I keep this book on a wooden end table right against the couch where I read and sleep. I can't say I reach for it often, but I must must find something important about it to keep it there. It came out in 1970, first as an excerpt in The New Yorker. I was just out of college. It was a huge deal. Even my father read the sections they put in the paper. Part of the reason I keep it close is I like the title and the typeface. It evokes some evolution/revolution, some change, some possibilities. Is there such a book for now? Even any music. Where's Buffalo Springfield?

I read yesterday in the Times that only 7 African-American kids will be part of the freshman class of 895 at Stuyvesant High in lower Manhattan. Admission to that elitist of the elite New York City public high schools is based on a test. You could analyze that one-test method and then analyze it some more. I held the sign today more convinced than ever of the importance of the message. 

Morning train back from holding my sign. Just after 9:00. 

In my neighborhood library. I see people from everywhere in mine using computers, getting citizenship forms and guidelines. There are books for recent arrivals. It should be open more hours each day. It should be open on Sunday. Shocking that it's not. People use it.

Among the things you can do other than drink this weekend is begin to read or reread Joyce's Ulysses. I don't sit at the bars anymore, but I look in as I walk by. There are maybe eight Irish bars within two blocks of my apartment. The best of them is Molly's where they'll serve pints to a packed house all day tomorrow in glasses not plastic cups. My mother died 44 years ago today.

'The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. it opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. in moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.'
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

I've mentioned this guy before. He intrigues me because he's the mayor of South Bend, Indiana where I went to college. The boyish-looking mayor went to Harvard and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. You don't think of that when you think of South Bend. You don't think they'd have a gay mayor either. But they do, and he's running for president. He's the youngest of the Democratic contenders. He's 37. He served in Afghanistan. He's been on all the shows. Today I saw this book of his in the big Barnes & Noble on Union Square. There are so many new books about politics and our culture in stores now. It's a heated time. I was thinking about books a while ago. When you read, you sometimes take notes or make a note in the margin. Even if you're reading a novel, you might do that. With TV, no.

A few of the books on hold in my local library on 23rd Street. I go to the library every day but Sunday when it's disappointingly not open. The ceilings are wonderfully high. The lights are brighter than my dimly-lit apartment. Those big windows you see look out on a busy street. It makes a stimulating combination of quiet inside and busyness out. That's why people like living in big cities, that combination. But the libraries here close at dinnertime. It's way too early. People go home and it's not quiet there. TV is on. Almost always. Almost all the time. Noise outside, noise inside. It'd be better here if the libraries were open at night.