Through the Prism: I Believe in Stories

We must learn to love our garbage,

how broken we all feel in our cores.

Not knowing is the practice of poets and sages.

Recognize ourselves

in the brokenness of

the characters in the stories.

You are my favorite.

A random, anonymous message from the cap of a bottle I opened the other day. Someone at work left three bottles from a four-pack out for the taking, probably because they didn't like the taste; it was chili & lime soda. I decided to try one, and found this.

Despite myself, I felt a little bit of delight. It's clearly inauthentic, a commercial, manipulative ploy meant to evoke the exact response I gave. I wanted to be cynical and disillusioned, and part of me was. But, still.

On Thanksgiving, my feed was full of people wishing everyone a happy holiday and sharing their celebrations. I chose to share one simple message:

I'm thankful for you.

I hope it was a less inauthentic manipulation than the bottle cap. In the first comment, I shared a picture of a spread from the book The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days by Kate Bowler. It was a blessing titled "for what makes us us."

Blessed are you, the strange duck.
You with the very intense hobbies.
Or the collection of movies or mugs or sneakers.
You with the hometown or home team
that makes you very, very proud.

Not everyone will get it,
but these are the things that bring you delight,
that let you swim around in the weeds
of who you are.

Blessed are you who have found your people.
The ones who understand. Or who seek to.
The ones who are up for the adventure or the hunt or the search.

Blessed are the details of your life. The specificities that make you, you.
The things you notice and the places you want to visit.
The eBay search you return to time and again.
The convention that's been on your calendar for months.
No matter how quirky or random or obscure.

You, my dear, in all your intricacies . . . are a marvel.

You are my favorite.

Facebook recently started showing me posts from the Dull Men's Club ("celebrating the ordinary"). I'm intrigued, so I decided to join. My first attempt at a post was declined, however, for violating group rule number four: Keep It Dull. Not sure of the nuance yet, but they deemed it too exciting. I'm partial to the post, though, so I'm going to share it here. Fair warning that it might not put you to sleep.

Hello. New here and working on getting a feel for things. I'll start with this introduction.

I'm a children's librarian, which means most of the reading I do is for work, books along the lines of:
The Adventures of Captain Underpants
The Toilet of Doom
Fart Quest
The Curse of the Werepenguin
Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute
My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish
Sex Is a Funny Word
Sex & Violence
How to Grow Up and Rule the World
Every once in a while, though, I take a break from that to read an adult book for myself. Titles of some of the books I've recently read for fun and excitement include:
Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark
The Good-Enough Life
Being a Human
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
Buried in the Suburbs
In Praise of Wasting Time
The Gigantic Beard that Was Evil
Thinking, Fast & Slow
The Story of My Teeth
Fifty-two, eleven, and I took this photo at my library's back parking lot on my lunch break today.

The authors of the books above, in the order they appear:
Dav Pilkey
Michael Lawrence
Aaron Reynolds
Allan Woodrow
Jarrett Krosoczka
Mo O'Hara
Cory Silverberg
Carrie Mesrobian
Scott Seegert
Cecelia Watson
Avram Alpert
Charles Foster
Elizabeth Tova Bailey
Jamie Lynn Heller
Alan Lightman
Stephen Collins
Daniel Kahneman
Valeria Luiselli

Maybe the titles sound dull, but not my presentation of them. Or maybe I'm not a good fit for the Dull Men's Club; nevertheless, I will continue to celebrate the ordinary in my particular way.

Speaking of books, I recently enjoyed The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. My review:

Beautiful.

I think the most beautiful stories are the ones that are the most honest about how broken we all feel in our cores. When we're able to be honest with ourselves. When we recognize ourselves in the brokenness of the characters in the stories. This is one such story

And Ozeki tells it marvelously. Her telling is compassionate, witty, philosophical, intimate, inventive, and authentic. The more I read, the more consumed I became and the more I loved it. Now I want to read it again.

Experience the beauty some more.

We must learn to love our garbage. To find poetry in our trash. It is the only way to love the whole world.

-----

"Vell, as I say, I am not a religious man, and in fact, I am an atheist, however when I am almost finished writing a book, in spite of myself, I often find myself praying, Please dear God do not let me die until I hef finished my book!"

