I went to the library yesterday, and it got me thinking: A good thing, and just what libraries ought to do best. As usual my thoughts flew around like squirrels, darting in and out of the half-cracked dormers of my drafty attic brain, always within sight of a roosting place but never quite grabbing the confidence to settle down and stop moving. (Someday I’ll nab of few of the little devils, pin their tails to a ceiling beam and have a close, hard, look at them in the glare of an overhead bulb. The little bastards.) After my trip to the library, I had cause—I thought—to stop in a bookstore. That got me thinking too, and wouldn’t you know it with some of the same damned squirrels.
It has become de rigeur for writers today to bemoan the death of independents bookstores, or, more recently and perversely, any “brick-and-mortar” bookstores, even giant chains like Borders that were perceived as soulless, bad-guy Goliaths scarcely more than a decade ago but mourned now in their messy demise. Breasts are beaten principally, though, over the demise of the “indies” and all they once offered. What is being bemoaned, in many cases, is not the disappearance of the stores themselves (for like anything else they ran, and run, the wide gamut of bemoanability) but the alternative ascendancy of amazon.com—not of all online retailers, mind you, but specifically and spitefully of Jeff Bezos’ Kudzu Frankenstein Emporium, which has come to embody for many the demise not only of Ma & Pa commerce but of writing, reading, reasoned discussion, informed criticism and ultimately of culture itself.
I’m not completely onboard the Mopey Train on this one. I get an itch to read some pretty weird stuff from time to time, by “weird” meaning far from the mainstream books I would find at any walk-in (as opposed to log-in) purveyor of pages between covers. I’m delighted when some tome I need (yes, need, hush) can be located online, from The Lazy A or elsewhere, and purchased without the necessity of donning trousers. Sure, I love the idea of hanging out in bookstores; browsing and chatting and all that, and I hold a special soul-place for certain modest book shops I’ve haunted over the years. But it’s not as though all or even most of the indie bookstores (at least in Seattle) these days are venues you’d choose first either for small talk or, frankly, shelf-surfing. Too often they are stubborn, fusty dioramas of the past rather than living stages for the future of the palpably written word—a role they must either embrace or die not trying, though I’m as baffled as the next guy about how they might accomplish this. Inevitably they are owned, or at least run, by a man or woman of a certain age plus ten with solidly gray hair, pallid cheeks and a coffee-stained cardigan. Entry into their domain rings an overhead bell, which rouses them from their half-slumber just long enough to present you with a withering glance before the door has shut behind you. You’re only here to browse, says the look;you’ll wander down the aisles pulling books down and putting them back in the wrong spaces, you won’t pet my cat and you won’t buy a thing. If you venture a cheery “good morning!” the response (if any) is halting and weak, less out of unfriendliness than uncertainty, as it likely has been days since they’ve had a customer, and they are ill-used to the forgotten back-and-forth of social discourse. As you move down the closest aisle, already planning your exit, you feel their eyes bore into your back, hostility bubbling back up through their salutatory awkwardness, magnified by their wire rimmed glasses and finding a raw, tender spot in the center of your guilt: Even you find something you want—you can almost hear the venom in their thoughts—you’ll go home and buy it on Amazon…
(The proliferation of “smart phones” has been a particular cruel development for these stubborn survivors of the Very Old Ways. Imagine watching a putative customer, though in truth simply a passer-through, perusing a special find on the back corner table—then whipping out his phone and with a quick thumb tango online locating and purchasing it—from someone else. Happens all the time. If you see the proprietor reach beneath the counter, make your way back out to the street. These are desperate times.)
