What I meant to say was, "Libraries have changed everything for me, this year."
Today was the last day of the Traverse City Film Festival, which means that, next week, life is going to return to some manageable semblance of Summer Normal. Because of the endless magnanimity of my manager, Tim--who is wise and all-knowing, and suffers the thousand hurts of life managing the madhouse with the quiet dignity of lesser saints--I managed to get a night off, and am celebrating by drinking a glass of Chateau Pomeys Moulis en Medoc, writing this journal, and baking iced tea buns for tea tomorrow.
The wine is a lovely Bordeaux that puts me in mind of the blackberry brambles I scrabbled in my childhood, tart and ripe and dark. I'd meant to drink it with my parents, while they were up visiting from Mississippi, but they "had to drive," and "really, Max, we worry about how much you're drinking these days," and "oh god put down the axe," and that sort of thing. So I drank it without them. Serves them right.
Speaking of work, I met the coolest librarian at work the other day.
Her hair was gray, cut almost as short as Bird's is. She had the sort of face that's been carved by a life alternately laughing and squinting at books and screens, and she had on a black Laurie Anderson t-shirt with the sleeves cut off (it was a monochromatic print of the cover of Big Science, which is probably Anderson's best album).
I told her I liked her shirt, noting that you really don't see many Laurie Anderson shirts around, and that Big Science had been my introduction to her.
"Yeah, well," she said, "I wore my other one out, and we're doing this thing at the library--'Libraries Rock' is the theme--so I went and tracked down another one."
"You're a librarian?" I asked. (I think that's what I said. It may have been, oh fuck you're a librarian too how do you manage to walk around without being mobbed for autographs and proposals of marriage being so obviously fucking amazingly cool as you are? Or something of that sort. It's hard to remember. Maybe I blacked out.)
And she said she was, and we talked about how libraries were, indeed, cool, and about Laurie Anderson, and I brought her food and booze, as is my current lot in life, and she left.
And I thought about libraries.
Many of my favorite places are libraries. The best is the Peter White Library, in Marquette, though the Olson Library in the college nearby was where I spent most of my time, and did most of my writing, while I was in college. The incomparably beautiful Carnegie library, in Ishpeming, where my Grandma Linda worked as a librarian for many, many years, and which was immortalized in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder.
(Remember the scene when Jimmy Stewart and Arthur O'Connell find the "irresistible impulse" loophole at the same time? They're in the Carnegie Library; Stewart is standing directly above the front desk where my Grandmother worked. It still looks almost exactly as it did in 1959.
There are other family stories from back when that movie crew came to town. Paul Biegler's house in the movie is a stone's throw from my Grandmother's house, and still just as it was. There's stories about drinking at the Congress with the film crew, and who danced with who, and which of my relatives bought which stars a drink. There is also the one about my wild great-grandfather punching out Jimmy Stewart's hair and makeup man, but that's probably for another time.)
I've done lots of writing in libraries. They're quiet, polite places, generally staffed by wise, polite people, and I love them. The way they smell, the easy way I can pluck a book off the shelf and fall into it until the sun has set, and I'm asked (wisely, politely) to go home.
But, for the most part, I haven't really used libraries, in the booklending sense, until this year. I wish I had been. It's incredible.
Did you know you can just go in there, and ask them for any book, any book at all, and they will hand it to you, and you can take it home, slip into your favorite robe, make a mug of cocoa, and read the fucking thing at your leisure? For free? As often as you like?
I've read my way through several of the high-espionage Smiley novels of John le Carré, and three of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books. I've gone through five books on bees and beekeeping. I'm a slow reader. This given me months and months of enjoyment and education, and it hasn't cost me one red cent.
(Well. Tax money, I suppose, but I'd rather my taxes pay for public access to mystery novels than new bombs to kill innocent people overseas with any day of the week. If I could give all my tax money to libraries, I honestly might.)
All of which leads me to Hoopla.
Hoopla is an app that you can download on you phone, computer, tablet, and/or smart TV. It's a digital content provider where you can download e-books, audiobooks, digital comics, movies, music, and television shows.
And the best part is that you can do all this only in conjunction with your local library.
You register with your library card. That's it. You're off to the races. As I understand it, each local library gets to set the number of "borrows" available to patrons each month. TADL allows users in this region eight borrows, and for me, that's been plenty. Then again, I exclusively use Hoopla for audiobooks, and I've been listening to a lot of Charles Dickens just lately (the last recording of Bleak House I listened to clocked in at around 40 hours: quite a bit of entertainment for a single "borrow"). Some of my family find eight borrows to be a little limiting, but they mostly seem to be using it to stream television shows that they can't watch on Netflix--Hoopla counts each episode as a borrow, and so they can only watch eight episodes a month: practically nothing for a modern, seasoned Binger.
But I've been thinking about that, lately. I remember a time, not too awfully long ago, when you could only watch one episode of your favorite show at a time. And then you had to wait a week before it'd come round again--unless, god forbid, the show was between seasons, in which case you'd go months without knowing what was going to happen next. If you really, really loved a series, you'd buy the DVDs, and watch them again; if a series was just okay, you'd probably drop it and get on with your life.
I remember a time before Netflix. I feel like I went outside more, back then. And read more. And wrote more.
Bird and I had a long talk while we walked Trinity earlier today, about cancelling our Netflix account. It seems, just lately, that we've established a new routine: I get home from work, we watch a couple episodes of some show, we go to bed. Every night. For weeks, now. Formulaic shows, too. Nothing mind-blowing.
Nothing I would write in on my calendar. Nothing I'd bother with at all, probably, if I didn't have fifty episodes lined up and ready to go.
A hundred and sixty dollars a year, and mostly what I do there is scroll through hundreds of things I kind of only half want to watch maybe someday but what do you want to watch...
...until it's too late to watch anything, and we just go to bed.
That's why I like Hoopla. I'm using my local library. I'm listening to books I've wanted to read for years, but never got around to: The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson, and The Ball and the Cross, by G.K. Chesterton, and Joe Hill's NOS4A2, read by Kate Mulgrew, which was far and away the best reading performance I've ever heard.
I'm listening through the complete H.P. Lovecraft.
The complete C.S. Lewis.
All the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Hundreds and hundreds of hours, and hundreds of thousands of pages of books and stories I always said I'd get around to one day, and am getting around to now, for free, through my local library. And for the first time in a long time, I'm finding I'd rather be reading than mouth-breathing into a pint of ice cream on my couch, staring blankly at half a season of Frasier for the fiftieth night in a row.
But I sense that I am wandering dangerously. The point is, if you like to read, or if you like odd, obscure, hard-to-find music, and you like your local library, check out Hoopla.
The point may also be that breaking the cycle of mindlessly binge-watching television can improve your life, and that maybe all those wise, polite grown-ups who told us to turn off the TV and go read a book when we were young might have known something, or seen something coming, that we didn't.
So. There. Libraries. Laurie Anderson. Hoopla. Just like I said I would.
Here. Let me leave you with some English Iced Tea Buns, which came out much bigger than I thought they would:
Not too bad, and pastel, to boot.