Restored By Reading: The Current Stack

"Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. 

A great library is freedom." 

-- Ursula K. Le Guin

I just have to say, there are never enough books in my life. Our house is filled to the brim with books, in literally every room (okay, minus one guest bathroom, which is too small), many of which I've not read....and yet, I am forever making the trek to the public library or making purchases for more. I love a day with nothing on the schedule, with nowhere I have to be, so I can sit with a book, savoring the language that sparks ideas, deepens understanding and that takes me to destinations far flung and unknown.

Most of my library treks take me to the public library in Vermillion, but the other day I was on campus and made my way to the university library, which has a sizable collection of new fiction and non-fiction available for checkout. Uh oh....I couldn't resist coming home with yet another stack of "impossible to finish by the due date" books. In case you can't read the titles in the photo above, they are, from top to bottom:

Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live / Akiko Busch 

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate--Discoveries From A Secret  World / Peter Wohlleben

Bottomland: A Novel / Michelle Hoover

The Exiles Return: A Novel / Elisabeth De Waal

The Atomic Weight of Love: A Novel / Elizabeth J. Church

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time / Keith Houston

The Last Days of Night: A Novel / Graham Moore

The Blind Astronomer's Daughter / John Pipkin

My husband and I have a little ritual of "story time", in which we read a book together....me reading aloud to him. It doesn't happen every day, as life gets a little crazy, but it is the goal to have a chapter read at some point during the day. The book currently on our story time docket is The Last Days of Night, a novel that takes you into the intrigue between Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla in the early days of electric lighting. In my own reading, I am nearly finished with The Exiles Return and have already dipped into The Hidden Life of Trees. I'm like a kid in the candy shop!

But there's something else I want to share. The Ursula Le Guin quote that began this post, which pays homage to art and libraries, as well as the life of the mind, is one that I found on Brain Pickings, an online newsletter that provides a cornucopia of riches. If you follow the link here, you'll be taken to an issue with an article that highlights the sacredness of the public library. In revisiting that issue today, I just realized there is another book I need to add to my already-too-full list of reading material....The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin. I urge you to check out Brain Pickings for yourself....there is much thoughtful research that goes into its creation. Of course, I must admit, I don't really have time to devote to reading it, as I have all those library books to get through. And really, I should be down in the studio right now, but tomorrow is another day!

January 23, 2013

January 24, 2013

A couple of not-so-recent dailies I just added to my Missouri Bend Studio shop. I had a stack of these 3 x 3 inch pieces and had forgotten all about these little collage items from a few years ago. Kind of fun! Enjoy your weekend....happy reading! Since you know what a book fanatic I am, feel free to share your reading joys here...always looking for wonderful finds.

The Commonplace Book

Over a decade ago, I learned about the lovely notion of keeping a commonplace book. This was a practice, particularly prevalent in early modern Europe, as a way to compile knowledge, a kind of scrapbook where one would collect quotations, readings, recipes, proverbs, prayers, etc. There is a brief overview here, if you are not familiar with the commonplace book. I began keeping one at the time, but didn't keep it up, although for years I have written down significant passages from books I've read....in all manner of other notebooks, on scrap pieces of paper etc.....none of which I can put my hands on, of course!

Locke's commonplace book...held at Yale

Now that I have more time to read, I am more serious about it and am reading books that have a significan number of passages I want to record....so I dug out that commonplace book I began years ago and have been adding to the pages in the last days.

Of course, I reread the first passages I had recorded and it took me back to a book that made a huge impact on me and on the threads that run through my artwork, Disappearance: A Map-A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes / by Sheila Nickerson. I recorded this passage, in which I discovered the notion of the cairn....a rich visual image and metaphor for life's journey. Here is the passage I recorded back in 1998:

As the Franklin searchers spread out over the frozen, wind-carved spaces of the Arctic, they looked not only for ships and men, but for cairns, rock piles in which explorers placed records of their journeys. Here in these cairns--or buried ten feet true north of them, to protect the contents from intruders--might be found information critical to the search: projected route and condition of the party, as well as previous routes, discoveries, accomplishments, and problems. This was the flight plan, the press release, the health report, the newspaper, the broadcast, the mail delivery system of Arctic exploration. Though random, it was critical, sometimes meaning the difference between a lost party's being found and saved or not. 

