tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6534665086749553287.post144650792898931253..comments2024-03-27T08:53:29.267-04:00Comments on CURMUDGUCATION: Give BooksPeter Greenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16511193640285760299noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6534665086749553287.post-54690112473997213192018-11-21T15:01:23.048-05:002018-11-21T15:01:23.048-05:00My father (an English professor and great lover of...My father (an English professor and great lover of books) sent me this poem two decades ago. It still can make me tear up a bit when I read it, remembering the love of books and reading he instilled in me. And no, the irony of sharing it by computer is not lost on me.<br /><br /> A poem by Dr. Jerry Sterns<br /><br /> Books will be replaced by electronic libraries, talking videos,<br /> interactive computers, CD-Roms with 100s of volumes, gigabytes<br /> of memory dancing on pixillated screens at which we will bleerily<br /> stare into eternity, and so I Sing the Song of the Book:<br /><br /> Nothing more voluptuous do I know than sitting with bright<br /> pictures upon my lap and turning glossy pages of giraffes and<br /> Gauguins penguins and pyramids<br /> I love wide atlases, deliniating the rise and fall of empires, the<br /> trade routes from Kashkar to Samarkand<br /> I love heavy dictionaries, their tiny pictures, complicated columns,<br /> minute definitions of incarnitive, and laniary, hagboat and<br /> fopdoodle<br /> I love the texture of pages, the high gloss slickness of magazines<br /> as slippery as oiled eels<br /> the soft nubble of old books, delicate India paper so thin that my<br /> hands tremble trying to turn the fluttering dry leaves and the<br /> yellow coarse cheap paper of mystery novels so gripping that I<br /> don't care if the plane circles Atlanta forever, because it is a full<br /> moon and I am stalking in the Arizona desert a malevolent shaped<br /> shifter<br /> I love the feel of ink on paper, the shiny varnishes, the silky<br /> lacquers, the satiny mattes<br /> I love the press of letters in thick paper, the roughness sizzles my<br /> fingers with centuries of craft embedded in pulped old rags<br /> My hands caress the leather of old bindings crumbling like<br /> ancient gentlemen<br /> I sing these pleasures of white paper and black ink of the small<br /> jab of the hard cover corner at the edge of my diaphram, of the<br /> look of type, of the flip of a page, of the sinful abandon of the<br /> turned down corner, the reckless possessiveness of my marginal<br /> scrawl<br /> The cover picture as much a part of the book as the contents<br /> itself--like Holden Caufield in his red cap turned backwards<br /> staring away from us at what we all thought we should become<br /> I also love those great fat bibles evangelists wave like otter pelts,<br /> the long greying sets of unreadable authors, the tall books of<br /> boyhood enthusiastically crayoned, the embossed covers of<br /> adolescents, the tiny poetry anthologies you could slip in your<br /> pocket<br /> And the yellowing cookbooks of recipes for glace blanche dupont<br /> and Argentine mocha toast, their stains and spots souvenirs of<br /> long evenings full of love and arguments and the talk like as not of<br /> books, books, books...<br />Stewarthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00486178352273140164noreply@blogger.com