In the Library

But the certainty that everything has already been written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.

—from the “Library of Babel”

As all libraries should have, our library has a wonderful and spacious center aisle, at the entrance to which a giddy patron can see the many shelves unfold in delectable succession, the space between them paradoxically shrinking in vision and remaining the same in reality, the simple repetition suggesting unending, “perhaps an infinite,” unfolding. As there should be, in this center aisle are tables with built-in lamps, tables of the sort that only exist in the center aisleways of libraries, tables of the sort we are adamant must be in libraries (which in turn should be like our homes in plush comfort but unlike our homes in that grandeur and columnar permanency should be the dominating aesthetic). Borges’ lamps were “spherical fruits”; our library’s, however, are sturdy, mushroom-shaped things sprouting at the tables’ twenty-five yard-lines. They are large and globular, as they ought to be. And so as to avoid poking holes in the illusion, the cords to these lamps are hidden somewhere below. The translucent caps of the lamp-mushrooms are plastic, and this is less good (for the library is a place of wood and glass) but considering the height and motor control of the children who swarm on this campus in June and July for advanced summer school programs, it’s forgivable. The lamps are rarely on, because the library is almost always lit with the invisible brilliance of New Mexico’s incessant sunniness, and this is also less good, because one must cloud the day in one’s head before a lamplit library session commences. The antithesis of the library is good weather.

            The tables themselves are, in relation to the aisle, perpendicularly oriented. Borges’ library had no aisles, only radially organized hexagons; librarial orientation I, however, have no opinion on, except that open floor should be minimized to what is necessary for an imposing foyer and, beyond that, just walkways and space enough to scoot back one’s chair. The tables in our library are set like bricks across the gap between stacks so that awed seventh graders in search of comics and depressed ninth graders in search of some optional but not optional Timothy Egan book must veer slightly to the right or left as they pass the tables, moving closer to the stacks, which in themselves tend to work like walls extraterrestrial, glowing with unseen energy, attracting some people (these kids put their fingers on books spines) and repulsing others (these kids stand at the end of a shelf and, bent slightly at the waist, peer into the narrow hallway between stacks like they’re looking into a cave they’re being forced to enter).

            I am a tickler of spines. But I don’t just love being between stacks, I even like lingering at their ends, noting their Dewey addresses, wondering at the families housed in these high rises. As I imagine many others do, I love to walk up and down the center aisle, veering toward the right or left, noting what colors and shapes and titles catch my eye before disappearing. It’s like walking through a suburban neighborhood at night. I am too old to play the games that I play in the library, but sometimes I catch myself thinking that the book that drew my advancing peripheral sight was somehow fated to do so. I usually leave it there, though, defying such futures.

            Recently I veered and saw something worthy of legitimate pause. It was at about knee-height, and stood between a tattered volume from the beginning of last century, dust-jacketless and faded blue, and a glossy-wrapped brick of a book with HEMINGWAY on its spine. The book I noticed most distinctly, however, was a thin book, and shorter than its two neighbors, its glossy cardboard spine still perfectly unbent at all corners. When I got closer I saw the three books more clearly: on the left was The Question of Henry James, Dewey Decimal call number 818.46 DUP, an anthology of criticism published in 1945. On the right was By-line: Ernest Hemingway, 818.5 HEM, a 1967 anthology of the man’s journalism. In between was the oddball: Grumpy Cat, 818.54 GRU, a 2013 book that contains jokes and anti-inspirational posters all centered around the strange internet personality Grumpy Cat, who is a real cat with an unfortunate face that makes him look disgruntled always. He’s the Garfield of the internet generation. 

            I extracted him. Henry James slumped to the right and rested on Hemingway’s immovable shoulder, an intimacy I’m sure had long predated Grumpy Cat’s meddling in perhaps the only locale in the Dewey Decimal system that permits such an illicit union between these two men, especially with James on the left.

            I gave the two their privacy and examined Grumpy Cat: A Grumpy Book, thinking I’d discover what about it might justify its shelving between two predators like James and Hemingway. On its cover the internet-proliferated personality stared out at me. I remembered, then, some of his jokes, which I’d seen before in those short, desultory walks through the urban blight of Google images. I remembered that Grumpy Cat is kind of funny. James and Hemingway, I know, never would have paid attention to something so base, and for a moment I just stand there with Grumpy Cat and feel the pull: as an English teacher and writer, I should do my duty and hide the book somewhere, check it out and never return it, misshelve it egregiously in the back of the library. But as a member of whatever generation birthed this sort of gelatinous humor, I sort of like Grumpy Cat, and I also know that I cannot defeat him, even if I do hide him behind the whoever was the 19^th Century’s Timothy Egan.

