The Invisible Library

Ursela K. Le Guin really likes libraries:

[…] I feel above all that I’m here as a proxy, a stand-in, for Literature. Literature is too busy to come collect her prize, and she’s too big to get into the building, even this building which was built for her. Literature is huge — they can’t fit her even into the Library of Congress, because she keeps not talking English. She is very big, very polyglot, very old, even older than I am by about 3000 years, and she weighs a lot. When we come to judge civilisations we see how heavy Literature weighs in the balance. Whole peoples are dismissed as ’savage’ or ‘primitive’, meaning they didn’t write things down, while others are seen as supreme because they left a literature. Take the Ancient Greeks. If it weren’t for Homer and Sophocles and Thucycides, all we’d know of them is that they were awfully good with marble. We wouldn’t know that they invented tragedy and democracy. We might not even know that democracy had been invented.
There have been governments that celebrated literature, but most governments dislike it, justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down. Of course they do their best to police the basement, but it’s hard, because Government and Literature, even when they share a palace, exist on different moral planes. Each is the ghost in the other’s bedroom. A government can silence writers easily, yet Literature always escapes its control. Literature cannot control a government; poets, as poets, do not legislate. What they can do is set minds free of the control of any tyrant or demagogue and his lies and disinformation.

Librarians like her, too. And librarians, for that matter. Alas, our library has none of her books. I’ll have to work on that…

link via Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny revolution.

Ever wonder what it’d be like if Stan Lee and Jack Chick had collaborated on a tract? Wonder no more!

Just in case you needed more proof that the Patriot Act was a bad idea:

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the [UCLA] Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody.

No university police officers were available to comment further about the incident as of 3 a.m. Wednesday, and no Community Service Officers who were on duty at the time could be reached.

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately. 

Eyewitness reports claim that the officers continued to use the Taser on him after he was handcuffed and subdued and that they threatened bystanders who were looking a little too concerned. But hay, I’m sure he was really a terrorist, not just a swarthy student.

This madness has got to stop and unfortunately, I have serious doubts as to weather the new Democrat-controlled Congress will have the balls to challenge the constitutionality of the patriot Act. Which means we librarians are going to have to find ever-elaborate ways to protect our patrons (and ourselves) from the more inane and despicable aspects of this fruitless law.
Hat tip to Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light.