The Public Library Association conference in Portland, Oregon, opened today with a surprise appearance by singer Natalie Merchant, performing songs from a new CD of poems set to music and titled Leave Your Sleep. The special twist was that Merchant had selected a number of fairly obscure poets from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and presented a slide show and commentary about their work and the research she did to make her selections. "I spent my entire childhood at the library," Merchant exulted, noting that Leonardo da Vinci was her idol when she was 7. She pledged her devotion to libraries, especially at a time when "we're all making budget cuts."
Between songs, Merchant commented on how she had researched such obscure authors as Charles E. Carryl and Laurence Alma-Tadema, locating photos in, among other places, Brooklyn Public Library. She also performed songs by better-known poets, including Robert Graves and E. E. Cummings, and even Mother Goose. She closed with a rousing version of her song "Kind and Generous," dedicating it to librarians and dancing through the audience to express her gratitude: "You've been so kind and generous. I don't know how you keep on giving. For your kindness, I'm in debt to you. For your selflessness, my admiration. For everything you've done, you know I'm bound, I'm bound to thank you for it," she sang, to appreciative applause.
No less appreciated was keynote speaker Nicholas Kristof, whom Public Library Association president and program emcee Sari Feldman called our "collective moral conscience," saying he was her personal first choice for conference keynoter. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist began his talk by stating emphatically, "As a child, I pretty much lived in the library." He went on to tell a number of moving stories about what he said was destined to become the most important moral dilemma of the 21st century: gender inequality, the oppression of women and girls around the globe.
Kristof pointed out that in the last half-century, more women and girls have been "discriminated against to death" than all the deaths from war and genocide in the entire 20th century. "The scale is mind-boggling," he said. He told stories of what he had witnessed in Cambodia and elsewhere in the world where trafficking in human beings, largely women and girls, is a scourge. He said that what really depressed him was coming back to America and seeing people caring only about having "a hot car or the latest cell phone," but then he would recall people like a Polish nun he had met in the Congo, "and then I just want to grow up and become a Polish nun."
"Helping people is harder than it looks," Kristof said, noting that the only things that really work against abject poverty and subjugation are "health education, financial empowerment, and water."
Also featured at the opening session were American Library Association President Camila Alire, and Jill Nishi of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who also pledged continued support for public libraries and who previewed the results of a new study that contains staggering statistics about the "unprecedented" surge in library use that has accompanied the nation's economic downturn.
