[MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: In college, Jeff Elias and I both saw this open call for an audition of a production of The Trial. He had auditioned for something. I had never auditioned for anything in my life. He said we should go and do that. Jeff ended up not going for whatever reason. So I was just there by myself. They had brought in a Polish director to specifically direct this production. And one of the University of Tennessee drama teachers was supervising the auditions. And the director pulled people randomly, like, "OK you do the scene". And it was the scene where they come in to Joseph K's room and grab him and take him take him away. And he's lying in bed when you walk in. And the Polish director said I want to try something, how about when you go in you both climb into bed with him. Me and this other person that I don't know had our scripts and we lie down in bed with Joseph K and read our lines. It was very bad. He said thank you very much. And he looked at me and said, I appreciate you coming down but your performance it lacked something. And he turned to the University of Tennessee drama teacher said, it lacked something. And she said, basic acting mechanics. But thank you for coming. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library, rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. And I can see Wendy's house from here. It's not her house, it's her office. Each week on Lost in the Stacks we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it. AMEET DOSHI: That's right, Charlie. Our show today is called The Unbearable Uncertainty of Classics. It was inspired by an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, called Goodnight Nobody, which explained why the children's book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown was not on the list of the top 10 books checked out from the New York Public Library in its 125 year history. CHARLIE BENNETT: I mean there's so much information in what you just said. It's like Good Night Mush all over again. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yeah can you unpack that show description or at least say it again, a little bit slower, Ameet? AMEET DOSHI: Yes I realize there was a lot there. OK you do it with me though. The New York Public Library was founded in 1895 And for their 125th anniversary last year they published a top 10 list. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Meaning, the 10 books that had been checked out the most from the library. And 5 of the 10 were for children. AMEET DOSHI: And you can probably guess at least two of those kids books. They're all classics, The Snowy Day, The Cat In The Hat, Where The Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Many people were surprised that the book Goodnight Moon wasn't on the list. FRED RASCOE: Because it feels like a classic, right? And it's older than all those other kids books on the list. So how did it lose a spot? AMEET DOSHI: Well so many people asked those questions, in fact, the library had to explain. And the reason the book wasn't on the list is because the library did not have a copy of Goodnight Moon until 1972, 25 years after its publication. CHARLIE BENNETT: And doesn't that reason need its own reason? FRED RASCOE: The explanation for that bizarre absence raises a few questions about how libraries and citizen archivists are part of how classics become classics. WENDY HAGENMAIER: For this show we're going to dig into those questions using three examples of classic books or authors that seem inevitable in their importance, but had unbearably uncertain beginnings. CHARLIE BENNETT: And those are Goodnight Moon, Franz Kafka, and Emily Dickinson. AMEET DOSHI: Our songs today remind us of those uncertain classics. Songs about moonlight about bugs and guilt and about liberating solitude. But to start the show we have a song about the true nature of classics. You just don't know what will survive generations or why. There's no telling what will be a classic until it happens. This is "Ain't No Telling" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, right here on Lost in the Stacks. FRED RASCOE: Yes. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: You just heard Ain't No Telling by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called The Unbearable Uncertainty of Classics. We're going to talk a bit about how libraries and citizen archivists influence the public's understanding, or awareness, of literature. CHARLIE BENNETT: The seed of this show is last year's revelation about how the New York Public Library handled the now classic children's book Goodnight Moon when it was published in 1947. WENDY HAGENMAIER: You got a little riled up about it didn't you? CHARLIE BENNETT: I sure did. I felt my foundations shake a bit. And whenever that happens, I want to shake our audiences foundations a bit too. FRED RASCOE: Do your worst then, Charlie. CHARLIE BENNETT: I always do, Fred. I am but a naive and sentimental book lover. I understand that sometimes the public doesn't quite get a work when it arrives. But I hate to think that a classic can be created or suppressed by one person with an agenda. But that's what happens. Check this out. Anne Carroll Moore was the children's librarian at the New York Public Library for a long time. In the early 1900s, she was a great advocate for children's literature. She basically invented what we think of, when we think of the children's section in libraries. She made the children's library in the New York Public Library amazing. Full of toys and bright stimulus and a ledger, where the kids wrote that they were checking out the books. She was amazing. In 1947 Margaret Wise Brown wrote Goodnight Moon. And Anne Carroll Moore hated Goodnight Moon. She had an extreme dislike for the Bank Street style of writing for children. That was