Life from the Stacks: Art, Bananas, and Snowflakes at the Library
Life from the Stacks is a weekly column by Joanne Wilson, Branch Coordinator at the Garberville Library. Wilson shares the wonderful world that awaits beyond the doors to your local library, within the binds of books, and as limitless as your imagination.
[Background images by Secretum Mundi, sourced from Wikimedia Commons]
“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
We love art at the library, as evidenced by our monthly shows in the Art Lobby by local Humboldt County artists. We also have a weekly art class (most Saturdays from 10:30 A.M. until noon) in our conference room called Creative Space. We do month long projects working in a variety of mediums and with an ever changing palette. We’ve done papier mache mask making. We had a clay class taught by local ceramicist, Marci Ebert. This month, we’ve been working with water color pencils. The class size varies anywhere from 5 – 20 people and the people who attend range in age from 5 years to 80+, which makes for some really interesting intergenerational discussions.
The most recent discussion involved Italian visual artist, Mauricio Cattelan’s display entitled Comedian. This piece consisted of a fresh banana duct taped to a wall. Perhaps you’ve seen it. Is it art? There are arguments on both sides. A week ago, this piece sold at auction. I asked the class members, after showing them the piece, how much they thought this art (?) piece would sell for. The prices they came up with ranged from $3.99 to $1000. The children were not only skeptical, but lacking a favorable opinion of the piece. The adults in the class shared their skepticism. If you ever want an opinion of what makes art, ask a ten year old. They are born art critics. You can Google Mr. Catalan’s art piece. Just type in “banana with duct tape”. Make up your own mind. Is it art?
The fact is, that we are all artists of one kind or another. We sing before we can talk. We draw and paint before we can write. We dance before we can walk. Art is a universal language that transcends countries, cultures and millennia. The libraries in Humboldt County alone carry hundreds if not thousands of art books and we dabble in art in every form.
This Tuesday from 3:00 until 5:00 P.M. we’ll have fiber artists working on their projects during the Yarning Circle. This is an all ages group. Bring in your crochet, knitting, darning or any fiber arts project to meet with fiber masters. It is a great group who can help if you have issues or problems with your fiber project.
The library will be closed Thursday and Friday of this week for the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll also be closing earlier than usual on Wednesday night (5:00 P.M.). Gobble! Gobble!
Saturday, we’ll be back open from noon until 4:00 P.M. We will not be having Creative Space on Saturday, but we will have a snowflake table set up in the library for anyone wanting to add to the snowflake collection the library already has. I sense a snowstorm about to erupt in the library. (No, the term snowflake in this paragraph has nothing to do with politics.)
A Reminder…On Thursday, the Garberville Veterans Group will be serving their usual Thanksgiving dinner at the Mateel Community Center beginning at noon. All are welcome. This is a wonderful community get together and a great free meal. If you would like to contribute, call Tom Pie at (707)499-3931.
Enjoy the holiday, have an extra piece of pie and steel yourself for the oncoming blitz of that Mariah Carey song.
By the way, that banana with duct tape sold for 6.2 million dollars. Go figure.
The Garberville Library…not just books and it’s all free.
Joanne Wilson
Branch Coordinator
Garberville Library
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Books
If given the choice of books or the internet I would choose books with no hesitation. (No, kindle or e-books aren’t books.) The internet could be taken away and I’d barely feel it compared to no books, which I liken to being in prison.
My father used to give us books for Christmas and I probably groaned and tried to hide the disappointment although my sister may have welcomed them gladly.
I pity those who don’t read books, who don’t even know what they’re missing, who don’t know the joy of lying back in bed, couch, or hammock absorbed in a good tale. Of all the art forms I respect novelists the most (movie directors probably a close second) as they can make me feel emotions about something which didn’t even happen a hundred years ago, or whenever the setting is.
Most of my peers read almost exclusively non-fiction and I probably should pity them too, although they learn more than I do with my escapist novels–as long as I have a good book to read I’m not bored. Once a non-reader (she watched the same Youtube music video 1000 times) told me I need to get out there and live life instead of holing up with a good book and she has a point.
When my father died my sister wanted me to box up his books and ship them west. It was many boxes as he had been a well-read English professor and they moldered away in a falling-apart shed for years until they were moved into a cluttered back room. Last month the room was finally cleared out, twenty-two years after his death, and I volunteered to haul to the dump the final load of hoarded stuff to make way for a bathroom project. Included were the last bags of books, musty and abused by bugs and rodents.
“You can have any of these,” my sister said as I loaded them into my bulging truck. “I took one.”
I declined.
At the dump I threw out everything, including the last bags of books but I did grab one random one just as my sister had done and it’s still rattling around in the truck cab although I don’t remember the title.
(A week after writing the essay above I went out to the truck to see what the name of the book was to complete this narrative and found that it was a compilation of golf stories from the magazine “Golf Digest” called Fun In The Rough. As I looked in the table of contents I was surprised to find my father’s name as author of one of the stories, a humorous imagining of golf’s origins centuries ago.
Of the hundreds of his books we tossed, the one I saved was the only one which mattered.)
Well as oft said, a worn book is a read book!