Well. I still have that book on my shelves and it is still high up on my list of remembered books. I have written up numerous pages just in the last few days from another fascinating book I am reading and it does feel good to be keeping a commonplace book once again. In my quick perusal of information for this post, I found a lot of great photos with a Google search and came across a blog post from Tom Standage who wrote the book, Writing on the Wall, about the history of our human communication in terms of "social media". There is documentation contained in the book about the commonplace book and how they were, along with diaries, often shared publicly.  We are social creatures and always have been, it's just that the terms of engagement have changed. Anyway, I'm quite anxious to read this book and am momentarily off to head into town to the public library to check it out. I encourage you to read that post by Tom Standage, as it quite fascinating...at least to me!

Have a great week ahead....enjoy the spring weather....if you have it to enjoy!

Winter Rhythms and Fine Reading

Winter No.2 from the Season Cycles Series

Well, somehow this felt like a big week with a couple of nice blog features for Missouri Bend Studio!  Robyn Gordon's blog Art Propelled post on Nature Lovers featured one of my recent book pages, along with the work of some other really wonderful artists.  Many of the readers of this blog are surely familiar and probably followers of Robyn's blog as well!  If not, it's a gem and I encourage you to visit just once...you'll be hooked!  I was also fortunate to be the topic of the day on the Thursday sketchbook feature on the Artisans Collective blog, which you can link to here. Since I don't really keep a bona fide sketchbook, I sort of walked through the process of making one of the book page pieces using the most recent Page from The Book Of Loose Associations.  

Also as you can see, I've moved into a winter mindset and have started up on the winter pieces in the Season Cycles series.  I have a few more in the works in the studio, but the second one was posted today.  I've been reminded of the beautiful shimmering grays that winter brings and am finding out that perhaps this is my favorite season...at least in terms of inspiration for making art!  Not to worry, I'm not letting the book pages go....they are still in process as well!

Late this afternoon I managed to spend a little time on the couch reading and that was delightful...not only to be reading and watching the gorgeous sunset with a glass of wine, but reacquainting myself with the rhythm of winter days when darkness sets in early and I tend to hunker down and surround myself with books.  That got me thinking again about books and the recent  posts about books in many of the blogs I follow.  I have books and bookshelves in every room in the house and have hauled nearly all of these friends of mine across the country and across town in recent moves.  I tried to part with them, but found I couldn't.

Many of the books I've collected have not been read and truth be told, I doubt I'll ever get to some of them, but give them away....highly unlikely...they belong here on my shelves.  Of the books I've read, so many have sent me soaring or stopped me in my tracks while whole new worlds opened up or brought me to tears when I couldn't imagine that such words strung together across a page could be quite so beautifully written or so powerful.  But ask me to tell you about them, to describe them...I'm kind of at a loss.  Perhaps my memory is not so great, but I think the issue is really that when you read a book, it's like a fine meal (the expression "devouring a book" is probably quite appropriate) that you consume and that literally becomes a part of you....in a physical way, but also emotionally as a memory of a time and place.  Enjoy a delicious meal, but in a few days time, if asked, could you describe it to someone else in any meaningful way?  You could only say in the most cursory terms how wonderful it was, or perhaps how awful, but chances are you probably couldn't even call up in your own body the very tastes you experienced.  Any good book read, once savored, is likewise absorbed by the body, nourishing even as it becomes a part of the very structure of our being....it has become who we are.  

So here's what I'm getting to...I randomly pulled a few fine dining experiences to share with you.  I can tell you this about each of these books...every one has been a part of making me who I am. They lifted and transported me to unknown places and I returned from each journey just a little larger.  

The Book of Salt by Monique Truong, beautifully written novel about Paris in the 1930s through the eyes of the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. This was her first novel and I've been looking for something new every since...

The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn...the book must be a classic and if you ask me, it is essential reading for an artist. 

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit.  I think Rebecca Solnit is pure magic...here's the blurb from the cover, which I wholeheartedly endorse: "Brilliant...never less than deeply intelligent, and often very close to inspired." -- New York Time  Book Review

Now I've gotten myself all excited to reread these little gems!

So....what books have so moved you....what books have provided your best meals????  I'm anxious to hear!

A hearty welcome to the recent followers of this blog!  Have a fine weekend everyone!