Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.

I think you’re more an archivist than a librarian,” he said. He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They’re pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful. ”They like everything,” he said, “gum wrappers as much as books.” He said this with a hint of disdain. ”Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists,” he said, “they’re too crazy to throw anything out.” ”You’re right,” I said. ”I’m more of an archivist.” ”And I’m more of a librarian,” he said. ”Can we still be friends?

I flipped to the author’s photo in the Library of America edition of O’Connor’s collected works, and forked it over. Solitary examined the photo. “Okay,” she said, handing it back, “I’ll read it.” What in Flannery O’Connor’s countenance met with Solitary’s approval? “I dunno,” she said. “She looks kind of busted up, y’know? She ain’t too pretty. I trust her.

All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.

Pimps make the best librarians. Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto con men. Gangsters, gunrunners, bank robbers- adept at crowd control, at collaborating with a small staff, at planning with deliberation and executing with contained fury- all possess the librarian's basic skill set.

Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.

Fuck it, I thought. As Don Rumsfeld once said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.

He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They're pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful.

For days I kept imagining the fate of the world's misplaced letters. I started noticing them everywhere. All the right letters sitting on desks and dressers, slipped into purses, abandoned in email Draft folders, forever sealed and unsent. Shredded. Forgotten, sometimes intentionally. And the wrong letters, placed in someone else's hands - which, once delivered, may never be taken back. Emailed and immediately regretted.

His elegant librarianship ... made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes - to which I was often drawn - but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time.

Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I'd emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident.

The space itself - its piles of papers representing decades of tangled history - reminded me of all that I didn't know and couldn't know. This itself is part of the wisdom of archives. By creating a finite space, where some things are included, some omitted, an archive challenges you to examine its dusty spaces, but more importantly, to search for what has been entirely left out.

An officer on an elevator in the Tower once told me he was proud of his job keeping bad guys out of society. "Someone's gotta do it, right?" - but that didn't stop him from going to church every week, for almost twenty years now, and confessing to what he called "the sin of locking a human being in a cage.

But the library was different: it was a place, a dynamic social setting where groups gathered, where people were put into relation with others. A space an individual could physically explore on his own.

I remember he once told me that he wore the cap of whatever baseball team was currently the World Series champion. This was a man intent on partaking of greatness.

His elegant librarianship, his hands deliberating over each title, the gentle way he dusted and kept notes and piles, the care with which he arranged the shelves, his silence, made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes—to which I was often drawn—but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time.

Elia often used the phrase “doing time.” I saw what he meant by it. Time in prison isn’t celebrated, commemorated, or even lived in, but something done with your hands, a repetitive chore, like doing laundry or shelving books. There’s a difference between being in prison and doing time. Elia was, I now saw, making masterful work of that task.

For some reason, I took this to mean he had a lot of law work to do. But, of course, out came the manuscript. I should have guessed: His main occupation was not his legal defense but his narrative defense.

The story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt is probably not factual. But it is factual that my family has been telling this story, in this way, forever.

Now he had my attention. After everything that had happened in his life, the abuse and the nasty crimes, perpetrated by and against him, the years hustling on the street, the homelessness, the lifetime in prison, it all came down to a simple thing: a good review.

Even though he’d committed some scumbag crimes, I wished him the best. In fact, I wished him the best precisely because he had done those things. He needed it more than most.

It became immediately evident that there would be a topless prison inmate, who bore a slight resemblance to Monica Lewinsky, slut-dancing in my library.

He had no use for guns—these were for people who didn’t know how to use words. Or, to quote him, “I don’t need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.

but that didn’t stop him from going to church every week, for almost twenty years now, kneeling and confessing to what he called “the sin of locking a human being in a cage.

In his eagerness to advance onto this new path, he was training himself to cook by simply pairing words. From his reading, he knew that the words balsamic vinegar went with the word asparagus even though he had never tasted either. He knew that rosemary went with chicken and with lemon, even though he confessed that he wouldn’t recognize rosemary if he fell into a bush of it.

Though, from my perspective, it was almost cheating to teach a guy whose idea of a love poem was “I wanna make love to you nice in your heart.” Nearly any string of vowels and consonants would sing compared to that.

Should the natural right to achieve our full amphibious potential be granted only to the rich, or should all people be able to afford a pool of water at a reasonable rate, with the option of paying on layaway (and no interest for thirteen months)? Isn’t this the point of America?