Marilyn Johnson Quotes

Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, "flinging shit everywhere" - and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. "Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought," Shea riffed. "If you were going to cast Jersey Shore, you'd go with heidelbergensis.

So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are.
They're sorting it all out for us.

It's almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, 'Inhale these.

Bibliomancy: Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.

So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers.

What could be better, except possibly waking up 200,000 years ago in Africa? If you were one of those creatures, Homo heidelbergensis or Homo erectus, "You know what your biggest problem would be?" Shea asked. "Getting to the ground alive. Because you probably had to sleep in a tree. Why did you have to sleep in a tree? Cuz there are at least five different kinds of carnivores living in your neighborhood and they all hunt at night. They can see at night, they can smell for kilometers, and guess what, you're on their menu." A grin lit up his wolfish face at the challenge of outwitting his stalkers. He'd be fine. I'd be meat.

Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.

One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You're constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can't just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can't carry them. And no villages - no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!" Idiots, he liked to point out, "don't survive in environments with lions.

Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.

The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the "Neolithic" (the new stone age) and the "Paleolithic" (the old stone age) was reductionist. "Write this down," he said. "Dichotomies are for idiots.

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.

There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.

We are all living history, and it's hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing's certain, though: if we throw it away, it's gone.

Seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples.

One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts - who can say when that will come in handy?

Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan - regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.

We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata - I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more.

Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.

We settled in a booth at Bishop's 4th Street Diner, an aging silver zeppelin on the rotary outside the naval base, grungy and stuffed with Betty Boop tchotchkes in the windows. The waitress greeted Abbass familiarly and promptly took her order: a hamburger, rare, and fries.

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.

Naturally, Shea was a fan of the old GEICO commercials with their intelligent and maligned cavemen. "There's an element of truth in those," he said. He enjoyed the commercials so much that he wrote a fan letter to the advertising agency that created them, to say, "'Thank you. You just made it so much easier to teach paleoarchaeology.'" Though no one at the company ever responded, GEICO later gave him permission to reproduce a photo of its misunderstood caveman in one of his scientific papers.

In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.

Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?

I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

Maybe it begins the day you pledge allegiance,
face the flag and suddenly clutch your left clavicle
because you find a tender puff of breast
where yesterday your heart was

Or maybe it happens later when you're walking home
from school and they rush you on the street--
those boys who reach out fast, disgrace your blouse
with rubs of dirt, their laughter
stinging hot against your face.
And you bite your rage, swallow your tears
because the fact is, your territory's up for grabs
and somehow it's your own damned fault.

And one day you stand at your mirror
armed with jars and razor blades against the scents
and grasses of your shameless bleeding body,
and you see what you've become--a freak
manufactured to disguise the real one,
the one who sometimes still recalls your innocence,
the time before you became a dirty joke.

And maybe it begins to end the day
you try against the odds to love yourself again.
Even though you know the worst thing
you can call someone is cunt,
you try to love the flesh and fur you are,
that convoluted, prehistoric flower,
petals dripping weeds and echoing
vaguely fragrant odors of the sea.

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy
for their patrons and themselves.

This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.

Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.