Lynda Barry: 2013 National Book Festival

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC it is an honor for me to introduce Linda berry today she has worked as a painter cartoonist writer illustrator playwright editor commentator teacher and now professor of interdisciplinary creativity at the University of Wisconsin in Madison how many have used how many of you saw the comic that she did for the Book Festival great last Sunday for the Washington Post wasn't that great in it she makes a wonderfully funny clever and eloquent tribute to the cause of reading and reading freely throughout one's life she is best known to many as the creator of Ernie pooks coming which ran in weekly newspapers for nearly 30 years and 19 books that include award-winning graphic novels she was born near Richland Center in Wisconsin she her brothers and her parents moved when she was very young to an ethnically diverse lower middle class neighborhood in Seattle she graduated from Evergreen State College where she studied painting and writing and also published some of her first comics in the college newspaper many of Barry's works feature characters in a seattle-based family including sister and mother our 'no and arnold Arneson and their cousins Marlys Mabon and Freddie Mullins in her books and comics Barry draws on her formative childhood and teenage years to create stories about these amazing fictional people and their world a world that is filled with challenges and traumas but also great humor and joy Barry's newest book is the Freddy stories please join me in welcoming Linda berry oh well hello everybody I really hope I'm not in a coma just imagining this because it's the kind of thing that I really would imagine you know it's like the kind of thing that you sort of make up when you're in the second grade and sometimes I think wishes come true but sometimes they you make them in the second grade and they come true when you're 57 which is all right with me so it's a it's an honor and honor a huge honor to be here and I want to talk to you a little bit today because I know that we have a I had a slide presentation and I'm going to show some of it but I can tell that you can't really see the slides am i right I mean especially because there's not one up right now you can definitely not see it well so I always like just because I'm nervous and I always like to start by singing a song because I think bad singing is better than no singing at all and I'm nervous anyway so it's the scariest thing to do so what the heck so I'm gonna sing a song it's an autobiographical song it's only one verse the tune is call miners daughter but I'll sing it about my life and then by the end you'll know about me all right here I go ah I was born a me cutters daughter my mom is from the Philippines she was a janitor I ate TV dinners at night I grew up by the TV light well dad drank vodka in the basement and mom hollered okay so that one part thank you the one part yeah I feel a lot better now the the one part in there I love saying my mom's from the Philippines and I love seeing the confused German Shepherd look on your face like no she doesn't look Filipino at all and I always tell people it's because I'm a quarter Norwegian and Norwegian blood can suck the color out of anything it's true if you have a shirt with a bad stain and you know somebody who's a hundred percent in Norwegian you just bring it to them and ask them to pass their hand over at three times if you can see this slide see if you can point out the one with Norwegian blood there but so that's my that's my family I grew up in a Filipino family and my grandma who was a huge huge influence on me and my work and the way I see the world well this is what Tagalog sounds like Monty gasai Maloney Linda acaba which means hard is the head of Linda oh my and my grandma was a big influence in terms of storytelling and I think grandma's have this very interesting role in in our lives and certainly as a cartoonist I leaned on her and leaned on a lot of things she told me a lot like one thing she told me was you know Linda God has made everybody a castle in the sky in heaven it's waiting for you after you are dead it's made of gold bricks beautiful but every time you are bad he takes one break away and your castle is getting very small like that was that was how she raised us or another another way instead of just saying you know the kinds of the kinds of things that you yell at kids to do the grandma always had a story so hers would be you know Linda in the Philippines there is a vampire she's very scary she's a lady in the day she's a dog you will know her though because if you see a dog and the back legs are longer than the front legs that is the vampire her name is the Aswang and at night she takes her legs up and she flies through the air we're like really so yeah she's coming to our house and my mom was terrified of the last one she doesn't it doesn't exist it's just a story and my grandma goes yeah it's just a story but it is true and the Osman you know sometimes you're watching the TB and you see the picture shaking but I swung on the antenna and that night she comes into the house she comes into a little crack in the window and then she crawls on the ceiling she's looking for your bedroom she comes into your bedroom she goes over your bed she turns her head can twist around and she has a long tongue with a needle on the end and she's lowering it into you to suck your blood because you don't pick up your clothes so that's I grew up with that and I always think that for as hard as everything else was having a grandma like that or having some of the teachers that I had in public high school are some of the librarians that I had actually it was a matter of life and death for me and they made such a difference so being invited here I can't help but think about mrs. Lewis Sain and mrs. bird and on my school librarian and all these people who gave me so much that