American Libraries Magazine: Newsmaker

An Interview with Jeanette Winterson

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:42:26 +0000

By Sanhita SinhaRoy

British author Jeanette Winterson discusses her love of books and language—and their redemptive effects on the human spirit

British author Jeanette Winterson grew up in poverty, with few books and even fewer prospects for escape from the small industrial town where she was raised. In her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove Press, March) the author pays tribute to the power of books and the influence libraries and librarians had in helping her break away from an abusive upbringing and build a better life for herself.

Born in Manchester in 1959 but raised in the bleak working-class north England industrial town of Accrington, Winterson and her adoptive family had no phones, no cars, no indoor toilets, and lived in a community where few if any had job security. Her mother was an evangelical Pentecostal who was “apocalyptic by nature” and kept only a handful of books in the house. As a child, Winterson writes, she was not allowed to read fiction because “the trouble with a book … is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late,” her mother would say. (She did read Jane Eyre to Jeanette but changed the ending so Jane becomes a missionary.)

Winterson gradually acquired books of her own, which she hid under her mattress. One night, however, her mother found one poking out and went into a rage, throwing them out the window, dousing them in paraffin, and burning them. Winterson eventually fled home at age 16, entering Oxford University and immersing herself in a life of books.

Now, several decades later, Winterson is an acclaimed writer with more than 20 published books under her belt, including her 1985 bestselling novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which she wrote when she was only 25.

The author, who is currently touring the country to promote her new book, spoke with American Libraries’ Associate Editor Sanhita SinhaRoy about the effect of libraries and language on modern culture.

American Libraries: Can you talk a little about the libraries and the librarians you cite in your memoir?

Jeanette Winterson: The library in Accrington was built in 1907 with money from Andrew Carnegie. It is one of those splendid Victorian constructions that was meant to be impressive. And it was. You went up the steps into this beautiful building with the enormous stained-glass windows. “Industry and prudence conquer” was written on the great big oak staircase, and there were books everywhere.

The library was meant to give working people a sense of pride in their town, and also a belief in self-education. Those days of bettering yourself through books, which are gone now, were really good for people who weren’t educated. People didn’t think they were in any way disadvantaged and impoverished; they thought that they could use the library and the lectures that went with it.

I didn’t know anybody who had been to university. Yet the library provided a surprisingly high level of culture in some ways. People could talk to one another. There was that fluency with language, there’s the oral tradition and the sense that a lot of these people had interests that they could develop through the function of the library—political interests and interest in the history of their town.

I’m sorry that we’re now going through a very bad phase with libraries. The thought has been that (a) libraries shouldn’t have any books, and (b) they should be about the lowest common denominator.

Obviously, books are useless if you can’t read, so you need literacy programs. More complex, challenging books are useless if people haven’t been taught to be confident in their abilities. We don’t empower people by saying, “This is too hard for you” or, “You can’t do this; we should make it easy.” I’m really against that. I’ve got more optimism in human nature, more belief in people’s capacities to learn. Most of us would find that interesting and stimulating.

I was just in Amsterdam. They built a new library and decided they wanted people to use it. It looks like a Guggenheim or a Getty building—it’s beautiful! It reminded me of my own public library but on a much bigger scale: On the ground floor, you come in and it’s full of sofas and places to sit and hang out and be. It’s really seductive. Glass escalators take you up to where the books are. Kids are using it because it’s cool. They want to meet their friends there, and the librarians encourage them.

And that felt like a real future for how libraries could be, because in England now, it’s really moribund. Funding is being redrawn, and there are all these arguments about whether a library is even worthwhile anymore.

I went back to my own library—it’s still that fabulous building—and it’s heartbreaking because the books have gone. There’s no room for English literature, A to Zed [the collection Winterson read as a child]. I could not do that now.

Of course, librarians were very serious, and they were proud of their profession. They never apologized for books. You felt you were achieving something to start reading. You could always go and ask them questions about anything or move your way along and develop your own mind.

When we learn to read, it’s a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

I learned that capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through those wonderful interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it’s so boring—nothing’s happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator’s head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It’s a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, “what’s next?” culture—that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that.

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you’re not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it’s the most exciting place because it’s going on for you, and you’re in that relationship. In that sense, it’s like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It’s the two of you. It’s your own world. But from that private world, which is so rich, you go out into the wider world equipped with ways to think about it and ways to live in it. I don’t think there’s any better way to do that than through a book.

You mentioned that the collection of English literature from A to Z is no longer there. What has replaced the books at the Accrington library?

Lots of computer terminals, which is good; you need that. They’ve just stripped out the things they don’t think people will want, so literature isn’t big.

There’s lots of chick lit. There’s lots of pulp fiction. There’s lots of airport fiction—all of that kind of thing that doesn’t really belong in a library. I’m very snobbish about libraries in that sense. If we’re going to have all that stuff, stick it over in a corner somewhere. Can’t we let the library be what it is, which is a place of excellence, and a place where you can find things you wouldn’t otherwise find?

It should have an element of challenge in it. It shouldn’t be like the easiest floor in a chain bookstore, which is what it’s becoming—you know, with cookbooks and celebrity biographies and how-to manuals and 10-step diets and all that stuff.

The good thing is that libraries tend to get big on local history, which I like. Libraries have really picked up on that—oral history, written records of where people live. There’s been a big interest in that from people using libraries too, but that can be only a part of it. It’s more than local because the mind is more than local. The whole point is that you should be global in a real sense. That you reach out to literature that you would never otherwise find, whether in translation or from your own country. You then see the size of the world—both the connections in human thought and also the great disparities between them. You see that we’re not all the same and that society changes over time. The past isn’t merely the present in costume drama.

If you were growing up today and the library was what it is now, do you think it would have altered your life?

A poor kid like me going into that library now wouldn’t find the stuff I did, and that’s upsetting. They simply couldn’t do it. There would be a few books that I read, but it would be much more randomized, and you wouldn’t get a sense of the sweep and scale of literature, which was essential for me because I needed a bigger perspective. Yes, it really changed everything.

Also, with the librarians: It was somebody you could talk to and discuss books with—who just takes it for granted that books are great and that you should want to be here. They don’t have to persuade you of anything; they aren’t apologizing. I found it very calming that I could go in that space and not have any of the troubles or difficulties of home.

I hate that we give kids books that we think somehow mirror or mimic their own situation, so we wouldn’t want to give them Madame Bovary or, perhaps, not even Gulliver’s Travels. We’d want to give them some social realism about where they are now. That’s self-defeating. It might make you feel better, but, in effect, you’re living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they’re eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That’s a real challenge. That’s much better than shooting down aliens in some video game. Reading isn’t the only thing, by any means. I don’t even think, strangely, that people need to be voracious or omnivorous readers.

We’re in a strange situation now where people either don’t read at all or they read a lot. There’s a huge gap in between. That’s something that would be good to bridge so it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I’d like to see that.

You’ve spoken in the past about digitization. Let’s talk a little bit about that. The trend is moving toward ebooks.

Lest we forget, the people who decided in their wisdom that we’re all going to go over to ebooks, they are not readers. These are technical people. These are people who think that somehow this is progress. It isn’t. It’s regressive. But even if we say it’s neutral, whom does it serve? It’s not progress to take books off shelves. If one more person says this is the new Gutenberg, I will probably commit homicide, because the whole point of Gutenberg was to put books on shelves, not to take them off.

It just seems to me to be such an overwhelmingly obvious fact that what we’re doing in our new revolution is taking them off of the shelves, which means that there’s no such thing anymore as democratic access. That is very serious.

We have a generation of kids who may never see a bookshelf or never see books in houses. What are they going to think about books? How will books become meaningful in their lives except as yet another form of digitalized content? A book is not just digitalized content.

The crazy thing is that when we go to somebody’s house, what’s better than looking at their bookshelves? Nobody’s ever going to say, “Can I see the index to your Kindle?” It’s so depressing and so unsexy. Sure, it’s there, but nobody is going to get excited by that.

It’s seeing these things on the shelf and thinking that this person’s put them together over the years. How are they organized? Are they organized alphabetically? By content? Even that tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.

I’ve got about 10,000 books in my private library. All the poetry you can think of. There’s a lot of essays going right back from Montaigne forward. Whether it’s Adrienne Rich or Harold Bloom or Susan Sontag. You know, crazy things like Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, W. B. Yeats. I love just reading widely.

Every year, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, my girlfriend goes away for the sun, which I hate, so I stay at home. All I do every night, I light the fire in my library and I go up there about 6 o’clock and will be there until maybe 12 or 1 in the morning. The whole point is to spend time with those books. I rearrange some of them. I play with them. I say, “I haven’t seen this for years!” I really will spend seven or eight hours in that week organizing and rereading. It makes me so happy, because now that I’m 50, it is a life in books. There’s great pleasure in that.

I’m very happy there. Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I’m happy when I’m standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited.

Do you still hide books under your mattress?

Well, yes! When I first went to Oxford, when somebody would knock on my door, I used to hide the book under the pillow as a reaction. It took me almost all of my first term to get out of that habit of hiding the reading—suddenly thinking, “This is why you are here; you can do this, forever.” I don’t think that secrecy around books and loving books so much has ever really gone away.

Knowing that books are something that is hidden, that almost has that alchemical quality to it. There is a secret society in here, and if you belong to it, you’ll be able to transform your lead into gold. I still have that rather magical sense about books—that they do, somehow, have special powers.

For me, the most painful thing is the thought of shelves without books. This is the problem with the digital thing. I do not want to see it on electronic. I do not want to see all of those indices on Kindle. I don’t want this physical object to disappear, because when it’s there and it’s present, it’s continually suggesting new relationships in a way that an electronic index couldn’t.

Say my 10,000 books were here now, listed for you on microfiche, Kindle, or whatever it was, it wouldn’t mean anything, really. You would think, “Oh, she’s got a lot,” but it would be very boring. But if we were standing in front of them and accessing the condition of them, and the date (because I write dates in them all), then it’s a private diary of your own life, which can never be replicated by the electronic book. It doesn’t matter if you write notes in the Kindle or if you date it. There is not that visceral relationship, which is so important.

In the memoir, you write about postwar Western society and its goal to create a sense of community. You use the term “collective responsibility.”

If people aren’t educated, they can’t question. If they can’t question, they can’t change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level.

The other side of it is that if you don’t educate people well, then you’re going to have a lot of violent, angry young men, particularly, and also young women. Then, of course, you can go around saying they’re all so violent, just throw them in jail, this is an underclass, what can you do? You can create fear. The issue of violence is very suitable for a repressive society. Then you can have more legislation, more police, more laws, you know, to fight crime, when all you need to do is to encourage people in a different way.

We do need to stand up and say, “No, we’re not going to go backward and have just one world for the rich—the 1%. What are we going to do for the 99%?” It’s going to have to be a personal movement, as well, because it’s up to each of us to also occupy those parts of ourselves that are not for profit. We have to make decisions in our own lives about what we want.

That’s why I go back to books, because I think this will give you an inner life as well as this outer life where everything is about how much you earn, what job you have, and your status. The 1% isn’t going to give up its wealth and privilege. Those who make up the 1% are going to do everything to say that society is reasonable, fair, and the only way forward.

It’s very easy to ban protests. In fact, they have, haven’t they, with Occupy? They say you’re breaking the law. They change the law all the time so you won’t have a legitimate way to protest. Then they criminalize you.

I am getting much more political as I get older. It’s the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world. You have to challenge it and use your platform to be asking questions. Saying, “Whose interest does this serve?”

Books are something that I love, and I’m going to fight for them and everything that they stand for. You know, when we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary. It seems to me to be sick as well as wrong, and it has to be challenged.

When people stand up and say there’s no money for this, we have to say there’s no money for being human? Because that’s what we’re really talking about. It’s about our humanity. We mustn’t become bamboozled by these people who are talking about these choices in this way. It’s completely false. They set up false binaries. They say, “Oh, it’s health care or it’s libraries.” They say, “It’s culture or it’s defense.”

You just think, “Hold on! Nobody said that. There are plenty of other things.” The moment they set that up, they then force you to try and argue in those terms. We find we are suddenly fighting people who are saying we need the hospital, and we are saying we need the libraries. They cleverly put people, who should be on the same side, at odds with one another, fighting over resources. We’ve got to be smarter and tell them we won’t argue on these terms, because they’re false, and here’s what we think.

I’d like to talk about language for a minute. One of the problems with watching TV is that you’ve got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That’s an issue. If you’ve got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world.

The best language is always found in books because it’s considered. It’s a high language. Sometimes, it is complex and difficult. It’s empowering and offers a way to speak about yourself that you don’t have if all you are doing is reading the newspaper and watching TV.

Some people shout at the television. I shout at the book because I’m really in there. You’re never alone with a book, are you? It’s a dialogue. I love reading aloud, too. I always did, and I still do. I talk to books. When I get to something I don’t understand, I might say, “What’s this about, then?” Or I’ll shout to the character and say, “Don’t do it!”

If I’ve got a new book of poetry, I’ll read it all the way through out loud, poem by poem. You always stumble the first time you read a new poem. That’s interesting because the language that’s being used is complex and it tends to be arranged differently from normal speech.

