We have a little library at the sidewalk in front of our house. We put it there to encourage people to share books. We put it there to make it easier to thin out the book clutter in our house.
The library is popular. Over the past couple of years, we’ve hardly put out any books of our own. These days there are a lot of different people taking and leaving books. There’s not a lot of room there, so I need to be choosy about what gets shelf space. My job has become clearly one of curation.
From the etymology online dictionary:
curate:
from Medieval Latin curatus "one responsible for the care (of souls)”
Souls? I thought that sort of stuff was above my paygrade as a big boy librarian for a very little library. It wasn’t that long into the gig that I realized that these innocuous looking boxes have become platforms for soul capture.
There are days I find random poetry pamphlets left behind by someone who thinks that perhaps this is a great distribution channel. These are good days. I love deluded people. Most of the poetry is as you would expect poetry to be - entirely subjective and easy to ignore.
Some pamphlets are less easy to ignore. There are pamphlets from the LDS crew. Though I like their ads, their literature ends up in the trash. The same happens to the stuff from the Seventh Day dudes and the JW crew as well.
The PETA pamphlets? They were burnt. I used the Greenpeace pamphlets to light them on fire.
The scariest pamphlets came from a local pentecostal church. They were graphic and gross as they predicted the ‘imminent second coming’. There was a sense of delight and longing in the drawings. It’s like these folks want a second coming. They want Armageddon.
It seems they aren’t the only lunatics worried about a second coming. The most offensive addition to the little library arrived just yesterday: It contained two plastic zip lock bags stuffed full with KN95 masks and long fanatical and fanciful stories about their importance.
Incredible eh?
The religious left have found a way to be as annoying as the evangelical Christian right.
Who knew eh?
The scariest thing I’ve seen lately is that Yanis Varoufakis has been denied entry to Germany for expressing unwelcome thoughts. Very weird.