Libraries Are Hardcore / Goblin Mood

Today: Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, and columnist at The Guardian; and Tom Scocca, editor at INDIGNITY.

Issue No. 22

Check Out the Punk Scene
Osita Nwanevu

Cruel, Wicked, and Bad-Hearted
Tom Scocca

Check Out the Punk Scene

by Osita Nwanevu

All told, I’ve probably spent more hours of my life in libraries than any other kind of place save restaurants.  I like libraries because I like books, yes, but I also like them because I like music. 

One night my freshman year of high school, I caught an episode of Cold Case that featured tracks from Nirvana⁠—a band I’d heard of, and had maybe even heard in passing before⁠. But that particular evening, the music sounded radically different from anything I’d spent my life listening to up to that point⁠—the oldies and classic rock hits that were always playing in the car or in the house, the Top 40 I’d hear at dances or on the buses to and from school. I wanted to hear more. The library had Nevermind on CD; the next time I went, I checked it out. To date, it’s the most personally consequential item I’ve ever borrowed from a library. It fundamentally rewired me. No book touches it.

I took it to school in my CD player every day. I checked out a Cobain biography and read it three times. I checked out Cobain’s journals and hunted for information about the bands he mentioned. That led me to a website called Pitchfork. I discovered they’d published a book the library had—The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. I checked that out too and listened to every track I could find on YouTube. (I didn’t have an iPod at the time and knew better than to ask for one, or the money to download songs from bands with names like Suicide or the Sex Pistols.) Then I hunted for albums. The library system had a few, seemingly added to their collections at random—Sonic Youth’s first EP, for instance, featuring an amplified electric drill, but not Daydream Nation—and I requested that they order more, writing and submitting little essays about how important these records I’d never actually listened to were, based on what I’d read. And they bought just about everything I asked for, at the public’s expense. I was 14. It was incredible. 

One of my biggest regrets from the time I lived in DC, partially because it reminds me of all this, is not having taken the opportunity to explore the DC Public Library’s punk archive—a collection of books and other artifacts from the city’s deeply influential punk scene⁠—music, merch, photos, oral histories,  posters—that might otherwise have been lost to time. 

Since 2021, a non-profit that supports one branch of the DC library system has been selling a T-shirt inspired by the archive in the style of an old punk poster⁠—“WHAT’S MORE PUNK,” it reads in block text, “THAN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY?” 

Last May, DC resident and blogger Matt Yglesias tweeted that the shirt bothered him. “I saw someone wearing this shirt on the street today,” he wrote. “[A]nd I think the effort to mash up the earnest, stolid, social role of librarian with the chaotic anti-establishment ethos of punk explains a lot of contemporary dysfunction.” Last week, he followed this up with a full post on his Substack, Slow Boring, making the case that public libraries are antithetical to the punk ethos:

At the end of the day, if you want a public library that has a good local punk scene archive, you need to get a building built. You need to ensure the collection is stored properly. You need rules about who can access the collection and under what terms. The library itself should be comfortable and well-maintained, and pleasant to use for most people, not only a refuge of last resort for the most marginal members of society. That means you’re going to need standards of conduct inside the library and enforcement and punishment for people who break the rules. It’s all good stuff—but it’s not very punk rock.

According to Yglesias, the punk ethos is best exemplified by songs like The Living End’s “Prisoners of Society”: 

Well we don't need no one to tell us what to do
Oh yes, we're on our own and there's nothing you can do
So we don't need no one like you to tell us what to do

“[B]eyond lyrics, there’s something convenient about being in such a decided minority that you never need to actually run things,” he writes. “If someone puts you in charge of a public institution—whether that’s a transit system or a library or a school or Medicare—you end up dealing with tradeoffs and troublemakers and questions like ‘how much should the curriculum reflect what I personally believe versus what the random parents at this school want us to teach?’ It’s in many ways a big drag.”

The post is instructively confused on a few points. While the deathless and tedious question of what punk is will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, Yglesias is right that the music and the lifestyles that accompany it are generally shaped by an anti-establishment sensibility. But there’s a difference between being anti-establishment⁠—opposing society as it exists at present⁠—and being against rules, authority, and order, in principle. In fact, in both their music and their political activity, many punk artists have made the case that the structures and institutions that shape our society should be replaced not by chaos, but by structures and institutions that are more righteous, by their lights—from punks with conventional socialist and social democratic politics on the left (perhaps most famously The Clash), to the widely reviled punks on the right who pine for fascism. The genre’s politics are a messy, fascinating jumble; you’ll learn more about them at your local library than you will from Yglesias’s piece.

