Why should I support my Local Library?

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The New York Public Library puts it succinctly with a statement that applies to all public libraries:

The Library is a hub of knowledge, culture, and communication. Without your loyalty and support, this free and accessible public service simply would not survive.

Federal funding covers only a fraction of our expenses. The ongoing support of patrons like you determines what the Library is today and what it will be in years to come.

Whatever you geek, the public library supports you. 

Join Geek the Library in spreading awareness about the value of libraries and the critical funding issues they face.

 

 

Why Supporting Your Local Library is the 

Ultimate Homage to Ray Bradbury

Bradbury ... was an avid supporter of public libraries. In a 2010 interview with the Paris Review, he said that he’s "completely library educated." 

Indeed, much like the current DIY learning movement, Bradbury eschewed formal higher education, particularly for writers, in favor of a self-directed process of unbiased, library-centered discovery.

The Declaration for the Right to Libraries is the cornerstone document of ALA President Barbara Stripling’s presidential initiative, Libraries Change Lives, which is designed to build the public will and sustained support for America’s right to libraries of all types – academic, special, school, and public.
In the next year, libraries of all types will hold signing ceremonies, during which community members can visibly declare their right to have vibrant libraries in their community.  The signing ceremony is intended to serve as the launching point for continued and vibrant community engagement to:

• Increase public and media awareness about the critical role of libraries in communities around the  country
• Inspire ongoing conversations about the role of the library in the community
• Cultivate a network of community allies and advocates for the library
• Position the library as a trusted convener to help in the response to community issues

 

. . . READ the TEXT of the DECLARATION . . .

99 WAYS TO VOLUNTEER AT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY

If any of these sound interesting or if you have other talents to offer, please give your local library a call.

1. Internet docents will assist library users with connecting to the Internet, basic operations of the graphical browser used by the library (often Netscape), help locate specific sites/URLs that the user wants to visit, make suggestions for those curious about the net. Some basic computer maintenance may be involved as well.
2. Repair books to extend the lives of the libraries’ resources.
3. Shelving books is pretty much self explanatory.
4. Delivering books to seniors and housebound persons. Operation Homebound and similar projects need volunteers to help with the delivery of books, magazines, large print, and tapes to persons of all ages who are ill or physically disabled or who cannot get to the library. This work may include the matching of appropriate books for the homebound person and getting to know that person.
5. Shelf Reading where someone adopts a shelf section and basically keeps it in order. Choose your favorite subject.
6. Video Tape checker/rewinder – someone has to do it!
7. Storyteller for the children’s section of most all libraries.
8. Bookwasher is what they call those, armed with paper towel and squirt bottle, who clean off the covers of books.
9. Friends of the Library is an organization always looking for help with booksales and planning special events.
10. Artists are always in demand to create posters for special events, sign and graphics for the library.
11. Clerical work may not be glamorous but its necessary.
12. Flash! Sue Rebro of the Moline (Illinois) Public Library doubled our list with the following additions:
13. Index the obituaries from your local paper.
14. Cut out items for story hours.
15. Clean up and weed the area around the library.
16. Help inventory the library collection.
17. Assemble new library card packets.
18. Offer to organize a book discussion group.
19. Keep the tax forms in order at tax time.
20. Send for the free material available from each state’s travel bureau.
21. Set up a drive to encourage travelers to bring back phone books (not stolen) from their travels.
22. Dust the computer screens and keyboards.
23. Help with mailing, writing, collating, and stamping the newsletter.
24. Call your local librarian for the remaining 77 ways you can help your library.

- Bay area Information Center

GIVE YOUR LIBRARY SOME LOVE

How to support your local library

If Only We Had Taller Been

- Ray Bradbury

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measure out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam’s finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God’s great hand come down the other way
To measure Man and find him Good,
And Gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that.
Short man. Large dream. I send my rockets forth
between my ears,
Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years.
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!

Alanis Morissett's song "Isn't It Ironic" & The Banning of Ray Bradbury's "Farenheit 451"

are all the proof you need that

 most people really do not understand the definition of the word "irony!"

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

The words reached out and touched her, "He's not really gone, you know. He'll never be gone so long as we're here."

(Photo source)


Visit:
RAY BRADBURY . COM

Everything Is Better With Cats

Check out AbeBooks for more.

RAY BRADBURY IS ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVORITE WRITERS

On his site he recounts how he became a writer. He tells the story much better than I could, so please stop by and read it in its entirety.

When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, "Live forever!"

IRONY AND CENSORSHIP

Fahrenheit 451, (1953)

Ironically, Bradbury's indictment of censorship has itself been repeatedly censored. Fourteen years after its initial release, some educators succeeded in persuading its publisher to release a special edition. This edition modified more than 75 passages to eliminate certain words, and to "cleanup" two incidents in the book (a minor character, for example, was changed from "drunk" to "sick").

When Bradbury learned of the changes, he demanded that the publishers withdraw the censored version, and they complied. Since 1980, only Bradbury's original text has been available.

As a result, some schools have banned the book from course lists. Through all these attempts to sanitize or banish it completely, Bradbury has remained diligent in his defense of his masterpiece, writing in a coda that appears in some editions of the book:

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever. ..."

"Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony."

Do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC . . .

What music those words evoke in my mind . . .

For years I thought that Ray Bradbury was their originator. His book of short stories balanced beautifully on those enticing notes, especially the title story. (It became a television movie, The Electric Grandmother - not nearly as poetic.)

But they are from Walt Whitman's ode to the wonders of the body human by the same name, in Leaves of Grass.

Is it surprising then, that as I read on I noticed many of the same harmonies in both book and poem? No.

Writers read.
Good writers read a lot.

I firmly believe that whatever your vocation, or avocation, it can only be bettered by reading.

Here is a taste. Follow the link for the complete text.

1

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body
were not the soul, what is the soul?

FIRE BREAK

This one reminds me of the scene in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where the firemen go into the woman's house to destroy her books and she chooses to die rather than give them up. She couldn't stop the firemen's overt actions, but by claiming her agency, she subverted their power over her and ultimately planted seeds of discord and doubt. (Boy, do I sound like an English teacher!) My husband always says that she is me. I'd like to think that I was that brave, but ...

THE SURVIVOR

- Katherine Gallagher
(for Anna Akhmatova)

A woman sits in a corner of sun
tracing a poem. Slowly
she is woven into it like the day
as smells of burning
carry her outside.

There, soldiers and jailers
are blocking the street,
books are being burnt—
thousands of words collapsing
in on each other. Suddenly
she sees her own fate,
her fellow-poet is taken
leaving her only silence.

She goes back to continue the poem:
it will go on for twenty years
islanded in her head
and Russia will remember her
as a lover
waiting for the ice-walls to break,
for her hermit’s cry
to be carried like fire
from hand to hand.

Aint' I A Woman! A Book of Woman's poetry From Around the World, Edited by Illona Linthwaite