{"id":1156,"date":"2015-09-10T17:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2015-09-01T14:36:52","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T18:36:52","slug":"joseph-mills-if-librarians-were-honest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2015\/1156\/poems\/joseph-mills-if-librarians-were-honest\/","title":{"rendered":"Joseph Mills: If Librarians Were Honest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>\u201c\u2026a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u2013Benjamin Franklin<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If librarians were honest,<br \/>\nthey wouldn\u2019t smile, or act<br \/>\nwelcoming. They would say,<br \/>\nYou need to be careful. Here<br \/>\nbe monsters. They would say,<br \/>\nThese rooms house heathens<br \/>\nand heretics, murderers and<br \/>\nmaniacs, the deluded, desperate,<br \/>\nand dissolute. They would say,<br \/>\nThese books contain knowledge<br \/>\nof death, desire, and decay,<br \/>\nbetrayal, blood, and more blood;<br \/>\neach is a Pandora\u2019s box, so why<br \/>\nwould you want to open one.<br \/>\nThey would post danger<br \/>\nsigns warning that contact<br \/>\nmight result in mood swings,<br \/>\nsevere changes in vision,<br \/>\nand mind-altering effects.<br \/>\nIf librarians were honest<br \/>\nthey would admit the stacks<br \/>\ncan be more seductive and<br \/>\nshocking than porn. After all,<br \/>\nonce you\u2019ve seen a few<br \/>\nbreasts, vaginas, and penises,<br \/>\nmore is simply more,<br \/>\na comforting banality,<br \/>\nbut the shelves of a library<br \/>\ncontain sensational novelties,<br \/>\na scandalous, permissive mingling<br \/>\nof Malcolm X, Marx, Melville,<br \/>\nMerwin, Millay, Milton, Morrison,<br \/>\nand anyone can check them out,<br \/>\ntaking them home or to some corner<br \/>\nwhere they can be debauched<br \/>\nand impregnated with ideas.<br \/>\nIf librarians were honest,<br \/>\nthey would say, No one<br \/>\nspends time here without being<br \/>\nchanged. Maybe you should<br \/>\ngo home. While you still can.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201c\u2026a book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work\u2026\u201d \u2013Benjamin Franklin If librarians were honest, they wouldn\u2019t smile, or act welcoming. They would say, You need to be careful. Here be monsters. They would say, These rooms house heathens and heretics, murderers and maniacs, the deluded, desperate, and dissolute. They would say, These books contain <a href='http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2015\/1156\/poems\/joseph-mills-if-librarians-were-honest\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[295,296],"class_list":["post-1156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","tag-libraries-are-awesome","tag-no-one-gets-out-unchanged","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1157,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions\/1157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}