and one of the things I like to think about when I think about this thing that we call the arts and I'd say comics are part of that and books and theatre and all these things I think of them not so much is this big accomplishment but as this means of transportation and the whole reason I'm standing here is because I drew a picture which is pretty wild right and the whole reason y'all are here is because you're interested in books and you're interested in what these things contain so the last few years my study I've been studying a lot trying to answer this question of what the biological function of this thing we call the arts might be so what do we call the arts so I the thing I think that they all contain is a thing that I call an image and the easiest way to explain when an image is is to show you what it feels like so I want you to think of your first phone number because I'm gonna count to three and we're gonna say our first phone number out loud together are you ready 1 2 3 pa 2 4 4 3 5 oh god that's very good one more time 1 2 3 ba 2 4 435 ok now your phone number from 3 phone number ago can you feel the difference in your head one is a spontaneous thing that I'd say contains an image and the other is thinking and there are two different things another so that's one thing about an image it's a simultaneous and it feels somehow alive and why I like to ask people to do that is because I love people to say their first phone number and then everybody does this afterwards like what the hell is that social security number first phone number for people who can't I saw a couple of people who couldn't remember and it's like so there's something about that first phone number that that contains an image and it feels like that and I'd also say that it's contained by anything that kids also when they're attached to an object I'd say that also contains an image I saw a kid in the airport who had had you know his mom's dragging him along and he had had the original Incredible Hulk doll but all he had left was the leg the legs all I need man I mean it really was um in a way in a funny way you can think about little kids who their blankie is reduced to nothing now that all they have is this little scrap that's all they need in fact some of you grown people still have that little scrap of blankie or you're still mourning the fact that your mother disappeared it and I think that that that urged for the arts I I'm coming to believe that it's well we'll use the term hardwired and that it begins prior to us being able to speak so let's go back to that idea of a kid with a blanket when you think about it that blanket really is a piece just a piece of cloth but it also contains something else like a painting almost or a character and so let's say instead of a blanket let's use this maybe we're talking about a little kid with a bunny that they've loved up a lot I love seeing the toys that have been loved for years and years my husband calls it the patina of love which means just everything's worn off if you say to that kid is bunny alive well first the kid knows that you're being a jerk because you they know you're grown and you know Bunny's not alive it's bunny bunny alive it's like no Lady Bunny's not alive Neagle well is bunny dead oh no don't even talk about bunny like that but he's not dead when he's not alive and Bunny's not dead bunny something in between I think that that's a clue about about where the arts are so I had some I had a friend who whose daughter got attached to because that's another thing when the kids get attached to something by the time you notice it it's already happened they don't get to pick what they get attached to so I had some friends whose daughter got attached to what everyone agreed was the ugliest toy ever it was a stuffed banana with blue eyes and little dangly arms she called it mr. banana and so she loved mr. banana from before she could talk then she's two then she's three now she's five now she's six and mr. banana is looking like a junkie at this point I mean he's just he wasn't built for this kind of lovin and and the parents are getting very insecure about the fact that their six-year-old is carrying around this ugly ugly piece of cloth and so they they hatch a plan to get her off of mr. banana and you can tell it was her first child and they hadn't read any child psychology books because they decided to do it while they were on vacation so they went to England and they convinced her that mr. banana wanted to stay in the hotel room while they went outside they just totally told her that's what mr. banana wanted and she's like you all don't even know what mr. banana wants but she kind of went along with it they left mr. banana in the hotel room they go out they have their breakfast I'm sure they're winking at each other like and they get back to the hotel room and the hotel rooms been cleaned and mr. banana is gone I love I love seeing people people go like this it's like y'all don't even know mr. banana Butte I know that mr. banana it's cuz you do know mr. banana you totally know mr. banana and so she starts screaming the parents suddenly realize what has happened they called downstairs and luckily the concierge also knew understood mr. banana and my friend said the happiest phonecall he ever got was ring ring ring mr. banana has been found and there's a knock on the door and they are there they are with this this thing that looked like garbage to the parents now looks like you know like the Holy Grail and and she runs and she's reunited with mr. banana and everything goes alright what's interesting about that is mr. banana really is a piece of cloth that has some stuffing in it he's also an object that makes a difference of whether that girl's going to be able to sleep that night or not and I don't think that we as beings who have gone through all kinds of evolution would have something like that unless it had some kind of biological function and some