Now, I loves me a fusty diorama like a fat boy loves his pie. Shoot, my entire physical universe increasingly is, in effect, a diorama of times and places past. And I’ve never been guilty—yet—of on-site browse-and-buy. (I’ve at least had the decency to take my treachery back out to the street.) I attempt, as frequently as I can manage the time and the scratch, to make real-life purchases from the shocked and sweatered sales folk of the indie domain, keenly aware each time that such purchases increasingly resemble, say, a two-hour trip to the forest to cut one’s own Christmas tree: a nod to the needs and customs of another age, but by no means the most practical (or economic) way to get the tree (or books) I want. Usually I’m not even buying anything for which I have any particular jones; I’m just trying to tinkle the bell on their under-used cash register, if only to mark for an instant the granting somewhere of another pair of angel wings. I have no delusions about keeping the poor places in business. I’ll drop by in a few weeks and the store will be a nail salon, an espresso bar or a tattoo parlor—or more likely just another boarded-up brick-and-mortar anachronism on a street of cracked sidewalks and “for lease” signs. (Soon such streets will be fusty dioramas themselves, of the yesteryear we call today. Field-trip kids will pass them in museums: Abandoned “shopping” district, circa 2010-2020.They’ll feel sort of sorry for us, but their teacher will remind them that we were brave and clever and didn’t know any better.)
My bookstore trip yesterday was not to an indie, but to one of the “big box” survivors; a Barnes & Noble in the downtown core. I was making a last minute gift purchase of a book published too recently to have trickled its way down to the second-hand shops, and I wanted it even sooner than an online retailer could get it to me without paying extra for quick shipping. As I wandered the aisles on both floors of the store, hoping to squeeze a little random browsing fun out of my errand, I took note of a reality that caught me a wee bit off-guard: the place was dead. Not dying but dead; the cornerstone of one of the newest shopping malls in the center of our busy city, a building barely a decade old, and yet its flagship bookstore has become already an empty, sad anachronism. It remains for the moment a few cobwebs shy of fusty, but it’s unquestionably as lifeless as a pot roast. Many shelves are empty, and those that bear books display only a handful of titles, though in multiple copies, placed cover-forward to maximize their visibility and make the aisles seem a tad less lonesome. Nearly all of the prime display areas, by the door and check-out and along the widest thoroughfares, are occupied not by reading matter but by gewgaws: arty bookmarks, blank journals, gag gifts, pricey pens, funny postcards and so on. There are information kiosks in each department, all advertising prominently the store’s proprietary e-book reader, which has a cutesy name I never can remember, and an actual specimen of which I have never seen outside of these displays themselves. None of the kiosks were staffed. I tried a self-help computer search station on the main floor. It didn’t work. I looked around for help. Even the cash registers were abandoned. I felt a chill. A young security guard, bored and ineffectively officious, stood on a raised landing by the door, yawning as he surveyed the emptiness below him. Our eyes met. He smiled weakly and shrugged; a flicker of befuddled commiseration in his eyes. I could imagine his thoughts, uninformed by any fleshed-out memory of what a viable “bookstore” might once have resembled.Why would anyone steal this shit? What the hell is that guy looking for? Ultimately I didn’t find what I was after. I came home and ordered it from Amazon. I paid extra for shipping.
But back to the library, which had been my first stop of the morning. My goals there were simple: I just needed a place to read, work and wait for the nice folks at the dealership to do a brake job on my car. I didn’t really need a library; I just wanted wireless access, relative quiet and the possibility of nearby coffee should the need arise. I took a chance that the main branch downtown would be open. Its hours have been shortened considerably due to budget cuts n the past few years, and too often I’ve made the trek only to find it shut randomly for a week, an austere omen of darker days to come, surely. I was in luck yesterday. The building not only was open, it was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it. A good thing, surely? I took a look around.
The Seattle Central Library made something of a splash when it opened seven years ago. Designed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. It is a bona fide eye-popper, no doubt about it. Have you ever played the game “Tangents?” It involves the arrangement of simple geometric cut out cards into not-so-simple, quirky little pictograms, speed-matched against an opponent with a different handful of shapes and a different image to represent. Got it? Okay, now imagine the Tangent pieces, which are mostly triangles of various proportions, made 3-D, turned to glass and stacked more or less randomly between two busy streets in a southerly block of Seattle’s downtown business district, and you’ve got the general idea. The building, all strange angles and overhangs, is said to soar, squat, dominate, ruin, enhance, destroy, beautify and/or disgrace its surroundings, depending on one’s architectural aesthetic. Inside, elevators, stairs and escalators are meant to swoop one up, down and around eleven well-lit stories, with all manner of post-modern nooks and vantages intended, somewhat desperately it seems, to distinguish this library from its ho-hum siblings and cousins, with their drab Carnegie facades and old-school functionality. There’s no stodgy gravitas at all about Koolhaas’s design—it is aggressively, ostentatiously futuristic, the sort of building that would make a splash anywhere, yet fit in nowhere. (It projects an unfortunate aesthetic similarity to Paul Allen’s EMP—i.e. “Experience Music Project”—edifice a mile to the north; a patchwork, shapeless trauma of a building, supposedly inspired by an imagined electric guitar being melted in a blast furnace, or something—in any event it’s a butt-ugly eyesore a few tacos short of being quirkily beloved by the gaze-averting masses.)
