History Lessons or Why One Hides in Books

What do you do as a year ends, having endured weeks of intense emotion - with seemingly more ahead?  How to make sense of it, can you make sense of it?  What can you compare it to - can you compare it to anything?

Reflecting back, way back, and re-reading  Solnit, my go-to person for reading and thinking about culture and history and spirit.

“On November 5, 1968 Richard Nixon was elected President,

That year Women’s Strike for Peace was founded when a hundred thousand women in a hundred communities across the country staged a simultaneous one-day strike, launching an antinuclear peace movement that also prefigured the women’s movement soon to be born. That year, Cesar Chavez was considering leaving his community organizer job to try to unionize California’s farm workers, and the science writer Rachel Carson was finishing Silent Spring, her landmark denunciation of pesticides published in 1962. Just as the civil rights movement achieved not only specific gains but a change in the imagination of race and justice, so Carson’s book was instrumental not only in getting DDT banned in the United States—which reversed the die-offs of many species of bird—but also in popularizing a worldview in which nature was made up not of inert objects but of interactive, interconnected systems, a worldview that would come to be

.... This is the way the world changes, as Dickens understood when he opened his most political novel with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It usually is.

.....globalization has the same yin and yang that everything else has - and it is good to keep aware of this.  Corporate globalization not such a good thing....but globalization that allows us to study and learn and communicate is incredible.

What gets called “the sixties” left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems most fundamental and most pervasive about all the ensuing changes is a loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness. The answers—the alternatives—haven’t always been clear or easy, but the questions and the questioning are nevertheless significant. What’s most important here is to feel the profundity of the changes, to feel how far we have come […]”

Excerpted From: Rebecca Solnit. “Hope in the Dark.”

Taking the time to be mindful -- of time.  Here we are again.

For me, Solnit is one of those writers who is a touchstone.  One of a handful.  Not only is she a great writer, she constructs ideas in a way I LOVE to think — pulling in disparate thoughts and pieces of information and history - both personal and not - weaving them together in magically seamless paragraphs.

I wonder if she does this for all of her readers?  It must happen for some - for a good portion of her readers.  She knows the importance of books and reading - having written:

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.

READING AND READERS

My Dad used to stop at the Detroit Public Library on his way home from meetings at the Engineering Society or teaching at the University of Detroit —  those were two reasons he went downtown when I was little.  He brought me books from the library and I remember laying on the couch in the family room, reading.  One night I read something to my mother and she asked me if I had memorized it, or heard someone else reading it - I just kept reading and she went to get my dad - that was high praise.   I knew that I had pleased them. The Christmas after that there was an entire set of Golden Encyclopedias underneath the tree.  The ones you could buy at the grocery store - a volume a week.  I think I already had the first two volumes, but my parents must have sprung for the entire set.  Heaven.  I devoured books, I hid inside of them.  My father did as well.

One of the things my parents would fight about was the amount of money my Dad spent on books.  Lots of IMAGE books and as his illness consumed him -  a decent man - a devout Catholic, he became more of a religious fanatic.  He loved jazz and geeky things of the late 50’s, early 60’s -  having a record player under the dashboard of your car or wiring speakers to be able to have the records you played in the basement heard throughout the house.  Cool minimalist furniture that I think my mother hated, and that his five kids destroyed with use.  Jackie Gleason and Yogi Bear cartoons.  Computers and all things digital would have blown his mind.

Time passed, more kids, more fights, mental health issues that often occupied and propelled anything else that was happening in the family.

I hid in books.  Devoured them.

The Winne the Pooh series (the ones with the E.H. Shepard illustrations) were were read to us as kids  over and over again, sitting on the couch around my mother.  I have those worn copies now and read them to the children in my life.  I would read anything about horses that I could get my hands on, the series, Misty of Chincoteague  I loved.  I read every Little House book, and the entire Nancy Drew series, begging for those instead of toys.  I remember going through a Native American phase, a civil war phase, lots of sappy schmaltzy lives of the Saints - then I got to the point where I would just pour through the library shelves for anything BIG,  The books with the most pages caught me immediately.  I would fall into those, coming up for air when they were over - looking around and feeling confused - like you do sometimes when you first wake up.

When I was in in middle school my dad brought home a list some priest had given him on a retreat:   all the books a well educated person (read: white Catholic male, better yet a Jesuit) should read.  He made sure all of them were on our bookshelves.  I read them all.  American classics like Theodore Dresser’s Sister Carrie, Steinboack’s The Grapes of Wrath - which astounded me.

To be continued.....

Chaos and Mess

Last week in a writing workshop David said, "Chaos and mess means thinking is going on."  I wrote it down.  Having heard it before in various permutations, "let's get messy"  or "mess signifies you are really digging in," it is often said to students and about students - and should be encouraged pedagogically.  Out of the chaos and mess - great things can come.

But it is also the story of my life as I look around the places I work.

Piles of books.  A given.  In any room that is inhabited for any length of time.  From the kitchen to the basement to the bedroom.  For all of the time spent with a device in hand or a screen nearby, it is the physical book that I lust after.  Yes lust.

synonyms:

crave, desire, covet, want, wish for, long for, yearn for, dream of, hanker for, hanker after, hunger for, thirst for, ache for...

