Anne Lamott Has A Column on the Boston Globe on Salinas.
Salinas is one of the poorest communities in the state, within one of the richest counties in the country, the locale of so many of Steinbeck’s great novels: Think farm workers, fields of artichokes, garlic, faded stucco houses stained with dirt, ticky-tacky housing tracts, John Ford, James Dean’s face in ”East of Eden,” strawberry fields, and old gas stations.
Now think about closing the libraries there, closing the buildings that hold the town’s books, all those bound stories about people and wisdom and justice and life and silliness and laborers bending low to pick the strawberries. You’d have to be crazy to bring such obvious karmic repercussions down on yourself. So in early April, a group of writers and actors fought back, showing up in Salinas for a 24-hour ”emergency read-in.”
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