So, you will stumble, but that just forces your brain to rework and immediately gives you another understanding of what language can do. It’s fantastic. As well as having an emotional impact of hearing through the voice, through breath.

On most days, I read a poem out loud. I always start my morning, and if I have a half an hour, it just makes sense before I go to work. Most always, I read a poem before I start work, and then I feel like I’m in good company.

What are you reading, now?

Carol Ann Duffy, the British poet laureate. She’s just got a new book out, which I’ve just got. I brought it with me, so I’m reading that. I was reading Mary Oliver before I came away. I like to find books that seem to be unjustly neglected in some way. Muriel Rukeyser, who Adrienne Rich is such a fan of. You know, she’s a terrific poet.

Winterson spoke at 2012 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Dallas.

Not featured

Newsmaker: Jamal Joseph

Pamela Goodes — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:55:49 +0000

March/April 2012

One educator’s odyssey from the streets of Harlem to the halls of Columbia

In 1970, Jamal Joseph exhorted students at Columbia University to burn their campus to the ground. Today, he is chair of Columbia’s School of the Arts film division in New York City. His personal odyssey—from the streets of Harlem to Rikers Island, Leavenworth penitentiary, and the halls of Columbia—is detailed in Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention (Algonquin, 2012). Charged with conspiracy as one of the youngest members of the Panther 21, Joseph was twice sent to prison. While incarcerated, he earned two college degrees and wrote five plays and two volumes of poetry. He sat down with American Libraries Associate Editor Pamela Goodes—before delivering the Arthur Curley Lecture at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in Dallas—to discuss his book and about growing up with the Black Panthers. Watch the full interview here.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES: Your book offers so many lessons, especially for today’s youth. Is that why you decided to tell your story?

JAMAL JOSEPH: It actually is. I work with young people in New York and travel the country speaking to high school and college students. The book is written through the curious eyes and passionate heart of a 15‑year‑old who was trying to figure out the path to manhood as much as trying to be involved in the social activism of the late 1960s.

How did you begin working with the Black Panthers and why?

I was raised by a wonderful adoptive grandmother, Jessie Mae (“Noonie”) Baltimore, who made sure I was active in the church and in the NAACP Youth Council. Through dinner-table conversations about what was going on in the black community and what was going on in the world, I had that sense of purpose that our lives mattered more than just what was going on personally with the family. Then, when Dr. [Martin Luther] King was killed, there was was an outrage in the community. But there was also an attraction to what we had been seeing and hearing on television, in the streets, and on college campuses, from the Black Power movement and from people like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.

One day I’m watching TV and I see the Panthers storm the state capitol of Sacramento in their Panther uniforms with guns and making this articulate and passionate bold defense of why black people should have the right to bear arms. I wanted to be that. It was the coolness and the badness of the Panthers that first attracted me, combined with that rage that Dr. King had been assassinated.

Once I arrived at the Panther office, I quickly learned that very day, that very moment, that the first weapon I would be given would not be a gun but a book and that the emotion of hatred and anger had to be replaced by a feeling of love for the community and a willingness to work hard for the struggle.

How important was reading in your development?

Reading was very important in my development. The value placed on education by Noonie, my grandmother, was paramount. She made sure that I read. This is a woman who herself had only a 6th‑grade education and came from the South, who worked very, very hard and was a domestic but understood the value of education in terms of the community improving itself and her grandson achieving his dreams.

She made sure I read. She made sure I did my homework. She would make me show her homework and would make me read and explain what she didn’t understand. I grew up going to honors classes and being a “smart kid”—a smart kid who hung out with the bad kids after school. I was kind of a puzzle to my family.

The Panthers were tough; they weren’t afraid. You studied. We saw these kinds of books in the Panther office: The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver; Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr.; and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth—tough books to read and get through.

You saw people who thought they understood what was going on in terms of social activism, world power, and geopolitics come to grips with a deeper understanding by having to study and really work hard. Then we saw people who could not read when they walked into the Black Panther office but who later learned to read and write because Panthers would tutor them. The first lesson would be the Panther 10-Point Program. You would see people turning into brilliant writers and public speakers after coming in knowing they somehow wanted to be involved.

You don’t hear much about the Panthers’ focus on education.

It was primary, and it was the first thing you encountered when you came into the Panther office. The second thing you encountered was community service. First I got a stack of books, and the second thing I got, literally, was a pancake spatula because the Panthers had a free breakfast program. They also had free health clinics. A day in the Black Panther office was a day of service and work in the community. You’d spend 95% of your work studying and doing community service and maybe 5% on guard duty at the office because by then the offices were being raided each night. It was more of a protective posture. It’s easier for the media to get headlines if they’re writing about that 5% of people who dared stand up against the system.

It’s also easier for the government to attack you if it criminalizes your movement. It’s interesting that when you look at the FBI memos, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were more concerned with the breakfast program and about the free books than they were about the guns. Truth be told, the period of history where the Panthers carried guns was actually a very short one because the Panthers carried guns in Oakland, California, where it was legal to carry guns. Those gun laws were quickly changed.

In most Panther cities, the Panthers patrolled the streets. They were unarmed. There were guns in the homes or in the offices. We had incidents like when Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep and the Panther offices were blown up. In Philadelphia, for example, men were stripped naked in the street at one o’clock in the morning, exposed to the elements and indignities by the Philadelphia Police Department.

Is there a particular library or librarian that aided your growth, that provided any particular guidance as you grew up in this movement?

I have a friend who grew up with me in New York, who now lives in Dallas. We talked about those days when it was a great trip to go to our local library up in the Bronx, the Wakefield Library on 229th Street. It was such joy. That was the way that you got your videos. They would let us stay and read. They would let us check out books, and that honor system of returning the books was an amazing part of it. It was also school librarians, like Mrs. Johnson, who made us feel at home in the library. Then there were those books I read early that made me understand about the struggle for identity. There was that thing of understanding what books and literature had done for young black men who struggled with identity in search of their manhood, in search of their purpose in life.

You went from a public school environment to what might be considered a private education at Harlem Preparatory School. How did that affect you?

Harlem Prep was one of the schools that opened in response to the lack of education that was happening in the community. A group of educators came around to talk about community schools, or what we now call charter schools. There was this idea of community schooling—what the Panther Party called the Liberation School Program—that first started along with the breakfast program, where we would give out books and talk with kids in school about black history. Then it became a Saturday program and then an afterschool program. During the teachers’ strike in 1968, it became a program where parents brought their kids because parents felt like, “Well, maybe the teachers are on strike, but our children are not going to strike. They need to learn.”

Number five in the Panther 10-Point Program was about education. It points to “an education that teaches us our true history and our place in American society.” We take that for granted now, in the age of [President Barack] Obama, where there is a black president and where we have people who have made great achievements in politics and in education and sports. We take for granted that this is part of the ongoing curriculum. Not so long ago, it was as if black people had made no contributions to American history. We’re not just talking about contributions to black history but to American history. If you came up through the education system, you came up thinking only white people had made a contribution to what was going on. So what did this do to your image if you dared to dream of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or a college professor, especially when you had no role models? Children often were not getting that encouragement in the classroom. People were saying, “You tested really well and you might be a good mechanic.” That’s what a teacher told me early on: “In that vocation, you tested really well. You should go to a trade school because you might be very good with mechanics.” The truth is that I’m now a college professor. I’m a writer. I’m a director. I’m a filmmaker. I do all of these things fairly well. I’m a terrible mechanic.

It appears that one of the turning points in your life was your involvement with the Actors’ Playhouse ensemble.

Because I love to tell stories and joke, people had always told me, “Oh, you should be an actor.” Then one day I was walking by a theater in Greenwich Village called the Actors’ Playhouse. It had a sign that read “Learn acting on stage.” I walked in, and Jack Ross, who ran the theater, was there. I told him I was interested, and he gave me a monologue on the spot to read. After the read, Ross nodded and said, “That was a very intelligent and sensitive reading. I’m going to let you enter the class.” Later I learned that if a German Shepherd came in and barked those lines, he would say the same thing.

Although Ross was trying to fill his class, the education I got was wonderful. I did learn acting on stage with the other actors. It actually planted a seed of a creative life that didn’t come to full fruition until later. I was a member of the ensemble, did a few plays, and learned a lot about theater. I didn’t know if I was going to be a full-time actor, but I knew I enjoyed theater.

While in federal prison, some of the guys had heard I had done some acting at some theater outside, although this wasn’t on my prison résumé. They knew I was a Black Panther leader, and a couple of them talked about me knowing karate, having been a black belt and performing in a couple tournaments. “You did theater?” they asked. I responded, “How did you know that?” I got a little worried and asked myself, Is that cool? Maybe I’m going to lose my cred. That’s not part of the convict code. They said, “No, man. We heard.” They looked real intense, and I thought I was going to get beaten up because I did some plays. “You need to do something for Black History Month,” they said.

I got a job in the prison library and, while there, went to the theater section because I had been charged with doing this play. There was only one black play in the theater section, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Truth be told, there were only two plays in the whole plays section—A Raisin in the Sun and Romeo and Juliet. After reading A Raisin in the Sun, I went back to the guys and said, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“What’s the problem?” they responded.

“This is a great play, but there are a lot of women in this play,” I said.

“Well, yeah. That’s not a problem. Look around the yard, pick out who you want, and we’ll put a dress on him,” they said.

So I wrote a play. This is how I became a writer. We started rehearsing. Prison is a dangerous and segregated place. There are sections of the yard, the mess hall, and every place you went where people just stayed together according to their groups. The Latino prisoners, the black prisoners, the white prisoners. And within those groups are these really strong gangs. They never leave unless it’s to do battle; or maybe there’s some business, such as gambling or something else. Here I am rehearsing with two guys, and into our rehearsal come two of the toughest Latino prisoners. These guys had killed a few guys since they were in prison. I thought, I’m doing life already. I’ll take more time. Do you want my license too?

They came in and now everybody’s nervous, and we’re looking over our shoulders. We’re trying to be cool. We’re trying to continue with our rehearsal because we’re thinking that these guys left this section of the yard and came all the way over here to the room. Who are they here to kill? Sure enough, as I’m looking over my shoulder, one of the leaders, Rafael, is looking very upset. I’m thinking, ;He’s working himself to really hurt somebody, to kill somebody.

After about 10 minutes, he jumps and points at me and says, “I got to talk to you, man.” I knew this was a bad idea and thought, Just talk to him man to man tomorrow and just stand your ground. See what he says.

“I’ve been here for about 10 minutes, and I’ve been watching you, homes, and I really got to let you know something,” he said. “The guy you’re working with, that ’effin guy. He’s not feeling his character.”

I responded, “Why don’t you get in and do it?” He got in and he was brilliant. I rewrote the play. The blacks and Mexicans started working together. The white prisoners were drawn in, including a member of one of those Aryan organizations. Through the power of art, we created the only integrated part of the yard. It happened through art, through literature, and writing plays. The guys got interested in that and started reading plays and doing other work. It became something that became the discovery of my creative soul in prison. I found that you can use the creative arts, writing, theater, and film, not just to bring about social awareness but to also help bring about social appeal.

What message are you going to leave librarians with here at the Midwinter Meeting?

The power and the importance of using art, education, and mentorship as a weapon, and how important the work is that they’re doing. While in prison, prisoners who were in their 60s and 70s who had been in for 20, 30, or 40 years would come around with the book cart. They would say, “Hey, young brother, you want to read this book?”

“No, I don’t want to read a book,” I’d respond.

“Let me tell you something: You’re here whether you like it or not, so you can serve this time or you can let this time serve you.”

If you paid attention, the thing that came behind that advice wasn’t membership in a gang. It wasn’t a little marijuana joint or anything else. It was a book—that very important weapon. When people talk about budget cuts, the first to go are schools and libraries. Prisons are opening up. In this country we have state‑of‑the‑art prisons and middle‑aged schools. Librarians, educators, and mentors need to understand that this is important work; this is frontline work. They can’t give up. They have to fight even harder.

Not featured

Joanne Budler

Beverly Goldberg — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:19:35 +0000

January/February 2012

Kansas State Librarian Joanne Budler recently terminated the Kansas Digital Library Consortium’s contract with ebook vendor OverDrive to become a beta tester of 3M’s new Cloud Library ebook lending service. The change is the culmination of a nearly yearlong battle over whether the consortium owned the content it had purchased or had simply licensed it. It also required her to undertake a massive campaign: contacting 165 publishers whose ebooks the library had purchased, because OverDrive requires those publishers’ permission to transfer platforms. In this interview, conducted by email with American Libraries Senior Editor Beverly Goldberg, Budler discussed her decision and its ramifications for Kansas.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES: Why did you decide to take this bold stance and make Kansas a precedent?

JOANNE BUDLER: There were really only two issues: pricing and ownership of content.

A pricing increase of 700% is unreasonable, especially in today’s economic climate when library budgets have consistently been cut over the past 3 years. In addition, if the State Library (on behalf of the Consortium) agreed to pay $75,000 for the platform fee, there would be that much less funding for content.

But the bigger issue was the change in paragraph 11.4 which basically changed our ownership of content to a subscription. This tied our access to this content to a continuation of the service with OverDrive. I believed, and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Chanay agreed, that content we purchased under the 2005 contract is ours. We should be free to move it to another platform or “shelf,” as long as we maintain the integrity of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system.