a particular school about education with a progressive psychologically complex intention with their children's literature. So Anne Carroll Moore refused to buy Goodnight Moon. And that's all it took. One person saying, not suggested for purchase by the librarian. New York Public Library didn't have a copy of Goodnight Moon until 1972. I've read Goodnight Moon so many times I memorized it. I can recite it to babies if necessary. I recited it to Ameet's kid in the studio. New York, I think, set the tone for libraries and even book audiences in America for a good chunk of time back when it was the publishing center. Goodnight Moon only sold 6,000 copies when it came out. It's now sold 48 million or more. Full disclosure, 99% Invisible, the podcast, has thoroughly explored this story. And so have several other publications. You can find more about this story than what I'm just saying here. But now that I've told you, the Lost In Stacks crew, how one person decided that a book that is now immensely influential wasn't worth even buying a single copy. What do we take from this? FRED RASCOE: This made me think of my experience being taken to a public library as a child. My mom was very anti- being told what to read. And was not the kind of mom that picked, Oh you've got to read this classic. You've got to read this. I'll get this one, I'll read it to you. She's just took me into the library and, go get some books. And I would go get whatever. Now if I asked something like, where are the dinosaur books, she would help me find them. But my experience was just go in pick out books that you like. She'd read them to me. But, don't listen to anybody telling you what to read. Go and pick your own books. Now I will say that in later years, as an elementary school student, the librarians at elementary school would recommend things. They would read a chapter of a Beverly Cleary book and they'd say, You know, there's more books by Beverly Cleary. And it kind of blew my mind Oh they can recommend things that I would like to read. But mostly I kind of kept that ingrained, just pick out what you want to read and don't worry about what other people recommend. CHARLIE BENNETT: And are you are you happy with that state of affairs Fred? Do you feel good about having that be your core value when it comes to finding books? FRED RASCOE: I'm not naive enough to think that I'm totally picking books on my own because the library still has to select the books. I still go into a library and pick a hard copy book to read. And I take it from the new bookshelf and somebody picked out that book. And somebody picked it for a reason. Probably because it was from a large publisher or because it's sold well, something like that. CHARLIE BENNETT: So there you go. Even in this library collection there still was that choice. We could let Fred loose on a pile of books. Say, just pick the one that looks good to you. But that pile of books was decided before you got there. Poor Little Fred. No chance for Goodnight Moon if it's not in the collection. FRED RASCOE: I was never read Goodnight Moon as a kid. CHARLIE BENNETT: Come on over. I'll do it for you. It'll be nice. AMEET DOSHI: It's also seems like-- I guess taking a more adult-reading look at this gatekeeper question. I read almost entirely using e-books and the app, the Libby app, through my public library. Just a great user experience. But it's possible to recommend titles to your librarian. And there is a bit of the infinite scroll to the e-book browsing experience even within libraries. Which seems to circumvent some of the gatekeeper, for better or worse, the gatekeeper function of what library collections have been doing for much, much of our history. And, on balance, I would rather have that freedom to at least recommend a title. Although I will say the few times that I've done it with my public library there's this strange interaction where they're trying to suggest other avenues. Like, well we don't have that in electronic form but perhaps a print version would be appealing to you. Or you can try using inter-library loan and it's because the e-book vendors are fleecing the libraries. As is no secret, with some of these titles. But in terms of user experience. I'm a big fan of the e-book infinite browse. CHARLIE BENNETT: But it has to be in e-book form for you to be able to find it. And that's another layer of choices, right? Another layer of someone making decisions. We have already run out of almost all of our time of this segment. Wendy I bet you haven't read Good Night Moon as many times as we have. But do you have any final thoughts on this before we go? WENDY HAGENMAIER: This story kind of makes me grateful for the internet. That's sort of a simplistic statement but at least there's more influencers now, maybe, than the one at the NYPL only. Maybe. I mean, pros and cons right? But, yeah, maybe there's something to like about this day and age with the internet. AMEET DOSHI: Bah humbug. [LAUGHTER] This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more library talk and internet connectivity after our music set. FRED RASCOE: File this set under PZ eight point three dot b eight one five. [MUSIC PLAYING] WENDY HAGENMAIER: You just heard "In the Still of The Night" by the Five Satins. And before that, "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" by Billie Holiday. Those were songs about moonlight. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: This has Lost In The Stacks. And today's show is called The Unbearable Uncertainty of Classics. About how libraries and citizen archivists influence the public's understanding or awareness of literature. We just talked about the New York Public Library and Goodnight Moon. In this segment let's talk about Franz Kafka. Kind of a jump. AMEET DOSHI: He's a writer who has his own adjective "Kafkaesque" and whose influence is still noted 100 years after his death. But in his lifetime he was what we would call a "minor writer" with less than 20 stories and two collections of his writings published. What happened after Kafka died in 1924? And how did we get "Kafkaesque?" FRED RASCOE: Because one of his friends refused to let him stay minor. