Author Keillor, at ALA Closing Session, Salutes Libraries
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 6/26/2007
Charming, disarming, and maybe a little stuck on a idealized image of libraries, author and radio host Garrison Keillor had the audience at the Closing Session of the American Library Association Annual Conference this morning in the palm of his metaphoric hand. He began with an impromptu song, to the tune of "America the Beautiful," crooning, "Oh beautiful, for documents/for books and magazines/and for the right to read them/whatever they may mean." Keillor then claimed--in what was surely a stretch--that he doesn't give speeches, but that a librarian wrote him to explain that "librarians are not like the stereotype you comedians promulgate," relating that, when asked her profession by someone she encountered on a nude beach, she got the response, "You don't look like a librarian."Keillor said he liked to write books in the library. "A library is a cathedral of quietness," he declared, "and home is not. The office is not. The coffee shop is not." (He hasn't been hanging around the gamers, apparently.) The urge to write is powerful, he said, but writers "can temper this urge by visiting the underground stacks of a major public library... where you can feel the chill of oblivion." Still, he offered a fundamental endorsement of the library, saying that "a person reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life."
"I grew up in a Carnegie library in my hometown of Anoka [MN], this temple in a town of 10,000 people," he said, calling it an "irreplaceable building" that "so naturally was torn down by vandals in suits and ties." The meaning of the "ugly library" that replaced it, he said, was "Don't get any funny ideas." But the library Keillor loved most, he said, was the Walker Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he entered in the fall of 1960, "walking into an enormous reading room filled with serious people," part of the "great migration of the children of farmers and mechanics and postal workers... to a new life."
He said he found inspiration in the new library in his home city of St. Paul, seeing "all these young people... poring over books." Most of those readers are immigrants: Hmong or Vietnamese or Somali. "When politics turns mean and nasty in our country," he said, "you can recover your civic happiness by walking into your local library, by looking at all those heads bend down over those books." The public library is "one of the noblest expressions of democracy, still."
And the future of libraries, he said, may be "simply as a quiet room where people can go to gather our thoughts... an unwired place." He acknowledged that libraries "were in a big rush to get wired, but maybe people are looking to get unwired." Most of those librarians at the conference have been trying to embrace the best of both tendencies, but, given Keillor's closing endorsement that "you preside over a sacred place," they were not about to quarrel with him.
Talkback
Related Content
Related Content
Sponsored Links