Was this feasible only because of the original contract with OverDrive, which the company has now changed?

Yes, that is correct. Once paragraph 11.4 was changed to the new contract language and that new contract was signed, I believe it would have been more difficult, if not impossible, to claim ownership of that content.

Have all of the publishers that you wrote for permission responded to your request?

No. We sent letters to 165. Approximately 20 publishers have not responded at all.

How are you handling the publishers that required an additional fee to have their titles included in the consortium’s collection?

The state library (on behalf of the consortium) owns this content and will not pay additional fees. The Attorney General’s office will be handling future correspondence regarding this.

What percentage of the OverDrive collection will be available to Kansas libraries on the new 3M platform? At least half?

We actually have two platforms: one for ebooks (3M Cloud Library) and one for audiobooks (Recorded Books: OneClickDigital). At the present time we have written permission to move 73% of the total ebooks and 63% of the downloadable audiobooks to the new platforms.

Are there any gaps in service, as the Topeka and Wichita librarians were worried about?

There was be no gap in service with Recorded Books. That service is available now to all Kansans. There has been a gap in service with downloadable ebooks because our service with OverDrive ceased on December 5, 2011.

The administrative service through 3M has been set up for the staff of the State Library of Kansas and librarians around the state (PDF file). The service itself will be accessible to library users this week, and the PC app will be ready no later than March 31, 2012.

Are there any independent agreements between libraries and vendors/publishers in the works, and how does that affect the consortium’s ability to negotiate on behalf of its members?

Approximately a dozen libraries in Kansas have signed agreements with OverDrive either independently or as a small consortium. This has not affected the state library’s ability to negotiate on behalf of the statewide consortium, which includes all libraries in Kansas.

Have you ever regretted going down this path?

No. It was the right thing to do.

How do you think this will affect publisher/vendor agreements with ebook consortia in other states?

I don’t know that it will. I guess we will have to wait and see.

What advice do you give other consortia in negotiating with ebook vendors and publishers?

I think that the library community and the publishers need to negotiate to a gain-gain solution. Certainly the library community wants publishers to continue to be economically successful. After all, where would we be without publishers? And anecdotally we know that the same library user who borrows from his/her library also purchases books–in all formats. I wish that there were more empirical evidence to support this!

Should ALA set guidelines for ebook lending contracts, and if so, what elements should be included?

Yes, I think that would be very helpful. E-content should not be treated any differently than physical content. It is irresponsible to spend tax dollars on material that evaporates or disappears at the end of a certain period of time, whether that is a subscription period or a contract life.

Ownership should be retained by the purchaser. Transfer from one shelf/platform to another should be based on DRM, i.e. as long as DRM is maintained, it should not matter which shelf/platform holds that content.

Not featured

Poet Laureate Philip Levine

Leonard Kniffel — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:56:10 +0000

November / December 2011

America’s street-smart new poet laureate has a few choice words to say about a lifetime of experience with good librarians–and some bad ones

At age 83, Philip Levine has been appointed 2011–2012 poet laureate consultant in poetry by Librarian of Congress James Billington. He took up his duties October 17, opening the library’s annual literary season with a reading from his work. “Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets,” Billington said. “His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling the simple truth—about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.” Levine is the author of 20 collections of poems, including most recently News of the World (2009), which the New York Times Sunday Book Review described as “characteristically wise.” He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth, the National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is, and in 1980 for Ashes: Poems New and Old. Born in Detroit in 1928, Levine succeeds W. S. Merwin as poet laureate. He and his wife, actress Frances J. Artley, divide their time between Fresno and Brooklyn. Levine spoke by phone October 19 with Leonard Kniffel of the American Library Association. What follows are excerpts from that conversation, edited for clarity.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES: How did you feel when you were asked to be poet laureate of the United States?

PHILIP LEVINE: Well, at first I was very surprised. I wasn’t home, and there was a message on my machine saying that a man named James Billington wanted to speak to me from the Library of Congress. When I called back, I said to myself, “I’ll bet he wants my advice on who should be the next poet laureate.” That’s what occurred to me because of a) my age, and b) a long history of political radicalism, you could say. I didn’t know how that would go down.

He got down to the facts very quickly when he came on the phone. He said, “I would like to invite you to be the next poet laureate.” For about five seconds, maybe a bit longer, I thought, “Do I want this?” and the answer came back, “Yes.” It was a curious answer in my head. I felt like, if you don’t accept this you’ll kick yourself forever. Maybe it was three seconds. [laughter]

On his duties as poet laureate:

The bare‑bones obligations, which are very small, in fact: A reading in October, which I did on Monday [October 17]; the choosing of two American poets sort of in mid‑career for the Witter Bynner Awards and introducing these poets at the Library of Congress; a reading with the poet laureate of the U.K., Carol Ann Duffy, in Chicago in March, I think; and then a lecture or a reading in May. And so I thought, “Jeez and you get $35,000 and a $5,000 travel stipend?” I thought, “Oh, I’m not going to be overwhelmed by work.” So then I thought, “Hell yeah.” [laughter]

On doing a special project of his own design for the Library of Congress:

I haven’t worked out the details with the library. I would need a lot of help with this. I approached him about it when I finally met James Billington. He seemed like a very agreeable man, and I described a couple of things that I was interested in, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to the people who would have to supply me with a lot of help to carry out this project. So until it’s really accepted, if it is accepted, no announcements. And you know, the world is not waiting breathlessly to hear what I say.

On visiting the Library of Congress as poet laureate:

I had been in the Library of Congress three times, but only once in the Jefferson Building, and I had either forgotten or never seen that sort of great hall there, where they had a big reception after I read. I took no part in the reception because I was upstairs signing books for over an hour, and by the time I was done I had no handwriting left. But I had re-met some people. A woman came up to me, looked at me, and I knew she had been my student and I said, “How you doing?” She looked different, much better actually, married, two kids, and still writing. And a woman came up to me with my yearbook from Central High School in Detroit, and there I was with a full head of hair. And, you know, I’m a twin. My twin brother was there. He looked so bad there in the photograph; it didn’t look like him. I’m afraid mine was a good resemblance. [laughter]

On using libraries as a youngster:

When I was quite young—I would say 7 or 8—about once every month on a Saturday my mom would take me and my twin brother to the Parkman branch of the Detroit Public Library. If she was looking for books herself, we would rummage around and find something for ourselves, and I would say it was probably once every couple weeks or once a month, but it was a pretty regular thing. It was a lovely building, and it was very quiet in there and even though we were fat mouths, both of us, we learned to respect the silence.

Then we moved when I was 12 or 13 to the outskirts of the city. My mother bought a house; it cost $7,000, can you imagine? After we’d been there about two years, the city rented or bought a space on Livernois—what had been some kind of a store—and they created a small library. I would say once a week would be the least amount of time I went there, because they also had a lot of magazines that I couldn’t afford. World War II was on, and I was a kind of news junkie, and the Detroit papers were pretty bad, but the photographs in Life at that time were extraordinary, and for me Friday—I think it came on Friday to the library—that was a very exciting moment for me. I would never miss; I would always be there to see Life magazine and see the photographs in the magazine and find out what American right-wingers thought of the war.

When I really wanted to find something that I had trouble finding, I would just take the bus to the Woodward streetcar and go to the main branch. Once I started college, Wayne [State University] had a pretty skimpy library, but it wasn’t terrible. The thing they did have, which was fabulous, was a collection of 20th-century poetry, the Miles Modern Poetry Room.

On his early years as a budding poet:

The poets of Detroit, not just the ones from Wayne, we had a schedule of meetings in the Miles Modern Poetry Room. I believe it was on Thursday nights, like the first Thursday of the month during the school year, and a couple of poets who weren’t students would come as well and even a couple of faculty members who wrote poetry, or what they thought was poetry. Well, everything we wrote at the time was what we thought was poetry. And we would meet there; usually we had a theme, usually a poet. Somebody did a thing on Robert Lowell. I did a thing on Wilfred Owen. Somebody did a thing on Archibald MacLeish. Nobody did anything on 19th‑century poetry; it was all fairly contemporary.

This guy Theodore Miles had taught at Wayne and gone into the Navy just after Pearl Harbor and had been killed, and he willed his library to Wayne. His widow worked in some administrative capacity, and I suppose she helped establish this room, and there was money put aside to keep it up to date. So if you were a habitué of the place, you could request a new or recent book and the library would provide it. It was just terrific. The librarians at Wayne were very nice. They would aid and abet your searches, and this isn’t always the case.

On a bad experience in a research library:

There was a period of my life when I had trouble with librarians. The worst librarians I ever encountered were at Harvard, Columbia, and Florida State University. I had real trouble with those people. I think some of them had come to identify their own physicality with the book.

For example, at Florida State, my wife was teaching there. We’d just gotten married, and supposedly, as her spouse, I had privileges to check out books. I was given a card, and every time I went to check out books, I got in trouble. They didn’t want me to check them out in the capacity of a faculty member. My wife was in the drama department, and I was finishing a master’s thesis on the odes of John Keats, a degree from Wayne State University. I’d finished my coursework, and that’s all I needed, and they didn’t have everything but they had enough for me to write a decent thesis, I hope (I mean I never looked at it after I did it).

There was actually a time where I had to struggle with a woman, tear the books out of her hand. Obviously some of these people were helpful and some of them were not. Somebody called and said that eight books that I asked for that were crucial to my research were in. I’m re-imagining the number is eight; it might have been 10. I go there and the woman who’s always been giving me a hard time is there and nobody else. I sigh. I go up to her and I tell her about the phone call. She tells me the books aren’t here. “I don’t know why that woman called you. Do you know her name?” And I said, “Yeah.” I gave her the name. “Oh, no, she wouldn’t have done that.” In other words, she’s calling me a liar. And then I see on a shelf behind her back, down near her back on the floor, the books. I recognized them because I’d used them at Wayne. I said, “They’re right there, ma’am,” and she said, “No, they are not.” And I went around the goddamn desk there and grabbed them. She was close to hysterics. And I said, “They’re not your child, honey, they’re books.” I was really sore, and I stomped out without even checking them out. I just walked out. That was the first time I really had trouble with a librarian.

On stealing from libraries:

I’m a respecter of libraries. In fact, not long ago, maybe 10 years ago, a student showed up in class with a book stolen from a library. I knew it. I’d been using it in the library at Poets House. It was Hard Labor by Cesare Pavese, and not bilingual, all translations by William Arrowsmith, a fantastically good book. I had xeroxed a couple of poems and brought them to the class and we talked about them and he shows up with the book. The book’s been out of print for 20 years and that version maybe even longer. He had the hardback, and I went up to him and I said, “Can I see that a moment?” And he tried to not let me see it. He knew what was happening. I said, “You took this from Poets House, you son of a bitch.” And I said, “If you don’t take this back, I’m going to flunk you and I’m going to call up and make sure … or go over there.” And he took it back, and then I got a thank-you from Poets House.

On two more bad experiences in academic libraries:

Harvard had a book on the Spanish Civil War that Tufts did not have. I was teaching at Tufts, which is only a mile and a half or so away. So I go over and I look in the card catalog and I had my faculty card from Tufts and I go to check out the book. Uh uh. “Oh yes, you can check this out, if, and only if, you bring a letter from the librarian at Tufts explaining that they do not have the book and that you need it for some sort of worthy purpose connected with your teaching or your research.” And I looked at this guy and I wanted to throttle him.

Then the Columbia one: My selected poems were going to be published and I was searching for a cover. In my mind I had an idea of what I wanted. So I went to the Columbia library. I was teaching at Columbia at the time, and I found a book that dealt with the holdings of a museum in Berlin before World War II. The book was printed before World War II, so who the hell knows what’s still in that museum.

There were two copies there and in that book was a relief, I guess you would call it, of a bird, and that bird was just like the bird in one of my poems. I was looking for something like that, something ancient and lovely but strong—this is Egyptian art—and so I take it up to the desk and try to check it out. “Uh uh,” says the woman. I think, “Why not?” She says, “We can’t even let it out for a day because somebody else might come and look for it.” I said, “There’s a second copy.” She goes to look in her catalog. “Yes, this is true, but there might be more than one person.” I said, “This book hasn’t been looked at in 37 years, ma’am. You know perfectly well.” The book was in German, by the way. So I go to the higher powers. I’m allowed to take the book out. I want to show the cover to my editor, and in order to do this I have to leave a credit card and my driver’s license. Also, should we decide to use it, they hand me all these forms—that I would have to get permission, not from the museum but from them, to use their picture of the art. I said, “What? You don’t own this.” And then I shut my mouth, I just shut it. I said, “Yes, of course.” I said, “You know, it’s late in the day.” “You can have until 10 tomorrow morning.” You know, the generosity here is just fantastic: “You can keep it overnight.”

I take it to my publisher, who says it’s perfect. “Perfect, Phil. Yes, it is the bird in that poem.” And then I tell him about paying. He says, “I can have a photographer here in 15 minutes. We’ll just photograph it and we“ll credit the museum in Berlin.” So I waited. They photographed it. I took it back. I said my publisher didn’t like it. Yes. I lied. [laughter] And it’s there, it’s there on my selected poem, published sometime in the ’80s. I have a new selected poems, so that one’s out of print. But it’s a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful bird.

