J. Edgar Hoover, Mao Tse-tsung, Casanova, Pope Pius and Golda Meir worked in libraries.

At one time, the strongest man in the world, a Belgian, was a librarian.

Machiavelli would take off his dirty underwear before he read classical texts.

Herman Melville begins Moby Dick with extracts and quotes about whales that he titles, “Supplied by a Sub Sub Librarian...”

1968. For many an old story. For others, a story they don’t want to hear. Assassinations and turmoil. Kennedy, King. Revolutionary fervor. Protest against the Vietnam War, racial, gender and class inequality. Rioting in the cities and on campuses, in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. “Something is happening,” Dylan sang, “and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Things could not go on as they had before. “The entire world was on the verge of radical transformation,” Eliot Weinberger writes, “from the structure of society and state to the details of body ornament.”..

The conservative philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote of those who had stepped onto the stage of history and did not belong there. Vertical invaders he called them. Those who had come up from below...

“My City Was Gone” is Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders’s elegy for Akron, the city of her youth. “There was no train station,” Hynde laments. “There was no downtown....My city had been pulled down/Reduced to parking spaces....The farms of Ohio/Had been replaced by shopping malls/And muzak filled the air/From Seneca to Cuyahoga falls.”..

At an oral graduation exam at Harvard during the nineteenth century, the legendary American scientist, Louis Agassiz (Henry David Thoreau provided him with turtles for laboratory dissection), gave frogs to three seniors. Tell me about the frog, he said. The students were offended. They had studied at Harvard for four years. They knew what a frog was. What was this?

The Mekons began as a garage band, as all bands, of necessity, begin, but in thirty years they have not crossed over, and have remained a garage band, fundamentally anti-commercial in a commercial market, what Dave Thomas ofPere Ubu calls avant-garage.

Last year in Franklin County, Ohio, Timothy Bowers went into a bank and robbed it. The teller gave him four twenty dollar bills in an envelope and hit the alarm. Bowers went over to the security guard and handed him the envelope, saying, “Here, be a hero today.” His plan was to get arrested and be sentenced to prison for three years, or until he was eligible for Social Security.

The American poet, George Oppen, who lived in Mexico City for ten years apparently never learned a word of Spanish. On a bus one day, he heard the driver say something in English, and blurted out, “The man speaks English.” To hear one’s language is a form of recognition. It places you in a world.

Ideas are like checks, the poet Ezra Pound notes. How good they are is dependent on how much you have in your account. We may make deposits in various ways. Experience, first of all. What we experience day after day after day tells us the world, and about ourselves. A particular experience that stays, that does not go away, may tell us more. Loss is a good teacher; love a more subtle one.

On October 7, 2006, Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. She was shot four times in the head and the assassin left his gun alongside her body in the elevator – standard practice for Russian hit men. She was 48.

Michael Herr was not embedded. In his magnificent account of the Vietnam War, Dispatches, one of the great books of our time, Herr sees himself as one of the grunts. He shares their dangers, fears and daily miseries of an impossible life. They give him their helmets and flak jackets, find him mattresses to sleep on. “You’re all right, man,” they say. “You got balls.”

Gibson, who gave us the term cyberspace (“a consensual hallucination” he calls it), was characterizing William S. Burroughs’s cut-up, collage method in novels like Naked Lunch as an influence on his own fiction, but I would like to suggest that it applies more broadly -- how we become who (what) we are. We can’t push away what bumps up against us. It leans in.

At one point, I had my car serviced by a mechanic who left the town I lived in to return home and open a garage in his home town. I followed him home, as it were, because he was such a good mechanic. I would arrange my schedule to wait for the car until work was completed, and I had an opportunity to see what his day was like.

“The American voice can only be heard in the collective stories of those who are for some time, no matter how brief, pushed outside the definition of ‘American’...The American voice is how one responds when silenced because of who he or she is.” -- Tanya Kalivas.

