This Book Is Overdue!

by Marilyn Johnson

  8.

  FOLLOW THAT TATTOOED LIBRARIAN

  As a rule, librarians cultivate a professionalism that projects sexual neutrality, which permits them to guard their trove of both innocent and risqué books from a position of high-minded principle, and also helps keep the stalkers at bay.

  Jenna Freedman is one of Library Journal’s “Movers and Shakers,” and she is also one of the Library Society of the World’s self-nominated “Shovers and Makers” (“S & M,” for short). “Jenna Freedman has always been a late bloomer,” she begins, then ends her mock citation by listing, among her other notable accomplishments, “worshipping my cats.” Along with their serious, academic, and specialized affiliations, many of the librarians I followed belonged to satiric groups like this one, “the greatest dis-organization of librarians and library fans ever!” The Library Society of the World offered T-shirts for sale, emblazoned with their mascot, a fish. Why a fish? A typo had turned their “code of ethics” into a “cod of ethics,” and they ran with it.

  If you had to divide the world into creeps and assholes, as writer Susin Shapiro once did, librarians would be creeps. By and large, they’re cat people, not dog people. Librarians’ favorite wall decorations are posters of the goofy “LOLcats,” adorable cat pictures with misspelled legends: I Can Has Cheezburger? or drunk dial kitteh callin u at 2 am. Is it the misspellings that crack them up?

  As a breed, librarians tend to share a sense of humor that is quirky, sardonic, and full of wordplay, but nothing captures their gift for self-mockery quite as vividly as the book-cart drills, held at various state conferences and culminating each year in a contest at the American Library Association’s summer convention. These precision-drill routines, set to music, are performed as a treat for their fellow librarians; rarely are they seen in public. I snuck in, though, and witnessed drills so elaborate and treat I felt I’d fallen through Middle Earth into a world of elves and hobbits, or entered Willy Wonka’s factory just as the Oompa-Loompas burst into song.

  The competition in 2007 was held in a hangar in the Washington Convention Center, a cavernous space where a small aircraft show could comfortably fit. Librarians packed the viewing area behind the ropes, craning their necks and flashing cell phones. They hooted in appreciation as a team from Delaware filed out to open the competition, a dozen librarians in black pants and shirts, sporting bling that included rhinestone necklaces and glittering tiaras. The performers spun bookcarts suggestively and waved their various-sized fannies to a medley of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Material Girl,” and took turns hanging on the arms of a large, unhealthy-looking guy in a top hat and tails, the token male librarian. For their grand finale, they lined up the book carts and the sugar daddy helped one of the women leap up and strut the length of the book-cart line right up to the judges’ table. The crowd whooped and cheered. It was wildly entertaining, a sparkle of Vegas in downtown D.C.

  What could possibly beat this? How about eight librarians from Ohio in black pants and bright yellow-and-black shirts, with what looked like antennae bobbing on their heads, spinning their striped yellow-and-black carts to the frantic tune of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”? Now that was inspired; the soundtrack perfectly captured the madness of the information age. The finale featured a librarian spinning a book cart on one wheel, a feat comparable to nailing the first triple axel in the Olympics. This elicited a roar of approval from the spectators. The bee librarians zoomed away, and a different kind of glitz rolled onstage.

  The Austin team wore Rosie the Riveter outfits, pedal pushers and darling embroidered denim shirts, with knotted bandannas on the tops of their heads, and moved like the June Taylor Dancers. Their choreography, to Bette Midler’s rendition of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” looked practically professional: a dozen attractive, foot-tapping, finger-snapping librarians, sending a dozen book carts marked “READING IS RIVETING” whizzing across the floor in coordinated waves.

  It was as unfair as a contest between Miss Texas and Miss Delaware. Austin was declared the winner to raucous applause. And what did the winning team get for defeating the vamps of Delaware and the frantic buzzing bees of Ohio, after choreographing and drilling for weeks, decorating props, investing in costumes, risking ridicule? The prize was…a book cart.