Maybe someday someone will say:  She lusted after books.  Reading them and making them.

There is a place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that, in my mind, is the optimal spot for looking at the moon and stars.  The stars are bright and endless, every constellation flung across the sky - the ones I can name and the others (many more) that I can't.  I sit in the dark in the middle of the night sipping bourbon and looking up.  The only sound in mid-summer being the clinking of ice.  No one around for miles.

They look chaotic and messy as well, unless you really can read them - which I can't.  But let's go with the idea of that for a moment.  Chaotic and messy - thinking going on - right?

There are a lot of references to these particular stars in the books in process of late.  

Solve vincula reis,
profer lumen caecis
mala nostra pelle,
bona cuncta posce.*

TETHERED 2015  (mixed media, v.edition of 6)

Tethered is one of those books.  It is a story of longing, motherhood, of travel, of moon and star watching.  It takes place over the course of 21 years.  In the colophon I write, "A solstice moon with a pacifier moving across the night sky..."   It is, I see now, also a story about how quickly time passes in spite of the constancy of some things.  Chaos and mess among them.

*Break the sinners' fetters,

  make our blindness day,

  Chase all evils from us,

  for all blessings pray.

Ave Maris Stella

Hail Star of the Ocean

the end of the book.... (again)

More from This is not the end of the book; by Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere.  I am still thinking about it and re-reading parts of it.  Background:  It was recently translated from the French and I picked it up when I was in London - in the bookshop at the British Library. (Oh - such a place!) The book is full of the enthusiasm of these two great thinkers...for all things - but especially all things bookish. Yes they can sound "pontificatey"  but I think they've earned it.

This idea of "the end of the book" has been going on for a few decades now.  My MFA thesis exhibit was (coughs) in 1987 and titled "Books in Space."  It was my reflecting on the "new" idea that books were disappearing, as well as how we navigate "different kinds" of space (ex. family space, academic space, community space).  I was beginning to explore calling into question (among other things) the nature of just what it was that constituted a book, or reading for that matter...as well as what was happening to books.  The idea of "books in space" came from the initial thinking and research - my outreach to astronauts - asking them what books they would take into space.  The only one who answered me was Sally Ride, who said she would take "The Tao of Pooh."

“But what is a book? And what will change if we read onscreen rather than by turning the pages of a physical object? What will we gain, and more importantly, what will we lose? Old-fashioned habits, perhaps. A certain sense of the sacred that has surrounded the book in a civilisation that has made it our holy of holies. A peculiar intimacy between the author and reader, which the context of hypertextuality is bound to damage. A sense of existing in a self-contained world that the book and, along with it, certain ways of reading used to represent.” ― Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, This Is Not the End of the Book

Anyone involved in book arts - making, teaching or critiquing - is very aware what is meant by "reading."  And it has little to do with words on a page.  It goes back to that question I was thinking about in 1987 - how DO we navigate different kinds of space?  How do we read form, materiality, the way text is place on a page?  It is so much more than content - it is more akin to what Barthes wrote about in The Pleasure of the Text;

Thus what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface:  I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple simple temporality of its reading. 

When someone hands me an artists' book for the first time - it is like beginning a journey.  The way it is built - the way it smells and the sound of the pages when I turn them.  Are there surprises?  I love surprises.  I feel this way about reading any new book -- always have.  Ahhh I'm starting to ramble now -- next post will try for more clarity.

Read this rock - Black River Harbor, Lake Superior

THIS IS NOT.....

.....the end of the book;

Picked this book up in London -  an english translation of a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere.  I am savoring each page of it because it is so rich with insight, with history and with the kind of reflection that only wisdom and experience can bring.

In the preface, French writer Jean Philippe De Tonnac writes about books and cathedrals - citing the work of Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,

"The book will kill the building....When you compare [architecture] to the idea, which...needs only a sheet of paper, some ink and a pen, is it surprising that the human intellect should have deserted architecture for the printing press."

De Tonnac goes on to write:

"Well the great cathedrals - those bibles in stone - did not vanish, but the avalanche of manuscripts and then printed text that appeared at the end of the Middle Ages did render them less important.  As culture changed, architecture lost its emblematic role.  So it is with the book.  There is no need to suppose that the electronic book will replace the printed version.  Has film killed painting?  Television cinema?  However, there is no doubt that the book is in the throes of a technological revolution that is changing our relationship to is profoundly."

And so the stage is set for a wonderful conversation between these two men.  Some of the topics in this far reaching discussion deal with the impermanence of most new technology platforms compared to the printed page.  New technology changes and become obsolete at a faster and faster pace.  Unless one has the resources to keep all of them nearby - information can become inaccessible.

In my own lifetime I have seen phonographs and type-writers and brownie cameras be replaced by reel to reel tape, word-processors and sx70's.  Then computers, digital cameras and ipads.  The storage and playback of each of these permutations is also different.  Don't we all have floppy discs somewhere that we can no longer access?  Reels of super 8 film, hard drives, jump drives, cassette decks....the list goes on.

Interesting to me that it was panned by several reviewers.  I find it rewarding - and worth picking up and putting down over and over again.  More information about the book here.