October 13, 2008
Festival
Our town hosted this weekend the annual Southern Festival of Books and the writers who write them. It’s a gala time.
But not, I suppose, for all. I read somewhere that twenty-five percent of us never read anything and have never read a book. I know somebody who has a TV remote and two books on the table by the barcalounger, one by Rush Limbaugh and one by King James. I don’t know whether they’re read or whether they’re just props for some bookends. And then, there’re even aspirants for high office who can’t for the life of them recall anything they might ever have read.
At book festivals, it’s the writers who are the cause for them and for me the most interesting. Some of them look like writers or like I think writers look, sort of seedy and with an ordered carelessness of attire. Others just look like the rest of us so much that one can hardly tell a writer without a program. Garrison Keillor was here last year. He sat around eating fast food and looking very much like a writer.
It’s also OktoberFest across the way at our Germantown with lots of knockwurst and sauerkraut and oompah. I’ve a friend who plays the helicon in the German band. A helicon looks like a sort of junior-grade sousaphone that’s all around as impressive keeping the tempo and the changes as well as any other of its tuba kin. If I weren’t such a jazzer, I’d almost like the helicon as much as an acoustic bass.
Anyhow, it’s all over now. It’s altogether comforting that books are still something to be festive about, and laptops are only also-rans with which to write them. One more thing about writers, Erskine Caldwell said that we must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and just to go on that basis. Not a great mind, he said, not a great thinker, not a great philosopher, but for sure, a story teller.
All the while this celebration has wound down, the national groundswell winds up elsewhere and probably here also catching up with the hatemongers on the presidential glory road. It may be, though, that enough hate’s sown already and once again beginning somewhere to germinate out of its horrid fecundity. The greed that’s thrown our economy into its current bollix is matched only by the greed that will do anything to gain power, a greed that no amounts of billions can ever rescue.
Trouble is, there’re surely some who couldn’t care less, maybe those who never read.
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