  If you don’t mention the stereotype, librarians will, with the sly humor that seems to be the best defense against their profession’s humorless image. I’ve got a librarian action figure on my desk, modeled on the charming real librarian Nancy Pearl, who thought up the idea of a whole town reading the same book and who wrote the bestseller Book Lust. When you press her back, she lifts her finger to her mouth, the old-fashioned signal authority figures use to say “Shut up!” The tiny shushing Nancy makes a nice tableau with my Virginia Woolf finger puppet and other bookstore novelty items.

  The sexy-librarian image bothers librarians as much as the shushing business. As a rule, librarians cultivate a professionalism that projects sexual neutrality, which permits them to guard their trove of both innocent and risqué books from a position of high-minded principle, and also helps keep the stalkers at bay. But there is a tension between the businesslike and generally modest librarians and the occasionally racy books they guard that finds expression in the culture in a stream of winks and leers. Even Marion the Librarian got it. (“She advocates dirty books…Chaucer…Rabelais…Balzzz.. zac!”)

  From the description on Amazon of one of the many, many steamy books featuring librarians:

  Though not quite a classic on a par with The Librarian Loves to Lick, and lacking the studied innocence of Horny Peeping Librarian, still, The Librarian’s Naughty Habit is easily the finest account of sex and the circulation desk that we at the Olympia Press can legally do.

  Enough already, some librarians grumble, but the young librarians run with it. How better to deal with the sexy-librarian trope than take it as flattery?

  “I’m more like Party Girl,” Tazmira (not her real name) told me over biryani and chicken tikka. She was referring to the 1995 indy movie in which “librarian” was the punch line of the joke: What would become of the creative, flaky party girl played by Parker Posey? As it turned out, she found her future embracing the Dewey Decimal System.

  Tazmira is a beauty, with masses of dark hair shot through with exuberant streaks of pink and candy red: part Indian, part Arab. She talks fast, about the Weezer concert she is about to go to, a film festival she has just come from, her husband and grad school sweetheart—she is a children’s librarian and he’s a librarian for “big kids,” which is to say, adults.

  Tazmira and I had been Facebook friends since I discovered The Tattooed Librarian, one of her many groups. I sat around some days and amused myself by combing the lists of librarian-related organizations on the site. So far, I had found The Tattooed Librarian; No, I Don’t Look Like a Librarian!; Yes, I Do Look Like a Librarian; Do I Look Like a Librarian?; Librarians Wearing Kilts; and Archivists Without Crippling Personality Disorders. And, speaking of Facebook, you know those silly quizzes, “Which Beatles song are you?” or “Which TV mom are you?” Librarians play one called “What metadata standard are you?”

  Although there were dozens of photos of Tazmira in various hair styles and bright colors on her profile, her tattoos were not visible, and unlike the other tattooed librarians, she posted no pictures of them. She was careful that way—it was her childpatrons she was thinking about. She was so concerned about setting a good example for them that she didn’t want me to use her real name or location.

  Tazmira had traveled to Las Vegas recently to visit an old colleague and friend. She did a search beforehand (of course; what librarian wouldn’t do a complete search before she went anywhere) to see what Vegas had to offer, and was amused to find a club called The Library. “Got to go there, don’t I?” “But that’s a gentleman’s club!” her friend said. Tazmira laughed, undeterred. “Wouldn’t it be funny to get a T-shirt? I just want a T-shirt and a
beer stein that says ‘The Library.’ Souvenirs!”

  So they went, Tazmira and her friend, and identified themselves as librarians. The man at the door invited them inside to see what he could rustle up in the way of merchandise stamped “The Library.” The club was almost full, all men save for one date—and of course, the performing faux-librarians, in glasses, their hair done up in buns, dancing on poles. Tazmira ran into a couple of them in the ladies’ room. They gathered around like she was some rare creature. “You’re a librarian?” they said. “Yeah, yeah, tell us about your work. We want to make our act more realistic!”

  The manager never found any souvenirs; had there been any to start with? However, one of his strippers had quit, and—“You wouldn’t be interested in dancing, would you?” he asked Tazmira on her way out the door.

