Robyn Schiff, _Information Desk_

 I WAS READING, or perhaps listening to, something by Rebecca Solnit recently--can't quite recall exactly what--in which she mentioned in passing that there were more museum workers in the USA than there were coal miners. Her point was that while coal miners are often taken to represent the core of the United States working class (as in that "Rich Men North of Richmond" song, for example), there are actually not all that many of them. And she is right, according to what I turned up on Google: there are currently about 38,000 coal miners and about 93,000 museum workers. Our whole picture of who the American working class is may be long out of date.

Coal mining is more difficult and dangerous than working in a museum, I imagine--better paid, too, no doubt, since coal miners have a well-established union. It's harder work than an 8-hour shift of telling people, "step back from the paintings, please." There's something to be said, though, for Solnit's suggestion that we update and revise our notion of who the working class is. The young person at the Information Desk with the bright smile and professional manner and (perhaps) an MFA does not seem to have stepped out of of a Dorothea Lange photo, but he or she too is a member of the working class.

Hence I see it as a helpful thing that the museum is getting more attention as a setting for fiction. There have long been examples in youth literature--Milan Trenc's The Night at the Museum and E. L. Konigsburg's classic From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler--but now we also have Cate Dicharry's The Fine Art of Fucking Up and Lucy Ives's Impossible Views of the World.

And now there is even an epic poem: Robyn Schiff's Information Desk. Schiff really was a museum worker for much of her twenties, staffing the Information Desk at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Not a curator, or a fundraiser, or a restorer, or a cataloguer...she's just one of the many ordinary workers interacting with the public as the public digests the accumulated treasures of several thousand years' worth of human achievement. 

No one is going to ask her opinions of those accumulated treasures, but she has some, to be sure, and also some opinions on how he treasures were accumulated, be it by imperial sway, robber baron largesse, or just plain old plunder. Information Desk conveys all that in supple, musical, but well-pointed verse.

Anyone really interested in trying to figure out the role of wealth and power in what we see, read, think, and are expected to value would be much better off skipping "Rich Men North of Richmond" and instead reading Information Desk.

It's a masterpiece.