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Max Brod, a writer, editor and literary influencer took all the fragments and drafts that Kafka asked him to destroy and started publishing them whenever he could. And he wrote articles and books about Kafka. In the 44 years he lived past Kafka he created a field of study by relentlessly promoting the work of his dead friend who had written to him, CHARLIE BENNETT: Dearest Max, my last request. Everything I leave behind me in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people's, sketches, and so on is to be burned unread and to the last page. As well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people from whom you are to beg them, in my name, letters which are not handed over to you should at least be faithfully burned by those who have them. Yours, Franz Kafka. FRED RASCOE: Well that didn't happen. And now, if you wish, you can read Franz Kafka's diaries from 1910 to 1923, along with a whole book of his letters to Milena Jesenska, or any of the other four volumes of just his letters to particular people. How do we feel about this, gang? CHARLIE BENNETT: He really wasn't interested in his own staying power as a literary figure. But Max Brod was. And in the words of Milan Kundera, Max Brod invented Kafka-ology by writing not only books about Kafka's literary sense and what the stories were about. He even wrote Kafka into his own novels. Max Brod did as a character named "Garta" or "Gerta" "Saint Gerta." He invented an idea of Kafka to keep him going despite Kafka wishing that everything had just gone up in smoke. FRED RASCOE: Interesting. I've never read a Brod novel. CHARLIE BENNETT: I only know about Max Brod because I read Milan Kundera. And he is very mad at the unfaithfulness of Max Brod. AMEET DOSHI: You know in Wayne's World where one of the characters says, I'm not worthy. The other guy said, no you are worthy. This feels like a little bit like a Wayne's World situation where Kafka just needed to be shown his worthiness his worth. CHARLIE BENNETT: He wasn't shown it though, right? I mean this all happened after he was gone. I can provide a very cynical argument that what happens after you're dead doesn't matter. To you, right? Max even made the argument that, Kafka knew I wasn't going to do it. I told him I wasn't going to do it. He should have picked someone else if he thought someone should do it. But I don't know. I also feel like this is the model for most of what we do when it comes to archives and personal papers and things like that. Once someone's gone we sort of take collective ownership I might be leaning into it a little bit Wendy. What do you think? WENDY HAGENMAIER: I guess it makes me have a question if you write something down, don't you always face the risk that you can't control what happens to it? I mean, there's a risk right? You wrote it down, it exists outside your mind, and who knows? I care a lot about privacy and the right of someone to choose what information goes where. But, you know, it's a risk. Maybe Kafka should have known that. [INTERPOSING VOICES] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is the most Kafkaesque conversation I can imagine. We've actually just told Kafka, hey if you didn't want to be published you shouldn't have written it down. You don't get to decide what happens. If I may be personal Wendy, do you have notebooks? Do you have personal notebooks that you have a plan for? WENDY HAGENMAIER: I don't. I have only digital things really. And all of those are probably visible to a third party. So I don't have anything that supposes my total control over it. CHARLIE BENNETT: What about you, Ameet? You famously hate the internet. AMEET DOSHI: Yeah. We're cleaning out our house right now and I found a lot of my old papers from college and I asked certain people in my household if my kids or grandchildren would someday be interested in what life was like in 1990- something. And then after the laughter died down, I went back to shredding everything. CHARLIE BENNETT: So one thing I noticed that we have completely dodged. We didn't say anything like, well it's so good that Kafka's work lasted. That it was the right choice. That wasn't the end, wasn't a thing that we thought about. The benefit to society seems to be huge. That Kafka's work has become an industry, sorry a little cynicism. But does that kind of leave our realm, librarians and archivists our realm of influence. We're thinking about what it means to write things down, not what it means to society. I don't know. There's hardly enough time to explore that. So in the last 30 seconds, someone answer my question for me. