The Washington Post February 21, 1993, Sunday, Final Edition Of All Possible Worlds BYLINE: Michael Dirda SECTION: BOOK WORLD; PAGE X15 LENGTH: 1900 words IN A well-ordered society, one that had its priorities straight, there would be branch libraries in every neighborhood. Elementary education would be the most respected profession, and grade-school teachers would be chauffeured to work in limousines. Everyone would be required to play a musical instrument. No one over 12 would be allowed to raise his or her voice except at choir practice. There's more. Every household would be allocated a museum-quality work of art, which would be carefully displayed in the living room. Each Sunday afternoon, between 2 and 4, people would be encouraged to visit their neighbors, both to look at the artworks and to discuss community issues. Tea or punch might be served. In Washington all lawyers would naturally be required to work the 12-hour days they seem to love, but four of those hours would have to be spent in soup kitchens. Politicians would be literally servants of the people, displaying deference, modesty and loyalty to their constituents; livery should be optional, but encouraged. Everyone would make exactly the same amount of money. It's fun to play Utopia and imagine an ideal society. The poet W.H. Auden noted that in his perfect world there would be statues of famous chefs in all the parks, and gossip would be the main source of public information. The philosopher Fourier decided that in his Utopian "phalanxes" young children would be the trash collectors since they would find the job a kind of amusement, like playing in the sandbox or making mudpies. Even George Kennan, in his new book, Around the Cragged Hill, yearns for an America that fosters handcrafts, public transportation and small-scale farming; he might almost be a latter-day William Morris. In literature scores of science-fiction stories depict apparent Utopias, almost invariably showing them to be secretly rotten or to have purchased their perfection at a terrible cost. In "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Ursula Le Guin imagines just such a paradise of art and peace and beauty; but it turns out that all these graces can be maintained only by continually torturing a small child in a clammy dungeon beneath the city. Surely the bliss of thousands more than justifies the agony of one! So most of the citizens of Omelas believe. But, as Le Guin's title tells us, not all. Libraries PEOPLE daydream about better worlds when they stop believing in their civic institutions -- the government, the police, the hospitals, the banks, what have you. Who does not despair when he opens the newspaper? In fact, I can think of only one institution that everyone, except apparently our elected representatives, still values as entirely beneficent: public libraries. Naturally the libraries (along with their cousins, the schools), suffer most when public officials decide to trim budgets. The Library of Congress must curtail its hours; my Silver Spring library is no longer open on Fridays and there are rumors of more cut-backs to come; the Four Corners branch up the road has already been forced to close. Only last week neighborhood libraries in the district announced that they will be laying off staff and reducing hours by more than 25 percent. I find all this incomprehensible. Shameful, actually. In my childhood the library was a town's chief pride and showplace, as well as a powerful engine of culture, self-improvement and scholarship. For kids, the library was where you went to study, write sophomoric research papers (usually based on the World Book or Compton's Encyclopedia), read books and magazines, flirt and simply hang out. From 10 to 9, Monday through Friday, 10 to 5 on Saturday, the library, with its shushing yet infinitely patient guardians, was always there when you needed it. As children, my sisters and I were taken weekly and allowed to check out four books apiece, so that at various ages I thrilled to Miss Pickerel Goes to Mars, The Mysterious Island, The Father Brown Omnibus, The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman (the first poetry I ever read on my own), the first five or six volumes of Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization (got bogged down somewhere in the Age of Reason), the four volumes of the essays and journalism of George Orwell, and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Once I tried to take out Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and was told that I'd need my parents' permission (which was duly granted). In high school I even signed out Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and for a week or so would casually pull the little book out during study hall and pretend to understand it. When the clutch on our '58 Ford failed, off I scooted to the library to check out some Chilton car manuals; two days later -- and this seems literally in the realm of the fantastic -- I'd replaced the clutch. And it worked. Now, of course, today's kids don't need libraries as much. They can always wander about the malls or simply enjoy the scenery in front of our region's many delightful office buildings. And why not? After all, it seems that our local governments spend most of their time and our money helping these damn things get built. As they say, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. That's from a very good book, by the way. Thinking Reads THINKING recently about black history, I called up Catherine Clinton, who teaches in the Afro-American studies department at Harvard, and asked her to suggest five good works of nonfiction about the black experience in America. A few hours later she telephoned back, emphasizing that her recommendations were simply a few "engaging, off-the-beaten track, but moving portraits of the black past." Here's the list, with Clinton's brief comments: (1) Celia: A Slave, by Melton McLaurin. "The gripping tale of a young black woman's murder of her master in antebellum Missouri." (2) Prince Among Slaves, by Terry Alford. "The dramatic story of a Muslim prince who triumphs over American slavery." (3) Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940, by Guy C. McElroy. "A lavishly illustrated look at the way