I thought about what my Book would say about the ego of a writer, but I decided not to bring it up, and instead I asked him about God. "If you don't believe God is real, why would God help you? Don't you think he knows the difference between someone who really believes and someone who's just faking it?"

"God is a story," he said. "I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you vill lose yourself. . . .

"'Ze truth about stories is that is all we are.' A famous Cherokee writer named Thomas King once said this. We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too."

-----

Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides.

-----

Never be afraid of not knowing. Not knowing is the practice of poets and sages.

For context, a description of the book from Goodreads:

After the tragic death of his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house--a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.

At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world, where "things happen." He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.

And he meets his very own Book--a talking thing--who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.

I find myself suddenly wishing I was named Maya, simply because it would be fun pronouncing my name backwards.

Just a random silly thought with a library lost-and-found item to break things up before transitioning to the next topic.

I also just read The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee.

A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.

When I talk to groups of children about the library, I say something similar to McGhee's quote. You can check these books out, take them home, and use them freely because you own them. They belong to you. A library is basically a big system for sharing. Everyone adds a little bit of their money to a pool to buy all these books and other things that none of us can afford alone, and then we take turns using them. You are part of this community, so you get to take an equal turn just like everyone else.

Except, in this book, McGhee shows how subtle racism permeates U.S. policies and decisions, limiting the amount of sharing we do, thus limiting the mutual and collective benefits we each gain. In other words, because white people don't want to share with Black people, we all suffer--including white people.

With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

One of the book's early chapters is about public swimming pools. In the first half of the twentieth century, communities were all about having grand pools as resources and gathering places. Then, Jim Crow laws were overturned and they were forced to integrate their pools, to allow Black people to use them. There were protests and assaults, and white use of pools dropped dramatically. Communities stopped building new ones, and, most importantly, many existing ones were closed entirely. White citizens and leaders chose to go without pools themselves if they had to share them with Black people. They preferred to suffer than share.

McGhee spends the rest of the book showing the same dynamic at play today in a plethora of realms: economic policies, education, voting rights, housing, government regulation, union support, healthcare, criminal justice, environmental pollution, and more. Many factors impact all of these areas, but at the core of each is evidence that race has played a role in preventing wider mutual obligations and benefits as unified communities. And everyone, Black and white (and in between), suffers for it.

The antiquated belief that some groups of people are better than others distorts our politics, drains our economy, and erodes everything Americans have in common, from our schools to our air to our infrastructure. And everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told. I set out on this journey to piece together a new story of who we could be to one another, and to glimpse the new America we must create for the sum of us.

The heart of that belief is that we are playing a zero-sum game, that one group can only benefit if a different group takes an equivalent loss. That's not how things work, but it's a powerful narrative that retains control of the racial thinking that controls our policies. McGhee does a wonderful job in this book of thoughtfully exposing the narrative as false, laying the groundwork for a different narrative--like the one I tell children about their library--to replace it. It is a powerful and important book.

In 1857, a white southerner named Hinton Rowan Helper published a book called The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Helper had taken it upon himself to count how many schools, libraries, and other public institutions had been set up in free states compared to slave states. In Pennsylvania, for instance, he counted 393 public libraries; in South Carolina, just 26. In Maine, 236; in Georgia, 38. New Hampshire had 2,381 public schools; Mississippi 782. The disparity was similar everywhere he looked.

Helper was an avowed racist, and yet he railed against slavery because he saw what it was doing to his fellow white southerners. The slave economy was a system that created high concentrations of wealth, land, and political power. . . .

Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nine of the ten poorest states in the nation are in the South. So are seven of the ten states with the least educational attainment. In 2007, economist Nathan Nunn . . . made waves with a piece of research showing the reach of slavery into the modern southern economy. Nunn found that the well-known story of deprivation in the American South was not uniform and, in fact, followed a historical logic: counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000. . . .

He made it clear, however, that it wasn't just the Black inhabitants who were faring worse today; it was the white families in the counties, too. When slavery was abolished, Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today. These deficits limit economic mobility for all residents, not just the descendants of enslaved people.

Everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told.

Speaking of the story I tell kids about the library, I recently wrote this article for my library system's intranet.

