ekstasis:

Take This Book: The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street by Melissa Gira Grant, on Kickstarter

“This used to be a library: thousands of books, thousands of people, tended to by a dozen or so librarians in Zucotti Park, the first home of Occupy Wall Street…”

Somewhere in that library was my name, printed and bound above the first story I ever published. On a livestream, I watched it being destroyed as riot cops rolled through the park, as journalists were arrested and the airspace over lower Manhattan closed. I watched the police dump a library full of books into piles on the wet street and dump those piles into trucks, to be carted off. 

It’s a testament to symbolism that the office of Mayor Bloomberg felt compelled to trot out some remnant of the library, a fraction of what it contained before the police had their way with it, to demonstrate that they weren’t so cartoonishly villainous as destroying books might suggest. It’s a testament to symbolism that the People’s Library existed in the first place.

Libraries and livestreams…the stories are numerous and so much is about their telling, about how you tell them and where and when. Now, there’s a story to be told about the library itself. Melissa has a book about how this remarkable thing came to be, the people who helped it come to be and what comes next. There are only 3 days left to donate for the project to meet its funding goal. I just doubled my pledge, because we’re all in this together and someone has to write these stories down and someone has to read them. Because…

…6

We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always. Crusoe

We say was
‘Rescued’.
So we have chosen.

7

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck
Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous…

— George Oppen

Now I’m weepy. (And here’s a video of Coming & Crying’s first arrival at the People’s Library, on October 2, 2011. It wasn’t recovered in the raid, so I’m assuming the cops must be enjoying it. I brought a new copy to Occupy 2.0 at Duarte Square on December 17. It was the first book donated that day.You’ve all already helped get a book we made to this collection — twice.)