He speaks with a musical cadence, stretching out his U's and double O's. There is a commuuuunity of persons who are with me wherever I go. At the podium, he drinks water from a wineglass and gently wrestles the gooseneck mike into submission. The blind man smiles. Stories, he continues, are the continents.
Storytellers are the oceans that hold the lands together.
The sin, he tells the academics of the ALA, is when academics canonize certain works to the exclusion of others. The language authors write in, or the region they hail from, should make little difference. He chastises professors for assigning the same old books and using the same old notes year after year. There is squirming in the audience. People are whispering to one another.