When the Central Library opened in May 2004, The Stranger responded with a heavily illustrated 1,018-word joke. The headline:
“Killer Library.” The subheadline: “The New Central Library Offers Civic Validation, a Huge Collection of
Material, and a Staggering Number of Startling New Ways to Die.” We
mentioned the hazards of a certain dizzying lookout on the 10th floor.
We mentioned “dismemberment, strangulation, and other tragedies
associated with escalator technology.” We mentioned chromatophobia
(fear of colors), cleisiophobia (fear of being locked in an enclosed
space), bathophobia (fear of depths or sinking), and barophobia (fear
of being crushed). And, just to underline that we were kidding, we
mentioned the hazards of thinking: “Ideas have never been safe or
stable. They are as violent as the library itself. Abraham Lincoln,
Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi were men of ideas. Look what
happened to them.”
What we didn’t say in that piece—because it would have ruined
the joke—was that we were astounded by the library, at a loss for
what to say about it, inarticulate in the face of its beauty, its
originality of function, its genius. It’s staffed by geniuses, too, as
anyone who’s ever had a conversation with City Librarian Deborah Jacobs
knows, or picked up the phone and dialed the Quick Information Line
(386-4636), or logged into the 24-hour librarian feature on the website
(www.spl.org). I once called the
Quick Information Line because I was writing about a homeless poet
selling his work out on the streets of Capitol Hill and I wanted to
know the technical description for the poetic meter in the line “A
ghetto of crack is a valley of dope.” The librarian who happened to
pick up didn’t put me on hold or ask a colleague or anything. He just
said, “Oh, that’s anapestic tetrameter.”
The resources at the library for people who write or make art or
films or theater are staggering. When Sarah Rudinoff, who won a Genius
Award in theater in 2004, was creating The Last State, her
one-woman show about Hawaii, she spent untold hours at the Central
Library reading transcripts on microfiche of the Senate hearings on
Hawaii’s statehood, parts of which she used as dialogue. When Gabriel
Baron, who won a Genius Award in theater in 2005, was starting his
theater career and couldn’t afford internet, he used the library’s
computers to look for work and send out résumés; more
recently, Baron spent time in the library reading Troilus and
Cressida, the Cliffs Notes for Troilus and Cressida, and
various essays about Troilus and Cressida‘s status as one of
Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” because there’s a production of
Troilus and Cressida he might direct soon. Jonathan Raban, who
won a Genius Award in literature in 2006, likes taking long walks
around the book spiral and discovering things he wouldn’t think to look
for. In the basement of the previous library, he once found an original
copy of 1769’s An Universal Dictionary of the Marine by
William Falconer, which Raban used when putting together The Oxford
Book of the Sea. The book was so old and bound so beautifully he
felt like a vandal opening it up to place it on the photocopier. “My
sense is there were and probably still are unrecognized treasures in
the undisplayed collection,” Raban says. “I’m a huge enthusiast of the
library.” He’s taken advantage of the writers’ room, too.
That’s the other thing about the Central branch of the Seattle
Public Library. It doesn’t just have books (roughly one million),
government documents (millions), DVDs (thousands), sheet music (more
than 150,000 pieces), magazines (the library’s print collection of
Gentleman’s Quarterly goes back to the 1790s), newspapers on
microfilm (the entire run of the Seattle Times, the
Seattle P-I, the New York Times, as well as
lesser-remembered newspapers like the Seattle Star and the
Puget Sound Mail), maps (more than 10,000), the image
collection (one librarian told me, “We have a much bigger image
collection than Google”), and databases (one of them, Play Index,
allows you to search 31,000 plays based on whatever criteria you
want—subject matter, size of the cast, etc.). It also has
practice space with keyboards and such (for musicians), the Eulalie and
Carlo Scandiuzzi Writers’ Room (for writers), and the Kreielsheimer
Foundation Performance Arts Room (for rehearsals), all of which are
free to anyone. The only requirement is that you book them in
advance.
Not to mention Seattle Public Library’s programming—hundreds
of readings and lectures per month, zine symposiums, film festivals,
and music-and-art events for teens. There’s a customizable calendar of
events at www.spl.org.
This is the fifth year The Stranger has given a check for
$5,000 and an obscene amount of attention to a filmmaker, a writer, a
visual artist, a theater artist, and an arts organization making
startling, original work in Seattle, and then thrown a party in their
honor. This year’s winners—Linas Phillips, Alex Schweder, Heather
McHugh, Amy Thone, and Strawberry Theatre Workshop—are profiled
on the pages that follow. (For profiles of past winners, as well as
reporting on previous years’ parties, visit www.thestranger.com/genius.)
It’s hard to convey how excited we are to be celebrating the fifth
annual Stranger Genius Awards at the Central Library, the Seattle
institution with the most legitimate claim to this word we keep
throwing around.
The entrance to the party is at the Fourth Avenue doors, although
most of the celebrating will take place in the Living Room on the Fifth
Avenue level, the Mixing Chamber that overlooks the Living Room, and
the red corridors on the level in between. The party would not be
possible without the generous contributions of Smartwater, Crave Foods,
Trophy Cupcakes, Whole Foods, and Cameron Catering. The party is
Friday, September 14, opens to the general public at 9:30 p.m., is 21+,
and features live music by Velella Velella and the Blow. Like every day
at the library, it’s free.
edited by Christopher Frizzelle and Brendan Kiley
photos by David Belisle • ILLUSTRATIONS
BY Eric Hanson
LIGHT BULB illustration by Corianton Hale
