I’m not a huge Garrison Keillor fan, but no one should miss this, which I’m excerpting from his article on Salon today:
I belong to an enormous special-interest group that, unlike Alaskans or hobby pilots, has never exercised much clout, and that is the English-major community. For us, the equivalent of the Gravina Island bridge is the public library equipped with leather sofas and an espresso bar and librarians who are trained in pressure-point massage. Greek columns would be nice, and a pair of stone lions, and a rare book collection and a three-story lobby with marble floors so your footsteps echo as if you were in an Edith Wharton novel. And a statue of Minerva.
I imagine that a super-library of that caliber might cost $223 million if you add in the books, the banks of computers with high-speed Internet connections, the movie theater, the Children's Room, the Steam Room, the Nap Room, the Hobnob Room where English majors can gather for a libation, the underground parking garage, and the kindly reference librarian with the bun, the faint mustache on the upper lip, the navy-blue knit dress, the sensible shoes, and the glasses on a chain around her neck. Those ladies have become rare and do not come cheap.
We English majors need a mouthpiece in Congress of the caliber of Rep. Don Young of Alaska. And we need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror. How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one. Therefore, the reading of Edith Wharton is a proven deterrent to terror. Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense?
Which side is your congressman on? If we English majors would make our voices heard and flood Congress with angry sonnets, we would get a major library bill passed. I hope that Minnesota will get the first $223 million library, but if Ketchikan wants one too, fine.
7 comments:
The aphorism is true! A stopped clock is right twice a day. I wholeheartedly agree with this, even if Garrison Keillor wrote it; proof, as if any were needed, that I am a broadminded Renaissance man and that one may be such a man even if one majored in Finance and went on to MBA-ness.
The one thing I'd amend would be a service via which you could buy your own copy of whatever book, and all profits going to the library.
Oh, and every copy of every magazine ever published in the USA...and not on microfilm. I know that I need to consult the 1951 tome of National Review, the October 1986 issue of Car and Driver and the first three years of National Lampoon.
-Joke
To have every copy of every magazine ever published in the USA, the building would cost more than Keillor said! AND it would have to be huge.
As an English major myself, I love his library and would love to be the reference librarian there but I CAN'T dress like that.
OK, fine. If it has to be expensive and huge, so be it. I need my copies of the July 1938 issue of Esquire at my fingertips whenever I bloody well feel like it, the cost be damned.
Oh, and an electric chair for people who deface books and magazines. (Caning for those under 18.)
-Joke, library hardass
hey Joke, have you ever read Nicholson Baker's Doublefold? If no, you should; you and he might have a lot in common. And I admit, I'd be right next to you guys, decrying the destruction of print copies.
I do have the little glasses and sometimes the bun, but I can't do the navy knit dress or comfortable shoes.
BB,
I will pick it up immediately if not sooner, purely on the strength of your recommendation.
If it reinforces my instinct to have print-vandals crucified or suffer the death of eleventy gazillion cuts, so much the better.
And this string of comments has led me to compile a list of Stuff I'm Reading, I'll post that at some point on my blog.
-Joke
Only if Danskos count as my comfortable shoes...
well, my tevas are very comfy but they're not nearly old-lady enough, i suppose.
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