On his local public librarians:

The library in Fresno and the library in Brooklyn, they’re terrific. I like the way they’re run. The fact that you can reserve books via the internet, that you can go through the whole thing… . Fresno County Public Library has vast holdings, and they’re incredibly generous about it, and it’s very easy to renew the book via the computer. I’ve taken to giving a lot of books to the libraries.

There is a library north of San Francisco [Coast Community Library]. I was invited by this library to give a poetry reading to celebrate the opening of this library, which is a private library because this county didn’t have the money or the population to support a public or even a county library, but the citizens got together and built a library, and they supplied computers for the young kids especially to use. The one thing they really lacked was books, and of course, poetry books. Over the years, I have sent them—I don’t know, 200, 250 books. Those people were, God they were wonderful. They were generous. It was one of the nicest things. I was almost ashamed of what I charged them for the reading. Almost. [laughter]

On his remark that Detroit poets were writing “what we thought was poetry”:

The remark was a little facetious because what all of us are doing is writing what we think is poetry. Even Whitman and Emily Dickinson wrote what they thought was poetry, and it turned out that time has judged it to be good, in their case to be great poetry. I know I write verse because it’s in verse, but is it poetry? Well, hopefully. That’s really all that I meant by it.

Was what I was writing back at age 18, 19, 20, or even earlier in my teens, was it poetry? If it was, it was pretty bad poetry; I can tell you that. I’m not a protégé of Aquinas, so I don’t want to go into whether bad poetry is poetry, and I suppose Plato or Aristotle would say bad poetry is not poetry. I’ve had teachers who have said, “That’s not poetry,” and I’ve said it to students, “That’s prose that you’ve chopped into lines.” Prose has its dignity. We need it. It informs us. It delights us. It moves us profoundly. And sometimes it almost rises to the level of poetry.

It’s kind of a tricky thing about what is and what isn’t poetry. Today, with the varieties of poetry being written in America, it’s almost impossible to give a definition of poetry. I remember when I was teaching a summer program for like three days and I said something like, “Well this isn’t poetry,” and a student said, “Well, give us the definition of poetry,” and I give him the definition. And he said, “That’s poetry?” and I said, “No, that’s a definition of poetry.” And he said, “I don’t understand the difference.” And I said, “Well you can’t define poetry, but it is easy to make up a definition: Poetry is a form of writing, you know, and then go to the specific, the lines of which are happy to be with each other.” I wasn’t that facetious, but I made it clear. I made it clear that as a critic, Coleridge was closer to my heart than Samuel Johnson, although I thought they were both wonderful.

On a recent trip to Detroit, the city of his youth and a lifelong inspiration:

At first it was daunting. Driving into the city and then being driven around and seeing how neighborhoods had simply vanished and how shabby and dead certain areas were that had been very lively and had their own personality and where you might go to hear music or get certain kinds of cooking, food, cuisine, meet certain kinds of people, and you go there and there was no “there.” I mean it was just fallen-down buildings, and I went by the Packard Plant and it was just pathetic. Chevrolet Gear and Axle, where I once worked, was gone, which was a good thing because it was an ugly building anyway. The Fisher building and the GM building, they look pretty good. The Union Guardian Building, on the other hand, is fabulous—that crazy lobby there. Wayne looks great, I thought.

The Detroit Institute of Arts had been enlarged, and it had been changed. It was unfamiliar to me, but it was kind of a discovery because it’s organized in a different way, but I could see why it was reorganized. People were incredibly nice to me. I was there as part of this photography show, and I had written an essay that went into the book Detroit Disassembled. It’s a book of photographs by a man named Andrew Moore, and they are incredible photographs, and I have a long essay about my view of what Andrew put in his book, and my memories of the place as well, but mainly my memory of the first visit back when I discovered that the place is almost turning into an agrarian heaven.

I have a long poem called “A Walk with Tom Jefferson,” which grew out of a visit to Wayne to take part in a retirement party for one of my old teachers. That was in the ’80s, maybe ’85, somewhere around there. I spent a lot of time just walking around. People told me I was crazy, it was not safe, but nothing happened to me, and I met some terrific people.

Detroit meant everything to me. I was shocked, you know in the ’40s, by the first riots [1943]. I was stunned. You know, I was going to school with black kids; they seemed to be getting along pretty well, but the kids didn’t create the enmity. And then I thought that the citizens had learned something from the agony of that, and I’m sure a great many of us did because what had happened was always there.

As I got older I was working with lots of black people, and sometimes they would bring the subject up and we’d talk about it. I especially remember some women that I worked with once talking about what happened. They were older than I. So it was shocking in the ’60s to discover that we had practically the same police force that would take black men out and just shoot them, and then you would get that kind of crazy rebellion, which in some ways was something magnificent, or so I thought when I wasn’t there.

I went back shortly after that. I realized, even though I was going through neighborhoods where I had lived, that I was clearly identified as what I was: white and middle class now and part of the problem. So I had very mixed feelings, mainly sorrow.

When I went back this time, I began meandering. I met a lot of people who were very hopeful about the city. My host, a woman named Nancy Barr, who runs the photography and print section of the Detroit Institute of Arts. She was very upbeat and very positive, and I met people who had moved back to Detroit. Some were writers, some were artists. It’s a different city. The city of my memory, the arsenal of democracy—because I really came of age during the Second World War and during this kind of full employment in a city just flush with money and nothing to buy back then, almost no building of housing, cars weren’t being manufactured—became a city of good times. During the war, Detroit was one big party on the weekends. I loved it. I would take the bus downtown—and you could get a job.

When I was 16, I was doing factory work in the summer. I would just go to a factory and lie and say “I’m 19,I need a job until I get drafted” or something. “Oh yeah, sure.” They didn’t care what age you were. They just needed some hands. So I was flush with money—for me—and I went to the great dance halls on Woodward Avenue and tried to pick up ladies, and girls. [laughter] I really loved the city. It had its own character. It was tough. I felt a lot of anti-Semitism from a very early age; of course, Father Coughlin was on the radio all the time.

Because of that, I started to train as a boxer, and I wasn’t that good. My coach, who was very good, had been the amateur champ of the U.S. middleweight, training for the 1940 Olympics that never happened. He advised me to find another art form. [laughter] But after working with him for a couple years, two or three times a week going to the gym, yeah, in some ways the city was responsible for the kind of stance I took toward the world, a kind of don’t-fuck-with-me stance, you hit me I’ll hit a you back harder than you hit me. I carried that with me a long time.

Detroit was … jeez I was so happy and so sad at what’s taken place, but as I look back on it I realize Wayne was the perfect school for me, absolutely perfect. The politics were crazy. I mean it had everything, the full spectrum. It had Marxist clubs and Trotsky clubs. The people who would found the John Birch Society and their children, the people who would go on to found the Tea Party. They were all going there. It was an exciting place, and like any mediocre school, if you snoop around you find the good teachers and you get a hell of a good education.

On still being a tough guy at 83:

I don’t have it anymore. I mean, if I hit you, I’ll break my hand, so I don’t dare hit you. [laughter] Or if I do hit you, it will have to be with my left because I have to write with my right. But I haven’t hit anybody in a long time, although I did in the 1980s. I got in a fight. I was like 60, and I got in a fight in the subway in New York. A guy shoved my wife, almost knocked her down. So I tripped him and threw him down on the floor of the subway. And the guy’s looking at me and I’m pretending I’m 190 instead of 150, and he said, “I know what you did to me.” I said, “You’re supposed to, asshole.” It was during rush hour and the subway was very crowded and that was why he had shoved her, to get in. There were too many people there for there to be a real fight and I was happy for that, and all he did was he got a good distance away from me and called me names, and I laughed. Everybody laughed when he did that. Today I wouldn’t do that. I would ask him to apologize.

Actually nobody shoves us now. You know what happens now on the subway? People get up and give us their seats. I kid you not. Last June a black young pregnant woman got up to give me her seat and I said, “Ma’am, do I look that bad?” and she laughed and said, “No, no, no, take the seat.” You know, I look my age, 83.

Not featured

Daniel Ellsberg

Greg Landgraf — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:04:02 +0000

July/August 2011

The Vietnam War whistleblower holds forth on transparency and how the internet has changed civic engagement

Forty years ago, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, documents that revealed the secret history of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Since then, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer, and activist on controversial U.S. interventions and the need for patriotic whistleblowing. Ellsberg was a prominent guest at Annual in New Orleans, giving an Auditorium Speaker address and attending a discussion that took place after the screening of a documentary about his experiences, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Former American Libraries Editor Leonard Kniffel and others from ALA interviewed Ellsberg after his speech.

What follows is a transcript of that interview, edited for clarity.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES The first thing I’d like to ask you is to recap for us your central message for the librarians who were in the audience, because there are a great many who couldn’t be here today in New Orleans. So what was your real central message to librarians?

DANIEL ELLSBERG Well, as librarians, they are custodians of history, to a large extent, and of journalism, which is the current history—the first draft of history, as they say. You have a lot of those books [of journalism]. And now, of course, the internet is in libraries, which means the entire output of WikiLeaks so far.

My message to begin with was that the situation today is remarkably similar to the one that the country was facing or the president was facing 40 years ago with the Pentagon Papers, and 42 years ago, and before that: namely, a question of what to do with respect to an unwinnable war that we were heavily involved in.

I’m speaking primarily of Afghanistan now, but also a number of other wars that we really have been involved in, whether the president calls them wars or not, such as Iraq—where I think, by the way, fighting may well expand again within the next year—Pakistan, Yemen, and other places where we really are involved in hostilities with drones and [in] other respects.

And the question is whether to extricate ourselves in one way or another, unilaterally or through negotiation, from one or more of those wars; whether to expand them markedly, as the military is advising in some cases; or whether to do what president after president did in Vietnam and President Obama is choosing right now, and that is essentially to prolong the war, to keep it from ending while he is in office, which might expose him to charges of being weak, unmanly—even foreign, in his case—but an appeaser, and a man who had chosen to lose a war that the military said was winnable.

And however foolish that promise was of winnability and however foolish and unrealistic the charges are of being a loser and a quitter and weak, the president doesn’t want to hear them.

And typically in Vietnam, and I believe now, the assumption, the hypothesis is very similar. Presidents prefer to send men and women now to die and to kill rather to be called names themselves, rather than risk re‑election, rather than risk their place in history.

And that’s a very typical choice, cynical as that may sound, by presidents in the past. I don’t think that President Obama is worse or different from the others. But that’s not a justifiable cause. That’s not a legitimate reason. And it’s practically the only reason that we are still involved with over 100,000 troops and 100,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan right now. It’s not good enough.

It often seems to me when I was listening to you talk that the question that doesn’t get asked in situations like Afghanistan, as it seems to me in Vietnam, is what would a win look like?

Well, actually a win is not that hard to define. It’s just impossible to achieve.

My boss in Vietnam, [Assistant Secretary of Defense] John McNaughton, is in the Pentagon Papers defining in some detail what a win in Vietnam would be like, claiming at that time that was our objective: Namely, all northern troops in South Vietnam would go back to the north and take with them the southerners who had gone north after Geneva in ’54, and then come back. All people under the command of the Communist leadership of the resistance there would go back to North Vietnam. The remaining people, the southern guerrillas, would lay down their arms and do it visibly. Not just bury them, but give up their arms, or amalgamate and accept the discipline of the South Vietnamese troops that we supplied and trained and funded and everything else.

You could define conditions just like that in Afghanistan. The Taliban are pretty indigenous. But if there are any al‑Qaeda people, they all leave. The Taliban join the Afghan army that we’re funding or they give up their arms. All coded communications on the other side must cease. All communications will be in the clear so we can hear them and hear there’s no covert call to continue arms and so forth.

In other words, the authority of the regime in the capital that we support and fund and back, that serves our interests, shall be extended to every corner of the country. And that doesn’t mean there’s no violence anymore, but it does mean that violence is reduced to a point where his mercenary soldiers can be paid with the drug money and the money we supply in order to pursue those few remaining holdouts indefinitely without the need for American troops.

So we have indefinitely a regime in the capital whose authority is extended to the whole country without the need of American troops, just with American firepower.

We never really aspired in Vietnam to a situation where they didn’t need our air support. We didn’t tell the public that. But that was Nixon’s game and that was Johnson’s game.

So that continues now with drones, but then it was planes entirely, from carriers or bases outside the country.

We could support the mercenaries that supported us, essentially. And they could control the whole country without our presence there. That’s a victory. Even though there might be some remaining violence, no one would argue with that being a victory. It just was far, far, far beyond our capabilities.

Vietnam was called the first war that was televised. Do you think that now that we have the internet, what we’re learning about the war and various [other] wars that we’re involved in has changed the game at all?

Television did have a big impact in Vietnam. Remember that public opinion didn’t have that much impact on the president’s policy. The majority of the public was against the war in Vietnam by 1968, years before the Pentagon Papers came out. That was increased by the Pentagon Papers, but it was already a majority. That didn’t stop the president.

And the fact that you see different figures—between 56% and 71% of Americans now think we should be out of Afghanistan as soon as possible—does not mean we will be out of that war any time soon.

I said that people had that opinion in ’68. The war went on for seven years, and troops remained there for five years. We could be in Afghanistan indefinitely, no matter how many people are against the war.