functional to do with survival so I'm going to talk a little bit about that that kind of relationship doesn't end when we grow up all of you have had a book that you've fallen in love with you know that book when you're laying in bed and you're reading and you know it's kind of too late to start a book but now you're on page 20 and it seems like a good book you know that feeling and then you're on page 40 and you can tell it really is a good book and then by page 50 you're like don't break up with me man like you don't want it there's something happening that's akin to falling in love and so you you read it over a couple days and now again it's late you should be asleep but you only have about 40 pages left of that book what do you do don't you slow down which is kind of wild right you slow down because this world that you've been in now is only a quarter of an inch that's all you got left and when you finished it don't you do this don't you finish it you finish it and then don't you hold the book what the hell is that like you know what I mean you hold it like I love you you know something happened something happened that turned that thing from a bunch of paper to something that contains an image so much so that if you lend that copy to one of your friends and they don't give it back or they lose it and they buy a new copy for you it's not the same what is that that's the stuff that I'm studying that's the stuff that I'm really interesting interest I'm really interesting about interested about another thing about about an image is it's specific like when I was a kid I always wanted an imaginary friend some of you were lucky enough to have one I didn't know how to get one what do you do like you know and so one day I realized I could just lie who would know which men I had an imaginary imaginary friend which is not nearly as good as an imaginary friend and I had a friend who she had a mansion Airy friend that I could tell was real the reason was there were some very specific things about her imaginary friend one her imaginary friend had a stupid name sprinkles like you wouldn't make that up the other thing is she could only talk to sprinkles through a moving fan like you can't make that up so I knew her imaginary friend was real but it was the specificness and if so specifics part of an image and some of you have had the experience I think most of us have had the experience of trying to keep a journal remember from when you're little you try to keep a journal and you get that first diary I'm 57 so the diaries they had down at the pan save were the five-year diaries where you're supposed to write three sentences for every day for five years and in the end you'd have I don't know what but I couldn't keep it up and then I tried several journals later and then people would would know that I like to write so sometimes I get a gift of a very expensive has that happened to you you know what I mean then you really are in trouble because you don't want to mess it up at all but you write your name and it's all it's already ruined and I always think that in in the afterlife or when I when I die yeah that one of the circles of hell I'm gonna have to go through is when all my unfinished journals attach themselves to me and I'm gonna have to try to walk with them so I had a friend who found I was trying to figure out why it was so difficult to keep them and I had a friend who found his journals from high school and he was really excited to read him over so you know he was over 50 and he poured a big beer and he said he started reading in it it was just feelings feelings feelings no details just feelings feelings and he said Linda it was like finding original footage of the Battle of Waterloo but it was shot by a monkey so there's no pictures of Napoleon it's just bananas bananas so one of it so that's one of the things I realized about a about a journalist it needs to be specific if all you did was just write about the shoes that you saw all day you'd at least have something going on versus I don't like Mary at work she's bugging me you know 4,000 pages later Mary is still getting on my nerves another thing about an image is that it's satisfying even if it doesn't make sense to the top of the mind example I have of that was a song by The Young Rascals that was popular when I was in junior high called groovin there now the old ARP Rascals but they're still Rascals and the song went groovin on a Sunday afternoon and there was one line that I loved that would be ecstasy you and me and Leslie groovin and I thought that sounded good to me you know I didn't know who Leslie was but you and me and Leslie grew in and I love how Leslie could be a boy or a girl depending on how I was swinging that year you know I just love that song well when I got older and I was in it grown-up and I'm driving my car and the car has good speakers here comes my song that would be ecstasy you and me endlessly grooving it wasn't you and me and Leslie grooving it was you and me endlessly grooving which is the better lyric its Leslie right even if you don't know what it means it's Leslie and which is the first thing a person who was editing it would take out well Leslie doesn't contribute to the arc of the story and she hasn't been introduced what about endlessly endlessly rhymes and makes sense and I'd say it also completely neuters the neuters of a song so it could never have children so so a version of that that specificness one of the things I love to do with kids is I can't and I want to talk to them because to me they're the closest to two functioning with this image stuff that I'm so interested in but I've realized I can't go up to them and just go can I discuss your transitional object with you and I can't go up to them at all so what I do is I just I just start to draw when I'm around kids I'll just start to draw kind of violently and big so they'll see me so I was sitting on an airplane mom is here you know it they