A Morning at the Public Library

I'm not much of a painter this week because of the rain that has been consistently falling since Saturday, although this morning it's more of a light misting that starts and stops almost imperceptibly. Psychologically, the misting is worse than a steady downpour because I'm compulsively glancing out the window and glass front door of the Waterville Public Library thinking Should I drive to the apartment complex and start painting? It helps that the windows in here are tinted, so when I look outside the sky is the color of rotting banana peels, id est, dark brown with swatches of green and yellow. Still, although this will be the third consecutive day I've been rained out, I continue to valiantly rise in the gray morning, pull on my white, Sherwin Williams painter pants, and drive fifteen minutes to the apartment parking lot where I sit, sipping coffee, watching the sky, and looking suspicious because I'm unshaven and loitering in an old van with a cracked windshield while children wait for their school bus. My unshaven countenance is cool when I'm teaching or at a poetry reading, not cool when I'm trying to get a library card from a "temporary address" as I explained it to the librarian, skulking around apartment complexes, or around non-familial children. (“I’m not from around here” is another phrase I wish I hadn’t used with the librarian. Am I a drifter from a western? I was being awkward because the librarian seemed, to me, to be bellowing, and I was compensating by being brief and mumbling.)

I appreciate libraries because they offer a sense of community I think many facets of our society lack. The draw, ostensibly, is free books, although now the desired service has drastically shifted to free internet, DVD's, and CD's. But whatever the attraction, people are forced to go out into public, abandoning their back porches and netflix, and interact. Coffee shops do this, in a way, and so do churches, although it’s easy to hide in a congregation, and lots of people go only out of obligation, which makes it a little different. One reason I think many students look back on their time at the university with such nostalgia is because it was the greatest sense of community they will ever have. Family is different, immediate and extended, because it's too sequestered, because it's an obligation, and because at some point, choice is removed from the equation. At the university, people are constantly interacting with others—from roommates to professors—and that is a good thing. Local friendships are established and flourish. Outside a close circle of friends, there are lots of people you meet and interact with from those who live in your dorm, to people you see regularly at classes and parties, to professors and staff. I love the university and what it stands for (more than simply community, obviously, though that is an essential aspect), and am wary of online courses. Online courses have their place, but they seem more goal/product oriented, whereas four years at a university is a process of growth and maturation. Some things cannot be learned alone.

The Waterville Library is where I've been going to write when the weather could leave drip marks on my paint or cause it to run off onto the siding. Currently, like yesterday afternoon, a CD with crickets and the occasional bullfrog are playing over the sound system. It's very relaxing, a kind of white noise over the patron one table away actively attempting to rack sputum from his lungs and the woman asking, Do you have mystery novels? It's much more enjoyable than the instrumental paean to Beatle's songs, which I’m nervous will start playing next—some of the songs are unbelievably repetitive without lyrics. The Waterville Library has a great music catalogue, much better than Oxford's, and yesterday, after I successfully obtained my new card, I checked out Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the new Grace Potter and The Nocturnals, an old Nick Cave and Andrew Bird (Noble Beast...can't remember the Nick Cave), and Led Zepplin's How the West Was Won. I've never really listened to an LZ album, and thought I might be missing out.

I haven't checked out any books yet, because I brought too many as it is from Oxford, though I would like to read The Hunger Games trilogy this summer. I've heard good things. I just finished Sylvia Plath's Ariel (yes, for the first time), which surprised me in a lot of ways, and which I would like to sit down and write about. I sometimes wonder if there's any value in my bloggings (like musings) on classics (besides to undergraduates--re: cheaters--who need to write an essay on Robert Frost) like Ariel, or if they just make me look pompous, but, like someone whose name I forget once said, How do I know what I think until I say it? There are many situations where that aphorism would get me into trouble, but as far as sorting out literature, I think it's appropriate, and yet another reason why the university classroom is important. We hear what other people have to say, and whether we agree with it or not, we begin to reconcile it with our own perspective. Often, I think, this process is unconscious.

One last thing—now I’m thinking about how other people fulfill their innate desire for community, and I’m thinking about bars. Fiscally, bars make little sense. You’re paying for something that costs perhaps six times as much as it would at a grocery store. I suppose there’s an argument to be made for selection, especially for those who like mixed drinks, but for beer and wine drinkers, and eventually mixed drink drinkers, it’s crazy. But we don’t go to bars to save money. We go to see other people, share a few words, listen to some music, and stare at the corner TV with a few other lonely souls. I have more to say on similarities between bars and churches and universities, but that'll do for today.