ALA & Garrison

I'll probably have several ALA/DC related posts, but I didn't bring a laptop and computer time has been ridiculously hard to get. But...
I just attended the final keynote session, Garrison Keilor featured. I've long been a fan, for many reasons, and he didn't fail me now (a bow to the little feat). His talk was a somewhat rambling monologue of how he has related to, and existed in, libraries from youth to this day, including one funny story about a library where the librarians were men who all smoked pipes. But in a nutshell, and this is to do the entire monlogue a diservice (I'll link to it if it becomes available), he championed libraries as place: places that were true landmarks, and in some cases pinnacles, of democracy. Places that anyone could enter, read an astonishing diversity of work, sit in silence and think, write or dream (the only other places I can think of in a city to do this are churches, and to a lesser extent parks), and that in this librarians and libraries have a tremendous responsibility. In an age of political tough talk, machismo swagger, and outright threats, libraries and librarians are more authentic defenders of democratic liberty. At times moving, boring, whimsical, enlightening, hysterical, GK is a true American legend, and a champion of the word, the book as object, and like Kerouac, Whitman and others, the true, honest and generous American landscape.
Briefly, on other notes, I'm reading the latest novel by Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero) and was pleased to find a reference to the poet Ed Dorn. That alone, to my mind, makes it worth reading.
All for now.