always stick the kid in the middle seat like it doesn't matter to them or something and then I'm on the end mom puts in her ear buds and is on her little device which by the way we're living in a time for the first time in human history where mothers and fathers have something more compelling to look at than their child's face which is pretty wild if you know the science behind eye contact and neurotransmitters and all this stuff it's it's almost a catastrophe in a certain way but so she's plugged in and he has a sticker book thank God so so he's still he's still alert to the world around him so I start drawing and he looks over he goes you can draw and I said yeah I'm a cartoonist and he goes draw something so I draw a chicken and I show it to him he goes you are like oh I know and so I asked him if he wants to play this game and it's a game that we've all played nobody really made it up where you scribble something and you pass it to your friend and they look at it and try to find a shape and they draw something on that then they scribble and you do this back and forth if you do it a few times with a kid you'll get a story so this kid's name was Jack he was about eight so we did it two or three times and he went oh oh I have a story and you can make it into a comic strip like that's what I always thought creative inspiration was like oh I have a novel it's a trilogy you know it's like the title is um he even knew the title and I knew the dude didn't even know the story he was about to tell he goes the title is chicken attack by Jack and I did make it into a comic strip and this is the story verbatim one morning a chicken was eaten by a man the man went to work his stomach started to feel funny he went to the portal let and then he went the chicken came out the man was surprised the chicken was also surprised the chicken ran from the portal led to the construction site they put the chicken in charge and from then on that and was boss in that an oddly satisfying story I mean it is right and your and and don't you feel better after hearing chicken attack by Jack now how that works is really fascinating to me because it doesn't make sense but it's super super specific and every time I tell it I always feel better there's I was talking to one of the volunteers here about a study that was done I keep thinking it's Caltech but I might be wrong about the benefits of choral singing of singing and so what's what scientists often do is they test professionals to try to to see what's really going on so what they wanted to find out what happens to our stress levels in our immune system after singing so they they tested these professional singers they had them give a sample of their spit and tested cortisol levels and some other immune immune system marker prior to singing and after and afterwards they tested them again and there was a measurable drop in cortisol the stress hormone and and there was a marker for an immune system boost they repeated the study in Zurich same thing happened then they came to Appleton Wisconsin to Lawrence University and did it with just people like us who just want to sing and they it was absolutely measurable just by singing immune system up stress level down but what was interesting is if people really got into it they doubt the the the results were profound so that was a clue to me about this idea that this thing that we call the Arts might not just have an aesthetic effect but it might absolutely have a biological effect yeah which is awesome so because they're able to now see well they're have F MRIs and all these different things of tracking brain activity even though they're they're not as precise as people think they might be or hope they might be one of the things that was really interesting in a study that I read about was how when a kid is in deep play and by deep play I don't mean when we're adults we we think play and fun are the same thing when you're in a you watch kids playing they don't look like they're having fun they don't look like they're having a bad time but they're very absorbed and they fall into it like this I was watching another mother on her device actually time moms and kids on their device just because it's so striking to me so she's on her device he's trying to get her attention he's about 6 she's not paying attention at all she even does that thing where he's trying to get her attention so she moves like this um so he's eating his breakfast seating he picks up this piece of bacon and before he puts it in his mouth he goes I'm gonna eat you right and then he does the bacon boys and I'm watching this like houses gonna come out man you know we're totally engaged and he's really in that and all of a sudden his mom stops just long enough to say what are you doing and he has no clue just like you know it's the same thing happened with the mom when I was getting off the plane and I talked to the mom who of Jack she can attack by Jack and I said you know he's a phenomenal storyteller he just told me this an amazing story and I repeated the story to her and she looked at him and said enough with the portal let's and I feel like when we when we try to make art when we try to do something that it's a similar problem that we start to the way we start to get somewhere and all of a sudden that voice comes in you know what I mean and tries to fix it we could pick something that's not that's not broken so with this there was a study about when kids are in deep play and an adult's are in a state of creative concentration and there's a signature in the brain that's nearly identical for these two states and I thought that's another clue because what do this is something that my Norwegian grandma and my Filipino grandma and every grandma in the world could answer and almost all of us can answer which is what would happen to a kid say that I was doing an experiment and I'm gonna have a kid and I'm not gonna let them play at all until they're 18 they