But it is true that the more you can see it up close on television, the more public opinion will be affected. But remember, without American troops dying, the YouTube material, which now is available and wasn’t available then, from cell phones, doesn’t get on our mainstream media.

My later-to-be-wife told me in ’66 that when she returned from Vietnam, she was seeing more of the war than anybody in Saigon was because she saw it on the television every night. We didn’t see that.

But now with no Americans dying—“no” meaning only a few thousand—you don’t see it on television.

WikiLeaks did put out on the internet that video of the helicopter [firing on and killing civilians on the ground in Iraq]. And I think it got, of course, an enormous number of hits. But I think that my understanding is that [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange felt later that he was mistaken not to make a deal initially with a mainstream television network and get it out on mainstream. And that’s why later he worked with the New York Times directly and the Guardian, because he knew he’d get greater coverage that way.

You mentioned, when you were talking yesterday, that you didn’t really think that the draft was such a big factor in the Vietnam War.

It was a big factor. But I’m saying that it wasn’t the whole factor that everybody speaks about now.

It surprised me because I always thought that if there were a draft right now, you’d see a great deal more resistance to the war.

You undoubtedly would, no question you would. But you’d also see much bigger wars. I think that if we had a draft now, we’d have big demonstrations, we’d have a lot more talk about it in Congress and the press, and we’d see several hundred thousand men and women in Afghanistan right now and in Iraq.

You just can’t do that without a draft. No way to do it. And we couldn’t have put 500,000 men into Vietnam—which, remember, they got there in ’68 after years of demonstrations. We were up to 550,000. You couldn’t have done that without a draft. So I’m against the draft.

Yes, it would be more fair. And if you could have a draft where the total number of soldiers remained the same, I’d be for that. It would be fairer. That’s not the way it’s going to work. If you have a draft, it’s still going to be the poor people who are in the front lines. That’s the way that works in every army. And you’re going to have a lot bigger armed services. And so we’ll have more men and women now to “spend.”

By the way, I don’t see how a draft can avoid drafting women at this point. That wasn’t even a question before. But with the current correct attitude, there isn’t any way you could draft men and not women. So you’ll be sending them over there.

There’s where I differ with a lot of my close friends on that—like [former Congressman] Pete McCloskey or earlier Ted Kennedy (he wasn’t a close friend, but an ally)—who were very much for a draft for that reason; but I disagree with them on that.

If I had top secret information that could stop the war in Afghanistan, what would you tell me to do with it now?

I would say, first, I would go to the New York Times, first, in hopes that they would print large amounts of it, large amounts of documents. No other paper really offers to print pages and pages of newsprint on something.

But I wouldn’t wait for months, as I did, without being told that they were actually working at it right away. If I had gone months without knowing that they were working away on it, I would now then have gone to other papers; and if that didn’t work, to WikiLeaks.

So I wouldn’t go first to WikiLeaks. Or if I did, I would do it on the understanding that they do it the way they did now, which is a pretty good model—that they coordinate with not just one paper, but several papers, creating that competition, so that no one paper feels they can bottle it up by sitting on it the way the New York Times did.

Here’s a question that just came to me as you asked your question. What if the people who gave the information to the Times in 2004 about the warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency, which the Times sat on for a year—[Executive Editor] Bill Keller should have been fired ultimately when it came out that he had suppressed that news for a year at the request of the White House. News that should have been out, absolutely should have been out, he finally put it out because of competition from his own reporter James Risen, who was about to put it out in a book. And rather than be scooped by Risen, he finally got it out in the Times and got a Pulitzer Prize for it.

Fine, let him have his Pulitzer Prize, in jail. Jail isn’t the right thing. Firing is what I mean. If he could have been impeached, he should have been impeached for that. His Pulitzer Prize, which he could enjoy with [former New York Times reporter] Judith Miller somewhere, his former protege.

But supposing, then, that the people who had done that had simultaneously given it to WikiLeaks or to another paper so that Keller knew he couldn’t sit on it for a year, that’s the way to get it out. And that’s the way WikiLeaks got it out. Because each paper—the Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and the Times and Le Monde—all knew that if they didn’t put it out the others would, using that competition very effectively. That’s what I would tell you to do.

And I would say that the people right now who are talking to Bob Woodward about his next book now—I suppose that includes [former White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel again and [U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl] Eikenberry, who is leaving Kabul and so forth—rather than wait a year or two for that to come out, it would be better if they gave the documents supporting that information to WikiLeaks right now.

And as a matter of fact, I would call on Woodward to give WikiLeaks all the documents he was given for that book. I’m not asking him to put them up, because he would get prosecuted. Even he would get prosecuted by Obama. And it wouldn’t serve any great purpose. Give them to WikiLeaks anonymously. Let us read them. So he isn’t the only one who gets to read these top secret documents.

If I were Henry Kissinger sitting across from you right now, what would you tell me?

Oh, God. Actually, there’s a couple people, including [former Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara and Kissinger, now only Kissinger is alive to tell the tale about some of the decision-making, so, really, my interest would be in trying to get him, at last, in the closing years of his life, like mine, to come clean about what he was up to in certain cases that we really don’t know about.

When did he decide that the U.S. could, after all, get along with the unilateral withdrawal of troops from Vietnam? The public was led to believe that Nixon and Kissinger intended from the beginning what finally happened: Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh City after a decent interval. I know that’s not true. They had no such intention. They were forced into that position. The question is: When and why did he finally decide that they would have to put up with and try to do with air power alone—that was his intention—without troops?

I’d be very interested in that—to see if he possibly would even tell me. Nothing he would tell me would be the last word, but it could be very interesting.

BRAD MARTIN, Cognotes You spoke near the end, I believe, about lessons learned and not learning lessons, or actually remembering the past and still doing the wrong thing? What lessons do you think would be learned by someone like Johnson, or even Obama, or anybody in that position, from the release of the Pentagon Papers? What might they have learned?

The last time I saw Kissinger—I saw him in the fall of ’70—it was to urge him to read the Pentagon Papers. And if he couldn’t read them all, which takes too long—he couldn’t even read a large part of it—I said read the summaries. Because those add up to about 40 single-spaced pages. That’s readable. You learn a lot from reading the summary—four or five pages—to each of the volumes.

I asked him if he had a copy. He did, in the White House. So I said, you ought to read it. And have your staff person put it in order, go over it, and summarize for you some messages from it.

He says, “Do you really think we have anything to learn from this?” I said, “Well, yes, I do.” He says, “But after all, we make decisions very differently now.” I said, “Well, Cambodia didn’t look all that different.” He was pretty nervous; he said, “Cambodia was done for very complicated reasons.” Meaning things like they were punishing Congress for having rejected [Supreme Court nominees Clement] Haynsworth and [G. Harrold] Carswell, and I could name other domestic political reasons that were going on.

I said, “Henry, every rotten decision in Vietnam in 30 years has been made for very complicated reasons.” And they’re usually the same reasons, the same kind of reasons—an election, this or that. It’s always domestic politics. And I said something about the people who resigned from his staff over Cambodia: Tom Schelling, who is in the movie, my old thesis adviser, who was a close friend of Kissinger’s, Ernie May, and others who worked on the Pentagon Papers. He said, “What? They didn’t have clearances." I said, "I had the clearances.” “Oh, you, of course, I know,” so forth.

I’m just remembering this conversation. I told him what I thought his policy was. And I thought it’s really very much like [former Under-Secretary of State] Walt Rostow’s policy. “Walt Rostow’s a fool.” “Well, that may be, but McGeorge Bundy [National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson] is no fool.” He says, “No.” NMcGeorge Bundy, who had been his dean. "McGeorge Bundy was no fool. But he had no sense of policy."

But the last conversation I had with Kissinger was some months later at a conference at MIT, where I asked a question that could very well be asked of Obama right now or of his national security adviser. It was a conference called Runnymede, the name Runnymede being where the barons had confronted King John I. [There were also] MIT students and their parents who felt they were confronting the king, the monarch, confronting him about Vietnam.

And I knew I had time for only one question. So I asked him, I said, “What is your best estimate of the number of Indo-Chinese under your plans who will die in the next 12 months?” And he said, “You are accusing us of racism.” I said, “No, no, no. Forget the word Indo-Chinese. How many people will die if your plans are carried out as planned? What’s your best estimate? I know we have estimates for the number of rubber tires they’ll bring down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, how many bombers, replacement bombers, how many troops. How many people will be killed?”

He said, “That is a very cleverly worded question. What is your alternative?” I said, “Dr. Kissinger, I know very well”—because I worked for him for once—“I know very well the language of alternatives, options.” I wrote the options paper, the first one he submitted. I said, “I know the language of options. I’m not asking for that. I’m asking you for your estimate, if you have one, of the consequences of your chosen course of action.” He just paced back and forth. And finally the student who was running things said “Well, he’s answered enough questions for tonight. And he has to get back to Washington.”

And so he did, by the way, because earlier on somebody had asked him something or other and he had burst out and said “You’re asking as if we were widening the war. We’re not widening the war. We are winding down the war.” So he goes back to Washington. I won’t go through the whole story, but I’ll tell you that what turns out is, he goes back to supervise the pre-invasion bombing of Laos, which extended the war. The next day, while he was talking. But I was pretty sure that he simply did not have an answer to the number that had been killed.

MARTIN I don’t know the timing of it, but there’s also the moment on the tapes where Nixon is actually asking him a similar question, asking Kissinger, if we bomb here … .

I know that. “How many have you killed?”

MARTIN “How many killed if we did this and this?”

“How many did we kill in Laos? How many can we kill in Laos?” “Oh, 15,000, 20,000.” Nixon says, “No, no. No, I think now we should hit the dikes. Hit the dikes. How many would that drown?” “Oh, about 200,000.”

“No, no, no, I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Got that, Henry?”

“Oh, I think that would be just too much.”

“Too much, Henry? Nuclear bomb? Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, for Christ’s sake.” That’s the passage.

MARTIN That’s almost word for word.

And that’s the way it sounds.

What I’m saying now is that it would be a very good question to ask of Obama right now, next press conference—or of [Secretary of Defense Leon] Panetta now, [former Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates before he left—what’s your best estimate of the number of Afghans who will die under our plans in the next year? What’s a range? What’s the range going to be? And what was it last year? And how accurate was did that turn out to be? Et cetera.

Now in the case of Kissinger, I had been almost sure they didn’t have an estimate. And the reason was that I had proposed doing a study of that a year-and-a-half earlier under Kissinger. And I knew that they had not done it. Kissinger said we have asked them enough questions now, we don’t have to ask that.

So I called up Winston Lord, his then-deputy, just before I asked the question at MIT. I said “Winston, do you remember that study I proposed a year-and-a-half ago? Did you ever do a study of how many we were likely to kill?” He said no, never done. So I sort of knew the answer, that Kissinger didn’t have an answer to this question.

Interestingly, now they’ve learned a lesson. Now they’ve said openly, “We don’t count bodies.” That’s Vietnam. “We don’t do that.” Well, that turns out to be false, as usual. WikiLeaks showed they were counting civilian dead. And it added up to 60,000. Now, that’s undoubtedly a huge underestimate, but it’s 20,000 more than Bush had said. And, interestingly, the 60,000 they counted—looking at the Times and the coordinates and everything else—the Iraq Body Count [independent database of civilians killed in Iraq] realized that included 15,000 that the IBC had not included in their estimate of 100,000 dead that’s based largely on newspaper reports.

So here’s an extra 20,000, which I would regard as noteworthy from WikiLeaks, some significance. But the question is: The American people do not demand and Congress does not demand, unfortunately—I can’t blame it all on the president—they don’t demand to know how many people we are killing in this collateral damage.

And the truth is that when they take credit for killing a terrorist here and a terrorist there—the Taliban—what they don’t tell is how many people they killed in a hunt for that particular terrorist. The same calculation. In some cases, to get this guy, it took 78 other people who had to die here, he wasn’t here then, we hit the wrong place, here was a whole collection of people we didn’t know were there, and so forth. And it adds up. Time over time. And finally we got him. Well, you killed 78 people or 17 people other than the one you were after. And their families joined the resistance.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES Have you made an effort to advise or reach out to President Obama?

No.

Why not?

Oh, because I do hear about people who do have access to him, like Kissinger and the others. My impression is that he’s a very busy man, of course, obviously, he’s got a very difficult job, a very complicated job. And when he talks to outsiders who don’t have current clearances and don’t have—I won’t specify it further, but who aren’t in the loop at that point—his only interest, like that of any president, is what he wants to hear from you, what he wants you to think he thinks or listens to or whatever. I haven’t heard of any useful interchange whatever.

A number of people that I do know, friends of mine, went to see him about transparency recently, and to get into the door they did something that was actually really bad, really shameful. These were open-government groups of various kinds, I won’t even name them here, but mostly friends of mine. And they were induced, to get in the door, to offer him an award for transparency.

The American Library Association could probably get in with him by giving him an award for increasing the number of National Security Letters that they’ve been presented with. And the ACLU could give him an award for closing Guantanamo. Then you get a conversation. But it doesn’t really affect policy a great deal.