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Well I'm thinking about another example. Governments write things down and often seek to destroy what they write down, right? But we collect it, or people in power collect it, as evidence of maybe wrongdoing or whatever and that outcome justifies, perhaps, the action. So there's the same dynamic happening in ways that I would really praise. But no, in the case of fiction, it feels a little bit more ambiguous. [MUSIC PLAYING] You are listening to Lost in the Stacks and we'll talk more about how the status of "classic" is unbearably uncertain on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] VOICE OVER: Hi, this is Steve Albini. I'm a recording engineer and I'm in the band Shellac of North America. And you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks. Today's show is The Unbearable Uncertainty of Classics. And what can I add to the conversation when I have something that Kafka wrote about uncertainty. This is from The Trial, which was published after he died, that he didn't want published. [MUSIC PLAYING] "There were dark hours of course, such as came to everybody, in which you thought you had achieved nothing at all, in which it seemed to you that only the case is predestined from the start to succeed came to a good end, which they would have reached in any event without your help, while every one of the others was doomed to fail in spite of all your maneuvers, all your exertions, all the illusory little victories on which you plumes yourself. That was a frame of mind of course in which nothing at all seemed certain." [MUSIC PLAYING] OK. I'm happy that Max didn't burn it. File this set under PT two six two one dot a two six e seven nine one three. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: You just heard "It's All Me" by Holly Golightly. Before that "Gokiburi Tengoku," "Cockroach Heaven" by Yasushi Suzuki. Those were songs about bugs and guilt. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called The Unbearable Uncertainty of Classics. About how libraries and citizen archivists, maybe, influence the public's understanding or awareness of literature. In this segment, let's talk Emily Dickinson. FRED RASCOE: Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 and died at age 55. She published 10 poems in her lifetime and in the 135 years since her death all of her nearly 1800 poems have been published in multiple editions. Her letters collected and her literary and personal biographies explored endlessly. WENDY HAGENMAIER: So how was Emily Dickinson's legacy created? AMEET DOSHI: By family members and lovers amidst a soap opera that could have killed it. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Emily had a sister, Lavinia, and a brother, Austin. She also had a mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and almost undoubtedly a girlfriend, Susan Gilbert, who would marry Austin. CHARLIE BENNETT: Like a special "lady friend" girlfriend? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yep. And Austin Dickinson had a special "lady friend," while he was married, Mabel Loomis Todd. When Emily died, Lavinia had a set of poems and Susan had a set of poems. Lavinia asked Mabel to edit and promote her set of poems, which she did with Higginson. Susan edited and promoted her set of poems. FRED RASCOE: They didn't work together, of course. Their various affairs must have been pretty obvious at the time. AMEET DOSHI: Dickinson's poems stayed in separate collections at Amherst and Harvard. This separation persisted in the next generation with Susan's daughter, and Mabel's daughter, each doing their own editing and promoting of their particular inherited Dickinson collections. CHARLIE BENNETT: Even today Dickinson's manuscripts are in a variety of locations. They are in, or have been in, the American Antiquarian Society, Amherst College, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the Boston Public Library, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections-- I don't even know where that is-- the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Jones Library special collections, the Library of Congress, the Morgan Library and Museum, the New York Public Library-- as we've already spoken of-- the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia, I've got to go there now, Smith College and Vassar. All had a variety of Dickinson's little scribbles and candy wrappers with poems on them and self-made chat books, the whole thing. It's amazing to me that this collection of poems survived all that. I feel like we didn't even remotely hit it as hard as we should have, that Emily Dickinson's girlfriend, her lover, married Emily's brother. And then Emily's brother had an affair with another woman who was another literary executor. How did any of this happen? Wendy, you're the most poetry minded member of this team and you're also an archivist. What do you think of all this? WENDY HAGENMAIER: OK this is super nerdy. But the first thing that comes to mind is that this is the perfect use case for the Snack Standard that's emerging. Or the Snack Project in archives, which is the Social Networks and Archival Context Project. Which is essentially creating records about creators of materials. So a record about Emily Dickinson that allows multiple repositories to provide description or metadata about the holdings they have that were created by that person. So essentially using technology to bring together these disparate collections or at least the metadata about it. And this is just sort of a perfect use case for that project. Like, we can do this now. Who cares where it is? I mean people who have to travel 50 different places to actually see the material really, really care. But where we've landed with link data and the ability to sort of reunify a corpus of materials is pretty awesome. CHARLIE BENNETT: And I believe there's an open access, online, collection now that's scanned as much as it can from all of these various places. And so we have the technology and the systems to make sure that this kind of "to the winds" collection of papers doesn't lose its consistency. But I'm still reeling from the fact that-- certainly I had a story in my head about Emily Dickinson. You know she wrote all her poems in her bedroom where she never left and they were all there and when she passed away her family said look at these poems, they're wonderful, let's publish them. Which is not even remotely how it happened. Turns out, Emily was a firecracker and she was just staying out of life, not like hiding from it. I had to do, I'm going to show it to you. All our listeners can't see it, but I had to make a diagram of all the executors and their