            I turned the book over. Ah. I’d only seen part of the call number. It was actually 818.5402: the 402 in the decimal had been around the bend of the book’s thin spine. I looked at James and Hemingway. They were just plain 818.5s (Here’s the Dewey Decimal flow-chart for the irrationally interested: Literature [800’s] > American And Canadian [810’s] > Authors, American and American Miscellany [818] > 20th Century [.5]). Same nationality, different species. But the numbers seemed to suggest that we weren’t far off from GC’s home—I thought maybe to the right of Hemingway somewhere was its numerical spot. I imagined a scenario in which an infinitely jointed eighth grader in a too-big t-shirt had come for GC and then misplaced him after the ten minutes it took to read his book. I then wondered why such a book would even exist, one that could be consumed in ten minutes. Perhaps the simple and everlasting pressure to monetize things was the reason someone made a book out of insipid things found for free on the internet.

I traced the shelves and found that even the next shelf down, all 818.52’s (> Before 1945 [.02]) The shelf below was the stack’s bottom shelf, containing Lionel Trilling and the dustier, shadowy parts of Gertrude Stein, and a book of Ed Abbey’s postcards. There were 818.54’s there (.54 = 20^th Century>After 1945). But even the just-.54’s were not Grumpy’s home. I followed the trail to the top of the next stack. A Capote Reader, then a book by Mary Oliver, no, no...

 

            In the middle of the top shelf, however, I reached an unmistakable ridge. The land beyond it was radically different than what I’d climbed through to get there. My old nemesis, Dave Barry, stood there on the ridge, telling jokes to himself and rocking back and forth. Not Dave Barry. Give me Louis Anderson, Tim Allen, any other unfunny comic! I was exposed to Barry early and often in a 90’s sitcom based on one of his books. The show was called Dave’s World and I knew for sure that it was boring and unfunny even when I was nine and totally indiscriminate (I wouldn’t miss an episode of “Family Matters” or “Boy Meets World”). All of Barry’s writing has, for me, forever been tainted with that show’s dusty, forced humor, a precursor to Everybody Loves Raymond and modeled undoubtedly on The Cosby Show (the sets in all three shows are nearly identical) but without believable acting or notable characters, and gripping the low-budget coattails of Home Improvement. When I discovered later that he was foremost a writer and not a creator of awful TV, I impudently applied the latter characteristic to the former. When I saw his syndicated stuff in papers, I skipped over it for the same reason I’d skip over Andy Rooney or the pastor’s message in the weekly church bulletin: this is for old people.

            Barry was just six thin volumes to the right of a book by Vonnegut in this particular bibliothecal landscape. In between the two men were oddities. There was an outrageously oversized but thin book called Orangutan Tongs by Jon Agee, author of “wordplay books.” Next to it, a pocket-sized book of daily meditations derived from the weird bestseller Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, which was a sort of self-help/novel hybrid that suggested to 1970’s America that maybe your reality is just an illusion you create (!!!) (and subsequently created a reality in which forty years later a friendly college student in one of my freshman writing courses gave it [the novel, not the book of meditations] to me to read, I think because he thought I smoked pot a lot). Anyways, then Dave Barry.

            Agee’s orangutan begins the .5402 (20^th Century> After 1945 > ???), but Barry’s territory in that continent is downright Russian in size: Dave Barry Turns 40, Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys. Despite Barry’s appearance I feel encouraged, for I can sense that I am nearing Grumpy’s hometurf, which is guarded by gatekeepers like Barry. We pass Bill Cosby, who is very busy and who doesn’t notice us, and then Ellen Degeneres of 1995, who on the back of her My Point...And I Did Have One is sort of curled into a sad fetal position, head bowed and face hidden in a way that perhaps is too easy to interpret as fear in the years prior to her 1997 Oprah-assisted coming out. Then a brand spanking new edition of The Complete Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids, then a 1993 book called Whad’ya Knowledge, which is a compendium of (very, very) slightly funny facts that one of the back-cover blurbs calls “Sort of Garrison Keillor-meets-Groucho Marx.” They’re referring to Feldman, the author of this book, and who Wikipedia tells me is a relatively well-known radio personality that dispenses something like “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” (which I listen to occasionally [WWDTM, not Feldman] and which I find interesting only because it’s not at all funny, though it is clever at times) but with far less syndication. Why Feldman is important is because of .5402 FEL. Next to him is .5402 HAL (Quickie Comebacks). Here are Grumpy Cat’s two neighbors.

When I part them, they don’t seem upset. Nobody moves. I slide Grumpy Cat back in to his place.