What Yglesias offers instead is a simple bifurcation. In radical politics, there are socialists, who, as much as Yglesias might disagree with them, believe in constructive activity, and there are anarchists⁠ (an intellectual tradition, his post suggests, that encompasses both Green Day and Mikhail Bakunin) who don’t really believe in anything beyond tearing institutions down by any means necessary. The latter frame of mind, he argues, has infected the contemporary left. “Most of the energy on the left in recent years,” he writes, “has been aimed at delegitimizing existing structures and hierarchies and calling into question the legitimacy of enforcing rules.” But this picture of anarchist thought and practice—no bedtime, plus political assassinations⁠—is a caricature. 

Some of the best evidence on this front comes, actually, from the punk rock scene. Any touring musician or concert promoter or record producer will tell you that the project of making and sharing music of any kind involves constructive compromises, financial acumen, technical know-how, and a willingness to tolerate hours of interminable but essential tedium. You need venues and recording studios. You need either labels willing to put out your music, or the resources and diligence to do it yourself. Precisely because of the anti-establishment nature of their music, punks had to build much of this  infrastructure from scratch; the genre itself is a miracle of cultural organization, undertaken with scarce resources by artists and fans operating at or near society’s margins. Touring circuits were mapped out. Zines were distributed. Radio stations were founded. People bought the paper for flyers and the blank cassette tapes, with money someone was keeping track of; I’d wager that many of the punks managing squats and performance spaces at varying levels of legality in DC in the 80s and 90s were as least as familiar with the city’s zoning and occupancy regulations as Yglesias is. There were anarchist punks at the heart of all this. There still are. 

Ironically, the DC scene documented in the punk archive was especially distinctive for the rules many of its members lived by. Influential straight edge bands like Minor Threat promoted a substance- and vice-free lifestyle, and popularized a now widely used system to allow underage fans to see shows without being served alcohol. And for decades now, punks there and elsewhere have worked to institute formal and informal codes of conduct to protect the safety of fans and concertgoers, including women, racial minorities, and the queer community. All told, the seeming chaos of the mosh pit was made possible to begin through organizations, structures, and rules crafted and tended to by members of a deeply committed subculture. This is exactly the temperament libraries depend upon.  And the library boosters actually responsible for the T-shirt that’s so troubled Yglesias said as much to the Washington Post in 2021: 

Carlos Izurieta, president of Mount Pleasant Library Friends, a nonprofit organization that supports the public library, said fellow library supporters made the first shirt for him in March as a gag birthday gift. Izurieta, who grew up attending punk shows and playing in bands, saw many links between a genre that prides itself on do-it-yourselfism and a public institution that provides free resources to one and all.

“Punk in D.C. is centered around the local community,” he said. “I feel like the library is like that. It’s a place for people to go who don’t have access.”

The shirt was inspired by a flier that D.C. librarian Chelsea Kirkland created with a version of the slogan while tabling for the library at the D.C. Punk Rock Flea Market, an annual all-things-punk sale held at a nearby church.

Kirkland, 36, grew up in the San Francisco area and said the punk community was her “whole world.” When she started going to the public library as an adult, she felt her musical and bibliographic communities had a lot in common: There was access to unlimited information, but there was no need to buy anything. This sense of possibility eventually inspired her to get her library degree, she said.

“It’s an open-ended space,” she said of the library. “No one is going to tell you what to do when you’re in there.”

As Yglesias himself concedes, the public library⁠—a communal collection of books and materials made freely available to all⁠—stands “as a kind of alternative to mainstream capitalism” And as a matter of social politics, politicians on the right are going out of their way to make libraries seem dangerous again—the concept of letting anyone read whatever they’d like with taxpayer dollars hasn’t been this subversive and frightening to large segments of the American public in quite some time.   To say, nevertheless, that libraries aren’t very punk rock’—that they contradict the ethos of the genre and scene merely because they require organization and administration —is to say that punk itself, which needs organization and administration no less, is not very punk rock. That’s not tenable unless one makes Yglesias’ mistake of losing sight of the ethics or politics underneath a given aesthetic.

Mount Pleasant Library Friends t-shirts are still available.

FLAMING HYDRA NEWS

Congratulations to Myriam Gurba on the sale of her new book, FIFTEEN LATINAS, to Avid Reader Press!!!

