Checking Your Sources

I was on the copy desk of the Knoxville, Tennessee, News-Sentinel when the teletype machines began to spurt out the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. It was after the final edition deadline, and only two of us were on duty at the copy desk, editing news service stories for the next day, cutting, marking capitalization and paragraphs and writing headlines.

This was a long time ago, but I distinctly remember our quandary as to which news service to trust as we scrambled to get the story of the president’s assassination into print, shorthanded and dazed from the almost unbelievable news.

The first Associated Press transmission and the story from United Press International had very different information concerning the number of shots which had been fired, the grassy knoll, descriptions from witnesses. The phones were going like mad, and under pressure to get out an Extra and remake the newspaper’s front page, we had to choose which story to run. We went with the Associated Press because there was no way to check the sources and the AP story seemed more conservative, more believable.

We live in a time of unparalleled access to news, and yet it seems ever more difficult to find out what is going on. Almost every time I try to research something through the Internet, I run into conflicting information. In order to stay current, I read the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times and the Athens News; I watch the local news and BBC America on television. There is not as much overlap as you might think.

Which is not to say I shouldn’t have checked my sources on the Brautigan Library information. Writing a blog is a little like putting a message in bottle. I don’t really know who will read it. Besides this lack of feedback, I find that I’m a bit glib when using the computer to write. (I always write poetry in longhand.)

Dr. John Barber, who has left a longish comment on my blog of March 30, "The Library Lives", reminded me that even if I am putting a note in a bottle, I need to verify my sources.

A story by Kevin O’Kelly in The Boston Globe on Sept. 27, 2004, said “If Brautigan (Library) founder Todd Lockwood’s plans work out, the (contents of the Brautigan library) will move to the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library next year.”

In 2005, The Fletcher Free Library, where the Brautigan library was housed, wrote in its newsletter that the Brautigan collection was going home to San Francisco. Lockwood had, according to the Fletcher newsletter, “negotiated with the San Francisco Public Library to arrange a permanent home for the Brautigan Library at the Presidio Branch of the SFPL, the exact location where Brautigan placed his fictional 24-hour-a-day library”.

To my credit, I did e-mail the Presidio Library to see if the collection had made it, but when I got no response, I didn’t keep after it. The Brautigan Library, as Dr. Barber says in his comment, never made it from Vermont to San Francisco, and, mea culpa, I never followed up to see if the Fletcher Free Library newsletter or the Boston Globe had noted that fact.

Everyday Author

Dr. Barber just sent this note updating the reference number on The Dioscuri:

Actually, the Library has been stored in Burlington, Vermont, and is now on its way to Vancouver, Washington, where it will become and permanent, interactive exhibit in the Clark County Historical Museum.

Ahead of the collection's arrival we have received an inventory and your book is listed as part of the collection. The Mayonnaise System Catalog Number is different, however. Here is the listing as it appears in our inventory:

Michaele Benedict

(Montara, CA)

THE DIOSCURI

Love: LOV 1990.004

This is a novel set in Greece which incorporates myth, magic and music into a contemporary story. Madeline and Yanni, daughter and adopted son of an American Quaker doctor, are the “twins" who are inseparable as children, and who, as adults, try in vain to live separate lives.

Telling Your Story

In his novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Richard Brautigan wrote about a library where anyone with a story to tell could write it out and put it on the shelves for others to read. The overseer of the library, which was open 24 hours a day, lived there. The fictional library was based on the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library,

Inspired by Brautigan’s idea, in 1990 the Brautigan Library was founded in Burlington, Vermont, by Todd Lockwood, a Brautigan fan, together with poet Robert Creeley and Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe.. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System used by most libraries, the Brautigan library categorized its books according to the Mayonnaise System, referring to the fact that the library in the novel used mayonnaise jars as bookends.

My unpublished novel, The Dioscuri, registered with the Brautigan Library May 25, 1990, was given the Mayonnaise catalog number LOV1990.05.003. The 325 books of the Brautigan Library archive (which included Brautigan’s typewriter) traveled to Seattle for a book fair, then back to its basement home in Vermont. It changed addresses in Burlington a number of times, finally winding up in the public library. In 2005 the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington decided it would be fitting to ship the collection to the Presidio branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Whether or not the collection actually made it I have not been able to find out, despite many inquiries. The last posted information about the move was a 2005 story in the Boston Globe.

What I wanted to talk about, however, was not the Brautigan Library itself but rather the idea behind a library where everyone could tell his or her story without the assistance of agents, publishers and editors. True, there is the Internet. But not everyone has access to a computer, and some people still like the idea of something written on paper.

I spend at least four hours a day writing at the computer, mostly for fun these days, though occasionally I will send something off to a magazine, and once in a while something will be published. I am a hundred pages into Murder at the Parthenon, a mystery novel set at a Tennessee newspaper in 1954. Certainly this effort is spurred by the love of the old newspaper technology, with its Linotypes and locked pages. I meet regularly with a writer friend so we can toss ideas back and forth and nag each other about keeping our noses to the grindstones.

I am working on a biography of the pianist and teacher Egon Petri, part of which has appeared in magazines and on a piano pedagogy website originating in Finland, of all places. I am editing a wonderful work in progress by a friend who wants to tell her story about meditation. And I am proof-reading an exquisite collection of songs by a composer friend.

There is a modern facility which somewhat resembles Richard Brautigan’s library. My nonfiction mystery, Searching for Anna, was published in February by this organization, Lulu.com. Lulu is an international print-on-demand publisher, some of whose thousands of titles strongly evoke those of Brautigan’s fictional library, such as “Growing House Plants By Candlelight”. Anybody can tell a story on Lulu. For a small fee, a book book can even get an ISBN number and be entered into Books in Print, which means it is available through outlets such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Everybody has a story. Jung said that in most disassociated “normal” living, one’s story was often interrupted. He said psychology’s primary function was to retrieve that story and reunite the individual with it.

One of the best pieces of writing I ever encountered was by a Skyline College student who had brought his essay to the Tutoring Center, hoping for help with his English. The story, laboriously written in longhand, was about how to wash dishes. The student’s grandmother had taught him the proper way to wash dishes, and in the telling of the story, the student revealed himself: Loving, respectful, obedient, attentive to detail, humble. The language was awkward, but the story was truly touching.

How to tell your story: Hemingway said to place the seat of the pants on the seat of the chair and move the hand from left to right, or something to that effect. I would add a bit about spelling and grammar, but really it seems to be mostly about having something to say, saying it as honestly as you can, and then hoping somebody reads it and understands what you meant.

(Reprinted from June Morrall's Half Moon Bay Memories)