I remember the buzz when the Central Library opened its doors. The New York Times ran a big piece on it. Local newspapers (Seattle still had two back then) covered its inaugural festivities with a zealous passion more suited to British tabloids at a royal wedding. I’m too crowd-averse to have attended the ribbon cutting itself, but I was on hand for its second day in business; one of ten thousand wide-eyed gawkers taking in its oddities inside and out, distinguished from my co-gawkers only by the fact that I was casing the joint not as a tourist or proud booster, but as a patron, wondering how the building would serve not just as a photo-op, but as an actual working resource and repository.
It’s old news now, but still unfortunate: the Koolhaas masterpiece may be a cool building, but it fails utterly as a library. It’s been widely rumored in the years since the building opened that its interior layout and workings were conceived of by a distant committee of people who never actually had ever been in, let alone used, a public library. Their notions of practicality and performance, like those of most school administrators and members of Congress, were based entirely on theory; the “wouldn’t it be cool if?” approach to spending public funds. Compounding the tragedy, the interior construction was wildly misconceived, using materials for the walls and floors particularly that became grossly filthy within the first few days of use and apparently cannot be cleaned. Once inside it is nearly impossible to find one’s way around, no matter how often one has been there. Signage is all but nonexistent, and often wrong. Elevators lead up but not down. Staircases are narrow, uncomfortable, hot and seem to be back-ways that ought to be reserved for maintenance crews or fire escapes, but often offer the only passages between floors. The classic Central Library experience is that of locating, after an hour of hunting, the section or shelf one hopes might offer whatever one is looking for, only to realize (often with a sob of despair—you hear them at times) that it’s on the other side of a glass wall of no apparent purpose, or down a half-level, or both, that there is no apparent way to get there and that there is no one to ask for assistance. (Budget cuts, again.) Curiously, the color scheme was designed by a sadist. No other explanation could account for the garish, painful, soul-sucking hues that assault one at every turn. (Another nod to the EMP here—though at least it’s shiny.) On most floors the shelves are as under-stocked as a 7-Eleven after a looting spree. It’s not a happy place.
Then why all the people? I glanced around the first floor for a place to sit. Nothing. Same with the second. Tables full, chairs occupied. Who were they? More importantly, what were they reading? I took a closer look. They weren’t, of course. There were a few students with their books spread out in an area reserved for same, but none of them appeared actually to be doing anything they couldn’t do more easily and comfortably at home—texting, chatting, sleeping and staring into space. The main reading room, replete with torturously uncomfortable chairs set at socially awkward angles in an open, drafty, inhospitable space, was occupied by adults. Few of them were reading either, though a couple had opened newspapers on their laps before dozing off. Indeed, sleeping was the most common activity here—subtly and not so subtly, the almost exclusively male congregation was for the most part copping some serious Zs beneath the Koolhaas glass ceiling.
I ascended a floor to a room with black walls, floors and ceilings, and row upon row of long tables with computer stations. They all were occupied, and the presence of a couple of dozen folks sharing small benches and milling around suggested that the wait list for them was long and time limits strictly imposed. Another couple of ascents, by stairs this time, took me to the conceptual edge’s of the library’s offerings—journals and newspapers, microfilm, technical books and reference volumes. Tables here, devoid of computers, were not fully occupied, nor were they completely empty. The folks here resembled those on the main floor, with the added bonus of having the tables on which to rest their heads. A couple of fellows had plugged laptops into the abundant outlets around the perimeter. (Both sat snoring in front of blank screens.) An elderly woman was slumped in her seat in a crooked corner, snarling at no one in particular in a harsh, vindictive language I’d never heard before. A pudgy city cop roamed the aisles, head swiveling, dark glasses tipped back on his freckled head, on the hunt for somebody specific. I hoped that he wouldn’t find him, at least not at the moment. I lucked upon an empty perch at a bank of windows overlooking the old Federal Courthouse across the street, and there I spent my morning.
