Dec 5 2012

Outrage at the Library!

Rosemary

Inexplicably, my favorite carrel has been moved!

 

It’s in the same place, but it has been rotated ninety degrees left.  Why, I do not know…  But it’s now absolutely undesirable.

Why, oh, why? she plaintively asked.

Makes. No. Sense.

Whereas before I could sit and gaze out the huge window, whilst thinking deep thoughts, now I could only sit and gaze at:

 

It's very difficult to pretend you're alone when you're staring directly at two other people!

Imagine all three carrels inhabited.

 

— Two other carrels.

 

Dang.   There aren’t many places in this lovely library that have both privacy and a window.

I’d rotate the desk back, but it’s a two-person job.

I’d go and ask the librarians for help, but — no, I am alone right now, and do not wish to interact with anyone, thank you very much.

I’d move to the far left seat, which is second best to the far right one, but that’s often inhabited by a young African-American student who clearly also values solitude and a window.    I don’t want to commandeer it, should he show up tonight.   I’ll sit in the middle.

Meanwhile, down to work — but first , your traditional random quote.

 

“To one who lives in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to be read.  The pages turn as the wind blows; the characters shift and the images formed by their combination changes in meaning, but the language remains the same.   It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone by and will come again.  The same text has been written there for thousands of years, though I was not here, and will not be here in winters to come, to read it.”

— The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, by John Haines,  published by Gray Wolf Press, 1989

That grabbed me so hard that I’m going to borrow this book.

 

"And there are those small ticking sounds of the ice in the evening when the cold slides toward its deepest zero, as if a thousand hiddne insects were chirping bitterly in chorus under the ice and snow.

Just back from the desert, I feel a pull to the furthest North...

Some quick internet research tells me that John Haines  is quite famous, though he is new to me.   They don’t give two Guggenheim Fellowships to just anyone.   Not to mention all the other awards.

This just reveals how uninformed I am on contemporary poets.

And, alas, Haines passed away last year, I see — here’s the NY Times obit.

Well.  Enough maundering, and more pondering….

 

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