Cruel, Wicked, and Bad-Hearted

by Tom Scocca

Suppose great giants, ten feet tall and fearsomely be-weaponed, have marched on the gates of the city. Knights and men-at-arms come forth to do battle, rank upon rank, unfaltering though tree-thick spears pierce them, immense axes slash through them. Brave warriors fall and more step forward, risking their own destruction to press the fight to the looming foes. Bold and fearless heroes! Long will the city sing of your sacrifice against the dread giants. 

Now consider the goblin horde. The little monsters swarm from their lair like rats or insects, fighting savagely against the heroes unlucky enough to run afoul of them. Their numbers are as inexhaustible as their malice. They don't fight fair. 

Who will take the goblins' side? Goblinhood has been more and more on my mind ever since I pulled the old Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks out of the attic of the house I grew up in, to introduce my kids to the game. Goblins are a survivable starter foe for low-level characters, as long as you ignore the Monster Manual's line for "NO. APPEARING: 40–400." If the numbers are roughly equal, a party of novice adventurers ought to be able to engage the goblins, slay them, loot their corpses (3–18 silver pieces each on the treasure table), and move on. 

Disposability is the goblin's lot. J.R.R. Tolkien's Great Goblin lasts all of three pages of The Hobbit from his first blustering appearance to his unceremonious demise, cut in half by a single stroke of Gandalf's sword. His followers scatter but they soon regroup; though goblins may be killable, they're persistent. 

The goblins have brio and they have goals of their own. They ride intelligent wolves, their comrades in war and raiding. Tolkien specifies that the wolves are "evil wolves over the Edge of the Wild," just as he specifies in introducing the goblins that they are "cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted." It's important to say who the bad guys are because, as he concedes, the animosity between the villain goblins and his hero dwarves is basically a fight over underground real estate. If the deck weren't stacked against them, the goblins might have a valid point. 

The Hobbit drew the pattern for fantasy goblins of this kind: antic, violent, organized. Tolkien claimed, as he hammered his children's adventure book into the continuity of the fantasy epic that followed it, that "goblin" was just another word for "orc," but the stories say otherwise. The orcs are grim cogs in the war machine, footsoldiers of Mordor. When Tolkien's orcs give a glimpse of anything other than meanness and bloodthirst, it's the weariness of beaten-down troops, not the animation of his goblins. 

When Gary Gygax wrote the rules of D&D, cribbing shamelessly from Tolkieniana, he kept the orcs and the goblins separate. Orcs stand six feet tall or more, while goblins are only four feet—one rung up from the bottom of the ladder of enemy humanoids, bigger and stronger than the kobolds and smaller and weaker than anything else, from orcs up through hobgoblins, ogres, and hill giants. Yet the average goblin has more hit points, more life force, than an ordinary non-player human or halfling (Gygax's barely veiled term for "hobbit"). 

It's all foundationally racist, beyond dispute, this building of fantasy worlds around different kinds of persons or non-persons, with their inborn proclivities and fixed moral status. Tolkien made his goblins not only bad-hearted but gifted miners who lazily prefer to do "untidy and dirty" work; for weapons, they use axes and "bent swords." He meant the goblins to be a vessel into which he skimmed off the bad from the good in humanity: "It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them," he wrote, though in fact on non-Middle ordinary Earth it was upright surface-dwelling humans who did those things. 

Still, stereotypes and archetypes twist around on you, like so many bent swords. Whatever Orientalist colors Tolkien may have tried to paint the armies of evil with in The Lord of the Rings, anyone even passingly familiar with the Crusades knows that defenders on the clean high walls of Minas Tirith would be the Saracens, with the filthy brutish Christians teeming below. And looking at the old role-playing games, four or five decades into life, I've felt my interest and sympathy turning toward the supernumeraries.

What roles does one get to play, really? The original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons let players inhabit personae including dwarves (tough, good at tunnel-building), halflings (nimble and magic-resistant), and even elves, with their near-endless lifespans and tedious superiority. Goblins were the Other, though. The closest you could get was to be a half-orc. The current Fifth Edition of the Player's Handbook still won't offer the goblins' point of view, even as it provides the more grandiose participants the chance to play as human/dragon or human/demon hybrids. 

Being part dragon makes about as much sense, narratively, as being part dungeon. Fantasy is dogged by the temptations of maximalism, the urge to skip to the part of the hero's journey where the protagonist is already special and interesting and the world tilts their way. Why not start off small and fierce and anonymous, and see how far you go?

FLAMING HYDRAS IRL

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún will be a panelist tomorrow, February 29, on "Translation and Social Justice" during the Translation Across Disciplines conference at Brown University. The conference is offering online viewing links, but sounds like you'll have to reach out to request.