could have everything else but they cannot play at all until they're 18 what do we know about that kid by the time they're 18 they'd be crazy there's a tacit understanding between the need for play and mental health which is really interesting we all know that and then at some point we think it doesn't apply to us anymore and which i think is why we're all so in a weird way crazy you know like low-grade crazy like a low-grade headache so if you said to a kid okay you can't play but here's a photo of a kid playing is that gonna help how about a video let's watch a video of this kid playing is that gonna help why if you can sit don't move you can sit next to this kid and watch him play but you can't do it that kind of help that's the state most of us are in as adults when it comes to the arts reading is the one thing that we get to do without feeling like we have to be an expert at it so it's another reason why I love books so much and it's amazing how soon we give up on the arts I remember being in the back seat of the car and the radios on and I heard the announcer say I was probably nine if you want to be a concert pianist you have to begin by the age of or I'm like damn you know if you want to be a ballerina you have to begin by the age of three it's like damn so by the time you're 12 you're already washed up you know you get this feeling and you get this feeling that unless you can do something really well you don't have the right to do it at all so the only thing the only kind of arts that are left to us are well the only that singing is just happy birthday which sounds like the Volga boatmen happy birthday I remember when I was in Mass I knew something was wrong because the priest would come out and he'd go lift up your heart and we'd go we've lifted him kinda to the Lord there was something missing there and drawing the only drawing that's left but it's still left it's a little doodles you do when you in that one little area on the page that you feel free which is over on the left behind a red line where the holes are on the only sculpture is peeling the label off a beer bottle really slowly while somebody tells you about their dream you know but I think that the fact that these that these things are still with us and they're still there is a is a clue to I mean wouldn't you even if I said to you you can never make a living off of it but you can sing to your contentment or you can draw to your contentment or write a play write a book but you can't make a living off of it wouldn't you say yes so something's going on there it's not just about being famous it's about something else so because I am my slides are so bad that I'm just going to show you that one and I'm just gonna tell you a couple more stories I remember here about art and why it's so important to us do you remember hearing when you were a kid that great art will make people burst into tears remember that around the same time you heard it opera singer could sing into a wineglass and blow it up with her voice and and I would go into the kitchen and hold my mouth mug with nobody around and go you know or I try to burst into tears and around that while I was growing up the other thing that if you know my work and if you hold me in any kind of esteem I'm about to change that for you right now by telling you my favorite comic strip of all time is Family Circus I love Family Circus I adore Family Circus I adore Family Circus so much that if I've had a couple shots of whiskey and someone tries to put down Family Circus I'll go to jail I'll get in a fight and go to jail so I love Family Circus because before I could even read it was in that circle and I could see this that life looked pretty good to me you know Billy Jeffy dolly PJ you know the dead grandparents looking down on Billy and you know when he was me a little letter like well we love you and I mean I just loved their life anyway as I got older and I went to I went to Europe and I was trying to find a painting that would make me burst into tears and I wanted it to happen with a cute dude like nearby who would go she is so sensitive I must have her it didn't even have to be a dude it didn't even have to be a person really could have been a ficus plant going I must have her but so I was trying to try and I remember being in the Uffizi gallery looking at this Botticelli painting that had just been cleaned it was in a room by itself it was a la primavera and I'm staring at it cute dude right here nine o'clock so I'm like trying really hard to cry and I'm able to bust out one tear but it's on the wrong side of my face you know so I'm like you know didn't work out he didn't see my sensitivity so years later now when the alternative cartoonists like me are now kind of included in the big family of cartoonists and I went to this cartooning convention where I got to see all the big cartoonists like I saw the guy who drew Beetle Bailey drew walks by you know and all these cartoonists are walking by and then Kathy walks by and when I saw her I went insane because she's really thin and really beautiful and I thought you've been making money off of women with asses like mine you know I'll kill you and then and then somebody said you like Family Circus right and I said yeah well bill Keane was the author of Family Circus now Jeff Jeffy from some family circus now he draws the strip so they said this is Jeff Keane and I went I burst into tears it was nothing that would make anyone want to kiss me I was like snot and drooling and I and I was walking toward him like this and he's backing away right like like this has never ever ever happened to him in his life he was totally scared you know and then I Chi I said oh just give me a minute I just needed I need to get myself together and like I basically squatted behind like something like that just keep it together keep it together keep it together but every time I saw him I'd burst into tears so much that it became the the joke of