Stanford University’s first president, ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, is the complex main character of a new book, "Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life," by Lulu Miller. The book is a wondrous mash-up of biography, memoir, history and even murder mystery. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" producer Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with Miller ... beginning with a tale from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
I had heard this story on To the Best of Our Knowledge back in 2020. I was so intrigued with David Starr Jordan and his courageous response to the San Francisco earthquake destroying his collection of carefully organized and taxonomied fish, that I had to read the book ... It's a complicated story, and one I wanted to share with WHSLA members, but I wasn't quite sure where to go with it ...
Last week, I heard the story again as a podcast, and was again just as intrigued by this guy who wrestled order from chaos time and again in his life ... I think the reason it so intrigues me is because that's what we do as Librarians: We create order from chaos. It's one of our favorite things to do, and one of the things we do best!
Cataloging, classifying, putting things in order so we can find them again later ... Adding subject terms, keywords, and tags of our own to help other people find them later. Taxonomies. Some of us may have even gone to the point of sewing the label to a fish's eye so the tags wouldn't be lost or separated in the next disaster. But that brings us back to the title of Lulu Miller's book: Why Fish Don't Exist.
It's taken me a while to come to terms with this book and it's lessons. Maybe we're trying too hard to impose order on our world? On other people; Other beings; Ther cultures; Other things. What's the big deal anyway? A fish doesn't care if we call it a fish or a bird. A whale is NOT a fish, but it lives in water ... They both live in water, but they are so much more than that when you take a closer look ... So many other directions the taxonomies can go when you dig deeper.
I don't understand why some people today are so insistent on classifying people as male / female / binary / cis / trans - him / her / it / their / them - black / white / brown - whatever box you want to put them in. They are what they are, and shouldn't the individual be able to choose what they want to be without the world telling them that are something else instead? Let 'em be who they want to be! Why does society feel the need to pigeonhole everyone as this or that? But again it gets complicated because when society / culture pigeonhole someone, it shapes their experience accordingly. That's not always a good thing ... and Yes, Black Lives Matter even when our larger society says they don't.
The thing that I have NOT been able to wrap my head around is David Starr Jordan's involvement with the eugenics movement and white supremacy. Yeah-- Not such a hero after all. Brilliant and complicated character, that refuses to be pigeon-holed.
GIve this story a listen -- The Podcast is only 12 minutes and may be enough to get you interested in reading the book. I'd love to hear what you think about it.
Michele Matucheski, MLS, AHIP
Medical Librarian
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