For the true bibliomaniac, libraries are temples, shrines, shuls, places of worship. They trace their lineage back to the great library of Alexandria begun by Alexander the Great’s lieutenant Ptolemy and his son. The library, variously estimated to contain somewhere between 200,000 and half a million scrolls, was said to have been accidentally destroyed in a fire set in a nearby harbor by Julius Caesar during his intervention on the side of Cleopatra in her war against her brother Ptolemy XIII. The great extant libraries are thought to include the Bodleian at Oxford, la Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne, the British Museum, the Vatican Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Peabody Conservatory Library in Baltimore, and a few others.
Most of these began life as personal collections of books built up and added onto over the decades, in some instances over the centuries. The bibliomaniac can only fantasize owning or even superintending as chief librarian the many books stored in such institutions. Meanwhile non-bibliophiles, even some philistines among them, often wish to attach themselves to the prestige of great libraries. The library, among other things, is a symbol of learning. In Margin of Hope, his autobiography, Irving Howe recounts how Abram Sachar called together a number of wealthy Jewish philanthropists in the hope of acquiring funds for a library for the newly founded Brandeis University. He regaled them with the prominence of Widener Library at Harvard in the lives of students, noting: “when the students at Harvard go to the library, they don’t say, ‘Let’s go to the library,’ they say, ‘Let’s go to Widener.’” Howe could sense in the men Sachar had gathered the thought: “Someday maybe they’ll say, ‘Let’s go to Shapiro!” Without great difficulty, Sachar got the money for the Brandeis library.
In 2021, we worry about the world ending because of wildfires and freezes and murder hornets and plagues, but in Howard Carson’s reality, America/Usa was destroyed by air pollution and gravity issues (pollutantus literati and pollutantus gravitas). I highly doubt that sustainability was on my mind back in fifth grade, but now it feels like a gentle warning to the human race to not be so wasteful. The things that remain in Usa are what we recognize as McDonald’s signs and gas station logos, but which Carson and Harriet interpret as spiritual altars along Monument Row. It’s far-fetched, but that’s the point. Besides, it probably will be the fast food signs and Big Gulp cups that remain long after we’re gone.
Here endeth this little parable—and true story—of what pondering a subject can do for a poet. The case in question was admittedly extreme: such pondering doesn’t always abet elevation. But it often abets understanding. I said in the last section that in choosing a subject, a poet engages with life. I’ve tried to show in this section that in pondering a subject, a poet examines life. It was Socrates, Google tells me, who said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Pondering a subject is a practicum in the examination of life.
Subsidized by the war chest of venture capital, these companies have in the past decade successfully gotten between restaurants and their hard-earned customers, aided by slick marketing that convinces us eaters we’re too busy to live without it and promises businesses they’ll grow sales while adapting to today’s uniquely fast-paced customer. There are many good reasons why getting carryout or delivery for dinner is a necessary expediency. But the idea that we have uniquely cultivated an existence that demands convenience to serve our mightily efficient lifestyles is more spin. We’ve always been busy. We’ve always craved convenience. No part of delivery is new, other than the predatory companies making it irresistibly easy—and using that ease to wedge themselves between restaurants and their customers.
The Four Humors, Mina Seçkin’s debut novel, is a deliciously bittersweet meditation on the elastic, shifting narratives we weave from the fragile threads of our daily existence, the people around us, and the places we call home.
“Love in the Big City,” already a best seller in Korea and Park’s first novel to be translated into English, is intoxicating. Across four parts that follow Young from college to postgraduate life in Seoul to burgeoning literary success, the narrator — hard-drinking, hard-feeling and hard-falling — recounts the loves that have defined his life thus far.
An anxiety over what language can — or cannot — contribute to one’s survival stalks these stories.
Throughout comics history, the work is pushed forward by what Dauber, in a discussion about the cartoonist Dave Sim, calls the “parodic sensibility.” It is these parodies that most enliven the works discussed in “American Comics.” There’s parody as homage. Parody as cutting, vicious criticism. Parody as cheap laughs; parody as genius. Dauber ably demonstrates that comics, as much as or more than any other art or literature, can handle the most serious of topics, including one of the most serious of all: our ability to laugh at ourselves.