of people whose minds have clearly not benefitted from the use of public libraries. Their personal biases and religious preferences have clouded their ability to see beyond their limited experience and professional expertise.

I use the Net all the time, for everything--whether getting the weather, recipes, news, video, or doing research for my work. But I am experienced at sorting out what is credible vs. dubiously credible information. I know who the great authors and thinkers are because I find history, etc. very interesting and so have read much about it before I go to the Net. I read newspapers, too, and make sure I get my information from a variety of credible sources.

But not everyone yet has the ability to sort out what is important to know to be a well-informed person.

Libraries give people the skill to decide for themselves what is credible, what is garbage--and where the difference is between the two. Critical thinking. Necessary to a clearly thinking people in a Democracy.

Libraries also give people a bigger view of the world--a telescope, so to speak--to see beyond the city walls of a place like Norwich.

Young people need to be guided and given the chance to look at the 'outside world' (as so many locals call it)--and imagine their own place in it.

You can take the skills that libraries help you develop onto the Net--and you will be a better educated user of the Net, and a better-informed, independent American citizen, too, because you can think for yourself.

All that because of libraries.

I say this: Keep them, fund them and nurture them. They are our museums of the mind and heart of humanity.

For the love of writing machines (aka typewriters)

Fri, 14 May 2010 11:04:05 -0400

I’m an Apple.

No I’ve not turned into a Macintosh, much as I enjoy picking and eating them.

But I am “keyboarding” this article on the IMac I use and enjoy using these days for so much more than writing.

As a boy I poked with two fingers at my first typewriter, a bright blue children’s 1960s Petite Feather Touch II with its own carrying case.

In a “personal typing” class in high school, tall, stern, white-haired Earl Potter would hold my fingers in the correct position on the keys of the old manual typewriter I learned on.

My ability to type helped me make a few bucks in college by typing papers for friends. It also let me support myself as a “temp” during more than one fallow period of my writing career.

I officially started that career—in my own mind, anyway—when I paid $50 just after my 1980 college graduation for a 40-year-old manual Royal KMM typewriter.

Many letters, poems and my earliest published articles—book reviews—were produced on the black cast-iron beauty/beast. It served me well until I got myself trained on a “word processor” in 1983.

After enjoying the networked word processors in the newsroom during my spring 1984 internship at the Christian Science Monitor, in Boston, it seemed a step back to the IBM “Selectric” typewriters then still in use at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, when I began my master’s program there the following January.

I bought my first PC in 1990, with the money I made from selling my recently deceased Dad’s car. He hadn’t been able to pay for my education, but I figured the computer would represent his investment in my future.

I owned two more PCs during the nineties and early 2000s before finally buying my Apple in 2006. I wanted to keep up with the trend in journalism toward the use of multimedia in storytelling. Not to sound like a commercial, but nobody integrates everything digital better than Apple.

I don’t think it’s only that I’ve passed the half-century mark--so maybe feeling a bit of nostalgia for my youth--that has me wanting to get that old Royal back to working condition. I’m an Apple, after all. I embrace new technology. I love everything digital.

Anthony Casillo, a New Yorker who has repaired and collected antique manual typewriters for 35 of his 55 years, put it well in a phone interview.

The man behind www.typewritercollector.com said that on any given day he might work in his Long Island shop on a 100-year-old typewriter and a cutting-edge computer.

“Seeing an old manual typewriter makes you stop and pause for a minute,” he said, “to reflect on all that’s happened since that instrument was in its heyday.”

He added, “Most of the time, in the hustle and bustle of everyday life you don’t take the time.”

So there’s that tangible, cast-iron connection to an earlier time.

But it isn’t mere nostalgia that makes many writers still work on old manual typewriters.

Part of it is an appreciation of the risk and romance of writing, of committing one’s thoughts and feelings in the printed word that can’t simply be taken back or deleted with the press of a button.

Ray Marr, 72, whose Marr Office Equipment shop on Main Street in Pawtucket, RI, has sold and serviced typewriters since his dad bought the business in 1950, recently recounted an experience that sums it up well.

