Chapter I
One imagines that one can escape a category by collapsing it, but if one tries to collapse the category, the roof falls on one's head. There a person is, then, having not escaped the category, but having only changed its architecture. Once it was a category with a roof, now it is a category in which everyone is buried in the rubble made of what once was a roof over their heads.
Anne Boyer, “Science Fiction” from Garments Against Women
“Inevitably we will omit almost everything.”
Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle
A few weeks ago, I started writing about Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, an excellent historical novel that has all the stuff: aviation, love, siblings, betrayal, queer people, adventure, queer people on adventure, bootlegging, mountains, oceans, crystal clear prose, dogs. This is what I sketched out:
The story opens with aviator Marian Graves’s final journal entry, written on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica before she departs to complete the last leg of her polar circumnavigation of the earth. The novel then leaps us back in time to when her parents first met aboard a boat destined to sink, her and her twin Jamie’s births, their rescue from that doomed ocean liner, and we rocket forward from there.
At age twelve, Marian is nearly toppled by a low-flying plane visiting her village in Montana. She determines then and there that she will be a pilot. Enthralled with reaching for infinity, Marian thinks flying will get her there. Much of the novel tracks her as she works to achieve that goal, including the costs of her family and happiness.
But Shipstead offers us time and space to luxuriate in the inner lives of many of the secondary and tertiary characters in Marian’s life, some of whom are equally embroiled in reaching for something that exceeds their grasp. Her friend Caleb, whose years exploring the upper reaches of Montana wilderness allows him to melt into and reappear across the Earth. Her navigator Eddie, whose uncanny intuition nearly brings the Earth to heel when he’s hurtling through the sky. Her brother Jamie, an artist, obsessed with capturing the curve of the Earth in his warped paintings.
I’m trying to skirt the oblique writing of book reviews that draws readers in without giving too much away. There’s too much to say about this book. It’s 650 pages of historical fiction that weave together meditations on memory, wholeness, infinity, and truth, and this is a preface to talk about that second epigraph, which whacked me across the back of my head:
“Inevitably we will omit almost everything.”
Marian writes this in her journal regarding her flight path to circumnavigate the globe via the poles. By this point in the novel, polar circumnavigation has already been accomplished; Marian is not interested in being the first. She sets out on the trip because she thinks it will bring her within reach of this tantalizing infinity. But she acknowledges that in actuality, she will only cross a thin circle of land spanning the tips of the plane’s wings. In attempting to envelope the Earth, she inevitably falls short.
Despite having written about 100,000 words in these last fifty dispatches over the last 18 months, I regret to inform you that I have inevitably omitted almost everything. By virtue of editing, and for your sake and mine, this newsletter is a highly distilled version (laughable, when you consider how long-winded these are. It could have been worse!) of what I’ve learned.
It’s not entirely my fault. Shockingly, I have not learned all there is to know. Library workers commonly grumble that “They don’t teach you this in library school.” Examples of “this” that follow: They don’t teach that much of this work lies in the drudgery of emails or the gummed-up gears of bureaucracy. They don’t teach how to tell when books are priced too high or item descriptions are too sparse. They don’t teach how to parse a job posting to figure out what an institution does (or doesn’t) want. They don’t teach the delicate ballet of donor relations. They don’t teach how to balance a budget.
On and on it goes. You might ask, “What’s the point of even going at all?” The arguments for and against the utility (and cost) of a Master of Library Science are well-trodden, but I will forgo them here for brevity’s sake.1 Dissatisfying, perhaps, to reach issue number 50, nearly three months after completing my degree, and turn to you without a concrete list of what I learned. I’m sure I could scrounge one up, but it would be a drag to write and even worse to read. I’ll admit that I learned more in my practical student employee positions than in most of my classes, the exception being my courses on rare books, which had the benefit of being similarly practical and directly related to my interests. Library school for me, then, was an opportunity to work at one of the finest special collections institutions in the country underneath full-time employees who care deeply about the education of the next generation of librarians. That’s pretty rad.
If I had to characterize my three full-time semesters, however, the first was about reference, the second about description, and the third about people. Forgive the crude summary, but asking questions, naming things, and helping people are three key functions of librarianship, so I feel like I covered solid ground during my degree.
Anyways, without transitioning into a trite high school valedictorian speech about being lifelong learners, each of these facets have thematic analogues that I would stake as the enduring takeaway from library school: how to be comfortable with curiosity, uncertainty, and incompleteness.
I titled the first issue of this newsletter “How to ask questions…on things you know nothing about.” Librarianship is an ongoing exercise of triangulating from different points of entry to get to the piece of information that we need. It helps to be interested in the world and to like learning, and it helps not to be embarrassed by that which we do not know. Our knowledge and our knowledge systems are incomplete, and a large part of these jobs—whether we acquire, describe, collect, display, teach with, refer to, or otherwise use books (and all the other stuff that lives in libraries too)—is to question the inclination to solidify either, to continually push the breadth and depth of both, knowing we will never reach a complete conclusion.
I don’t conflate comfort with complacency, however. I don’t look at that incompleteness—in our collections, historical record, naming systems, training criteria, on it goes—and say, “Well, that’s the best we can do, so we’re going to stick with it.” Comfort with incompleteness means that I’m not striving for a perfect whole. Not every collection, naming scheme, reference library, exhibition, etc. needs to have everything. Our attempts at holding everything, everywhere, all at once are futile, unless you’re Michelle Yeoh, in which case, go save the universe! Trying to organize, collect, contain it all—for any value of all—requires a degree of hubris to the point of exclusion. It doesn’t have to be profound. Sometimes this is simply practical. That’s why we have interlibrary loan.