  That’s right, the children’s librarian was offered a job as an exotic dancer in Vegas. Tazmira laughed. She had a very nice job, already, thank you.

  The phenomenon of smart, funny, cool librarians was exotic enough to make front-page news in the New York Times, though, perhaps inevitably, the article was blighted by its headline: A HIPPER CROWD OF SHUSHERS. It seemed that a nest of adorable young librarians in Brooklyn regularly mixed information science with cocktails while toying with the stereotypes of their profession. (There were similar nests in other spots; Philadelphia was home to a group that called itself Authority Control, named for a cataloging term.) Librarians of both sexes, including “a reference librarian at a law firm, who had a tattoo of the logo from the Federal Depository Library Program peeking out of his black T-shirt sleeve,” were throwing retro parties with literary themes, raising money and collecting books for literacy campaigns, and making fashion statements with eyeglasses—pink, red, green, chunky black, even cat’s-eyes with rhinestones. This group, the subject of the story, called itself Desk Set, after the least-famous Katharine Hepburn–Spencer Tracy collaboration.

  In that 1957 film, Hepburn played the head reference librarian in a corporate library, administering a female staff of fast-talking know-it-alls. (The script was by the first generation of Ephron wits, Phoebe and Henry.) Spencer Tracy, as the fifties version of an IT geek, installed a giant computer designed to replace the librarians. Instead, the computer overheated and crashed, and Tracy fell for Hepburn’s brainy charm. The librarian saved her job and snagged her man—and, by the way, as the film made clear, librarians were absolutely still necessary in the computer age.

  Desk Set, the librarian group, began as a social club. Library science students going through graduate school at different rates were losing touch with each other, so they started arranging monthly meetings in bars. Soon, they had a name, a Facebook page with more than six hundred friends, and a more ambitious agenda. They toured each other’s libraries; hosted “Dance Dance Revolution” video game parties; organized book drives for Katrina victims, where the party hosts swapped cocktail chits for used paperbacks; called for “swarms” of librarians to volunteer; and threw a grand dress-up holiday affair they called Be Still My Frosty Heart: A Biblioball. Like every party Desk Set sponsored, the ball was sold out and the space packed with young, laughing librarians, male and female, and music loud enough to shatter the old stereotype.

  The song “Librarian” by the New Zealand duo Haunted Love debuted in 2006 with a video featuring two attractive performers suited up as mock librarians, hair pulled back, glasses in place, fingers and feet tapping in disapproval as a patron committed various crimes, like scattering books through the library and sticking gum under a table. The “librarians” lure the culprit into the closed reserves with the promise of new magazines, then crush him between the movable stacks. The video recycled the usual clichés, but at least it was stylishly done.

  Perhaps inevitably, a team worked up a book cart drill to the song “Librarian” at the ALA’s 2008 conference in Anaheim. While recorded female voices chanted, “I want to be a librarian / I want to check out your books. / Please give them to me / With the bar code…facing…up!” the real librarians, with open books somehow secured to their heads, spun their carts and mouthed the lyrics with relish. In unison, they scooped their hands in front of their breasts: “I want…to check out…your books.”

  The librarians in the audience roared.

  9.

  WIZARDS OF ODD

  Marilena and Hypatia hovered above the virtual library like Tinker Bells…. “Will you look at that,” Cathy marveled and called another librarian over. Together, they gaped at my screen. “That’s a librarian?”

  Late spring, the twenty-first century, the wired house. One teenager video-chatting, the other on Xbox LIVE shooting cartoon soldiers manipulated by people from around the world, though mainly from his school. They both talk to their screens. I’m in the kitchen playing word games on Facebook; in the background, an old-fashioned baseball game plays out on television. Ding! comes an e-mail, a message from the virtual-reality site Second Life: spontaneous party at the Jazz Cat. “Put on your dance clothes and come shake it.”