the conference to try to just get him into my peripheral vision but when I met him and I shook his hand I realized that I had gone through the circle that circle that I had looked through the whole time I was a kid and dreamed of that life I crossed it and I did it by drawing a picture and so when I think about images and I think about their power that it's so much bigger than I mean it's really the difference between the feeling that life is worth living or not living and I didn't have to be a whole lot of worth living it can be just a little tiny bit okay so let's see if there's anything else and then I'm gonna I might read you I'll just read you a couple comic strips really fast oh yeah I know I'm gonna tell you really quick about this is this is the whole point this is the whole point so I got really interested in in science because I trunk because that's where it that's where you're led kind of anyway but I'm trying to figure out what the what the function of the images might be and I happened upon some work by neuroscientist you probably want you tonight have even heard of him vs Ramachandran who's a very interesting neuroscientist and his his interest is in the phenomenon of phantom limb pain so you all know what phantom limb pain is right you're missing your hand but it still feels like there I think there's phantom limb pleasure but we'll never know about it because like who's gonna call the doctor doctor my missing hand feels fantastic that means like we'll never know but we know about phantom limb pain anyway Ramachandran had a had a patient who had in fact was missing his hand you can see this guy on YouTube if you want to see him because it's pretty amazing he was missing his hand but his sensation was not only was his hand there but it was clenched in a really tight fist and it kept getting tighter and tighter and tighter so imagine living with that for three weeks a year it's eight years and it really did erode his feeling that life was worth living what do we do for the guy well Ramachandran had this amazing idea and he built a box I always think of it as a big shoe box with a mirror down the middle and a hole on this side and he had the guy put his hand in that hole and make a fist and look down and what the guy saw was his hand reflected right you follow me Tim Ramachandran said open your hand and he looked at it and he saw the other hand open and it instantly started to change what was happening with his hand in fact that that mirror therapy is now used for stroke it's now used for a lot of different things that there's somehow just seeing an image and when I heard that because I think science gives us the metaphors we need to understand art just like art gives us the metaphors we need to understand science when I heard that I thought that's what images do that in everybody's life no matter how Family Circus your life is that there are things that are like that like maybe your mom died when you were little or maybe your house caught on fire maybe there was a war or maybe you're just sent too sensitive I would imagine there are a lot of people in this tent that were too sensitive as a kid we gather together without even knowing how we find each other but we're all here and I believe that there are certain things that the only way that we can open that phantom limb pain that phantom problem is by having our experience reflected somehow whether it's in a book or a song if you can remember being in junior high school how songs you would become addicted to them and they would change your life do you know what I'm talking about there is actually some science to that that we do become addicted to songs and that there's that there are certain songs when you especially when you see junior high school kids and high school kids that have to play a song over and over and over again what's happening is that the song causes a release of dopamine a neurotransmitter that also is released when we smoke and and certainly antidepressants use dopamine but here's what's really interesting it doesn't it's not for the whole song it's just for that one part you know that you play the whole song I know there's that one part and you're with your friend and you point to the radio and they go yeah that's actually causing a chemical release in your brain if you're attached to it so when you think about all this stuff then it gets interesting again then making work using images isn't just about making something great or making something that's terrible but it could be making something that's making life worth living so I'm going to now finish wait I'm gonna read one comic strip so even if you can't see it I'm going to read you uh one of my characters okay so this is called titles of poems we can never turn in uses of poetry unit to we can say things in a poem that we can't say in real life right some examples of something you've been unable to stay and use them as titles for poems poetry titles by Marlys one mrs. davis the big mole on your eyelid is disturbing to please obey me three I hate this pukey meatloaf so abolish it for to see the nude bosoms of Janet Jimmer's and to want to see them again for educational only five every single swear six sir I want your donut or madam seven I want to stare hard at your defect eight mom I have worms all right now I'm going to end with my party trick that I have basically retired but this is a special occasion so I can sing without moving my lips and I'm gonna do it for you and it takes a year off my life every time I do it but it's worth it it takes two off of yours if you watch okay and this is the song from the image part of me to the image part of you and I mean it with all of my heart okay this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 3,714

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, National Book Festival (Recurring Event)

Id: fWlZPfkaoxA

Length: 40min 0sec (2400 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2013