Note From a Reader

I recieved this note from a reader the other day and I enjoyed it so much I thought I would provide it for public consumption. Enjoy:

I came upon your blog this morning and I liked it. The meta of the blog is a noble idea and I wish you the best. Thought you might appreciate a little ditty I penned
–

Summapoeta

Summa was a bookie, not the Vegas thing where 5 will get you 10, but a fairy that
hung out around ink and parchment and leather bindings. Summa hung out around books.
Sometimes bookies are call library angels, but Summa bristled at this nomenclature.
She was always quick to point out that angels were entities that had been very bad,
that were now trying to be good. Not so with fairies. Fairies had always favored
phun and play and giggle, wiggle, laughing. Why be bad when having phun was so much
better?

Summa’s full moniker was Summapoeta. She favored the short sweetest of poems to the
drudgery of wading through the ramblings of fools and their novels. Yes, beauty to
Summa was to say much with little. –

And unto my beckoning
it did come
a perfect point
of celestial splendor
and with this light
I now see
the beauty amongst the shadows.

– to Summa this was a zillion times more beautiful than any novel.

I have always liked the concept of library angels or book fairies, an invisible hand
that seems to lead you to what you need.

You can catch some of my other stuff on http://robertdsnaps.blogspot.com. Hint –
Some of the big ones hang out in the archives.

Doing time on the ball,

“d”

I love libraries and I love the idea of “library angels and book fairies.” Libraries can be incredible, mystical places. Anyone who has been to the New York Central Library or the Los Angeles Central Library knows it… and anyone who has read the work of poet, writer, philosopher and blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges, knows the power of the library as well… see his Collected Fictions for various magical library tales. My favorite fictional library? It would have to be the library in Richard Brautigan’s novel, The Abortion. In this library, anyone can walk in and place their own handmade book on shelves that gather no dust, and the book will remain there for posterity, for anyone who wishes to see it.

Bookfinding… Classic Literatures and my Broken Down Car

I feel no particular affinity for my car. It is very average and there is nothing romantic about it. And yet, living in Los Angeles, I depend upon the car perhaps more than any of my possessions. Somehow though, this unassuming car of mine must be really tuned into my psyche, because it seems to collapse sympathetically when ever my life hits a rocky patch. During my various periods of full and gainful employment, my car has behaved admirably, quietly doing it’s job, asking and recieving no special notice from it’s owner… very unassuming. However, whenever I am scrimping and struggling, my car seems to feel my pain and its insides deteriorate and fail, seemingly reacting to the stresses felt by its owner. And so, naturally, with a rent check looming that may be beyond my means, I brought my car to a trusted mechanic for routine and necessary maintainance, and sure enough my trusted mechanic, after spending some time under the hood and under the car, quickly identified several areas where my car was teetering on the brink of total collapse. Having seen the decay with my own two eyes, and resigned to the fact that my car’s chronic desire to push me ever deeper into credit card debt, I set out on walk, not often done in Los Angeles, to kill time while my car was unde the knife.

Along my way, I passed several bookstores peddling both new and used books, many of which I would like to have owned, none of which I could afford. So, I was much pleased to come upon a Goodwill store in the course of my travels, one with many shelves of dusty paperbacks going for 49 cents a piece. Many of the usual thrift store suspects were present, mounds and mounds of bestseller fodder from two decades ago, but I was able to lay my hands on three classic novels that I am very pleased to add to my growing library. First I found an old Signet Classic paperback copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Dickens has long been one of my favorites, and I am especially fond of Great Expectations and Hard Times. Many consider Bleak House to be his greatest work. I also found a copy of one the most important American novels ever written: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Finally, I came across a novel that I had not heard of before working at the bookstore. Somehow I went through life without any knowledge of Carson McCullers, who as a 23 year old wrote a Southern gothic masterpiece called The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. But now I own the book, and I can’t wait to read it.