But my learning & writing return, always, to the issue of categories and how we chafe against them, a topic that preoccupied much of my thinking in the autumn. Library school offered me the vocabulary to articulate my discomfort with the tools we use to order our world that remain exceedingly insufficient. Something must always be excluded, inevitably omitted, then obscured. And when we try otherwise? Boyer’s poem captures the seeming futility of pushing against the boundaries of categories—they don’t bend, they break.
What I learned in library school, then, was comfort with the reach exceeding my grasp.
My first pass on the Great Circle essay didn’t have enough substance to it, so I set it aside, and then a few weeks later the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope dropped (big album of the summer contender until Beyoncé’s prodigal return), and I realized that was what I was waiting for:
The whole of the universe burst into existence and expanded rapidly and infinitely, and lifeforms evolved over the course of 4.7 billion years on this hunk of earth, and then one kind of lifeform figured out the means of physics and engineering to capture a specific point in space and time and translate those images to the visible light spectrum and deliver those images to viewers worldwide so that I, Shira, could finish this essay about tugging oneself towards infinity. The purpose of the universe is to help me finish my self-imposed writing goals, actually. Could you imagine?
A lot of people have put into clearer and more succinct words how they feel about the photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. In his eleven-paragraph essay “The Universe Came to Us,” Barry Petchesky of Defector captured the majesty of space-time, idiosyncrasies of naming systems, human persistence, and the comfort of humility (seriously, please read this piece). Various Tumblr users yelled about the novelty of life—how close we are to the beginning, our lives unfolding in the milliseconds after this nuclear sneeze. Many pieces on the Webb photos have pointed out how in looking into the past, we’ve accomplished our own version of time travel.
One of my favorite posts—from elftwink on Tumblr.com (unparalleled usernames on that site)—noted that if we can see the past, “the future can see us.”2 We are alive to beings hundreds of millions of light years away from us. We are still here, we are already gone.
All of that, captured in a space the equivalent of a grain of sand held at arms length.
I love working with books because they are the closest I can get to geologic and astronomical time without doing math. Oftentimes, I wish I hadn’t been such a coward in college and that I had taken a math class, faced my fear of failing, and just gotten on with the whole kit and caboodle to study rocks and stars. The novelty of working on things that are older than I am has worn off, but the knowledge that so many things had to go right for many books to end up in my hands never does. Staring at the afterbirth of the universe multiplies that feeling by an magnitude of infinity.
When I wrote about the insufficiency of naming nearly a year ago, I argued for starting small, drawing from Linda Gregg’s poem “We Manage Most When We Manage Small.” I realize that the James Webb Space Telescope was a project 30 years and billions of dollars in the making, so it’s not exactly a casual endeavor, but these first photos captured an infinitesimal portion of the universe and still, gave us so much. Or Marian Graves’s fictional flight circumnavigating the globe, at once huge yet covering only a single strip bookended by the tips of her plane’s wings. Nothing and everything held in these gargantuan and minuscule gestures. Infinitesimal is a kind of infinity, too.
In Great Circle, Shipstead’s characters gradually realize that their attempts at depicting infinity, or flying into it, or circumnavigating it, are for naught. This realization is not a failure, however. As Petchesky writes, “We did not know things; now we know some things. There is victory in that, even when the prize is humility. In seeing and grasping our insignificance, we create meaning.” After churning through two master’s degrees in three years, I’m left with an ongoing negotiation between what I know and what could be known, and I cannot shake the nagging assurance that we built the roof in the first place. We can tear it down and try again. Who knows what we will find? That’s what Boyer doesn’t account for in her poem: In the aftermath of the collapse but before you rebuild, the gleaming moment of possibility when you climb from the rubble and suddenly see the stars.
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
This is technically newsletter No. 50. We passed week 50 a while back, but that was not issue number 50, even though I wrote myself into a corner attempting to send these out weekly. I realize the numbering has been disastrously confusing, what with the weeks and then the volumes, which goes to show: sometimes prescriptively naming something will bite you in the ass and you have to start all over.
What I read recently: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler; The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi; Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim; White Teeth by Zadie Smith; and for Bookish Book Club, The Vixen by Francise Prose (I did not like it but that’s okay).
Also, for Roxane Gay’s Book Club: Trust by Hernan Diaz (which I serendipitously read at the same time as Grandma Phyllis. It was excellent, a favorite for this year) and Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow.
And: The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. The first time I picked up this book, I didn’t finish because I felt the book deserved more attention than I could give it. The second time, my inclination was proven right, and Erdrich’s writing holds me so close that it doesn’t take much effort at all to be drawn in.
The cover image for the Carina Nebula is courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.
bird
A video of Hector the Hummingbird enjoying a meal
And a thrilling tale of rescue from my bestie Grayson:
Forgot to mention someone dumped a duckling (probably an Easter gift) in the lake my parents lived on and it wasn’t prepared to survive on its own so my dad rescued it and was able to give it to a sanctuary today. Their neighbors were paddle boarding and it had followed them home, so they gave it to my dad because they know he takes care of animals sometimes.
What delightful news. Thank you, Grayson’s dad!!
More later.
I will continue to ask myself what I learned in library school as I step away, for the first time in my life, from full-time school-based learning. I’ll return eventually, probably. In my senior year of undergrad, I won the superlative for “Most Likely to Never Leave Graduate School.”
toothpaste-footlocker (I am never leaving that website) wrote, “We are the old gods.”