They made a mistake on that one. And so here they give a transparency award to the guy who was transparently the most secretive administration we have yet had. And that’s some heavy competition. He is actually using the state secrets privilege more promiscuously than even George W. Bush. He has run almost twice as many prosecutions for leaks as all previous presidents put together. And they’re boasting about it.

I’ve been announcing that for the last year or so, and people are astonished, saying “What? Really? Yes?”

It’s a small number. Five versus three for all previous presidents put together. But his new Department of Justice person, [Lisa] Monaco, who is getting hearings now to get confirmed and will be in charge of these prosecutions, she’s boasting about it. She says “we’re doing twice as many as previous presidents, look how tough we are and how determined we are when stuff leaks.” And this is the man they gave the transparency award.

I don’t really have any confidence that what he would hear from me would serve a purpose. I don’t have the clout. I don’t have a large campaign contribution, and I don’t have votes in Congress.

What do you make of our preoccupation with sex scandals? Is this some sort of distraction?

Human. Most of us are men in this room. Maybe even women download the stuff. But the gender bias isn’t downloading Anthony Weiner’s material. I don’t know if we’re interested in that or not.

Do you think it really distracts us? While we were so absorbed in the Clinton scandals, all sorts of things were just … .

Well, on the one hand, who wouldn’t rather hear about some sex scandal than something like this horrible stuff about what we’re actually doing in the world? The number of people we might kill. Or whether climate change is going to kill us all. So you can’t blame people for wanting to be distracted, I would say.

But on the other hand, you can blame people for just totally neglecting every other responsibility they have to inform the public or to discuss with each other or act as citizens.

Humans are capable of rising above this. The point being, though, that we’re so easily distracted, that nothing else is available, really. That’s not excusable.

I had a similar-type question, which is—and again it’s a little lessons learned–related—why is it so hard for people to learn or understand the connections of history—for example, our involvement with the mujahideen and that whole thing?

Here’s something I would have liked to have brought out for the American Library Association if I had had time—a piece of history that I’ll bet most people in the audience did not know. And I only knew recently. And I found one of the most shocking and unsettling revelations ever in my life. And I read it on the internet as a quote from Le Monde Diplomatique, I think it was. No, another French journal [Le Nouvel Observateur]. And earlier, then, I found I had on my shelf Gates’s memoir—his earlier memoir, before he recently became secretary of defense—both saying the same thing.

[Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski said in this French journal in 1998—you can easily find it, Brzezinski on Afghanistan, on the web, 1998—that in 1979, middle of ’79, six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he had urged President Carter to fund, through Pakistan, extreme jihadists to oppose the Marxist pro‑Soviet regime in Kabul in order to provoke Soviets into invading Afghanistan.

And then six months later—this is in the same interview—Brzezinski says on Christmas Eve, when the Soviets finally did it (and the main provocation was, by the way, Soviet fear that we would overthrow that regime in favor of a regime that would let us do covert operations into Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the other Soviet states that later became independent, that had a lot of oil) that the Soviets feared that we would use Muslim extremists, like al‑Qaeda types that were still fighting, to unsettle their own regions; and so to stop that, they would go into Afghanistan.

Now why did we want them in Afghanistan? On Christmas Eve, when they invaded, Brzezinski wrote a memo to Carter saying, “Now we have the chance to give them their Vietnam.” And so we did. 10 years later, they’d lost 13,000 men and got out.

And we had given the Afghans, by supplying [them] this entire time with money, finance, creating al‑Qaeda, foreign jihadists from all over the world we were helping fund indirectly—most of them didn’t even know the money was coming from the CIA—through Pakistan, through Saudi Arabia, into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and bleed the Soviets, we gave the Afghans their Vietnam.

They had been at peace before that. There was a lot of controversy. The regime in Kabul was very controversial. There was another Communist party, more Maoist, that was fighting the Moscow‑oriented Communist party. And there were others. There were all the people who were there. There was controversy. There was no war.

From ’79 there was a war that we had fueled for the next 10 years and then beyond that. I won’t give the rest of the history. A million people died. A million died from various causes during that war, Afghans.

Now, I, at 80, remember—let me just ask you, frankly, and don’t say it just because I know it—are you aware of what I just told you? Did you know that history?

I was more aware of the Reagan administration expanding it.

No, this is Carter.

But I didn’t realize it was Carter. No, not Carter, no.

Okay. Let me just ask: Go look at Gates’s memoir, I forget the name of it [From the Shadows]. Look up Afghanistan in the index. Look up Brzezinski on the internet, Brzezinski, Afghanistan, 1998. I think you’ll find it quoted very exactly.

And the French interviewer says, “Well, do you have any regrets now?” That was in 1998. There had already been the al‑Qaeda attacks on some of our people before 9/11. He said, “No. You’re asking me to regret? That was one of the best things we ever did. In the eyes of history, which is more important? The end of the Soviet empire or some stirred-up Muslims?” That’s three years before 9/11 and everything else, right? Brzezinski, very smart guy, not one of his smartest or best moves or assessments here altogether.

Here’s what that said to me. I remember very well when the Soviets went into Afghanistan Christmas Eve. I saw that as aggression. I was told it was aggression. But Carter, remember, said at the time … . Do you remember that? Can you remember? Nobody here remembers?

Which are you talking about?

Come on. You’re not that young.

But I remember … .

Carter canceled our participation in the [Moscow] Olympics because the Soviets had done this. And he said “I have learned more about the Soviet Union.”

Carter, you know, is in many ways one of our better presidents, looking back on it, which is better than he looked at the time; but at this point he says, “I learned more about the Soviets in the last month than in years before to see their real face.” Like the time they shot down KAL 007, that’s what Reagan said: “Now I see who they really are.”

And Carter brings back [military draft] registration, cancels the Olympics. He starts the rapid deployment force. We’ve got to protect the Persian Gulf from the Soviets, and the Indian Ocean.

I took that all for granted, and I couldn’t even understand why the CIA was doing this all as a covert operation. He’s resisting an invasion. Why don’t we do it openly? The American people would support this. I would have supported it. Why did it have to be a CIA operation?

So of course we’re totally reaping the fruits of that operation today, you know, totally. That was Pakistan. That was accepting the Pakistan nuclear program in order to funnel the money through Pakistan. It was backing the Haqqani group that we’re talking about fighting today, right now. That’s who we were backing. The Pakistanis were backing the Haqqani group and so forth. So those were blowback consequences.

But the image of what our policy was, who our allies were, who was going to discover that what the Soviets had done is what we had predicted they would do if we did the illegal things we were doing. They weren’t entirely illegal. [They were] helping, covert operations.

But we wanted that invasion. We wanted it. And we provoked it. Of course, they say nothing about what it meant for the Afghan people. Carter doesn’t. Brzezinski doesn’t. Gates doesn’t.

That meant as of this year, or last year, that we have been involved in fueling war in Afghanistan not for 10 years as we read every goddamn day, but for 30 years. And by the way, it does go back earlier because Eisenhower was involved and so forth. We weren’t fueling a war, though.

We’ve been fueling a war for nearly all of 30 years as we did in Vietnam. There would have been no war in Vietnam had we not fueled it, one side of it, with money and everything else. There would have been controversy. There would have been killings. But there would not have been a war.

And in Afghanistan, there was a small period where the Taliban were in charge where we probably weren’t the major cause of what was happening. It was a matter of a few years. But for most of 30 years we’ve been doing that. And that’s what I was saying today: I read that not only was the policy totally different from what I thought, but that it was a wicked policy. That it was a cruel, ruthless policy.

And when Brzezinski said “But it brought down the Soviet empire!” Well, that’s a good thing on the whole, that development, better for some people than for others but not a bad thing. But on the backs of a million Afghan dead? No. We didn’t have any right to do that. And it was wrong. And it’s wrong right now.

And I’m saying that when President Obama, who I voted for, and if I was in Florida or Pennsylvania or Ohio when it was a close election, I would certainly vote for him again without any question. Would I rather have McCain? Or a McCain equivalent, who now wants to go even higher? No.

But in the case of Johnson, he did have a smaller war than Goldwater would have had. He wasn’t entirely the same as Goldwater. The Vietnam War could have been worse, much worse, if we had done what the military asked us to do. We would have been at war with China. And we would have used nuclear weapons.

The antiwar movement did have an effect. And the effect was not to shorten the war very much, but the effect was to keep a lid on the war. And some people will say “Well, that kept us from winning it.” Maybe they’re right. I think they have their head up their ass. I think they’re wrong. And I’m glad we didn’t find out.

But, anyway, I’ll take responsibility for that. I did what I could to keep that war from being larger. If I’m wrong, then I’m guilty of that; that’s my responsibility. But I think the antiwar movement did accomplish that, and that was a good thing.

Right now, we still have it ahead of us to prevent not an invasion, but an air attack by Israel on Iran. We can’t prevent Israel, but [we can prevent] the U.S. from backing an air attack on Iran by Israel. If Israel is crazy enough to do that, the chance that we will stop President Obama from backing that crazy idea is as small as it could possibly be. But it’s not quite zero. Yes, we do have a monarch. And he’s close to being an absolute monarch. But he isn’t quite an absolute monarch yet. And there never were absolute monarchs; they lost their heads in the end. But we still have enough to give us some responsibility here.

It would be a disaster if we attack Iran. And we can try to build obstacles to that right now with some possibility of success.

The escalation or the continuation in Afghanistan is inexcusable, even though practically any president who would get to be nominated would be doing the same. It would be all wrong. And it’s happening right now. It’s unjustified homicide. And unjustified homicide is murder. It isn’t first-degree murder necessarily, but there are degrees of murder. And it is reckless endangerment. It’s manslaughter. Its woman-slaughter and infant-slaughter.

When people used to say to LBJ, “How many kids did you kill today?” that was regarded as inexcusable, meaning wrong. But a perfectly fair question. He was killing kids every day and he didn’t have a right to do any of that.

I’m told it’s time to wrap up. But I would like to ask you just one last question if I could. And that is, when you look back on the Pentagon Papers and you look back on your life and your activism, can you tell me why you didn’t say, as so many of us do: Let somebody else do it?

That’s a very good question, which I’ve never been asked in 40 years. Congratulations. Good question. Well, I’d certainly said that a lot—not so consciously, but in effect I had. My first leak was really in 1968.

And what caused that was seeing the example of a very, very efficacious, consequential leak by somebody else who leaked that the president had asked for 206,000 more men on top of the 550,000 that he had. And that was in March of 1968. And Congress rebelled at that news.

My book [Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers] tells what I did then. I did a number of things as a consequence of that. But I wouldn’t have done it without saying, “My God, that was the right thing to do.” That was a really very consequential thing. So I had the example.

And the second thing is, then I thought I would lose my job, my career, and probably be found out. And I wasn’t, just kind of by a bureaucratic glitch that fell through there. They were going to prosecute me, but it got aborted, and I continued to have access—another mistake. So a year and a half went by.

But meanwhile, then, I had read Martin Luther King Jr. and I had read Barbara Deming, Revolution and Equilibrium. I had read Gandhi and Thoreau, and Thoreau’s line “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

But the key thing was that I met people right before I copied the Pentagon Papers in late August of 1969 who were on their way to prison. I saw that here are people just like me—one of them, Randy Kehler, had gone to Harvard just like me, a young man then, and he was going to prison because that was the best thing he could do to protest war.

I think I may have been the only person I knew who had met a draft resister who had gone to prison. Just a different world. They didn’t interact [with us] at all.

I wonder if Obama—well, I’m sure that Obama has never sat in a room with a draft resister [or] with somebody who refused to go back to Iraq and was in prison for it, like Camilo Mejia, or Ehren Watada, who refused to go to Iraq and was then court-marshaled for it. Or I could say Jeff Patterson in the Gulf War. Matthew Hoh didn’t go to jail, but he resigned from the Foreign Service as the highest Foreign Service officer in one of the provinces in Afghanistan for all the reasons I’ve given. He had been a Marine, a company commander, earlier, in Iraq. Like me, he agreed having a Marine company is the best command, the best job you can have, perhaps in the world, almost—best job I ever had. And he loved that job.

Then he became a civilian [joining the State Department and assigned to Afghanistan] and resigned that, saying it was hopeless, it was counterproductive—what we were doing was corrupt, this and that, everything I would have said.

Matthew Hoh. He came back, ready to testify. He was offered a job by [U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl] Eikenberry, who agreed with him. Offered why? To keep his mouth shut? No. Because he’s such a good, terrific officer and person. As was Watada.

Then he comes back here and is debriefed by [special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan] Richard Holbrooke, who offers him a job in the White House. For that, he accepted. How can you refuse? And then he realized: Wait a minute, this is going to shut me up, I can’t say anything here. He resigned that after a week.

He offered to testify before Congress. He was not asked. Right now is not too late for President Obama to pull in Matthew Hoh and sit down with him, and whoever else he wants in the room, and Hoh won’t pull any punches. He’ll learn a hell of a lot, but actually he’s hearing pretty much the same from [Vice President Joe] Biden and from [National Security Assistant Tom] Donilon and everyone else. So I’m not sure it will make that much difference.