American artists have represented and distorted African-American experience." (4) A Voice from the South, by Anna J. Cooper. "A black woman reformer's story, first published at the turn of the century. Part of the Schomburg Library of 19th-century Black Women Writers, all of whose volumes are worth looking into." (5) When the Game Was Black and White: The Illustrated History of Baseball's Negro Leagues, by Bruce Chadwick. Provocations RUSSELL HOBAN is the only living author who has written masterpieces for every age group: Bread and Jam for Frances (ages 2-5); How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen (ages 5-10); The Mouse and His Child (ages 10-16); and Riddley Walker (grown-ups). The best novelist in America that you've never heard of, let alone read, because you don't bother with "science fiction" is Gene Wolfe. His four-part Book of the New Sun is as ambitious as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as intricate and beautifully written as Nabokov's Pale Fire. Post Bag THEODORE WILENTZ (Washington) wonders, "Do you ever add Judge Dee to Jeeves/Wooster and Archie/Wolfe" as favorite vacation reading? Judge Dee, based on an actual medieval Chinese magistrate, is the hero of a series of whodunits written by the Dutch diplomat Robert Van Gulik. I've never read the books, always meant to -- though there is a mystery series set in ancient China I am fond of. Barry Hughart's three novels about Master Li and his sidekick Number Ten Ox blend whimsy, philosophy and Chinese swashbuckling in some highly entertaining mystery-thrillers. The first, Bridge of Birds, won the World Fantasy Award; the others, equally good, are The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen. John Morris (Arlington) writes that "John Dickson Carr was a master of the classic detective story, arguably the master. Yet his place in the canon remains insecure, and he's too often overlooked or underrated by surveys of the genre." Morris goes on to remind me that last month I "inadvertently invented" a title that doesn't exist -- "The Problem of the Green Spectacles" -- which is a "conflation of the book's British title 'The Black Spectacles' and its U.S. title 'The Problem of the Green Capsule.' " Apologies. I did, however, mention both titles of Carr's masterpiece The Three Coffins (in Britain The Hollow Man). For some reason, Golden Age mysteries frequently seem to suffer retitling when they cross the Atlantic. Some arcane marketing reason, no doubt, but a vexation for readers and collectors. Two other Carr books that show him at his best are the The Crooked Hinge (very ingenious) and the supernatural thriller The Burning Court (deliberately ambiguous and extremely disturbing). Whodunit fans may also want to try the neglected novels of Elizabeth Daly, according to Constantia H. Johnson (Syria, Va.) quite possibly "the premiere American mystery writer." Christina Hunt Mahony, associate director of the Center for Irish Studies at Catholic University, writes to emphasize that Louis MacNeice is, above all, an Irish poet and that substantial sections of his Autumn Journal -- "an undervalued modern masterpiece" -- are "devoted to MacNeice's examination of . . . his Irishness." She quotes one of his still "blisteringly accurate" observations: And the North, where I was a boy, Is still the North, veneered with the grime of Glasgow, Thousands of men whom nobody will employ Standing at the corners, coughing. Mahony also suggests that readers look for MacNeice's Selected Poems, edited by Michael Longley, and Louis MacNeice: A Study, by his wife Edna Longley. Jerome Shipman (Potomac) mentions that some mathematicians "refer to the logarithmic derivative of the Gamma function as the digamma function" and wonders if the latter was named after the lost letter of the Greek alphabet that I briefly mentioned. Does anyone know? As for Homer himself, Eugene LeVert (Rehoboth, Del.) suggests readers try Christopher Logue's "libertine" but powerful versions or "accounts" of the Iliad recently gathered in Kings (Books 1-2) and War Music (Books 16-19). But Eva T.H. Brann, dean of St. John's College in Annapolis, says that the only way to really appreciate Homer -- you can see this coming -- is to "learn Greek." Mary V. Kagey (Lynchburg, Va.) agrees. Aristotle, I remember, maintained that "all men by nature desire to know"; unfortunately, he also observed that "all education is accompanied by pain." Sadly, Greek is all Latin to me, and the most I'm ever likely to learn is the alphabet and a few words. Unless, of course, St. John's sees fit to offer me an endowed chair in comparative literature, with plenty of time for independent study. "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." -- Gertrude Stein "No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment." -- Isaac Babel "I live for syntax." -- Raymond Chandler "Readings" appears on the third Sunday of the month. Comments about it or any other aspect of Book World may be sent to Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World, Washington, D.C. 20071. Highlights from the letters will be reprinted in this space. Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for Book World. COUNTRY: UNITED STATES (92%); STATE: DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, USA (92%); SUBJECT: BC-02/21/93-X15OFA BOOKS EDUCATION (90%); PRIMARY SCHOOLS (90%); ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS (90%); ART & ARTISTS (90%); LIBRARIES (90%); WRITERS & WRITING (87%); BOOK REVIEWS (66%); PERSON: URSULA LE GUIN (58%); LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1993 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH SERIES: Occasional GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION, ZARKO KARABATIC FOR TWP TYPE: REVIEW Copyright 1993 The Washington Post Search Terms [(peace "gene wolfe")](28) View search details Search Details You searched for: (peace "gene wolfe") Source [The Washington Post] Show Full with Indexing Sort Relevance Date/Time February 20 2010 10:10:48 View first documentView previous document 11 of 28 View next documentView last document Back to Top LexisNexis® About LexisNexis | Terms & Conditions | My ID Copyright ©2010LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.All rights reserved.