Building Community One Step at a Time

Not long ago my son, a fourth grader, had his first ever Mathletics competition. A neighboring school was hosting us and and one other. I was able to get away from work to join him and his mom for the event.

We took a couple of steps into the school's cafeteria and tried to get our bearings amidst the buzz of activity: long tables filling most of the space, chairs around the perimeter, students, teachers, and parents everywhere. As we looked for our teacher and team, I noticed a large number of students waving in our direction. I assumed they were waving at my son, but he didn’t recognize them. I turned and looked behind me, then finally clued in that they were waving at me. Smiling, I waved back. As we walked past their tables to our spot, they all called out, “Hi, [Degolar]!” A few even ran closer to greet me.

Why were students from a random school excited to see me at my son’s event? That’s a story that involves many people and pieces. If the children know my name and face, it’s due to a network of connections involving a large team working to build community.

Educators from our county’s Department of Health and Environment (DHE) have organized a group of local organizations to make the neighborhood around my library more walkable to build connections and a sense of community. A placemaking initiative. You can read more about their impetus at the county’s Community Health Assessment website, including:

Everyone needs real, human connection, from the teenaged social media maven to the elderly shut-in. People with strong social support are more resilient to trauma and the onset of mental illness, and have enhanced immune function in addition to being less vulnerable to early death. . . .

Municipalities can build environments where connection is natural and easy. Spaces designed to encourage interaction are often denser and pedestrian-friendly, with green or open spaces that act as natural gathering places. Think of Downtown [City] or the [City] City Center. Have you found a bench and enjoyed these connected public spaces? Chatted with others as you listened to the band at the Farmer's Market or sat by an outdoor fire pit outside the Library?

The gatherings they have initiated have included representatives from the library, the schools, the city’s parks and traffic departments, Walk & Ride, and others. Much of the discussion has focused on ways to create more natural, accessible walking routes to connect public spaces like libraries, parks, and schools. The work is being supported by placemaking grants from the state.

One idea that emerged from the meetings was schools taking walking field trips to the library. Three elementary schools are within manageable walking distance of my library, and all three contacted us last spring. Two had groups visit at the end of the school year. The Mathletics host has been having grade levels visit this fall, one each week: sixth, fifth, fourth, and third.

Our branch has coordinated a team to host each visit, as the schools generally bring 50-60 students at a time. We customize from a general template of:

Whole-group welcome and orientation;
Divide into groups for rotations through tours of the building and other discussions or activities;
Finish with time to check out.

We usually divide into three groups to make tours more manageable, which means three staff directly involved and many others indirectly. Depending on the age of the students and the desires of the school, break-out topics might include homework help and resources, booktalks, a storytime, finding different subjects and genres with the catalog, and similar.

One thing I’ve worked hard on for my twenty odd years as a librarian has been how to talk to kids about the library. How to tell a compelling story about just what a library is in terms that are meaningful to them. I tell a version of the same story to each group of children I talk to. It’s an interactive story that depends on their participation, so it’s a bit different each time; it’s, as much as possible, a conversation. It goes, in brief, something like this.

I start by asking them what a library is and field the variety of answers that pop up, elaborating as makes sense, giving us a general picture. Then I ask them who owns the library, which person or people the library belongs to. This is a longer, more tentative process that I sometimes have to prompt and guide until we get to: “The Library belongs all the people who live in our County. You live in our County, so the library belongs to you. You own the library.” I’ll hand a random student a random book. “This is your book. You own it. So you can take it home and read it.” Then I take it back and give it to someone else. “It also belongs to you.” Repeat. “And you.” Repeat. “And that’s what a library is. A community of people all buying a bunch of things together to share and take turns using. It’s the books and DVDs and computers and eLibrary—Information and Stories in all forms and formats—and it is buildings and spaces—that chair belongs to you, by the way, just like this room we’re in—and it is a system and people to help you keep your resources organized and share them well. Which also means, by the way, that you’re my boss. I work for you, and it’s my job to help you make use of your library.”

That leaves out the details and elaboration and interaction, but that’s the general idea, and I’ve found that kids usually find it a meaningful conversation. It leaves them feeling empowered and excited to engage with their library.

The morning of the Mathletics competition, I’d had that conversation with the school's fourth graders, so while I was initially surprised to see them waving and greeting me by name, I shouldn’t have been. I was the face of the new connection they felt to a part of their community they’d just experienced by taking a short walk through their neighborhood.