relationships to understand just how messed up Emily Dickinson's literary legacy was handled. And that's all I got. I can't even come up with a moral to this story. FRED RASCOE: I hate to put the archivist on the spot again. But looking at that diagram which has Emily Dickinson and this mentor, with a line to this conservator, to this person that submitted to the archives. Wendy, do things come into archives with that complicated of a legacy, provenance, whatever the right word is? WENDY HAGENMAIER: I think that there is an understanding, or it's probably written in some code of ethics among archivists, that repositories try to collaborate with one another so that collections don't end up split apart in a gazillion places. But, when things are expensive and extremely valuable, all those ideas kind of go out the window, perhaps. Or when there's third parties like dealers. I think archivists try to avoid the situation. But yeah, try. CHARLIE BENNETT: Wendy, do you feel like archivists are always trying to manage a bunch of different agendas by people in these sort of famous collections? Or is this an extreme example. Is Emily Dickinson really, really, particular, or is this kind of what happens with all of these massive collections that become important? WENDY HAGENMAIER: This is a really extreme example but it certainly has happened with other collections and other archives. And fortunately I haven't personally encountered it here at Georgia Tech and I'm super grateful for that. FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called The Unbearable Uncertainty of Classics, about how libraries and citizen archivists influence the public's understanding or awareness of literature. WENDY HAGENMAIER: File this set under PS one five four one dot a six. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: You just heard "You Don't Own Me" by Lesley Gore and we started off with "All By Myself" by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. Songs about the freedom of solitude. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called The Unbearable Uncertainty of Classics. And to finish off the show, I ask each of you, what's a contemporary work of literature that you hope people will still be reading in 100 years? And what do you think are the odds that it will be? FRED RASCOE: Well I'm still holding on to that principle that I learned in my youth, I talked about in the first segment. Just go in and find a book. And don't worry about whether it's a classic or not. But I guess I still remember a book that I found wandering through my third grade elementary school library called The Alligator and His Uncle Tooth. And it would be a shame if that one fell out of the collective memory. But I suppose it would be OK. And after I'm dead I wouldn't worry about it anyway. WENDY HAGENMAIER: So this is on my mind because I visited my sister's family over the weekend and one book that we read was Mo Willems The Pigeon Has To Go To School. Which just felt so appropriate, in this current moment, for so many reasons. And it perfectly captured the emotional landscape that I think a lot of us are living in. So I hope that will remain a classic. You know it's a question right because will we have to go to school in the future? Will it make any sense? Well, we still feel the same emotions if school is online delivered by Google and YouTube? We'll see. But anyway it was brilliant. Loved it. AMEET DOSHI: Well I am struggling with this one. But I will cite a book that has been gathering a lot of dust on my bookshelf. I keep coming back to it, I just can't bear to give up on it. It is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. [LAUGHS] Full stop. CHARLIE BENNETT: I had an answer my head and then you brought up David Foster Wallace and now I'm completely lost. Oh I know. OK. That book series that I mentioned a couple shows ago, The Expanse, which is called the expanse because it's on television. I hope those books last a lot longer than the television series. I think they're really good. And I love the idea of someone encountering Leviathan Wakes in the same way that I encountered The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, when I was in high school. But, then, I look at the lists of books published in fantasy and science fiction each year and I don't think there's any chance of any of those being the one that lasts 100 years. It's unbearable, the uncertainty, Roll the credits. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: Lost in the stacks is the collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech library. Written and produced by me, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens and Wendy Hagenmaier. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Today's show was edited and assembled by Charlie. And it's OK with him, if you tell people that, before he dies. FRED RASCOE: Legal counsel and a small book of perfect poems, by someone you've never read before, were provided by the Burris Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special thanks to 99% Invisible and Joe Rosenberg for that story that kicked this off. To Max Brod for all that hard work. To all the Dickinson's and their friends, and enemies, for more hard work. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. FRED RASCOE: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week on Lost in the Stacks, "books in a blender" What does that mean? AMEET DOSHI: It's time for our last song today. Our discussion was about classics, legends if you will, and each one seems so much less certain than they did when we first heard about them. If things had gone a bit different. These unknown legends would have stayed unknown. But they would still be pretty cool. This is "Unknown Legend" by Neil Young right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everyone. [MUSIC PLAYING]