As all librarians should be, the librarians at our library are nice, and what I like most about them is their sense of humor about books. They like reading primarily; analysis is something that happens once the books leave their sonorous domain.

            This, too, is why I like our librarians: when I approach the front desk and ask to see the Dewey Decimal classification manual, they stare for a moment, then smile just barely, then say, “You mean...” as they walk over to the special librarian shelves where glossy Dewey Decimal volumes stand proudly.

            “Yes!” I said too enthusiastically, not two minutes after rehoming Grumpy Cat. I walked around the desk. I had not yet explained my purpose. The lady that normally does the nonfiction decimaling was clearly nervous—she thought I was there to check her work. Students streamed in and out of the library’s airlock, but all librarians turned to the librarian-shelves behind the desk. I pulled down a volume.

            It’s important to know that I am not a librarian. As an English teacher and writer, I inhabit an intensely curated book-world. If an English teacher is anything, he is curator; if the writer is anything, he is hoping to draw the curator’s eye and avoid his scythe. The English teacher/writer is a particularly painful combination: for curation is both highly necessary, as one does not write in order to be another voice crying in the wilderness or to even be a mediocre voice crying in the wilderness, but so, too, is curation highly personal, as one does not write in order to be culled. Thus, the English teacher/writer is not democratic, nor is he populist. He is elitist, totally unpredictable, multicultural only for the sake of legitimacy. He is viciously dismissive of literary mediocrity; he considers mediocre the lion’s share of books written by folks plenty more intelligent and talented than he. Naturally, being so paradoxical exhausts him, I mean, me, mostly because yeah yeah yeah the canon isn’t representative and all that stuff, but more so because while we teachers bicker over whether or not Huck Finn should still be taught, there are hundreds of thousands of books being published like donuts emerging from a machine, glossy, identical. The English teacher/writer cannot focus on this department meeting conversation on Huck Finn for long; he wonders if he’s the only one who notices that the meeting room is slowly filling with books; he sees the department chair’s furrowed brow being consumed by a cloud of hardbacks. A couple other colleagues, ET/W’s themselves, notice it, too, and they’re leaning back in their chairs, trying to keep their noses in free air. They look to the others like they don’t care.

            All that to say that the reason I like librarians is because they long ago saw the rising waters. Librarians dance in the cascade of publication; they splash around and grab books by the handfuls, read pages here and there, wonder gleefully at such abundance. Every English teacher and every writer needs a librarian counterpart, otherwise (I can already tell) we will be consumed by calcification or bitterness, or both.

            But let’s not deny that, when all kenneled in a library, there’s something attractive about the ocean of books, the depths dredged in the human intellect by five hundred something years of mass-producing our findings. What’s down there—I mean down below the top layer of bestsellers and classics, down in the black places into which Grumpy Cat’s form, even now, is being slowly absorbed, ink in ink—is no canon, really. What’s down there is chaos, hundreds of thousands of books published yearly in the US alone, read by a hundred folks, a thousands, and immediately forgotten by as many. The library must somehow house all of these unwanted ones (for who would write if they knew their progeny, as disposable as it may be, would just be disposed of?). In the chaos, there is Dewey. His acolytes are collating and organizing in the abysmal darkness like happy worker crabs who know or care nothing about merit or genius but everything about categories and sub-categories and sub-sub-categories…

            I brought Dewey’s book to a nearby librarian table. I found the place in the book.

            I spent some minutes untangling the lists of numbers and decimals. From what I could tell from such a cursory examination, Dewey Decimal had no explanation in the most recent manual for what exactly the .0002 is that’s added on to Grumpy Cat’s call number to make it Dewetically distinct from the book of Ed Abbey’s postcards.

            “Huh,” I said emphatically. The librarians leaned in.

            I then told the librarians the brief story of James, Hemingway, and Grumpy Cat: A Grumpy Book. The nonfiction decimaling lady smiled just a little, then smiled much bigger when she realized we were talking about a book of stupid cat jokes. I told them how GC was caught interfering with James’ and Hemingway’s amorous rites, though I didn’t say amorous rites because I am not among English teachers or English teacher/writers. Regardless, I saw that I had something of co-conspiritors in these women, these ladies of the chest-high check-out counters, these commanders of the demagnification machine. I was glad to be among them at that moment, for I don’t know that others would have been able to even feign interest in Dewey’s mysterious number-language and Grumpy Cat’s place in it. (An English teacher would have lamented GC’s presence in a temple so sacred. They’d say something like Isn’t the fact that Grumpy Cat is misshelved depressing enough in that it implies use? A writer would have sighed and said How can you compete with Grumpy Cat? And all of this is depressing and totally besides the point in a library.) Librarians, our librarians, said things like, “I sort of like Grumpy Cat,” and “What does that .0002 mean at the end of the call number?” and “Dewey would do that!” and a few good-natured Oh-my-goshes. One librarian joined my hovering above the prostrate Dewey manual. Another joked that Dewey would have liked Grumpy Cat (this is brilliantly and probably unintentionally true, because Dewey spent a good amount of his waking life pitching a system of simplified English spelling to an uninterested public: Melvil Dui was his appellative simplification [don’t think too much about the different i sounds]; Grumpy Cat’s name wouldn’t have changed a bit in such a system). A third librarian floated to a computer to see the other books with the same four-decimal call number. The nonfiction decimally librarian stood with the same book open that she had opened when I first said something about Dewey. Even she was smiling.