My brother (who was later to teach math at Lakewood High School) worked at Republic Steel in the Flats. I saw him at work once on the graveyard shift where he cut up ingots as large as boxcars – hickeys they were called – with acetylene torches. Fiery, hellish flames shot into a dark sky. Soot and sweat caked on the faces of workers who moved slowly, deliberately, as if in some kind of trance. Those who had worked for ten years or more, he told me, looked twenty years older than they were.

Who have we the right to speak for? Who has the right to speak for us? Who owns our speech? Can I, a white male, say, speak for – speak as – a black, a woman? In 1839 in Paris, a workers’ paper, La Ruche Populaire, permitted only workers to write for it. We understand why, not just because we can’t write of what we are ignorant, but to presume to do so is to speak for someone who should speak for himself.

It’s not so much that we live speeded-up lives, but that technology has made it impossible for us to live any other way. If the nineteenth century ended when the airplane was invented, the twentieth reached its nadir with the computer. In the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over because it took more than a week for news of peace to reach the armies. We saw 9/11 on our computers as it happened. Increasingly, the premise of film – thirty frames per second per second – is the story of our lives. Computers give us answers faster than we can come up with them. Cameras preserve memory better than we can. Instant replay permits us to see what our eyes cannot assimilate. Remote controls lower our threshold of boredom, or distraction.

What doesn’t change is the will to change, the poet Charles Olson notes. We may go to school, leave town, better ourselves. We cite Shakespeare not Jerry Springer. We drink Pilsener Urquell not Genny. The cleaning woman does work we used to do. People don’t change, Olson adds. They only stand more revealed. We may cross town, but we never leave our street. It is, at the last, the one thing if we do not trust marks us, and continues to mark us.

It’s not so much that we live speeded-up lives, but that technology has made it impossible for us to live any other way. If the nineteenth century ended when the airplane was invented, the twentieth reached its nadir with the computer. In the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over because it took more than a week for news of peace to reach the armies. We saw 9/11 on our computers as it happened. Increasingly, the premise of film – thirty frames per second per second – is the story of our lives. Computers give us answers faster than we can come up with them. Cameras preserve memory better than we can. Instant replay permits us to see what our eyes cannot assimilate. Remote controls lower our threshold of boredom, or distraction.

For my upcoming 50th reunion at Lakewood High School, I was asked to summarize my life. What have I done? Who was I? What I would say now would not be what I would have said ten years after graduation. At 28, there were goals, dreams, possibility. At 68, reflection, realization, assessment. Thing done, not done. Happiness, disappointment. What I could not anticipate, what I could. Dreams fulfilled or foreclosed. At 68, goals are necessarily different than they were at 18. We speak of last things, not first ones.

If we want to see what happens in slaughterhouses, how fast food becomes fast food, Michael Pollan argues in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we would demand better food for our tables. “If there is any new right we need to establish,” he suggests, “maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look.”

After he graduated from Harvard (and before he became a poet), E. E. Cummings applied for a job at Reader’s Digest. He was told that any article written for the magazine had to meet three conditions: six to sixty; anyone can do it; it makes you feel good.

“Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice,� Marco Polo tells the Great Khan of China in response to the Ruler’s question why Polo tells him about every city he has seen except the one he is from.

I go down the same side of the street Gordon Brumm does, even if I write about culture broadly and Brumm politics. Of course, artists have political views as much as anyone else. Joan Jett campaigned for Howard Dean and was on stage with him when the press captured his scream. “It was a compete fabrication,� she says of what the press did. “It was created to knock Dean out.� This year she went to Afghanistan to play for our troops. “A lot of times people can’t separate that when you play for the troops you’re supporting them but not the policy that put them over there,� she says.

“In Khoyniki, there was a ‘plaque of achievement’ in the center of town. The best people in the region had their names on it. But it was the alcoholic cab driver who went into the radioactive zone to pick up the kids from the kindergarten, not any of the people on the plaque. Everyone became what he really was.� --Voices from Chernobyl,