(Once, many years ago, I climbed a tree adjacent to that selfsame courthouse minutes after its doors were locked on a Thursday afternoon, to pound on a window and get the attention of a janitor, whom I begged in impromptu but apparently effective sign-language to come downstairs and let me in so that I might further talk my way past the weary court clerks on the fourth floor and persuade them to accept some legal papers I was carrying and stamp them as received that calendar day, their filing deadline. I needn’t add that this was long before 9/11. I was a young paralegal, and took pride in my short-lived ability to outwork the system. These days I’d file the damned things online.)
The Library’s ground floor looked about the same on my way out as it had shortly after opening, though a touch more animated, though. Guys were talking, laughing and exchanging greetings across the room. Regulars. I too was a library regular once, at a much younger age, in a small town in central Ohio. (Our library sat on the same Main Street block as little frame house with a historic marker commemorating the birth of the American Prohibition movement. One filters one’s influences even at a tender age.) I read a lot, sure, but also I just liked to be there. Tucked into in an overstuffed chair next to the newspaper rack with its polished wooden bars, in view of the two-ton dictionary on its heavy oak stand, listening to the whispers and stifled giggles of high school kids working on papers at the tables near the door—all of it made me feel a way I didn’t feel anywhere else, and rarely have since. A good way, to be sure. It had something to do with potential, with possibility, and with the deep, healing comfort that can come only thought the magical Vulcan mind-meld of holding someone else’s thoughts, bound in one’s hands. As a middle-schooler, inclined to domestic moping and without a pack of friends to be off busy with, I came to think of our little backwater library as a place made just for me. Someday I hope I find another somewhat like it. It won’t be Seattle Central, certainly—it offers far too precious and strained an environment, made not for people but for photo albums and municipal booster brochures; a place where design lords it over function and damns the consequences. I’m sure Mr. Koolhaas counts it as an achievement—it figures prominently in his digital P.R.—but I’d bet my lunch money he wouldn’t opt to spend time there.
Yet as I stood on the ground floor watching the lunch-time fellows yuk it up, I felt my disdain slacken some. My cranky personal nostalgia for a well-lit spot with a comfy chair and a Big Thick Book About Anything didn’t play any part in the Kolhaas design, nor ought it have. The empty, soaring floors above me; the grand efforts to downplay the “content”(all those pesky pages) in favor of the “experience” (the wacky geometry, the ooh and ah views, the torturous chairs) nothing here ever was meant to meet my vision. The Library’s users here today have different needs—for the ground floor men it’s a warm place on a cold day, a cool place on a hot one. For the students it’s neutral ground, for they can and will be about their business in the same way no matter what the setting. For the folks upstairs, the black room with its rows of flickering terminals is a vital resource indeed, and not nearly large enough to accommodate them. (Expect renovations soon.) I suppose even the poor soul on the lam with the cop on his heels found the place useful too. I wonder if he’d managed to slip away.
And the unreachable aisles, the staircase to nowhere, the off-and-on hours, the unattended help desks, the bare, aching shelves? They’re exactly what I imagine Koolhaas had secretly in mind: a museum. A fusty diorama, if you will. A nod to a diminishing, stone-dead past, very much like the bookstore to which I’d soon make my lazy way down the bustle of 5th Avenue. (I bet the security guard on the B&N landing wishes he had someone to chase around the aisles, to relieve his tedium) That doesn’t mean that the building is a failure, not by a long shot. The practical purposes of the megalomaniacal fantasy around me are being met just fine, thank you, regardless of any designer’s intent: It’s become a place to chat, to read some email, maybe snag a macchiato. It’s an awfully grand and spendy setting for such tasks, but hey, it’s what we’ve got for now until a new aesthetic wrecking ball comes along, maybe even in my lifetime. For though it’s only a seven-year-old this year, our grand Central Library has become already principally a place of memory: untidy, dusty, and a little shabby in spots, as memory, after all, is wont to be.
