Category: Other

I attended my second WCLS trustee’s meeting a couple of weeks ago. The main topic was the library budget and the contract with the library employee’s union. The contract is important because personnel accounts for nearly three quarters of the library expenditures. Library people have character. The negotiations were civil — unlike the histrionics to the south of us involving a certain well-publicized union contract rejection. I think the library results will prove to be satisfying to everyone.

The basics of operating WCLS are still new to me. It’s easy to forget that keeping the library staffed with the helpful people who unlock the value of the library to all comers is a very important job. Moving books as they are requested and returned from our spread out branches takes manpower and coordination.

I sympathize with skeptics who might wonder why buying books and other content is not more than a quarter of the budget. That seems to make sense, but it ignores something mission critical. A library full of books but lacking the people to make the books accessible is one hand clapping. It consumes resources, but there is no sound. A library is a service that puts books and book-related resources into people’s hands. That takes good people as well as good books.

Putting books into hands, especially hands that would not ordinarily have books, is the real job of the library. This is a noble thing and something worth being thankful for in this season of giving thanks.

To me, “the library” now means the Whatcom County Library System . Last week, the WCLS put out a press release announcing that I have become a trustee and a picture of me stares out from the front page of the library newsletter, Read On. I admit it—I am proud of that little article and I am happy to have become a trustee. I hope I do a good job and keep up my enthusiasm.

For the past few weeks, the director, Christine Perkins, has taken me on tours of the library system. This has been fun. Although I have lived in Whatcom County my entire life, for the last two decades, I have been distracted by a job that seemed to be everywhere but Whatcom County. According to my count, I’ve gone through 4 roll-aboards in my job and I’d prefer an impacted wisdom tooth to another redeye to Kennedy. Truthfully, in the last ten years I have visited the small towns of eastern Long Island that surround my former company’s headquarters more often than I have visited Blaine or Sumas in Whatcom County, so the tours were a revelation to me. The county has grown in many ways.

The road signs of Suffolk County, the eastern end of Long Island and most distant from New York City, have Indian names like Hauppauge, Ronkonkoma, and Amagansett, just as we have Nooksack, Sumas, and Lummi, but the small towns of Long Island are influenced more by New York City than Whatcom County is affected by either Seattle or Vancouver, even though Manhattan (referred to as “The City”) is about the same distance from Sag Harbor on the eastern end of the island as Bellingham is from Seattle. The Long Island Rail Road has a lot to do with the relationship between Manhattan and Suffolk County.

I like Long Island. It is not as rural as Whatcom County, but the towns are not that different. They have libraries like the towns of Whatcom County and people are friendly with a small town feel. Suffolk County is affluent, but my one venture into a Suffolk County library has proven to me that Whatcom County has nothing to be ashamed of in our library system.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the popular book list from Suffolk County Library this morning. Near the top is Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a book about the Japanese internment in Seattle. It is a good book by a northwest author and well worth reading, although a tad on the sweet side in my hard-boiled opinion. It doesn’t appear on the WCLS most popular list, which amused me. Ford’s book disappeared from the New York Times list several months ago and disappeared from the WCLS page about the same time. It appears that Whatcom County is more in tune with the NYT best-seller list than Suffolk County.

Here is a link to the story I hope to read part of at Laurel Leigh’s Village Books Open Mic on October 28, which I call Lunchus Interuptus. The story is written using characters created by Rex Stout in his Nero Wolfe series of detective stories, although I suppose I could not help slipping in some of my personality. I admit that it is impertinent to steal from Grand Master Stout–but he is dead and my writers group (TPWG, The Private Writers Group) has read this story and said nice things. I’ve scrubbed it up some since the group read it, and now I intend to read a couple pages to the open mic. If I have done my job well, the listeners will want to read the rest of the story, so it is posted here. If they don’t want to read it, I will have learned something important. I hate to learn, but life insists on it.

Rex Stout started writing the Nero Wolfe mysteries in the 1930s and he continued until he died in 1975. He created a repertoire of characters that appear in most of the novels and stories: Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, Fergus Cramer, Fritz Brenner, Saul Panzer, Lily Rowan, and more. Part of Stout’s charm is the comfortable familiarity he created in setting and characters.

I like to think of Stout’s characters as deep caricatures–akin to both Bertie Wooster and Philip Marlowe. They are more realistic than a burlesque, but magnified beyond life; often comic, but facing deeply serious issues.The putative main character, Nero Wolfe, is a lazy and reluctant genius whom Archie must goad into action. Somewhere buried in his seventh of a ton planted in a custom-built chair, Wolfe is a mortally wounded hero, and I believe his wounds draw us to him. Archie, the true center of the stories, is a wise-cracking squire who does Wolfe’s leg work, but will not face his own quest until Wolfe’s wounds are resolved and Archie is set free.

A&E produced a Nero Wolfe television series from 2001 to 2002 starring Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin. There have been several radio, movie, and television productions based on Nero Wolfe, but I like the A&E series best. It’s as faithful as television ever is to the original and the sets are Merchant Ivory gorgeous. I recommend seeing it if you have a chance. There is a DVD set of the entire two seasons. There was a Canadian CBC radio series that is good listening, but it is hard to find.