Into Great Silence

I shouldn't have used that title.  People Googling the film about the Carthusian monastery  will wonder why they're reading Branches and Rain.  But that's what the week has been like.

Regardless of all the elections noise in the media, a calm seemed to settle here on the town and at the library this week, reflecting below the long spell of dry, cool, golden weather above.

Well those days on the mountain
I remember so well
like walking around in the ring of a bell.

 There's no college football here this weekend.  There are crab & butterfly do's at St. Marks on the coast, an art fest at Railroad Square, and Eddie Money's coming to town.

The park and gazebo on Park Avenue outside the library have been wonderfully deserted.  I don't know where the rude boys and homeless alkies have gone, but I'm grateful to be able to sit and read there at lunchtime.

The library has also been strangely quiet, with little or no waiting time to get an Internet PC, even on Monday.  It's felt like people imagine the library to be:  a feeling of relief and spaciousness.  I spent my time off the service desk today evaluating donations and massaging the Fiction section.

I rejoiced to find on the shelf, while looking to see if we needed a survey of classical Greece, a beautiful book that I had sent to processing ages ago, The Leopard's Tale:  Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük, by Ian Hodder.  I had given it up for lost, and grieved over it, and there it was!

MK and I attended a webinar this afternoon about the new texting feature that will be rolled out next week by the statewide Ask-a-Librarian digital reference service, in which our library participates.  I need to create some scripted replies for our library about library hours, locations, policies, etc.

I'm reading James Howard Kunstler's sequel to World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron.  Kunstler is a Peak-Oil doomsayer, and his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, is pretty wild.

But the man can write!  The Witch of Hebron is subtitled, A World Made by Hand Novel, so Kunstler has presumably found himself a groove, and we may expect more to come.  It is as though, the crisis having not materialized soon enough, Kunstler has gone ahead and fleshed out his post-oil world as fiction.  In doing so, I think he has found his strength.