Towards the Library Election

Everyone involved in this library election was on the board or in the volunteer group working towards the building of a new library. I myself would not have volunteered my time if I did not think that having a new library would be beneficial to the community.

The problem for all candidates is that the referendum for building a new library lost. We can try to mollify ourselves and our supporters with whatever words we want, but there is one truth. Either we did not do enough to sell our vision or we over-promised that vision.

The positive effects of a library are hard to quantify, and harder since we’re projecting into the future. The future we can project but is ultimately unknowable.

This unknowable future is why the library is so important to me though. The building we didn’t approve is one that was open and flexible in a way that the current one is not. Space is limited and programs are closed. Our vision was broad and open.

The library as we know it will always be the center of learning. It is not just books but a place for everyone to communicate and learn and grow.

Ultimately the library is a community resource. My vision is growth, but accepting that we might need to reach out to our opponents. The library is a resource for all citizens.

No matter what happens, the goal is to serve all the people of Brookfield.

On Kindt and Hall's "Pistol Whip"

Ultimately, I liked this book.

The problem here is that I can’t talk with my hands.

I want to speak of the noire character of the book, the dark and unknown that stays there through the end. What really is interesting is how the book can both probe deep and stay on the surface of things so that it is hard to get close to the characters, but you care deeply about them.

And here’s the hands-y part. I want to take both of my hands to describe a place in space that takes both hands in parallel facing you, and then weave them through each other. When I do it in space it feels like one of those dances someone on ecstasy does. I’ve never done ecstasy. It makes me think of that two-bits critical word I learned in grad school: “entrelacement”. But I think it is just making me drop pseudo-French and not being real. I hart that.

So, to look back, this is a book about a private eye and a dame and a radio superhero. And about none of that. And totally worth it.

On The Bus: Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"

This is one of those books I hadn’t read, but thought that my knowledge of the canon was incomplete if I had not read it. Especially considering reading bunches of Wolfe’s other fiction and nonfiction and my writing being compared to the “New Journalism” movement back in college.

This is also part of a project of mine to revisit books I had started and then abandoned some time before. I first bought and started reading this about two years ago, I was in it, but here’s a spoiler alert: there is more to the book than the bus ride (though it is the metaphor that carries through “you’re either on the bus or off the bus”). I guess I was off the bus, since once the bus trip ended and the Kesey colony started in place I felt out of place.

But I picked it back up and it ended up being rewarding because though I was looking for one arc, it ended up servicing another arc that worked. There was just that one transition period that left me cold and made me put the book down. There is a whole story about how people started trying to expand their minds in here, and the push-back against that both from the original people on the bus as well as the people who were never on the bus. It gives more depth to Kesey as a person and make him more than the author of the book that became that Jack Nicholson movie (and the author of “Sometimes a Great Notion,” a book I read 200 pages of and stopped reading 15 years ago, Maybe I should dig that up).