The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Library of Congress

  • Why We Read

    “In the tenth book of the Republic, when Plato has completed his final burning denunciation of Poetry, the false Siren, the imitator of things which themselves are shadows, the ally of all that is low and weak in the soul against that which is high and strong, who makes us feed the things we ought to starve and serve the things we ought to rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: ‘We will give her champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only sweet – as we well know – but also helpful to society and the life of man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I take it, if this can be proved.’ Aristotle certainly knew the passage, and it looks as if his treatise on poetry was an answer to Plato’s challenge.”

    Aristotle: On The Art of Poetry (Translated by Ingram Bywater with a Preface by Gilbert Murray), Oxford, At the Clarendon Press. First Published 1920. My copy reprinted 1967 in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford, by Vivian Ridler, Printer to the University. Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W . 1. 95 Pages. Light pencil marks by your student reader throughout, this little chapbook size paperback was used as a text at CSUDH, early 1970’s, Prof. Marvin Laser instructor. “Personal Library of…” emboss stamp on first page. The passage quoted above is from Murray’s Preface, page 1.

    I’ve been experimenting with a book library app I recently found: Libib, a library management tool, used apparently by professionals and amateurs. (Any comments I make here on the app’s functionality refer to the Libib Basic, i.e. free, version). The app can be downloaded on mobile, tablet, and computer devices and they all sync. I first played around with such an app as volunteer assistant librarian at The Attic back around 2012. There we used Library Thing. Libib is cleaner, efficient, and quick. Books can be scanned via mobile device and barcode. Most of the books in my collection however predate barcodes and current ISBN formats, so must be manually input. If the book has been reprinted in some new edition, you can use that, but it won’t be the same book (edition, print, etc.) as the one in your library. Case in point, the Bywater translation of Aristotle’s “Poetry.” That problem could be workarounded by importing the newer version and then editing the information; alas, the app disallows editing of imported info. Nevertheless, I’m moving forward using the app, even though it means yet another project I’ll never complete.

    No matter, what I’ve found is the app provides another purpose, that of perusing, browsing, not to mention dusting off, books that have not been touched let alone read in awhile. The app information can be downloaded into sortable files, should one have a need for such a tool. In any case, I’m currently happily stuck in Aristotle’s examination of poetics. Every page is like opening an oyster and finding a pearl. At random, this:

    “The objections, then, of critics start with faults of five kinds: the allegation is always that something is either (1) impossible, (2) improbable, (3) corrupting, (4) contradictory, or (5) against technical correctness.”

    92

    Yes, I’ll take all five. It’s why we read.

  • Remembrance of Things Past: or, The Card Catalog – ACCESS CLOSED!

    What better way to close Open Access week than with a post on the card catalog? The Library of Congress’s In Custodia Legis (the blog of the law librarians of congress) has posted a photo of a notice users still find at the entrance to the card catalog, and librarian Christine Sellers explains: “When you walk into the Reading Room of the Law Library of Congress, you might notice something you haven’t seen in a while. A card catalog that is still in use, though no new cards have been added since December 1980.”

    Open Access is necessary – efficient, effective, fair. But more, the virtual world, its backlit windows, are like Whitman’s “…Houses and rooms [are] full of perfumes, the shelves [are[ crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.” Though we can not smell it, the virtual world still attracts us, like a sterile flower.

    We miss not just the card catalog, its thumb-worn cards housed in red oak, carefully annotated by the librarian’s perfect pencil, but we miss too the smell of the open stacks, the aisles and shelves of books like Ferlinghetti’s Backroads to Far Places. But that’s not all we remember and miss. We miss the mimeograph machine, helping teacher turn the drum, watching the press emerge, holding the freshly inked papers to our face, smelling the wet ink. We miss the feel and smell of the pages of books, the large windows full of available light, and when the sun slanted through the library windows on warm summer evenings, the lighted air in the high-ceilinged library, like Ezra Pound’s, from Canto XCIII: “…The light there almost solid.”

  • Free Parking at the Library of Congress

    ParkingWe try to imagine a world without cars. Given our experience, it’s difficult: our MOS was wheeled and track vehicle mechanic; we parked cars at the old LA International while working our way through college; we underwrote autos for a time. Our first car was a 1956 Chevy, purchased for $75 from our friend Gary leaving for Vietnam – he never returned. Our second car was a 1949 Ford pickup truck, called the “Peace Truck” for a small peace sign decal we put in the center of the rear window – we used the truck for surf trips. Then we went through a series of old Volkswagens, mostly bugs, but we did have a VW van for a time – it blew a rod one night on way home from a Jimmy Hendrix concert. We try to imagine Kerouac’s On the Road without cars: impossible.

    We try to imagine a parking space at the very spot and time we need one. We’ve always talked to our cars, but parking spaces don’t listen. We remember our first time parking in the Columbia Tower in Seattle: the entrance to the underground parking garage is a concrete circle that descends quickly around and around and around for seven stories below the building, the massive concrete beams just inches overhead – not a place for the claustrophobic, almost as bad as the MRI machine, another circle of hell. Dante would love it, were he in Seattle with a car to park. After parking, one must take four separate elevators to get to even the 33rd floor.

    John Grisham’s A Painted House contains a theme related to cars: it’s 1952 and the characters are struggling to survive on small cotton farms in rural Arkansas; some leave for the north, where they find jobs in the automobile industry, in Flint, and they travel back in their big new automobiles to visit and show off. The irony in the end of the story, underdeveloped, is that as the main characters finally give up the dream of making the farm work and follow the exodus to Flint, today’s reader knows they’ll be back – imagine cities full of hollow parking garages, empty parking lots.

    What in the world brought on this reverie of the car? A road trip? A particularly gruesome commute? No. This, a post at the Inside Adams blog at the Library of Congress site: “Long Live the Parking Garage.” There will be free parking as soon as we get rid of the cars; meantime, we should caution you that if you are susceptible to following links you may never find your way out of the parking garage post.