A Providence Journal sports writer brought in his old Olivetti. The keys were worn after being pressed for years into the service of translating their user’s reporting into engaging and lively newspaper stories.

Could Mr. Marr fix the old machine?

After a thorough cleaning and with new keys harvested from the exact same Olivetti model he found in the shop’s basement “morgue” of broken typewriters, the old boy was good as new.

The owner was so excited about his “new” typewriter he ran out of the shop to fetch his wife from the car just to see it.

Two weeks later, Mr. Marr was shocked to come across the sports writer’s obituary in the newspaper.

Years later he tells the story to illustrate how attached writers become to their “writing machines.”

He was glad his work had brought such joy to the man so unexpectedly close to the end of his life.

As a writer myself I’ll venture to suggest something even deeper was happening for the reporter.

I think there was a certain fulfillment.

The beloved, taken-for-granted, no doubt at times despised instrument on which he had transposed the music of words and language that filled his heart and mind, had been renewed and restored to new life--and its life would continue, even after he himself had moved on.

It seems to me that’s as beautiful a note as any on which to end an article about writing machines--or a life.

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Ash Wednesday

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:36:13 -0500

“Remember that from dust you came, and to dust you shall return.”

With these frank words the priest dips her thumb in the ashes of burnt palm fronds and traces the sign of the cross on my forehead.

Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the forty-day season of reflection and penitence called Lent which ends with the festive triumph of new life we celebrate on Easter Sunday.

I always wipe the ashes off my forehead as soon as I leave church after the Ash Wednesday service. I take literally Jesus’s admonishment, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”

For me receiving the ashes on this particular day is simply a way to share with others, in a spiritual ritual, what I do every day.

Every day I observe what I have called my “sacrament” of pill-taking. Why a sacrament? Because each time I take my HIV medication I’m reminded of my mortality, reminded that I would very likely get sick and die from AIDS if I didn’t take those little pills.

Because I have this daily reminder that I will one day die--my doctors tell me it will likely not be from AIDS--I can “do” Ash Wednesday, though I’m not big on drawing it out for forty days.

I much prefer to live a Mardi Gras kind of life. I don’t mean the kind of license and wild abandon often associated with Fat Tuesday in New Orleans.

I’m talking about the amplified and intense pleasure of living that I feel because I’ve had to confront the fact that I will one day die.

I’m talking about the tears that fill my eyes as I watch Olympic athletes demonstrate what it looks like when human beings focus their energy and strength toward being the best they can possibly be.

I’m talking about tasting not only the ingredients in well-prepared food, but also tasting the love that has gone into the preparation.

I’m talking about the choice I make on a daily basis to embrace hope rather than despair, to look forward rather than back, to see (and trust) the promise of spring in the two-inch-tall daffodils popping through the cold February ground.

One day we are all destined to return to the dust from which we came. But until that day comes, I hope not soon, I will do what I need to do to stay alive.

I’ll wipe the ashes off my forehead, the tears from my eyes, and turn my face upward, like the daffodils, to soak up the warmth and light that even in winter tantalizes me and beckons me onward toward spring.

Haiti’s Suffering

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:48:57 -0500

My heart broke along with all the bones and hillside homes shattered by the devastating earthquake in Haiti two days ago. I watched, helplessly, as the images beamed across the miles onto the TV.

My memory carried me back six years to the days I spent in Port-au-Prince in November 2003. I was there to report on the work of USAID-funded HIV education programs for Haitian youth, and to advise my Family Health International colleagues on how to engage Haitian media in telling the stories of the young people with whom they were working.

I interviewed young Haitian women and men, smart and determined to make a difference in their country by helping their fellow young people to protect themselves against HIV. I marveled at their passion and the warmth and graciousness that are hallmarks of Haitian culture.

One day I hired a taxi driver to give me a tour of the city. The older gentleman and I spoke French as he showed me the presidential palace, Notre Dame cathedral, the waterfront. He waited for me outside for more than two hours while I attended a special holiday youth variety show. The $50 fare might have been steep by local standards, but I considered it a bargain for the experience of seeing this gentleman’s city through his eyes.

