No Shushing!

One secret I only infrequently reveal about my past life is that I used to perform with an international folkdance group. Several, in fact. And I went to dance workshops with a renowned Polish dance teacher, who would frequently cry out, "NO SHUSHING!" meaning, "Don't drag your feet!" But that's not the kind of shushing I'm writing about today. It's the other kind, the kind depicted in the cartoon below.
As a graduate student in Library and Information Studies, I have suddenly found my inbox filled everyday with notices from my department: job notices, house sitting opportunities, announcements of lectures and social events, kittens free to a good home, piano for sale -- U-haul ... this could really become my life, if only I didn't have a pretty full life already. I delete the bulk of it.

Today I got a link to an archived, out-of-print publication from 1972, called Revolting Librarians. It's an entire book of essays and poetry about librarianship, available online. I'm going to have to read it in stages as I find reading from the computer screen arduous, but I read this essay by Arthur Plotnik, and found it quite enjoyable. (How could I not enjoy the sentence, "Has any non-librarian ever portrayed us in any way except with that goddamn finger vibrating like an oboe reed in the force of an enormous SHHHHH?") The essay has to do with silence in libraries and the bold step that Mr. Plotnik took when he published a neon pink sign -- a special pull-out feature in the Wilson Library Bulletin -- with the subversive words "No Silence." The sign came with a note printed on the back:

A CHALLENGE TO BRAVE LIBRARIANS
Printed on the reverse is a sign of the times. Librarians with the courage to hang it in their library will be those who know that, to the new generation, silence is no longer golden. At least not when information and communication are wanted. Of course, a library can be both a place of reflective, inner solitude, and of overt, human and electronic communication, although not usually at the same time and place. To a few youngsters, the sign may be no more than an invitation to raise hell. That's the risk. But think of this: perhaps nothing has ever hurt the image of librarianship and libraries so badly as those grim signs demanding SILENCE. Who's willing to start making amends?

I was interested in Mr. Plotkin's musings on the nature of silence. It seems to me that there is dead silence and then there's living silence. As a Quaker, I practice silent worship, and I can tell you that that silence is anything but dead. Sometimes it positively hums with energy. And the silence in the wee hours of morning, when I get up before anyone else, holds the promise of all the daytime sounds into which it will wake -- the birds stirring, the cicadas, the occasional car going by in the dark. It is my favorite time of day.

But I know the dead silence too. Sadly, that's the current state of affairs in my school's library, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I worry that some school district mucky-muck will come to visit and decide to axe our full-time librarian because of it.

Oh, I realize I'm rambling here. It's late Friday afternoon and my brain is a little fried at the end of a teaching week that saw me receive 4 new kindergartners in one day! I'll draw this post to a close with a silly story. My eldest daughter liked to visit my classroom on her days off from high school. One day she was there when I was lining up my students to go somewhere. They were particularly boisterous. (Walking in quiet lines is not my natural m.o. I sometimes think that while the words "Quiet line please!" are coming out of my mouth, there is a little invisible demon sitting on my shoulder saying, "It's OK, kids. She went to an alternative hippy dippy high school in the seventies, and she doesn't really mean it." Guess who the kids listen to.)

So I was becoming slightly exasperated, and I said in my best voice of authority, "All I want to hear right now is the sound of silence!" I looked up and caught my daughter's eye, just as she was opening her mouth to break into that maudlin, sappy Simon & Garfunkel song. (We read each other's minds.) "DON'T EVEN THINK OF IT!" I think I said.

Anyway, good weekend to everyone.