In praise of quiet places to think and be inspired

Last weekend, Canadian writer and sometime CBC Radio host Ian Brown wrote a marvelous opinion piece on the future of libraries for The Globe and Mail, “Don’t Discard the Librarians”. He began with the decision of the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board to shutter its school libraries and dump all but four of its library [...]

The full impact

Pulitzer and Griffin prize-winning poet and essayist Charles Simic has a moving and thought-provoking blog post at the New York Review Blog this week, “A Country without Libraries”, from which: All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operations. Detroit, I read a few days [...]

Those pesky outdated and inaccurate books

Oh, Canada. From today’s Globe and Mail, Today, many Canadian children have never even seen a school librarian and never will. Nova Scotia has none, and the full-time equivalent of just three are left in all of New Brunswick. At least one school board in Ontario hasn’t had a teacher-librarian in 15 years, and numbers [...]

Springing forth

The leaves on the trees are finally unfurling.  No, not all of them, but lots, and we finally have a haze of green around us.  The perennials are coming up nicely. I know because at 6:30 this morning I heard loud mooing much too close to the house and there were several cows and their [...]