Today we will learn to catalog nonfiction in all its multifarious categories. It is a rude shock to me to learn that in library world poetry is classified as nonfiction. Really? Poetry is the most fictiony thing there is. Even the language rules of poetry are fictional. It looks like we will use limited Dewey for nonfiction. Dewey is a shelving system, but it might move the English poetry too far away from the American poetry and prevent discovery by proximity. Before Dewey in the library of congress books were shelved by acquisition date and height. The general public did not have access to the stacks. The history of the library of congress is a good thing to read about in the middle of the night. I have two library heroes who were not librarians. Henriette Avram created the MARC (machine readable cataloging) record which became the international standard for bibliographic meta data. Daniel Boorstin, whose Discoverers and Creators series I loved, was the 12th Librarian of Congress. He and Avram both led simple, stable family lives while changing the world. Make that three. The poet Archibald MacLeish was the 9th Librarian of Congress.

Before there was the internet, before blogs, before blockquote tags, when journals were written or pasted into notebooks, I read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and wrote down a lot of quotes from it and identified with her main character. I have read nothing else by her until this week when I started Gilead because my sisters are reading it. Now I suspect that all her character narrators are one. Since I'm reading a Kindle edition, I don't have to write down all the sentences that make you read them over and again; I can just highlight them: "People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree."

And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

Milestones: ice out on April 2, first grant submitted March 30, third TV interview today. 71 degrees on April 10. Shocking, really. Saturday morning donations: people from Lewiston, Orono, Farmington, Winslow drove here to give us books. That TV exposure lets people know about us. Other libraries reach out to us. Will visit Rockport and Friendship libraries on Wednesday.

If I read The Yellow House in the early morning, my head is in New Orleans all day. It is the One Book, One Community book for Baton Rouge and my sisters and I are reading it together. We can relate to the poverty, the house (no longer there) full of people, the religion, the hurricanes, the double consciousness of being here and remembering there. Of the family my sister Claudia said she didn't think of them as being black, but just as people. See why we are reading books together?

April 12: the Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation grant is headed to Bangor by express mail. It's like writing a paper, getting it handed in on time, and waiting for your grade. Grants are basically how English majors play the lottery. Appointment with attorney made to have library lease and our wills drawn up. Those documents will be inspected by the town's attorney before the special town meeting which hasn't been called yet. Those documents could be key to getting some reluctant voters to approve our TIF funds request.