But has he actually met someone who has given up a career for this reason? Who would say to him what Hoh could say? Or what I could say—but it sounds self‑serving, but let’s say what Hoh could say—is “Mr. President, winning the next election is important for all the things you want to do: for your legislative program, for keeping out these crazy people who want the job, crazy people in Congress. It’s not some unimportant thing. But it is not the last word. It’s not a sufficient reason to kill people at a large rate. You should reconsider whether what seems self‑evident—that the only thing that matters is holding this job so you can do good things in the future at the cost of any number of lives—is not actually a justification. It’s not an adequate reason.

See also the video of this interview.

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Christine Wigfall Morris and Barbara Sorey

Pamela Goodes — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:58:10 +0000

March/April 2011

Christine Wigfall Morris, affectionately known as Miss Chris, was hired by the City of Clearwater, Florida, in July 1949 as its first African-American librarian. Prior to working for the city, she had never been inside a public library because local segregation practices did not encourage African Americans to visit one. Now at 88, she has recapped her lifelong Florida history and her 33-year career as a librarian in <em>Christine Wigfall Morris: Stories of Family, Community, and History</em> (PublishAmerica, 2010), cowritten with local author Barbara Sorey. Morris helped to spearhead the opening of the facility designated as the Negro Library in April 1950, located in a storefront. An innovator even then in terms of library services, Morris implemented a voter registration program, began a tutorial program for residents preparing for high school equivalency exams, and started a summer program for children featuring storytelling, movies, and puppet shows.

American Libraries: Why did you decide to write this book?
CHRISTINE WIGFALL MORRIS: I had so much to put into the book and not all of it is in there. I also thought that it would be nice for other people to learn about the family and its history in the community.

Was there a controversy when you were hired by Clearwater in 1949?
MORRIS: Before I was hired, Afro Americans or blacks could not go into the main library. You could take books back for some of the families, but there was no place for us to go. That was the reason why a number of concerned citizens went to the city commissioners.

What about the reaction from the staff?
MORRIS: Some liked it and some did not. They had heard so much about Afro Americans. They wanted to feel my hair to see if it was kinky. There were certain things that they had read about Afro Americans, blacks, or Negroes that wasn’t true.

What role did you play in the opening of the Negro Library in 1950?
MORRIS: I was everything: the sweeper, the keeper, the book checker, and the storyteller. And it was a joy to know that I could hold my head up and do some of these things.

How important was your role in using the library as a place for voter registration, tutoring, and summer programs?
MORRIS: It was very important because it involved the whole community. We would host festivals and involve children from other cities. My two great-nieces started the program, and it really shone the limelight on the city of Clearwater.

How do you feel about the naming of the collection in your honor?
MORRIS: I feel good about it, though several people have said that it should have been the library that was named in honor of me. But the city commissioners said that I had to be dead. It gives me more honor to see the collection than to be dead and not see the library.

What is in the collection?
MORRIS: Information about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Afro-American cookbooks, spirituals, pictures, and CDs.

What are some of your favorite sections in the book?
MORRIS: I don’t have any favorite parts; all of it is good. What really impressed me about the book was to see the pictures of my family and my high school classmates, and to know that I have served all these years under so many presidents.

What advice would you give young people of color about a career in librarianship?
MORRIS: The library gives you so many sources that you can use: books on history, English books, and children’s books. I have one young lady, now living in Illinois, who said that I was one of the people who influenced her to go into library science. She was very impressed. And I know a couple other ladies who are in library science who have said that I pushed them into that, to see what the world is all about and to meet different people.

Why should people read your book and what will they gain?
MORRIS: I’ve had good reviews. And most of the people have enjoyed the book. Some said they would have never known anything about my life, about the city of Clearwater, or about what happened some 30-odd years ago when I was in the library. The book has been reprinted for the third time.

How was it writing this book with Miss Chris?
BARBARA SOREY: It was a pleasure. I had invited Miss Chris to a women’s history program at the Dundee Library. There was a book signing for my second book Florida Girl and afterwards I said to Miss Chris, “Miss Chris, do you want me to write your story?” She said yes! And I said okay. We got started in March 2008 meeting once a week at her home and we’d record her story. We gained a new friendship. It’s like she’s my mother, and I just love her.

Tell me a little bit about you.
SOREY: I was born and raised in Clearwater. I really didn’t start writing until 1999. It’s been a long journey. I wrote and published my first book Know Where You’re Going? You Gotta Know Where You Been! which includes stories of growing up in Clearwater, basically as something for my family. I researched my second book, Florida Girl: Short Stories of Family, Community, and History, 1804–1969, by going into our main library and looking for any kind of articles on African Americans. I knew there were many outstanding African-American policemen and nurses in the community, but when I went into the Clearwater library system to look for something, there was nothing. I was floored; it’s like we were an invisible people.

It was just wonderful writing Miss Chris’s stories and finishing this book. When the Negro Library first opened, there weren’t any books. All of them had to be donated by the main library downtown and by people from the community. The same building that housed the library is still standing, but now it’s a children’s Head Start facility.

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Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez on Libraries

Pamela Goodes — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:20:12 +0000

January/February 2011

In what looks very much like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández recently visited American Library Association Headquarters in Chicago, accompanied by First Lady Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, to talk with ALA staff about libraries. Fernández spoke passionately, but pragmatically, about his plans for developing a superior public library system in the Dominican Republic, and about the First Lady’s plans to build libraries for children and teens. An avid reader who grew up in New York City and attended Harvard and the Sorbonne, Fernández is also a writer and a believer in the power of education. One of his early actions as president was to equip government offices with computers. He is equally enthusiastic about the printed word.

American Libraries: How important is the development of libraries in the Dominican Republic? PRESIDENT FERNÁNDEZ: It is very important for us personally and for the future development of the Dominican Republic. As you look around the world, you see that all great nations have great library systems. On the other hand, poor nations tend to lack a library system. So there is a correlation between economic and social development and the existence of a library system that will enable a population to read and see reading as a tool for personal growth and for national development.

It has to do with development, but also for self-fulfillment. Sometimes you just read for pleasure. But even reading for pleasure, you will develop a connection with words, and you will discover the power of words and ideas. And all this is very transformative, for the individual, the family, the community, and the whole nation. Both of us place a lot of attention, a lot of interest, on the importance of reading, the importance of books, the importance of libraries, in personal transformation and the transformation of nations across the world.

Tell us about your country’s Reading Olympics? PRESIDENT FERNÁNDEZ: This has been amazing, astonishing to see how many young students around the country participating in these Olympics are able to read, the amount of reading they can do, the time frame in which they can do it, and the comprehension skills that they develop. We have had students, for example, that in a three-month period can read over 100 books. And when you question them about the contents, they have understood very well and they can discuss and argue around each and every book. We have discovered many young, talented students around the nation, and we have awarded them with a Presidential and First Lady Recognition Award for their natural inclination toward reading and reading comprehension.

What is your personal favorite librarian or library experience that you’ve had in the states or in the Dominican Republic? PRESIDENT FERNÁNDEZ: My reading habit personally began here as a student in the United States in New York. It began at the school level, elementary school. The idea of having a library within the school and the children have to visit the school library at least once a week, you begin a reading habit there. But at the same time, I was fortunate enough to have a branch public library in my neighborhood. I used to live near 95th Street in Manhattan. We had the Bloomingdale branch within the New York Public Library system down the street, just five blocks away. After 40 years, on this trip we went back just to see exactly what had happened to this Bloomingdale branch and it was amazing to see all the children and young adults there, just as in my old times. I was lucky. I was fortunate to have access to this reading opportunity as a child and then go back to the Dominican Republic and also be part of an environment of young readers that I have always kept going on with me.

FIRST LADY FERNÁNDEZ:That’s why we want the people from our country to also have that opportunity and to have access starting when they are very little so that they develop that skill and that habit of reading every day. When I don’t read even one day, I get hungry. I need that. That’s like food for my soul. That’s what we dream that our youngsters have in our country.

How can your American counterparts help you develop what you want in the Dominican Republic? PRESIDENT FERNÁNDEZ: In many different ways. The U.S. has the best public library system in the world. You have the knowledge, the experience, and the best practices in every way: How to build collections, how to train the staff members, how to even build libraries. Everything that needs to be put in place in order to really have a system that can be effective, that can be running on a standard international recognized standard basis, you have it here in the U.S. and within the American Library Association. You have so many members affiliated with the Association who you can tap into directly. I know that they’re very open and very helpful in trying to implement all our different projects. This is the reason why we have come here to the American Library Association to establish a permanent, long-term relationship where you can make a contribution to the improvement of library services into the Dominican Republic.

I came from a low-income family, while I was living in New York or back in the Dominican Republic. It is very difficult for someone with a humble origin to aspire to become president. The only way I was able to do that is because I was able to, through books, get an education and through that have been able to communicate to people my thoughts, ideas, and dreams for a better Dominican Republic. You don’t need to have financial wealth. What you need to have is a wealth of ideas. And these ideas come from books. The transformative impact that books and reading can have on a person’s life; they can take you anywhere because through reading, your imagination can flow, your creativity will enhance; and if you’re able to put that in a practical term, from ideas into action, you will transform yourself, you can transform your nation.

FIRST LADY FERNÁNDEZ: We have to follow up and pursue our dream, which is to plant the Dominican Republic with education, with books, with the habit of reading, because that’s the only way to get what we really want and to go to the top of the mountain.

Watch the president and first lady’s full interview with Pamela A. Goodes.

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Harry Potter READs: Actor Daniel Radcliffe on Reading

Leonard Kniffel — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:41:24 +0000

November / December 2010

“Anything that gets kids into reading is fantastic,” says Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe

“Anything that gets kids into reading is fantastic,” says Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, who recently posed for an ALA Celebrity READ poster along with his Potter costars Rupert Grint and Emma Watson. ALA Graphics released the three posters just in time for the premiere of the first part of the last film in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, on November 19. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) talked to American Libraries in August, shortly after the photo shoot for the poster. Radcliffe’s upcoming roles include a film adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, a British ghost story, and a Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES: How did the READ poster photo shoot go? Librarians everywhere have been clamoring for Harry Potter posters since 2001.

DANIEL RADCLIFFE: I think it’s good we waited; my interview answers at age 11 wouldn’t have been as interesting. We shot a lot of other things at the same time, but this one was simple and only took about 15 minutes.

In your poster, you are holding Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. That’s an extremely interesting book choice, with demons, succubi, a talking cat, the interplay of good and evil, truth and lies. How did you discover it?

I’ve been obsessed with the novel ever since I read it about a year ago. I’ve always been a huge fan of Magical Realism. It’s an inspiring genre in which writers can just let their imaginations go wild and wonderful. I discovered the book through an Amazon.com recommendation. I’d just ordered Louis de Biernières’s The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, and The Master and Margarita came up as an Amazon “other readers like this book” choice. I’ve read it twice now, and I just received an English first edition (Collins and Harvill, 1967) with a beautiful cover as a birthday present. That’s the one that appears on the READ poster.

You mentioned in one of your interviews that you buy a lot of books—what are some of your favorites?

I loved Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I also liked Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Émile Zola’s Germinal, which I thought would be difficult but it read very easily. I also like classic Russian writers; I’ve read Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground. The reason that these books have become classics is that they are so readable and accessible.

Do you think Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is one of the best books in the series?

My personal favorite is the fifth, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, because it’s involved with Harry’s relationship with Sirius Black, the most interesting character in the series. But Deathly Hallows is also one of the best novels. J. K. Rowling was under intense pressure to complete the series, but she is a woman of much conviction and she wrote a final novel that was both up to her exacting standards and one that she knew would give fans the ending that they wanted.

Will these two Deathly Hallows films be the best of the Harry Potter series?

They’d better be. We need to have the series go out with a bang, in recognition of all the fans who have supported the films and books over the years.

How much of the Harry Potter character is due to J. K. Rowling’s text, and how much do you attribute to your own insights and ideas?

Most of what you need to know about Harry Potter is in the books. It would have been presumptuous of me to add things that were not already there. J. K. Rowling is not one of those authors who is constantly on the set, but she was always available to answer questions.

Besides mastering Rowling’s books, how else have you prepared for your role in the film series? Do you get ideas from other fantasy novels?

Not in other novels so much as listening to music. I find Radiohead inspirational, also Florence and the Machine, whose song “My Boy Builds Coffins” from the 2009 Lungs album is filled with melancholy and determination. And “Me Ves Y Sufres” from Hope of the States’s 2004 The Lost Riots album, with the lyrics, “It’s so desperately sad that my life has come to this / I hope there’s something better than this for me.” Harry Potter is similarly dogged by tragedy.

Have you ever dipped into books on occultism for inspiration, or books about basilisks and dragons?

No, not at all. I didn’t know there were any books on basilisks. But I did look at J. K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a companion book to the series, and Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings.

What was it like shooting scenes for the first two films in Duke Humfrey’s Library at Oxford University? Did the librarians let you look at any of the really rare books?

No. Even if they had, I doubt whether I would have appreciated them at the time. However, I’m very excited to participate in the British Library’s Adopt a Book program that supports the library’s conservation work. For my birthday, a former teacher of mine, a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, chose Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles to adopt, and we get to go on a behind-the-scenes tour of the library’s conservation lab. I’m really looking forward to it.

Librarians love Harry Potter because Rowling has created such vivid characters and a fun fictional world that encourages kids to read. I understand that many cast members were intense fans of the book. Do people tell you that the books and the films have inspired a love of reading?

