LA County Public Library -- Main Library - The LA Flood Project (sitios de interés)
Descripción del sitio
Stage 1He is the sentinel of the library stacks, the minuteman of the microfiche. If you have forbidden fruit, illegal imbibery, or unallowable onions, the man you will reckon with, in his taut burgundy suspenders and tidy bow tie, is Albert Winston Sanchez. The son of a crossing guard and a parking enforcer, he grew up playing among these hallowed stacks, when card catalogs were secret keys to untold paginated pleasures, well indexed, sorted, delivered with the simple submission of a request slip across the desk of the librarian. And now they are his care, so no matter if you are old or enfeebled, tired homeless and cold, or a runny-nosed toddler with hyper-attention and over-active bowels, you and your mother or nanny will abide by the rules that act as the frail bulwark against the armies of ants and militias of mold. And so it is with at first mild perturbation that Albert reacts, when he first notices on his clipboard checklist, the jagged circle of the first raindrop that has somehow penetrated the vault of the ceiling. Albert looks toward the arc of the ceiling and whispers with determination, We'll see about that.
Stage 2
The book-laden water cascades down the escalators of the Los Angeles' shrine to the printed word – a library in Lala Land! -- this fanciful Valhalla that the rest of the world could hardly believe exists outside of some sound stage -- with the possible exception of Ray Bradbury and the litany of authors whose undeniably massive life’s work is logjamming down the escalators like some Amazon of prose, poetry, maps, and deeds, variorums of velum roiling downward.Yet at the bottom of the stairs, a woman, up to her knee-highs in water, her over-stuffed grocery bags floating away, screams at Albert at the top of emphysema lungs -- cheeks enflamed with spiderwebs of scarlet and pink and violet-- What about my books? What about my books!
Stage 3
A library is a metaphor, a vessel of civic wisdom, of data stored and shared, a great thermos of knowledge passed around the communal campsite in a night with hardly a star. And at the bottom of it all, at its base, where lukewarm waters pool and puddle, where acid-free pulp, circuits and silicon have proven equally vulnerable to sog, from his spot on the stairs, his leg pinned beneath, of all things, an ancient card catalog, all Albert can think is…backwash.
-- MCM