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Thursday I drove to Summerville for an interview with “Palmetto People,” which will run on July 6. The interview took place inside the Henry Timrod library. If you aren’t up on Southern poets, Timrod was dubbed the poet laureate of the Confederacy and spent most of his time suffering. He’s buried in Columbia, right across from my favorite place – Cornell Arms Apartments. You can read all of his poetry online, just about, although people like Ray Bradbury hate that:

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Bradbury supports old fashioned public libraries, not those meaningless Internets. In fact, that’s the focus of a recent New York Times story (from which I just quoted). The author of Fahrenheit 451 will rescue a California county’s library system single-handed, even if the system is more than half-a-million dollars in debt and could conceivably close. Wait a second. I thought Fahrenheit 451 was about the intense, nearly erotic pleasure one feels while dousing great heaps of books with gasoline and burning them, or increasing the air temperature in a room until books spontaneously burst into bright sexy flames. Did I miss the irony? Maybe I should read the second half.

Bradbury also says that, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years” and then went on to publish three books a week for 50 years.

Bradbury does know that colleges and universities have libraries, right, and that college students read books (hopefully)? And that colleges and universities give scholarships now?

Paul Muldoon shocked the world earlier this week (or at least Americans) by saying on The Colbert Report that poetry has intrinsic value. Even on greeting cards. The insular world of poetry should embrace the greeting card. Imagine that. Sharon Olds could handle Hallmark’s Valentine’s Day line, Yusef Komunyakaa could take on birthdays, and Charles Simic could run Christmas.

On a related note, John Stewart had an intelligent and witty debate with Mike Huckabee about abortion. Colbert and Stewart, will you come visit my English 101 and 105 classes this fall?