Such riches for mulling, it’s hard to know where to begin.
President Obama’s team has started to think about his presidential library and the documenting of his life. This is exciting, but oh my! How one hopes the team thoughts avoid the wretched excess of recent presidential efforts. Wouldn’t it be lovely to put together St. Augustine and Loraine Hansberry, the former because he gave shape to the early church by compiling and interpreting the scattered works and the latter because she (with her estate) made her very varied, compiled materials widely available through her web-based archive.
Then the team could oversee making a library place mostly for people to connect to and retrieve information from all the other Obama-related elsewheres that an unusual staff finds and makes available. He has personal ties to so many places and presidential ties to so many more, he is truly a man of the world and when you add his lively mind and family,he is also a man for all ages. A one-spot library won’t work, but a hugely flexible first-stop library would. Then both droppers-in and follow-uppers would know what to do next, how, where and why. Cheers for the presidential library that is a web of possibilities with chairs for all heights, good windows, changing exhibits and good coffee. When it’s time, Roseledge Books will do its part to help distribute the “publications” that follow.
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Nothing beats a good / browse to keep a thinker's con / versation worthwhile.
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In the ever-mullable scheme of information moving and people knowing, add to the mix Boston Public Library’s renovations which, by the by, made the top-ten list of most-read NYT articles last Saturday! Enjoy the good news and shrewd thinking behind the widely shared changes. Can’t you just see the antsy of any age reading on the treadmill for a healthy body, healthy mind? Or the older gamers keeping active the brain cells used to plot video game strategies? I love when libraries keep up with users’ changing habits and the new ways and means they use (and provide) to keep information moving and the conversation lively.
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To mull: does reading keep conversation alive? Is reading, then, the heartbeat of conversation? In how many ways are browse-able bookstores idea generators?
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Food, view and conver / sation, help the reader frame / the experience.
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To keep the mull alive, I’ve ordered Jeremy Black’s book The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World. From the blurb, I think that he thinks that how a society understands and uses information is key to understanding the development and character of the modern age. This is my kind of perspective and, if all reads well, it will suggest room in the scheme for a presidential library that is other than an ego palace, a big and good public library that changes with the times, and a tiny bookstore that caters to characters of this and other ages.
Now that should keep the mull alive until the out of doors does more than beckon.