One Day They’ll Wake up to Me

One day they’ll wake up to me.

They’ll say, he doesn’t read the books he requests we purchase.

He just flits through them

Why does he even bother?

And I’ll say, ‘coz the book reviews were inspiring

or I read an extract in ‘The New Yorker’ or ‘SMH’,

But when I went to read it I got bored: the characters were flat, the plot rambling, the writing uninspired.

A bit like some of your posts, a snide librarian might say.

My Friday friend once said, I had the attention span of a gnat.

Ouch!

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

I did finish a book a few years ago.

That was a book of short stories. Does that count?

Anyway, they’ll blacklist me soon, and everyone will be happy.

Do You Do That?

Do you find that? That you are lying on the bed, buried in a book when suddenly you come across a passage that is so striking, so delightful you must write it down? And then you dash to your laptop and keyboard your excitement so others can read when you post it to your blog? Do you do that?

Here is the passage I found quite early into my voyage of ‘The Last Voyage of Mrs. Henry Parker’: ‘on the shelf above the clothes rail were two identical life jackets lying side by side like a canoodling couple …’ Even more apt when you learn she is waiting for her beloved husband to board.

It was an extra pleasure to be able to GO INTO the library, roam around the new book shelves, and strike up conversation with the librarians whom I had not seen for over seven weeks.

 

Do you do that? Do you copy out passages? What’s the last book you were really excited about, particularly regarding the quality of writing?

There’s Just One Problem

I would like a copy of Amy Hempel’s Collected Short Stories please.

I’ll just do a quick search, she says.  Good news, We have a copy in the system. One copy. We can get it from the Burnside library.

That’s great.

There’s only one problem.

What’s that?

Did you learn any foreign languages at school?

French, Spanish, a spattering of German. Why?

How about Croatian?

Pardon?

The only copy we have is in Croatian.

How did that even happen? I ask.

God only knows. Do you know any Croatian?

My cleaner comes from Montenegro. He taught me a few swear words. Does that count?

Not really, she says. You could do a crash course in Croatian.

No thanks. I’ll wait till there’s an English version.

It could be a while. This version came out in ’96.

Have you got anything else by Amy Hempel? I say. In English.

 

• have you ever encountered an unusual problem in the library?
• can you speak Croatian? are you one of the readers of that Amy Hempel book?

 

• photo by Jakub Arbet from Unsplash

 

 

Looking for Dodos

 

I was walking through the new state-of-the-art library

Looking for a book of poems, any book of poems.

It was like looking for dodos in the zoo

or passenger pigeons in the sky.

Do you still keep poetry books? I asked the librarian.

I’m not sure , she said.

She had to do a search

Then called the chief librarian who came with a swagger

Looking for that rarest thing— a poetry book.

Here, she said. Here they are.

They were squeezed Between ‘War’ and ‘Sports’,

The whole Western World’s canon reduced

to ten books on a tiny shelf.

And the ultimate irony?

There were more books on extinct animals than poetry.

I checked.

 

do you see evidence of the death of poetry?

when’s the last time you bought a poetry book? or borrowed one?

 

Libraries Used to be Safe Places

All quiet on the Western Front? I asked one of the security guards who had been involved in an incident ten minutes before.

Yes, he said but you could tell he was a little jumpy.

He and two of his mates had wrestled to the ground an ice addict who was bothering one of the patrons.

Amongst much kicking, punching and hurling of abuse, he was shoved out of the library.

I pulled out my phone to take a film. One of the guards seeing me, said: No. Put it away, mate.

So I did.

I wish it were as easy to put away some of the stuff that is out there but it isn’t. It isn’t.

Waterlogged

The rain has begun.

I park the car close as possible, then dodging the drops, duck into the library.

“Ahh,” says the librarian, “we’ve been wading through your requests and look what’s washed up.”

It is like Santa handing over a present.

“Ahh, ‘Waterlog’”, I say.”The perfect book to read in the bath,”

“Just don’t drop it,” he says.

I should have seen that coming but Steve is quick, very quick.

“Thanks,” I say and we have a brief chat on the merits of reading in strange places, like baths.

“Have to go”, I say. “The rain’s getting heavier.”

By the time I get to the car, the book and I are waterlogged.

Steve would have appreciated that pun.

Now I don’t have to worry about dropping it in the bath.