Looking Around - Feb 18 2020
Lately I’ve been really interested in libraries, and their role in creating tight societies. I was inspired by a book I got a while ago by Shannon Mattern called “A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences,” which, as I’ve picked it up and put it down, has meandered across many different topics. It started as a dive into dashboards – their origins, and then use in city centers to gauge the quality of a city. But also contained big discussions about the nature of ‘grafting’ as it pertains to new technologies (particularly surveillance ones) being patched onto old infrastructure. I’m still only halfway through the book but have been reading her chapter on libraries as information centers, and the gravity of the institution really grabs me every page. I cannot say enough good things about this book.
It prompted me to go to the Houston Central Library the other day after work – I skateboarded about a mile with my laptop in my backpack and a nice new sweatshirt I’d bought to see what all the librarians had put together. But what I didn’t fully appreciate until I got there was the sheer number of social services that the library provides to Houston’s homeless population. The whole place was filled with black men holding all their bags with them, mostly just relaxing, or talking with someone else; but boy, I stuck out like a sore thumb. While I looked around at the very thoughtfully curated selections on the first floor, I was struck with how tense my body was in this environment. It certainly didn’t help that at one point I looked up from my book to see a burly black dude about forty feet from me staring wide-eyed and tensely at my chair. I’m sure my eyes made a horrified jump, but I also instinctively smirked at him after, and he broke his stare with a kind of “this kid doesn’t get it” chuckle.
I’d been thinking about race generally and my upbringing a lot recently, mostly because of a book I read – White Fragility, and my experience at the library really exposed to me how much racism is instilled into my body – whether from Menlo Park, or from social media. I could feel in my every movement as I looked around at the books, the uncontrollable ways that I perceived the space around me. I actively didn’t want to move differently than I would have were the space filled with white moms, but it took so much conscious thought to not let my assumptions of people veer me away from certain sections.
Some part of me hoped that my presence in the space was helpful - that I was creating a more diverse environment where everyone can appreciate the resources of the library in their own unique way. But at the same time, I felt like I was again gentrifying a space that was far more important to these homeless people than I could ever imagine. More likely I’d bet, my conception of the library as something that could be owned or shared in-and-of-itself was demeaning to the idea of the library, and that I should just read what I want and relax like everyone else.
But at the same time, I couldn’t help but romanticize the building and the lovely librarians I talked to there. The entire first floor was made up of little cascading shelves no taller than your shoulders, filled with small groupings of 2-4 books, each pod just as odd as the next. A book about near-death experiences next to a book about reparations, next to a book about climate change. No best sellers, no featured authors, just a little four-title thematic puzzle for me to put together, attuned to life in 2022, and in no one else’s interest but mine as a denizen of the Houston Central Library.
I don’t really have any closing thoughts. I wish that the first floor of that library were something that could be sitting around on every little neighborhood corner. Maybe like those little mini-user-run libraries on some street corners. We could all use a little thematic puzzle.
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