Anyway, I subscribe to some library blogs and they've been listing all these crazy facts about libraries in celebration of NLW. Some of them are kind of interesting; like, did you know there are more libraries in the United States than McDonald's restaurants? WOW!
But some of the facts must be randomly generated from some old-ass list, because here's one I saw today:
"If the cost of gas had risen as fast as the cost of academic library periodicals since 1990, it would cost $3.00 a gallon to put fuel in your car."
Yeah. I'm pretty sure the average price of gas around here is like $3.60. Not quite as strong an argument as your McDonald's fact. Get with the times, ALA.
A designated celebratory time period I can get behind is National Poetry Month, which is this month.
In honor of NPM, here's one of my favorite poems:
Psalm
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down --
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.
--George Oppen (1965)
