Ken Brecher on the Power of Libraries in the 21st Century
Ken Brecher: When I was very, very young, I asked a question which nobody seemed to be wanting to answer, and so I thought, "Maybe I'll answer it. I'll try and answer it," and I'm now ready to answer it, and the question was: Is friendship more durable than love?
Adam Kampe: Ken Brecher, President of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
KB: There's a wonderful thing that, a couple wonderful things that I've been thinking about that Werner Herzog, the filmmaker, said, "Sometimes it's better to ask the big question, the deep question, than it is to get a straight answer.” And what I love about that comment is that I think that's what we do in arts and culture, and particularly what we do at the library. We're framing those questions. We're not telling people what to think, but we're saying, "Here are the questions that we all have to wrestle with.”
AK: By trade an anthropologist—Ken Brecher lived with a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon for two years as a student—his quest to understand humanity, to ask the big questions, has taken him all the way to the top positions at the Sundance Institute, the Boston Children’s Museum, and now the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Considering what libraries are—repositories of endless stories and information—it’s no surprise that Ken, a charismatic storyteller, now works here. In fact, the first thing he did when I entered his office was place an Indonesian storytelling hat on my head and ask me to tell a story. His office is filled with objects like that hat that Ken has collected over time. Over here, there’s a Roman toga made out of credit cards and over there a vivid painting by his friend, the late, Carlos Almaraz. A lifelong collector, he even has over 550 bottles of water.
KB: “I have water from the top of Mount Everest. I have water from KGB Headquarters. I have water from the White House. I have water from the Danube. I have water from the Amazon, (fades out) I have water from where the Blue Nile meets the White Nile. I have water from … ”
AK: An endless seeker of information, Brecher and the Library Foundation are on a mission to make libraries as relevant as ever in the 21st century. And this has Ken smiling.
KB: I'm smiling because our board has a purpose statement, and the purpose statement says that the purpose of the Library Foundation and the purpose of the public library is to change Los Angeles through the power of libraries, and I think that is fantastic. They see that power as having many different manifestations. One of them, which I'm thrilled to say the NEA is a great supporter of-- and thank you for that-- is a series, an award-winning series of writers, authors, the most interesting people of our times. It's a series called "Aloud", and the NEA grant makes it possible, and it's completely free and open to the public, and we have Supreme Court justices and Nobel Prize winners and, it's just fantastic who…people tend not to say yes to a library. And we don't pay, and what people come for is because they all have a library in their life. There's always a story. I remember asking one of the producers of what was then the most popular television show and I said to him, "Thank you for saying yes. I know you're in great demand," and he said, "I've never done a series that didn't start in a library. I did 'Breaking Bad' in this branch, and I did this one in this branch," and I just love the idea that where people sit in the library and-- they begin there, even though they may have an office at the studio or an office at the station. And so I decided, wouldn't it be fun to do what they used to do at the British Library? When I went there as a student years ago I said, "I'd love to see where Karl Marx sat." Because he went every day to the British Library when he was writing his great book, and they said, "Oh, that was the chair where Marx sat." And so when I came to this job at Los Angeles, I thought, "I'm going to find out where people sat." So I said to Walter Mosley, "Where did you sit when you were going to the Robertson branch and writing the Easy Rawlins stories?" He said, "Oh, I can show you exactly where I sat." And then I met a woman who was then in her 90s who had been F. Scott Fitzgerald's assistant, his last assistant-- the great Francis Ring. She wrote a wonderful book about being a young girl who just graduated from high school, answering an ad that said, "Writer needs Girl Friday," and the writer was F. Scott Fitzgerald, and she worked with him in the last years of his life, and I said, "Where did he go?" and she said, "Oh, he loved the Fremont branch and the Central Library, and I can show you where he sat, because I used to take him there." I thought, "There should be a little plaque at the back of that that says, 'In this chair F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.'" I mean, and I've been collecting it for various people. And actually, Salman Rushdie was here as part of the "Aloud" series that the NEA supports, and he told me that during the fatwa he used to come to this library. So I said, "I think you're going to have to show me <laughs> where you sat, because my obsession is that we're going to put little plaques up one day."
I've always felt interested in alternative answers to questions. Why do we live in a society where there are so many hungry people? How do we figure out how to be a society that is inclusive, really inclusive, of diversity? How do we make sure that our children have the kind of education that is only possible when you have access to information? And so many people don’t have it. And one of the shocking things to me was that when we tell people at the library that it's now possible to check out a laptop, they look at me as if, "How could that be? Libraries are about books," or "Laptop? You can check out a laptop?” And they always say, "Well don't they all get stolen?" and I say, "No, they don't get stolen." It's because of respect. If you respect a young person, they respect you back.
