[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Keith says;
Please defeat this woman at the polls. She's pridefully reading the fantasy
of a child/wizard. This gal's other prescriptive fantasies for leading the
People's Republic of Mpls. will no doubt follow her wish list for force feeding
the rest of us (below). And to sum up, and quote, her remedy for development;
TAX IT -but call it, a la' Pawlenty, a "building impact fee".
This paragraph really honks me off. If you think we should not vote for
someone for Library Board based on what he/she reads, then you have
entirely missed the point of public libraries in the first place.
What I saw in Smart's reading material: *she knows she has to be
conversant with what kids are reading; *she's a little bold for MN where
everybody reads Frieri, but, so as not to be branded as a communist, no
one mentions it; *everyone could enjoy reading Achebe, he's a great
writer and Things Fall Apart is a great book. The rest were a little
more than I want in the summer, but to each her own. No murder mysteries
in the list--that's too bad.
Let's only allow library board candidates who read the "safe," books,
the light weights, the genres. Laurie Savran is also on the library
board. Her father owned a book store next to a college campus. Imagine
what she might be reading or have read in her life. She's a lawyer to
boot, so god only knows what she'll be perusing. Oh, the horror of it!
Not to mention Gregory Grey and Laura Waterman Wittstock. Every time you
turn around, there's Grey with his nose in a book by an Af.American and
Laura's been flaunting books about Indians--and writing them--forever.
Fellow travelers at the very least.
Now Diane Hoffstede, who's been on the board for years, deals with
stocks and bonds, financial stuff. She's probably a safe reader, though
you never know. She could have hidden, unAmerican depths she's managed
to keep quiet about. Oh, and Virginia Holte. She's really dangerous.
She's a retired government documents librarian. One mighty dangerous
septuagenarian there. She probably read Izzy Stone every week of her
life til he died.
Here's a hard, cold fact about libraries: they're declining in utility.
MPL has done most of its outreach to the middle class. But the middle
class is more or less tapped out for new patrons, they're already
library users. MPL has got to do massive outreach to the working class,
immigrants, and the lower class if they are to improve their utility to
the population and justify the money spent on them. Virtually no library
employees in a management position are or ever were lower class, so the
staff knowledge of the lower class is somewhere south of nil. Some come
from working class families, so have a largely untapped fount of
knowledge there. Some are immigrants. A paltry few are Af. American,
Native American, Latino or Asian.
Therefore, libraries largely reflect the management and the primary user
biases. This is not a good situation. Back in the day when MN could
pretend it was monocultural, that only satisfied some of the potential
patrons. Now it largely ignores the potential patrons, particularly in
the city.
If anyone applies to be a library board member and has even one clue
about enticing the pool of potential patrons, that alliterative,
amorphous bunch, vote for that person.
WizardMarks, Central
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