A week ago I acquired something I haven't had one of in years, a library card. The Unity College Library serves as the town's library and I went there to see why the webmail link on unitymaine.org was being blocked. I took down the name of the college's network guy and then checked out two books: Roy Blount's Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans and The Tent by Margaret Atwood. The 2005 Roy Blount book is like the last snapshot of New Orleans before Katrina. My favorite story is about the pompous Phil Johnson trying to interview Fats Domino. The Tent is a collection of tiny (matching my attention span) stories/narratives/jokes almost (ok, vignettes), each one more delicious than the last. I ordered copies of both books on Amazon so I could send them to people. So yesterday I went back to the library (it's now part of my Saturday routine) and checked out John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and a book of essays called Global Values 101. Now I've arrived at the real purpose of the library: reading books you wouldn't buy. Something I read each week is The Week magazine. Favorite part is the real estate page, and on that the "Steal of the Week" which I always imagine buying and restoring. The Week was in yesterday's mail along with the new Derek Trucks Band CD from Amazon, the former containing a brief review of the latter. And seldom has a reviewer missed the point. I bought the CD for something I find hard to articulate, but there it is in the Village Voice quote sticker: "Expect to be transfigured by the Holiest Guitar in the West." The holiness is in the material he's chosen and the fact that he doesn't do his prodigy shredder thing to the disservice of the song. It's always about the song for me, and this CD has introduced me to the lyrics of Nick Cave. I put a couple of cuts from the CD on the March Mix. Chatting with Carla of Zoe Speaks before the show, I told her I like songs about the Big Ideas, which now that I think about it, are inseparable from the Big Feelings. The Big Feelings do not usually include whiny little complaints about somebody not loving you back, but do include universal peaks, the hallelujah highs, the de profundis lows, the search for place and meaning, the sense of your people and their oppression, the journey aspect of life, the anticipation of death, the sense of the whole. I also like songs about Nothing, all innocence and play, not about anything.

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