One night I came down to the library very late at night and it was all dark, and there was a group of young people pressed up against the doors of the library, teenagers. And there was a young man pacing up and down in front of the entrance to the library. There were about 10 or 12 teenagers on the steps, up against the building. I thought, "This doesn't look good to me. This doesn't look right. What's going on here? It's almost midnight." I said to this guy, "What is this? What's going on? I work here." He said, "I'm a social worker. Those are all homeless kids. They're here doing their homework. They come and press themselves up against the library so they can get the free Wi-Fi." He said, "See those two girls over there?" I said, "Yeah, I've seen them. Yes." He said, "Well, you've seen them. They come to the library every day. They're sisters. They sleep in a box about two streets behind, three streets behind the library. They're doing really well in school. That's my laptop. That's my girlfriend's laptop. I don't want them to disappear. I don't think they will, but I don't want to be here alone either, so I'm kind of here with them, for them." And I thought, "This is amazing. The role of the library, the importance of the library. Let's open those doors. Let's get those doors open. Access." You don't have a shot in America today of knowing who the right candidate is or how to find a job or how to be the person you dream of being unless you have access, and that access is to words and music and film.
There's a range of people who find their way into the arts and into arts and culture who often bring with them a passion for an idea or a certain way of looking at the world, and my hope is that the work that I've been able to do has always had a response to the big questions of anthropology. I remember when Robert Redford hired me to run Sundance. I said, "You know, I don't know that much about film. I'm not-- I love film, but I'm not a film person." He said, "No, I'm interested in what you know about myth and ritual, and about the difference between a chief and a shaman," which I certainly do now, and I'm very interested in that today. How do you create an environment where people feel that they can think in a different way, be more, let's just call it, progressive. Think in a different way than their parents or their grandparents? One of the really great figures in our society, Marian Wright Edelman, who was just here in our library, and we've had a wonderful-- I had a wonderful conversation with her, the head of the Children's Defense Fund-- wisely said and we've all-- many of us have heard it, "You have to see it to be it." And sometimes you have to see it in the form of a librarian, and sometimes you have to see it in the form of someone in a film who, saying things that you feel in your heart but you've never been able to say to anyone else before, or you read it. We all know that experience of reading a book that becomes more real than your own life, and it's two o'clock in the morning and you can't stop reading. You're finding the words to say what you've always felt.
Technology has been such a wonderful thing for libraries. When I came to this job six years ago, friends of mine said, "Aren't libraries a thing of the past? I mean, I buy all my books on Amazon," or "I haven't been to a library since college," or "I used to take my kids, but now I don't go. I read everything on my device or my Kindle." And I said, "Oh no, libraries are booming." And it's absolutely true. We have record numbers of people coming. Part of it is because they want access to information and they want that access in all forms. They want it in technology, and we have thousands of computers and state-of-the-art-- and someone said to me, "You have libraries that are filled with young people after school. Almost 100 thousand kids are coming to the library after school every week. Why is that? How did that happen?" And I said, "Is there a single 15-year-old in the world who does not want to be adjacent to a 3-D printer?" <laughs> I said, "You need two things after school. You need snacks, you're hungry." Who isn't hungry after school? "And you need adjacency, and you need adjacency to someone who says, 'Oh, I can help you with that algebra problem. You know that stuff. We did it last week. You can do it.'" And we provide that as well, for free. Every student in Los Angeles with a library card has access to a free tutor seven days a week.
Libraries are the great evolving democratic institution that we must hold onto. And someone said to me, "You're going to have to fight for them, because I don't know, I think there's not enough-- I don't know, Carnegie in his day, those robber barons, they had all that money and they built all those libraries. I don't know that a little town, a little town in South Dakota can afford to have a public library.” And I remember hearing Stephen King, when he came to the library, telling me they had closed the library in Methodist Corners, Maine, where he grew up, and someone said to me, "You're going to have to fight to keep libraries." I said, "Well, if we have to fight, we'll fight until Hell freezes over, and then we'll fight on the ice.” Because libraries aren't going away. When libraries go away, our democracy goes away.
Adam Kampe: That was arts and culture advocate and President of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Ken Brecher.
For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Adam Kampe.
Music Credits:
All songs from WFMU’s Free Music Archive, at freemusicarchive.org
“By the Dry Banks” by Ketsa
“Horizon” and “Cosmic Kitten” by LetMeKnowYouAnatole
“Remember the Shadow” by Komiku
