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• 1 media/bartleby_the_scrivener_by_frisca_freak_d639ucd.png 2020-12-07T15:00:38-08:00 Bartleby at the Wall 19 How can fiction and popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship? plain 2021-02-14T17:36:59-08:00 What can we learn from Melville's Bartleby about workplace refusal?
  How can fiction and popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship?
  
  Why does  Bartleby's story still resonate with creatives?
  
  
  As Andrew Delbanco comments, [It's] “An old pice of writing by a guy who lived almost two hundred years ago and was describing a world that in some ways is very far from our own but it connects intimately and immediately to our own experience. (Giamatti & Delbanco 2020)“
   

  Diana Schaub 

  Bartleby has given up on the word, given up on communication   . . . Melville might be suggesting that there’s a kernel of truth about Bartleby’s intuition about the status of letters and the status of the word in modern life. 
   

   

  92nd Street Y. 2020. Paul Giamatti in Conversation with Andrew Delbanco. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbDDIbI9BtA&feature=emb_logo.

   

  Lawyer says: Nothing so aggravates an earnest man as a passive resistance 

  Anybody who thinks about history knows passive resistance has proven to be a very effective weapon to change the world.  
  
  What Bartleby does is make it harder and harder for boss not to look at him . Pretty soon everyone's looking and they can't look away. https://youtu.be/kbDDIbI9BtA?t=1559

  All of us do a good job at not looking at other people, particularly if they look like a problem that we don’t want to have to deal with, then we’d rather they were somebody else’s problem.

  Simón, Ryan. 2019. “Editorial: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” AMERICAN VULGARIA. April 21, 2019. https://americanvulgaria.com/bartleby-scrivener/.

  as Camus suggests in The Rebel, a “man who says no… is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.” And so for each of Bartleby’s rejections, might there be an unspoken acceptance of — or, at the least, a preference for — something else? Or is this guy so hardcore punk-rock that he’d even go so far as to eventually reject preferences altogether? 

  
  From Bartleby can we learn how to say:

  I prefer not to take you up on your offer to expand my duties.
  I prefer not to be the beneficiary of others' largess if the strings are too tight.
  I can fully occupy my role, my space, my destiny.

  
   
• 1 media/common-ground-charles-luna.jpg 2021-02-14T14:26:59-08:00 What Refusal can we take up? 9 plain 2021-03-13T06:33:49-08:00
  [Hark back to fictional & popular culture examples laid out earlier/in other threads?]
  Refusal resonates with everyone. This video of Notre Dame's undergraduates accompanying Rungren on "I Dont Want to Work" illustrates how refusal resonates with everyone and across generations . Todd Rungren describes I Don’t Want to Work as " the most lucrative song I have ever written."

  
  explaining how ". . it got adopted by a lot of sports fans… then it got picked up for various commercials and movie promo— things like that. And then Carnival Cruise decided they wanted it to be their entire identity. For several years, they were paying me ridiculous money to use it. And then they started sinking a lot of ships. So they decided they should change their image *laughs*… I don’t make as much money currently off of it as I used to, but it’s available *laughs*…But, I like to say it was some kind of cosmic gift I was given(Nolasco, 2019). 
  
  A cosmic gift indeed, from Bartleby on down through the years to rundgren can we learn how to say "No":

  I prefer not to take you up on your offer to expand my duties.
  I prefer not to be the beneficiary of others' largess if the strings are too tight.
  I can fully occupy my role, my space, my destiny.

  
  Refusal to work “more than” We can refuse to work more than  the other person paid more to do our same job ?
  Refusal to send our people to work (or go ourselves) without PPE during a pandemic?
  When's it time to say: "No PPE?  I'm not coming in to work/I'm not working around [these co-workers, that patron] "
  Refusal to be last in surveillance or diagnostic testing or simply not included at all ?
  We can say: "Re-opening/Staying open without COVID-19 testing?  I'm not coming in to work "
  
  Refusal to work harder for less advancement opportunities? Innovation vs maintenance in valuing contribution (another form of canon vs curator?)
  
  Refusal to to work without credit?
  Refusal to work without copyright? (UC’s recent announcement) Equity, hierarchies of staff, fac, admin early/late career?

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  Strike as the ultimate form of organized collective refusal?
  Carrie Smith. 2018. “Unions 101: What Library Unions Do—and Don’t Do—for Workers.” American Libraries Magazine (blog). November 1, 2018. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/11/01/library-unions-101/.
   

  Nolasco, Stephanie. 2019. “Todd Rundgren Explains Why He’s Never Taken the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Seriously.” Text.Article. Fox News. Fox News. December 13, 2019. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/todd-rundgren-rock-roll-hall-of-fame.