Absolutely, and I am a case in point. Before I was cast in the first Harry Potter film, I didn’t read much at all. But I have grown to love reading because of the film and now I am an absolutely voracious reader, although kind of a slow one. Anything that gets kids into reading is fantastic.

Do you run into other people who say that the books and films are instruction manuals for paganism and witchcraft? How do you answer them?

I have encountered that occasionally. “Paganism” is one of those words that’s thrown around and can have some terrible connotations, and I detest the word “witchcraft.” I tell them that witchcraft is not real and that I don’t understand what they are complaining about. Harry Potter is about loyalty and friendship and duty and fighting for what’s right. I believe in people and the human spirit.

I’ve read that you have contributed to charities that have helped out with the recovery from the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Are you also involved in literacy outreach efforts or anticensorship causes?

These are absolutely the kinds of causes that I would support. Recently I have been giving to The Trevor Project, which is an around-the-clock crisis and suicide-prevention helpline for gay and lesbian youth.

The Harry Potter role has offered you a wide range of acting challenges—drama, comedy, action, maybe even a little bit of romance. What type of role do you see as your best fit at this time?

I don’t really like to think in terms of genre. If a film has a good script, with a good director and a good part, then I’d consider it. There are very few good films that fall into just one genre.

Featured

Ellen Tise on International Relations, Energizing the Profession, and Access to Knowledge

Leonard Kniffel — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:09:46 +0000

October 2010

South African librarian Ellen Tise is president of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 2009–2011. American Libraries caught up with her during the 76th IFLA World Library and Information Congress, August 10–15, in Gothenburg, Sweden, where she talked about international relations, energizing the profession, and open access to knowledge.

American Libraries: How was the IFLA conference for you?

ELLEN TISE: It’s been a wonderful, very stimulating conference. The theme for the conference, “Open Access to Knowledge,” links very much to my theme for two years as IFLA president. I’ve been inspired and stimulated by the thoughts and the ideas and all the discussions that came around this theme and how libraries need to ensure that we continue to provide the most equitable access to knowledge. We have had about 150 sessions in different languages, wonderful plenary speakers that really added value to our congress this year.

In your professional life when you’re not being president of IFLA, what do you do?

In my real life, I am senior director of library information services, basically the head of library services, at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa. I’ve been there for about four and a half years now, and for most of my career I’ve been in academic libraries. I worked for one year in a public library. But, yes, it’s still my full‑time job. The IFLA job is part-time, and that actually is the congress annually, two board meetings in The Hague (where IFLA’s headquarters is), and then of course representing IFLA at various conferences, meetings, and events in different countries throughout the year.

How has your professional agenda meshed with the mission of IFLA and your work with the federation?

My professional agenda fits very much into IFLA and IFLA’s work. For all librarians, because IFLA is basically the international organization for librarians, it’s part of our professional development. We are able to share expertise, and this is what the congress provides. So just from an advocacy point of view, IFLA is a global voice for libraries, it advocates for libraries, for the sustainability of libraries, funding for libraries. In addition, the federation sets standards for libraries, providing guidelines, supporting libraries, developing librarians and library services. We have professionals in the library information field, library information science practitioners, and we also work with all other roles that involve information work. So it’s spread really from every discipline you can think of in the world, every subject. We have law, music, IT, education, everything, all the professions in the world in IFLA.

What is IFLA doing for young librarians who might be thinking about international work?

This is perhaps one area where IFLA should actually do a lot more. Just like other professions, we find that many people are retiring, and we’re not getting enough young people into the profession. IFLA has a new professional group, and this group is specifically there for library information science students who are new to the profession to get them involved in IFLA’s work, understand how IFLA operates, and also for them to be able to explore new areas and bring innovation. If we’re going to bring in more young, new professionals, then it also means that we need to be able to communicate with them in the media that they are now used to—just like what we have to do with our users in our libraries.

The second program is called Adopt a Student. This is where we again are trying to get more students and young professionals into IFLA, get them involved. And of course because they are students and young professionals, they are not seniors, so they don’t normally have the funds to come to the IFLA Congress. That’s why it’s so important for us to use social media, so that we can also reach those thousands of young professionals and students in any part of the world so that they can participate and are able to share the experience of an IFLA congress. We need to develop more online tools, webinars, communication. As I travel to countries and I speak to young professionals and students, this is exactly what they’re saying. They would like to participate, but how do they do that? So let’s utilize technology and get them involved. They don’t have to come to an IFLA conference, but they can experience an IFLA conference and also benefit from it.

Don’t I have to work in a big association or research library or a national library and speak seven languages to get involved in IFLA?

Absolutely not. IFLA has seven official languages; it’s a multilingual organization. You are able to participate in any of the major languages in the world.

And as I’ve just indicated, it’s not just national libraries or just large metropolises, it’s all types of libraries. Young people and anybody interested in libraries, enthusiastic about library services, and who wants to get engaged and learn from librarians from all over the world and share the solidarity and compassion of libraries, if you have that, then you’ll find a way you can get involved in IFLA.

You spoke a little about your first year as IFLA president and your travel. What have you seen? What have you learned? What has really stuck with you?

It’s the vibrancy that still exists in the profession. People. The internet and the development and information technology and electronic materials—and social networking and all these new tools that you can use to find information. “Libraries are no longer relevant? Libraries not necessary? Why should we still fund libraries?” Of course some of those perceptions still exist, but to the contrary, as I go around the world, I see more and more the need for libraries. Librarians all over the world find new and innovative ways to make sure libraries remain relevant. New libraries are still being built. Of course, there are many countries that do not have libraries at all, and one of our plenary speakers here in Gothenburg showed us the statistics and the importance of the growth of the world’s population, and if the projections are true, in terms of how many people there will be on the planet earth by the year 2050, he said that we’re going to need more libraries than ever.

We need to develop librarians, give them more and more skills, and train them to work in this new environment. He said there are three things that are the most important things in the world: electricity, literacy, and libraries. If we don’t have those, if we don’t have people who can read and write, then people will not be able to develop. Wherever I go and speak to governments, they say they need libraries. People campaign for them every day in some countries. In South Africa, the country that I come from, we have school learners campaigning, and they went on a hunger strike about two weeks ago because they want to have libraries in their schools.

What are you looking forward to?

We’ve just ended our 2010 IFLA congress and we were all really inspired by what libraries do, how libraries want to ensure that everybody has access to information. We are now planning for our next year’s congress, which is going to be in Puerto Rico, which is very close to the continental United States. It’s an opportunity for many young librarians, new librarians, librarians from the region to come and share, so that we can hopefully have just as much of a quality congress as we had this year and can further support libraries and librarians in order for them to provide the best possible services that they can to the users no matter where they are in the world.

Mexican Library Association President Jesus Lau on International Engagement

Leonard Kniffel — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:24:56 +0000

A tireless crusader for international cooperation and exchange, Jesus Lau is currently serving on the Governing Board of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. At IFLA’s August conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, he talked with American Libraries about the value of his international activites, especially his ongoing involvement with the American Library Association. Lau is president of the Mexican Library Association and of the USBI VER Library at the Universidad Veracruzana in Veracruz and an advocate for the role of librarians in fostering better relations between his country and the United States. He received his library science degree from the University of Denver in Colorado and his doctorate from the University of Sheffield in England. Lau recently announced his candidacy for the presidency of IFLA.

American Libraries: Talk about your role in IFLA and how you attained it.

JESUS LAU: I’m currently a member of the Governing Board and also a member of the Executive Committee. In Gothenberg, this is my second term, which means that I’ll be playing this role for a year more. I’m in the third year right now. I have been active in IFLA for over 20 years, and I have played different roles within the sections and divisions. In the last two years, I decided to try to be a part of the board, and fortunately I was elected to it.

What have been the most important things you’ve learned from IFLA that help you to deal with librarians internationally?

Coming to IFLA is like coming to an international workshop in different subjects and in different cultures and in different languages. You meet peoples of different backgrounds that work in public libraries or school libraries or university libraries. You learn that things can be done in more than one way. I would say that coming to these conferences means getting out of your own home or your own village and seeing what others have to eat!

Why is it important for somebody from Mexico to get out of Mexico, to get out of the village?

Because you learn to do things in different ways. You learn different perspectives. When you don’t travel, you think that the things that you do may be the right ones, but when you do, you learn that things could have a different slant. For me, going abroad is like engaging in a benchmarking process, because every time I come to this conference, I see the layout of the convention center and I compare it to my own environment.

You have been a member of the American Library Association for a long time. How does that benefit you in your own setting back in Mexico?

ALA at first was the first foreign association I joined. I did my master’s degree in the U.S., so one of the things I discovered was that there was a library association, there was a big one, and it was a strong group of leaders. ALA, for me, has been the first door to go to the outside world. I remember meeting someone who was an ALA member during my student years, and this person described what our Association did at conferences . I had never been to a conference. So ALA has also been a way to meet some of the best librarians in the U.S. I have met, I would say, most of the ALA presidents, for example, just to mention a group of members, and most of them are people from whom there are lots of things to learn; there are morals to follow in the different ways that they work.

What are some of the things that ALA has done—services, products, that you have found particularly useful?

If you don’t come to the conferences, the best tools are American Libraries and the website. During my years as a member, certainly the magazine was the best tool to be in touch with ALA, because during those years I didn’t have the means to come to the conferences. Nowadays, the website plays a very important role. And there is a section that I like and I use a lot is the International Relations Office website that is part of ALA. And all the documents, all the publications that you produce are normally focused. But once you go to the conference, obviously the conference becomes the big thing, and the place is like a big supermarket where you can do almost anything and shop for ideas from different sources.

How have libraries or your colleagues in Mexico benefited from your activities?

I have been a library director for almost since graduation.I think that almost from every trip I get a new idea that I can apply to my job or to the things that I do. For example, I’m the current president of the Mexican Library Association, and I have followed some of the U.S. conference-organization projects and tried to apply them to my own smaller environment. So I have learned how to run a conference by attending conferences. And the first conference that I attended brought back, one of the American ones, I have run probably nearly 20 conferences in the country. I have been a great promoter of conferences, and the skills I have developed is because I have been in touch with this international experiences. The second thing is that I have been able to meet people who are willing to share their knowledge, their expertise. I have had several American friends come to Mexico to do a workshop, to do something for the Mexican community, a it’s a long list of benefits that I have. The third thing, and probably the most important one, is that I think I’m more open‑minded. I’m more flexible in the things that I do because I know that there are several ways to do things. My own staff has benefited from my travel because I have been able to get library changes, to get grants, to be able to publish. Because even though we’re in this high-tech communication environment, when you come to these places, when you get this face‑to‑face interaction, you get more published. You get invitations to publish. I have been able to publish in U.S. journals, in U.K.journals. I think the benefits are many. A big window in your job when you go abroad.

How has going abroad and your involvement internationally changed you personally?

I think I’m a richer person. I love to appreciate different cultures. I love to see the experience of other people. I think after doing my first trip abroad—in fact, it was to the U.S. when I went to get my master’s degree, the first plane that I took from my home state in Mexico to Denver. After that, I learned that I wanted to do more. And I think the greatest benefit is to enjoy what people think, what people do, what people eat, the music that they have. I enjoy just, you know, the international experience in the different places.

Were there any big surprises for you as you started going outside of Mexico?

There were surprises. I learned things, simple things through the complex. You know, the complex will be things related to the job, to my employment, but there are some simple things—how an escalator works, how a building came about, some elaborate buildings. To learn how to play these spaces in my own place. Especially when I began my career, I didn’t have the experience of how to build, for example, a library building. But coming to this place, I see that the Swedes do it one way and the Italians do it another way, you do it in a different way.

I think there are surprises all the time, and this is what keeps the motivation to come abroad. No matter how many times you travel to a country, there is always something to learn.

Given some of the immigration issues between the United States and Mexico, what do you think American and Mexican librarians can do to foster good relations between our two countries?

I think what we could do is to build communication bridges. I think we need to learn what we do, but especially how we do it. The more we know of the things that you do and why you do them [Inaudible] what you have. We are neighbors. We share a large border. But the language barrier is sometimes the crucial barrier, it’s a big one between our countries. Any time I have the opportunity to talk to my colleagues in Mexico, I encourage them to make the effort to come, but sometimes the language is a barrier. Not all librarians speak English. And the language is a powerful tool. It’s powerful to understand what other countries are doing. So I think that it would be difficult to summarize the actions that could be taken, but just by going to each other’s conferences, you are building bridges.

It has been quite interesting to invite, for example, ALA president‑elect, which is normally my focus when you go to ALA, to invite them to come down to Mexico. When they come, they get a real picture of what Mexico is, at least in library terms. And they normally make a good friendship with them. I know I have a link with them. Some of them have been longstanding collaboration with them. So I think that what we need to do is to learn what we do, why we do it and we could break those barriers. It is not easy.

That sounds like an invitation.

You are cordially invited to come to our Annual Conference. It is in the first week of May. We have Cinco de Mayo in Mexico. This is going to be my last conference, so it would be a great honor to have you. You have the best library magazine in the world. I enjoy it, and I put it by the side of my bed to browse it and read the news most relevant to me. But I like it because it has a broad approach, and it is always fresh. “Cool,” as the youngsters say. This is an open invitation to everyone, but especially to you because you are a communicator.