Vol 8 # 5  February 15, 2024

Feasibility Study Moving Forward for New Library Branch 



On January 23rd, a well-attended community meeting at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School introduced the City’s consultants from HY Architects who described the goals and timeline for their feasibility study on how to adapt the former Child Development Center (CDC), next to the library on Echo Ave., for a new, larger Piedmont Avenue branch. Around 50 attendees brainstormed ideas on specific ways that a new branch could meet current and future needs for the neighborhood and school communities. The HY team will incorporate this input into proposed design options for discussion at two sets of community meetings--see link below for details and pre-registration:

Wednesday March 13th in-person at Piedmont Ave Elementary School,

4314 Piedmont Ave. Duplicative online meeting Thursday March 14th

(6 - 7:30 pm both days)

Wednesday May 1st in-person. Thursday May 2nd online (6 - 7:30 pm both days)

Link for March meetings “both days” https://forms.gle/1LgzH9oRvGtyDMsKA 

We hope that the City and its consultants will also post online previews of work-in-progress before each meeting. In the meantime, library supporters can also share their ideas and comments via the Google survey at https://forms.gle/1LgzH9oRvGtyDMsKA

Read More & Get Involved

Friends of PAL will continue interacting with the feasibility study and helping the Library seek funding for the new branch. Our meetings are held at the branch library (80 Echo Avenue) from 6:30 to 7:30 pm on the third Tuesday of each month.



The Friends’ website at https://www.friendsofpal.org has more details about the January 23 meeting and feasibility study, as well as background on the former CDC and our Building Campaign. If you or anyone you know is interested in volunteering or being added to our email list for further updates, please let us know at contact@FriendsofPAL.org

Frequent visitors & library fans.

Knitting & Crochet

Crafts at the library

Our next General Meeting is March 19th, 6:30 - 7:30 pm at the library. We will review the March 13th Feasibility Study meeting and our next steps in advocating for a new, permanent home for our library.

Beyond The Game: Dr Vernon L. Andrews Explores

“Policing Black Athletes” Saturday February 17^th, 1:00 - 3:30 pm

At the Rockridge Branch Library, 5366 College Avenue

This special event featuring Vernon L. Andrews, Ph.D. is a part of the activities for Black History Month. An accomplished author, scholar, and sociologist, Dr. Andrews brings a unique perspective to the intersection of sociology, sports, and social activism. Don't miss this opportunity to engage with a distinguished voice during this month of recognition and celebration.

Dr. Andrews is a prolific writer, with contributions to newspapers, magazines, and academic publications. His December 2020 book, "Policing Black Athletes: Racial Disconnect in Sports," published by Peter Lang Academic Publishers, explores the intersection of Colin Kaepernick, social activism, and African American expression

Dr. Andrews grew up in Oakland as an A's, Raiders, and Warriors fan, graduated from Castlemont High school, lived as a professor in New Zealand for 14 years, and this year will be attending Burning Man for the 14^th time!

Don't miss this enlightening afternoon that transcends boundaries and brings our community together. 

The Fraud by Zadie Smith [2023]

Zadie Smith, a preternaturally talented writer whose premier book, White Teeth, was still a work-in-progress when a bidding war broke out for rights to publish it. Smith was 22 years old. The book’s publication in 2000 was greeted with almost universal high praise. The book is dazzling in its multitude of voices, in terms of class and immigrant men and women; English, Bangladeshi and Jamaican, posh and impoverished, living in post-War Northwest London. Like great writers, from Cervantes to Tolstoy to Joyce, from Dos Passos to Marlon James, Smith’s work teem with unique characters, minor and major, and portray bravery and cowardice, virtue and vice, generosity and parsimony, sublimity, and degradation, in a celebration of life in its many faceted splendor. Smith is also a first-class essayist. She is in the top rank of today’s formidable writers.

The story opens like an early Victorian nineteenth-novel. We meet the long suffering housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, as she tends to repairing the crumbling library - and crumbling career - of William Ainsworth. Based on an historical figure, Ainsworth was a contemporary and one time friend of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. Eliza Touchet was his cousin and his servant with occasional benefits. Smarter and shrewder than the faltering writer, she observes Ainsworth’s slide into obscurity. The segments herein take on the cadences and spirit of Victorian literature. The fallen Ainsworth also relies on Eliza Touchet’s literary and social acumen. This, at times, approaches a drawing room Comedy of Errors as the once celebrated Ainsworth becomes a befuddled spectator to a world he doesn’t understand: slavery, abolitionism, gender, Jamaica, property, and literary ambition. Eliza Touchet cajoles with gentle admonitions the enfeebled Ainsworth.

There are two other worlds Smith explores with wit, erudition, and style in The Fraud. It’s the dual awakening of Eliza Touchet as a woman, as she becomes open to the greater world and to events of intertwined historical importance. As she becomes more open to female friendship and the follies of Victorian men, she (again, drawn upon the historical record) witnesses the trial of the century, “The Tickborne Claimant,” where a mysterious and unlikely man claims to be the lost heir of an aristocratic barony. His claim draws great attention among the popular classes and England’s scandal making press. Eliza learns more about the popular classes and the wrath of the English aristocracy. As a consequence, as she attends the trial, she falls in love with Andrew Bogle a Jamaican manservant to the Tickborne claimant, a man who was born in slavery, a man of great dignity. 

The Fraud is a wonderful book, opening windows to class, gender, empire, and the wretched of the earth, all with mirth, wit, erudition, and a wonderful narrative line. Who is the fraud? Literally, it is the Tickborne Claimant; but ultimately at some point, it is everyone in the novel. Writers - surprisingly Dickens is a target here - Victorian men and women, the high and mighty and the subjugated.  I highly recommend the novel.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8HuPOK6WHU

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/zadie-smith-i-get-in-trouble-when-i-talk-about-the-state-of-the-nation

https://jamaica-history.weebly.com/andrew-bogle.html

By Louis Segal. Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn.