“One difference between the kind of anarchist groups I like and the classic Marxist group, for instance, is that we don’t start by defining reality – our points of unity are not our analyses of the situation, but rather what we want to do, the action we want to take, and how we go about it.”
–from “Interview with David Graeber,” The White Review
It was a couple of years ago by way of Doug Henwood’s Behind the News I first heard Yanis Varoufakis speak with such great command of the current crisis. In Athens last year I had a chance to speak with him myself, and I came back to the States with this essay to write.
“The Great Shock,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2011.
Rose Reading Room
Summers we have my daughters with us here in New York, though this becomes more of a stretch for them now they’re sixteen and thirteen—all the fun is back home with their friends. To hold their interest we have to keep reinventing the thing. This year the younger is at SUNY’s Fashion Institute of Technology taking “Print Design” and “Hot Fashion Trends.” And hot is the word—not one of those record-smashing Satanic mills type Julys, but infernal wouldn’t be too far off, and there are these withering, grit-filled winds that come up afternoons, NYC’s version of the Catalonian leveche, only they savor of trash day.
After I drop Grace at FIT, I make straight for the cool tomb of the Main Branch library on Fifth Avenue to write for a couple of hours before retrieving her. I’ve been coming to the great Rose Reading Room here for many years now. If you’ve never seen the place, words will be another stretch—the largest single room you’re likely to see that doesn’t feature a sporting event. Not that you couldn’t play ball there; it’s very near as long as a soccer pitch and almost half as wide. But it’s the vertical scale of the grand Beaux-Arts hall that’s most stunning, fifty feet from marble floor to baroque ceiling, the greatest expanse of headroom outside a Gothic cathedral. It speaks of a time when the world of the mind was felt to have the same sublime scale. There’s room to think here, room to think big.
More earthly but just as essential to the experience of the place is what I wish I had a better word for than its layout, a double file of long oak tables, forty in all, each of which seats sixteen readers. That’s room for over six hundred, and though it might surprise you, most of it’s almost always filled. It’s the other extraordinary way the Reading Room strikes one as a strange enclave of alternate history, like Steampunk’s utopian double, as a place to read and write in intimate collective activity. This great spectacle, six hundred of us exercising some of our finest capacities, it’s worth something. Consider what it might mean to the self-understanding of a city.
Alas, a room like the one described here will never be built again, not in this civilization. Now we close public libraries. And what do we trade them for? Ipods and Kindles. “Personal” culture you either pay for or go without and a War on Terror.
Long live the Reading Room!
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