            “Spongebob!” the librarian at the computer blurted. “I Can Haz Cheeseburgers!” She was smiling. She had somehow brought up all .5402 endings, which apparently were tagged onto other call numbers throughout the library. Though they share the .5402, I assumed that since Spongebob was not real and Grumpy Cat was, Grumpy belonged four to the right of Dave Barry, and Spongebob in an entirely different librarical hemisphere. I drew near to the monitor and noticed that Spongebob (Classroom Crack-ups) had the same exact call number as Grumpy Cat. I Can Haz Cheezburgers—more cats and more Dui simplification—goes there, too. Fiction, non-fiction—jokes, apparently, were genre-defying.

            I closed the Dewey book, shaking my head slowly, warmly. That Dui. He’s always doing stuff like this. We stood behind the tall counters and commiserated on the kind of fun insanity of Dewey, the difficulty of a joke’s genre, the fact that GC and Spongebob are just a couple books over from Ellen Degeneres, who I don’t think knows a thing about all this. We smiled and said thanks to one another for the little detour. One librarian was still looking at I Can Haz Cheezburgers on the screen.

            I began my walk back down the center aisle to my place at the tables in the stream. Rarely, I thought, was the lightless worker-crab part of a librarian’s job an intellectual topic. I congratulated myself on this indirect gratitude (By cracking the Dewey book, I have won their hearts!), and on my restraint, because even more rarely than Dewey-Manual-perusing is the occasion in which an English teacher does not comment on the relative worth of Grumpy Cat.

            Back toward my mushroomed table I strolled, eager again to be amid books, thinking I might could maybe perhaps write something witty about how short the Dewetic distance is between our canon and its chaff, feeling the prickly pleasure that an English teacher/writer feels when an idea hits him in a moment where there were no teacher-duties to be done, in an hour when the coffee hasn’t been burned off completely, in a place that has windows and other writers standing all around but making no eye contact, smashed as their faces were into the cover of their western neighbor’s jacket.

            As I walked down the center aisle I passed a pair of junior girls. One was thumbing her phone, the other was sitting with her legs splayed out. This girl was also holding her shirt up, like an elderly man on a front porch, to expose what I suppose was an overheated midriff. I frowned a bit, averted my eyes. This was a double downer: an English teacher does not like midriffs, and a writer does not like pop stars in his sanctum. Another kid—this one younger, knobbier than the girls, more fully covered by his clothing—walked down the center aisle in my direction, his arms wrapped around a stack of manga comics. A couple others—highschoolers—walked more quickly behind him, they had their phones out and their backpacks on, and, without even looking up, they parted around the manga-kid like unseen river fish around unseeing ankles.

            I reached my table-island. My eyes wandered back to the strange stacks where Grumpy Cat now slept. Dave Barry’s books were just visible on the top shelf of the 818.5402s. They hollered at me in 1990’s block letters.

            I returned my gaze to center. The aisle ended in the portion of the library unlit by electric light, but filled with white glow of indirect sun. In the very back: silhouettes of studying students at tables like mine, mushrooms unlit.

Pay no attention to the midriffs, the manga, the memes, oh English teacher/writer! You are surely nobler than these!

            Something in my peripheral vision suggested itself. I moved my eyes left, to the stack directly across the aisle from the one I’d just perused. I saw, on the left side of the aisle, just beyond my table, BARRY painted on spines there.

            I got up quickly and confronted them.

            I saw immediately that they were, according to the call numbers, correctly shelved. This was not eight eighteen point five four oh two but eight fourteen point five four oh two. Barry had, it seemed, had established a transoceanic colony here on the other side of the aisle. Here such colonial presence seemed even more grating.

