Conquistador of Lucas County Libraries
Love set you going like a fat gold watch! I can’t get that line out of my head, and every time it pops in, it's almost immediately followed by a line from the poem “Design” by Robert Frost, I found a dimpled spider, fat and white. The first line, by Sylvia Plath, is like a song I can’t forget, and the Frost line is right behind it like an off-kilter echo. Both have the word "fat," both get us thinking about chubby babies, and both poems have something a little bit nasty about them. Possibly more than a little bit, although the full cheer of Plath's "Morning Song" isn't obvious until weighted by the rest of the book. (Okay, the lines, I'm no more your mother/ Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/ Effacement at the wind's hand is obviously not jocular. ) Any undergraduates who found this blog by googling “free robert frost essays” or “sylvia plath love set you going”, etc etc, there could be an interesting paper there comparing the two poems. But, enough about that. I am continuing to resist the compulsion to write about Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, mostly because I feel like I’m in a season of consumption right now—lots of reading (Mating, Online Articles/Poems) and music—and I want to keep my focus there until at least the end of the week. If I still want to write about Ariel post Memorial Day, I’ll give in, but maybe something more interesting will come along. FOR INSTANCE, June will mark the beginning of my sojourn through The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, so tune in for that in a couple of weeks, if you're interested. I like to take on more ambitious projects in the summer, and while I wanted to read his entire cannon, tracking down each individual work became a real pain. At least the collected version I have organizes the poems chronologically.
I finished my job painting the wood strips outside the apartment complex, and just in time, because some wicked storms have beset the Bowling Green/Toledo area. I’m going to start painting the apartment porches next, but since exterior painting was impossible today, I went to ravage another public library.
My new card gives me access to any library in Lucas County, so while perusing their website, I saw the Maumee branch was a Carnegie Foundation library (Andrew Carnegie was a philanthropist who donated 10,000 dollars to many libraries across the country. Maumee's was founded in 1918) so I decided to check it out. I wanted to walk around and take a picture or two, since I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a Carnegie library (I’m sure I have and wasn’t conscious of it), but there was a deluge of rain as well as a tornado watch, so I just went inside.
It was larger than the Waterville branch. It was nice. I went right to the CD section like a greedy little pig and starting flipping through the albums.
I’ve started to worry I should model more tact, or culture, or something other than avarice when I go into a new library, instead of acting like a logger stumbling upon a virgin plot of rainforest. I tried to contain (conceal) my greed today by pausing to gaze at the display of new fiction and non-fiction before flipping through the entire music collection. I look through the entire catalog album by album, removing the ones I know I want and mentally marking possible second choices. I think part of my discomfort stems from the fact that I know I have an addictive personality, and I’m a collector. I have to make a conscious effort to control my proclivities, hence no longer playing Words with Friends. (I’m still not sure where those four days went after I downloaded that app.) But, now that I’m painting, I do listen to all of the music I borrow, rather than just storing it on my hard drive like some kind of scrooge. Also, I’m working on making two badass mixes, one for my wife, and one for a friend who will be undertaking a long drive while moving to a different state
Speaking of music, I saw Damien Jurado last night at Frankie’s Inner City in Toledo, and he was good (As expected but no better, except for his final number, when he ran the songs “Sheets” and “Ohio” together in a medley, which enraptured everyone at the bar), but the local band that opened for him, Frank and Jessie, were really energetic and all around fun to watch. Kind of a southern rock sound? except instead of being from the south, they’re from Toledo. I may try and buy an album by them this summer.
I will also say that the Maumee library had one of the better selections of contemporary poetry I’ve seen outside of a university library. I checked out collections by Anthony Hecht (The Darkness and the Light), Margaret Atwood (Morning in the Burned House), Franz Wright (God’s Silence), and Stephen Dunn (Between Angels), who I’ve been meaning to explore ever since I read an essay by him in the Georgia Review about the intertwining of sound and sense in poetry, id est, if a poet is going to try and say something, or get a message across (sense), they have a responsibility to say it as beautifully or interestingly as possible (sound). I think he has a point. Otherwise, write prose, and don’t make us read your cruddy line breaks.
Okay, the lightning is flashing outside, so I’m going to post this and unplug my trusty Toshiba. Four years and going strong, not bad for a five hundred dollar laptop.
I finished my job painting the wood strips outside the apartment complex, and just in time, because some wicked storms have beset the Bowling Green/Toledo area. I’m going to start painting the apartment porches next, but since exterior painting was impossible today, I went to ravage another public library.
My new card gives me access to any library in Lucas County, so while perusing their website, I saw the Maumee branch was a Carnegie Foundation library (Andrew Carnegie was a philanthropist who donated 10,000 dollars to many libraries across the country. Maumee's was founded in 1918) so I decided to check it out. I wanted to walk around and take a picture or two, since I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a Carnegie library (I’m sure I have and wasn’t conscious of it), but there was a deluge of rain as well as a tornado watch, so I just went inside.
It was larger than the Waterville branch. It was nice. I went right to the CD section like a greedy little pig and starting flipping through the albums.
I’ve started to worry I should model more tact, or culture, or something other than avarice when I go into a new library, instead of acting like a logger stumbling upon a virgin plot of rainforest. I tried to contain (conceal) my greed today by pausing to gaze at the display of new fiction and non-fiction before flipping through the entire music collection. I look through the entire catalog album by album, removing the ones I know I want and mentally marking possible second choices. I think part of my discomfort stems from the fact that I know I have an addictive personality, and I’m a collector. I have to make a conscious effort to control my proclivities, hence no longer playing Words with Friends. (I’m still not sure where those four days went after I downloaded that app.) But, now that I’m painting, I do listen to all of the music I borrow, rather than just storing it on my hard drive like some kind of scrooge. Also, I’m working on making two badass mixes, one for my wife, and one for a friend who will be undertaking a long drive while moving to a different state
Speaking of music, I saw Damien Jurado last night at Frankie’s Inner City in Toledo, and he was good (As expected but no better, except for his final number, when he ran the songs “Sheets” and “Ohio” together in a medley, which enraptured everyone at the bar), but the local band that opened for him, Frank and Jessie, were really energetic and all around fun to watch. Kind of a southern rock sound? except instead of being from the south, they’re from Toledo. I may try and buy an album by them this summer.
I will also say that the Maumee library had one of the better selections of contemporary poetry I’ve seen outside of a university library. I checked out collections by Anthony Hecht (The Darkness and the Light), Margaret Atwood (Morning in the Burned House), Franz Wright (God’s Silence), and Stephen Dunn (Between Angels), who I’ve been meaning to explore ever since I read an essay by him in the Georgia Review about the intertwining of sound and sense in poetry, id est, if a poet is going to try and say something, or get a message across (sense), they have a responsibility to say it as beautifully or interestingly as possible (sound). I think he has a point. Otherwise, write prose, and don’t make us read your cruddy line breaks.
Okay, the lightning is flashing outside, so I’m going to post this and unplug my trusty Toshiba. Four years and going strong, not bad for a five hundred dollar laptop.
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