My own eyes certainly saw the poverty: the flimsy concrete shanties, the vendors peddling their fruit and crafts on the dusty streets, trying to make a few dollars. I had seen the same kind of poverty in Nigeria a year before.

In fact, I was struck by the resemblance between many of the Haitians I saw in Port-au-Prince and the Nigerians I’d seen in Lagos. Then I realized it wasn’t a coincidence: Many Haitians were descended from Nigerians who’d been brought to their island home as slaves in those earlier, shameful times.

But what I also saw, and the reason Haiti and her people left such an impression on me was this: Joy. Laughter. Bright, cheerful colors in their paintings. Happy, foot-tapping rhythms in their music. Faith. Hope.

It was the smiles I saw in Haiti that made the most lasting impression on me, smiles amid the poverty and squalor every bit as dazzling and warm as the Caribbean sunshine.

I’ve drawn faith, hope and strength from those remembered smiles as I’ve had to face my own difficulties the last few years. If the citizens of Port-au-Prince could smile and laugh when their lives were so challenging, surely I could also find it in me to press on.

It’s painful to see those smiles turned to anguish and grief and sorrow. It’s as if Hope itself has been dealt a severe blow when even these most hopeful people are hurting more than ever, and the hurt is open and raw.

Haiti will rise again from the rubble. Haitians will once again show the rest of us that, although a natural disaster may afflict our bodies and destroy our homes, it can never extinguish the divine spark of life that fills our hearts.

Christmas

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:00:27 -0500

I put my (Episcopal) priest on notice a couple years ago.

I told him, “I love Christmas, but you lose me in Lent.” I can celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation, marvel at the idea of Love incarnate.

But the grim, depressing season of penitence isn’t my thing. Life throughout the year has enough challenges than to call them all to mind and spend forty days flagellating myself for my shortcomings.

And yet . . .

And yet I discovered that the marvelous wonder of Christmas is its celebration of life and renewal against the backdrop of winter’s bleakness and hardship. It’s precisely the same thing we celebrate at Easter, the end of Lent.

At the start of Lent, Ash Wednesday, we hear the stark, startling words, “Remember that from ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” That’s a pretty clear reminder that we are mortal and will one day die.

At Christmas we hear the stark, startling words of the prophet Isaiah, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”

Wow!!

It seems the only fitting response to that kind of message is to leap to our feet, singing and dancing, reveling in the amazing gift of life.

I thought about these things three years ago when I was in New Orleans for a December conference, sponsored by the National Association of People with AIDS.

The French Quarter was decked out for Christmas, and the revelers were reveling—as they do there all year long.

When I pointed out that the purple, gold and green of Mardi Gras were also ideal Christmas colors, the owner of a souvenir shop told me people actually repurposed their Mardi Gras beads and baubles for Christmas.

It only made sense. Mardi Gras, after all, marks a celebration of life in defiance of death and the dolor of Lent that begins the day after “Fat Tuesday.” Mardi Gras floats feature death masks, as if underscoring the point that life is for living while we’re alive.

That year, and each year since (until this year, which has been another story), I decorated and displayed a Christmas tree bedecked in Mardi Gras “throws” and crowned by a beautiful mask. I called it my Tree of Life.

That little tree represented to me the flame that burns within me, urging me to take care of my health, tend to my spirit, love while my loved ones are with me—and never forget the priceless, sacred and fragile gift of life.

Lent will come again, soon enough. Winter will have to be endured between now and then.

But for now, at this winter solstice, on this shortest day of the year, I want to bask in the sunshine, enjoy the beauty of the snow we got over the weekend, and remind myself of the reasons Christmas is my favorite season.

It has so little to do with the commercial charade and orgy of spending the popular culture wants to force upon us. But it has everything to do with standing, silently, and reflecting on Isaiah’s words.

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”

Life is here, to be lived. Now! The glory of Love is risen upon you.

Arise, shine!!