            Because moving left from Barry: two James Baldwin volumes, then books of essays by Bakers (Nicholson and Russell), then the same by Maya Angelou. Further beyond her were folks like Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow, and the shelf ended with John D’Agata, whose name is on an anthology of not-boring essays about how, ultimately, boring essays are boring.

            In the shelf above: solid Emerson and Thoreau (they are 814.4’s [the .4 denoting nineteenth century]).

             To the right of Barry: Wendell Berry, then a cowboy author named Baxter Black, then the end of the shelf.

            In the shelf below were the likes of Didion, Dillard, Doctorow, Gretel Ehrlich, Ian Frazier. William Gass for God’s sake (which copy I’d squirreled in my office for months last year). This shelf ended with a book of essays by William Gibson of the Neuromancer I’d worshiped it in college.

            That Barry was there, in 814 (just: “American essays in English”) as opposed to quarantined in the 818 (“American miscellany”)—there, touching (undoubtedly without his permission) James Baldwin and officed on the floor just above Didion and Dillard and somehow at rest on a roost just below Emerson’s clawfeet—all of this was unsettling, not only because I held in my dark English teacher heart an admittedly unexamined belief that humor writing seems somehow out of place in Dewey’s otherwise stunning 800s, which is a fat-volumed, low-altitude range titled “Literature (Belles-lettres) and rhetoric” on Dewey’s topographic maps. It’s true, I had a hard time granting to Dave Barry is from Mars and Venus proximity to such a pinnacle as Nicholson Baker, whose U and I (813.54—fiction, Dewey? it’s nonfiction! What sort? Memoir? Sort of, not really. Analysis? In a way. Essays? Not at all. Travel? If you count from the living room to the study. Miscellany? Well, yes...but God, no! I’ll take fiction over Miscellany! Alright Dui, fikshun it is!) stunned me so thoroughly with its excellence that I wanted, standing there in front of his essays, to call him personally and apologize for Dave Barry.

            Yes, yes, this was all fodder for that intelligent essay I was thinking I’d write while simultaneously losing the window to write it in. Nevertheless I’d write it and publish it and anthologize it someday, another of the prudent little academic badges an English teacher/writer needed to be promoted out of full-time teaching and into a Jamesian/Hemingwayish/Bakerian life of Belles-lettres. The essay would question the librarians’ radical democratic worker-crab method that allows Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits to be separated from Baldwin by less than a fifty-book wall. It would also praise librarians for their bravery. The essay would recommend that there should be some in-cabin ding or a lighted symbol installed on each socialistic shelf to indicate that you are now descending from the canon.

            I returned to the table and began to write that essay, even, lingering on lamp shapes and the adjectival forms of library. I worked up a sufficiently intellectual, English-teacher huffiness about Barry, and I believed it would suffice for the English teacher/writer’s needs. This was not as it should be!

            I lost steam, quickly, though. I felt tired. An E T/W is always a little tired. As an English teacher I was easily riled by Barry, but as a writer he was something entirely different, indeed. Dewey was right: I had as much right to be mad at Barry as at Grumpy Cat.

            But such radical democracy was too much. I left the library.

           

I came back the next day, put my stuff on the same table, and returned to stand in front of the same shelves, Emerson above, Barry below. I knew it wasn’t the democracy that had scared me off. I found the place, the lack of a gap that had weighed in my consciousness since I’d walked out the day before. No, it wasn’t Barry that had been the problem at all. Or rather, he only made the problem worse. The trouble was on the next shelf down.

            On the left of it, E.L. Doctorow. (This was a bad sign.) On the right, though, was Dunn. (Not Donne—oh, hope!) I pulled Dunn out from his anonymous place between Doctorow and Ehrlich. (It will be beneficial to have faceless and fameless Dunn on my right shoulder, I thought, shielding me from venerable Ehrlich). Dunn’s book was black, and its cover had an unremarkable abstract painting of cubes. Its title—Riffs & Reciprocities—was clearly too alliterative to be canon, I thought, and the font looked like Times New Roman that’d been simply squeezed from the sides. Bad typesetting, anonymous author that’s not Donne, chintzy title. Yes, hope!

            I opened the book. Norton published it. Something thipped against the inside of my sternum, but recovered, thinking perhaps this is Norton’s off-Broadway sort of line, like Nordstrom Rack or something.

            I flipped to the back.

            This (I read) was Stephen Dunn’s tenth volume. He’d won the Academy Award in Literature and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

             I stepped backward and sat down quickly at the table. The horror, here, was that everything in the library was exactly as it should be.

  

Ben Dolan, a guest writer on Talented Reader, teaches high school literature and writes essays. His writing has appeared at EssayDaily.org and Massachusetts Review. Another essay is forthcoming at Diagram in November.