Once upon a time, preparing for a road trip meant baking special brownies, buying a carton of cigarettes and packing two pairs of jeans, three T-shirts and a large thermos of coffee. All I needed beyond that was a working radio.
That was in the days before media consolidation — when a radio station in Macon might sound different from one in Tampa or any other point on the map and you could get a feel for an area you were passing through by scanning through the dial.
Now, radio pretty much sounds the same, regardless of where you are, and I've given up cigarettes, coffee and dui. So I needed some other form of stimulation and entertainment for a 10-hour drive to the mountains of north Georgia.
My road trip compay, Michael, suggested we hit the library for music and books on CD. We went to Jimmie B. Keel, a Hillsborough County regional library on Bearss Avenue. Most of the audio books at the library are still on tape, not yet CD, which limited our literary selection. We grabbed a Tom Wolfe novella, Ambush at Fort Bragg, read by Ed Norton, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and a Robert Parker mystery called Hugger Mugger, read by Joe Mantegna.
Michael, being a musician, chose the music. The library's selection is mostly classical, but it also has respectable sections for rock, folk, Latin, gospel, blues, jazz and world music. Michael was impressed with the library's selection of stuff he says you can't even find in stores. He plays jazz, the real kind not the smooth kind, and was especially surprised to see an excellent variety of new and challenging jazz recordings, rather than just the old chestnuts.
We started our detox from city life by popping in the Tom Wolfe, a puffy piece on media puffery and a portrait of a venal Yankee television producer exposing redneck crimes in the South. The whole production is overwrought, with overbearing music and Ed Norton, with a terrible Southern accent, overacting every character to cartoonish effect. Still, it was entertaining and urbane, and it carried us out of Florida on I-75, with its billboards for truck stops bearing scrofulous-looking women promising to bare all.
After dinner in the gorgeous antebellum town of Madison, Ga., "the town Sherman refused to burn," we popped in Memoirs of a Geisha. You might remember that former geisha Mineko Iwasaki sued author Golden for revealing her identity after he promised her anonymity if she would give him information about the world of the geisha. Despite Golden's apparent lack of ethics, his novel was praised for its depiction of the life of a geisha, written from a feminine perspective. Disappointingly, it turned out to be a shallow, predictable romance novel with very little information about the training and life of a geisha and zero insight into the feminine psyche.
Once we arrived at our destination and commenced relaxing, we realized something was missing. We had been so intent on selecting music and audio books for the drive that we'd neglected to get books to actually read. We hit a bookstore in the mountain town of Clayton and bought Anne Tyler's quietly hopeful and masterful tale of redemption, called A Patchwork Planet, a book on hiking trails in North Georgia and Quite a Year for Plums by Bailey White.
We could have gotten it all at the library for free. Instead, it cost us more than $60, even though one book was 30 percent off.
On the way home, we tried to listen to Hugger Mugger, but it was so bad in every way, we had to turn it off and resort to reading aloud. Parker's writing, or shall I say "typing" was dull and uninspired; the plotting hackneyed and the reading — well, let's just say you won't be missing anything if you never hear Joe Mantegna doing his impression of a drunk, spoiled, rich girl trying to seduce a hardboiled private eye.
Fortunately, Bailey White's novel is an enchanting and affectionate portrait of Southern eccentrics living in the very area we were passing through, right down to her description of two retired Georgia schoolteachers staying at a motel across the street from a "we bare it all" truck stop. Michael, who isn't even a professional actor, knew better than to try a Southern accent and high, squeaky voices for the female characters. He could give Mantegna and Norton some pointers in this regard.
After we got back to Tampa, I returned the stuff to the library (though I could have kept it for three weeks) and checked out the other offerings. Not only can you get music and audio books at the library these days, you can also get movies. Like the books on tape, the movies are a little behind the tech curve with mostly videos and just a few DVDs scattered in so far, but it's a good selection and free. Plus you can keep the movies a full week. There's plenty of educational stuff, including how-tos, travel series, biographies, cultural and historical documentaries, and a veritable encyclopedia of films from classics and sci fi to foreign and art films. Did I mention it's all free?
Perhaps best of all is the array of online services and Internet access the library provides. You probably already know that you can search the entire collection of the library online and request that your choices be sent to the branch most convenient for you. You probably also know that anyone can walk into a library and jump on the Internet without spending a penny.
What you might not know is that the library, through its Information Gateway, provides access to credible, premium, scholarly, government and other subscription web sites, databases and reference works that you would have to pay to use on your own. All you have to do is go to www.hcplc.org and select the Information Gateway button. Imagine looking up a medical problem and getting real research instead of cleverly disguised ads for pharmaceuticals on a drug company web site. You can also get full-text magazine and newspaper articles, loads of grant and fundraising directories, genealogical research, and journals of art, music, medicine, history, science, culture, religion and much more. In many cases, you don't even need a library card to access the information.
Senior Editor Susan F. Edwards can be reached at ed@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 122.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2003.