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parasitegirlI've been getting an urge to reread some Hammett and Chandler.
I miss having access to a good library.
When I lived in Madison, Dean Mommy and I had a serious relationship with the computer system at the Madison Public Libraries (we knew he called other women, but we’re too in love to care.) It’s a lovely and simple system. You enter what you want and, if it is checked out or at another location the computer calls you when your books have arrived. There was nothing like coming home to a note that “HAL called, he’s got two books for you!”
My nearest library is so sad I've only set foot in it twice. It's a special hell for people who like to read. Recently, I found my old entry on it and realized why I've given up on it:
The Kashiwa library is a pit of despair. When I found the foreign books section I kept looking right and left to find out where the rest of it was. It even had the look of disuse and un-love. Every spine of every book bore that tell-tale faded light blue that videos and books left, unprotected, in the sun get…and the books that were there…sorrow. In the fiction section I found all three novelizations of the Back to the Future movies…and in regards to the age of some of these paperbacks, I didn’t even know that the original Agetha Christie play, Ten Little Indians, was EVER published under the title Ten Little Niggers. The non-fiction section seemed to be dominated by someone who was totally obsessed with unauthorized celebrity biographies…if I ever want to read that infamous one about Nancy Reagan…
I fled. Not a single book in my hands.
I miss having access to a good library.
When I lived in Madison, Dean Mommy and I had a serious relationship with the computer system at the Madison Public Libraries (we knew he called other women, but we’re too in love to care.) It’s a lovely and simple system. You enter what you want and, if it is checked out or at another location the computer calls you when your books have arrived. There was nothing like coming home to a note that “HAL called, he’s got two books for you!”
My nearest library is so sad I've only set foot in it twice. It's a special hell for people who like to read. Recently, I found my old entry on it and realized why I've given up on it:
The Kashiwa library is a pit of despair. When I found the foreign books section I kept looking right and left to find out where the rest of it was. It even had the look of disuse and un-love. Every spine of every book bore that tell-tale faded light blue that videos and books left, unprotected, in the sun get…and the books that were there…sorrow. In the fiction section I found all three novelizations of the Back to the Future movies…and in regards to the age of some of these paperbacks, I didn’t even know that the original Agetha Christie play, Ten Little Indians, was EVER published under the title Ten Little Niggers. The non-fiction section seemed to be dominated by someone who was totally obsessed with unauthorized celebrity biographies…if I ever want to read that infamous one about Nancy Reagan…
I fled. Not a single book in my hands.