That happened to be my night to work, so I had to leave the event early to get back for my desk shift at the library. I hadn’t been there long when one of the students who’d crossed the school cafeteria to greet me walked past the desk and said, "Hello, again. We got first place." He was one of the 5th graders who had visited the week prior—one of the 21 library card applications those 50 students had brought to school so we could create unverified accounts for them before their visit—back with his mom to verify his card so he could check out some more. He’s one of many we’ve seen return to do so.

Addendum: During the third grade visit, the final one, one of the teachers told us that some of the sixth graders have formed an unofficial after-school club that comes and hangs out at the library every day now.

Building a web of mutuality.

Blessed are the details of your life. The specificities that make you, you.

How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes

Bias occurs in many algorithms and AI systems — from sexist and racist search results to facial recognition systems that perform worse on Black faces. Generative AI systems are no different. In an analysis of more than 5,000 AI images, Bloomberg found that images associated with higher-paying job titles featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most professional roles were male-dominated.

A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too. . . .

“An Indian person” is almost always an old man with a beard.

“A Mexican person” is usually a man in a sombrero.

Most of New Delhi’s streets are polluted and littered.

In Indonesia, food is served almost exclusively on banana leaves. . . .

Other country-specific searches also appeared to skew toward uniformity. . . .

Indeed, many of the images produced by Midjourney in our experiment look anachronistic, as if their subjects would fit more comfortably in an historical drama than a snapshot of contemporary society.

“It’s kind of making your whole culture like just a cartoon,” Claudia Del Pozo, a consultant at Mexico-based think tank C Minds, and founder and director of the Eon Institute, told Rest of World.

For the “American person” prompt, national identity appeared to be overwhelmingly portrayed by the presence of U.S. flags. All 100 images created for the prompt featured a flag, whereas none of the queries for the other nationalities came up with any flags at all. . . .

Across almost all countries, there was a clear gender bias in Midjourney’s results, with the majority of images returned for the “person” prompt depicting men.

We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.

A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.

Attitudes on an Interconnected World

How close do people feel to others around the world? How much do they want their countries involved in international affairs? How do people’s experiences with travel and feelings of international connectedness relate to their views about the world?

These are among the questions we explored in a recent 24-nation survey. We found that while most respondents feel close to people in their countries and their local communities, they are more divided over how close they feel to others across the globe.

A median of 50% say they feel very or somewhat close to people all over the world, while 46% feel not too or not at all close. Feeling close to others around the world is more common in Europe than in other regions. Only 35% express this view in the United States, and it is even less common in Argentina, Indonesia and Israel.

When it comes to engagement and cooperation with other nations, views differ significantly among the nations we polled, but a median of 55% want to pay less attention to problems in other countries and concentrate on problems at home; 43% think it’s best for the future of their country to be active in world affairs. . . .

In many nations, people on the ideological left are particularly inclined to say their country should be active in world affairs. Those on the left also tend to believe their country should consider the interests of other nations even if it means making compromises.

This ideological gap is largest in the United States, where it has increased substantially over the past few years. Since 2019, about two-thirds of American liberals have consistently said they favor taking an active role in world affairs. But the share of conservatives who hold this view has declined significantly, and it has also declined among those who describe themselves as moderates.

With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

A poem.

Mark Jarman

ALMOST

Almost grasped what Grandmother Grace knew
Last Sunday sitting in church, almost knew
What Alexander Campbell grasped when, confronted
With the desolate orphan, he told her, “You
Are a child of God. Go claim your inheritance.”
Almost got it. There it was in the sunlight,
Squared in the clear glass windows, on the durable leaves
Of the magnolia outside. Almost grasped the weather
That turns clear and crystallized in Hans Küng’s brain.
Almost held it in the ellipses and measure
Of my almost understanding. I see the moment
There in my notebook, then the next day’s anxiety
Spilling like something wet across the ink.
I almost put in my hand a vast acceptance
And almost blessed myself, then it slipped away.
All that colossal animal vivacity—smoke
Of the distant horizon, most of it, haze.
But to have known in any place or time
What they knew is worth a record, a few notes.
Almost knew what they knew. Almost got it.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006