  It’s not a real party in the sense that I have to drive anywhere or be seen by others. I can’t remember the last time I went to a spontaneous party in real life. On Second Life it happens all the time. This one was organized by Hollyjean for a network of Second Life librarians and library lovers who call themselves InfoGroupies; they help provide reference services for avatars. Avatars—the forms we take to represent ourselves onscreen.

  We love information. Reading, writing, and researching information makes us happy. We love talking about information. Sometimes we even have useful information! But mostly we use our vast stores of information to amuse ourselves and others.

  Without moving from my kitchen perch, I click on the pale-green hand that launches the Second Life application. My screen fills with a cliffside vista, the view from the castle I rent for a few (real) dollars a month. The leggy animated figure inside is my avatar, Marilena Basevi. Using the computer’s space bar and built-in mouse, I move her around corners and up the stairs to her dressing room. In a modern version of paper dolls, I dress her. I click open my inventory of outfits, some of which I charged to my (real) credit card, a few pennies here, a few bucks there. The invitation said it was a casual party, and in person I’m casual, but in Second Life, my alter ego is a clotheshorse with a collection of more than a hundred outfits. I drag one of my favorites, golddigger cocktail dress (hard steel), onto Marilena’s form and, presto, her old outfit disappears and her new one materializes.

  Then I find the address of the Jazz Cat Club in my landmarks file and click it so as to teleport—just like in Star Trek—to the party. The screen goes black with an audible whoosh, then resolves on the outskirts of a swanky open-air nightclub suspended over a shimmering lake and encircled by trees strung with tiny white lights. The dance floor is full of swaying avatars. Our hostess, the dishy blond Hollyjean, grooves and dances on top of a black piano.

  A gentleman avatar named Waldron offers to dance with Marilena, via an instant message in the chat window, so we each click on a ball on the dance floor marked waltz (the one who leads clicks the blue ball, which triggers a dance script; the other clicks the pink one to follow). This causes the avatars to leap together and dip and sway in sync. I click a quarter-note at the bottom of the screen and the music of Frank Sinatra is piped into my kitchen, compliments of Martini in the Morning, which streams rat pack music on the Internet.

  Marilena is acting out this pantomime on a set designed by a librarian from North Carolina. Someone from the cornfields of Illinois is running the avatar Hollyjean; Waldron is the stand-in for a university librarian in Toronto. It feels like round midnight in the Jazz Cat, but each of us is in real time, too—for the Brits and Germans it’s the wee, wee hours; it’s evening on the East Coast of the U.S. The Australians are having a jazz break midday.

  In real life, as we all persist in calling it, I don’t look like Marilena, I don’t dance, and I don’t listen to Frank Sinatra. But what can I d
o? I heard there were librarians on Second Life, and my job is to chase librarians, even if I have to dive into the computer and go where I would never ordinarily go. I created Marilena, control her every move, and speak for her, but she has her own personality; she’s the front babe I send to do reconnaissance on the 3-D web, a useful extroverted extension of me. During the slow windups and long pitching changes of a baseball game (and my life) I manipulate this little doll-like figure and act out scenes of retro-sophistication while eavesdropping on librarians, their groupies, and mates.

  After more than a year of crashing librarian parties on Second Life, I can tell you where the conversation is going. The avatars will exclaim with enthusiasm over their outfits and the ambitious projects they’re working on in virtual reality and grumble about their real lives; Hollyjean or Abbey Zenith or one of the other energetic librarian-avatars will cook up a new project. And I guarantee, one of the dancing librarians will bring up cataloging. Even at a sixties-themed bash Marilena crashed, full of tie-died and miniskirted librarian-avatars passing around virtual joints and gyrating to Hendrix, the Stones, and the Grateful Dead under a suspended VW bus—a party held at the librarians’ other social hot spot, TX950, named for the Library of Congress call number for clubs and bars—the librarians couldn’t help themselves.

  “Hated cataloging…”

  “Have you all cataloged your inventories?”

  “Was Dewey a hippie?”

  “I’m in the middle of a cataloging nightmare and I’m not even a cataloger….”