Notes from a recent informational webinar run by For The People, a fantastic team aiming to get more people actively involved in defending and championing libraries. This was well-timed, since I wanted to check out volunteer opportunities with our local Friends of the Ojai Library organization, but Katie, Mariame, Tara, and their colleagues inspired me to dig deeper. This call was aimed at enrolling people in their incubator project, which offers weekly Zoom calls to help elected or hopeful board members navigate group dynamics, stand up for free speech, and strategize together. It’s an incredibly smart and well-run operation.
True to their word, I found the documentation online for the Ventura County Library board to be pretty opaque, but with a little digging I was able to locate the one board member who lives in Ojai. I reached out and she kindly agreed to give an informational interview on Friday, so we’ll be chatting about how things get done in this corner of the world. I’m very curious to see what she has to say about the process.
If you’re a library enthusiast, I can’t recommend For The People enough. Sign up for their newsletter, check out their fantastic resources page (especially the Public Libraries 101 zine), and see if you can get more involved in your own local library community.
Stumbled onto this page on my local library system’s website while looking for a way to request a graphic memoir about care homes and learned about something magical: ZIP BOOKS.
Hi, me again. Just wanted to tell you about another amazing thing offered by California's libraries: Zip Books! Have you heard of this? I hadn't. Order a book, it ships TO YOUR HOUSE for FREE, you read it, return it to the library, and it becomes part of their collection! WHAT!!!
It does my heart good when I yell about library stuff on Twitter and lots of people share the tweet. The Internet being hot for libraries gives me faith in society. Although it’s also rough that the library’s website is so labyrinthine that I had to stumble onto this program by accident. I wish every library had a website as functional and fancy as a startup meditation app.
(I really liked The Library Book by Susan Orlean.)
Haven’t been blogging because my brain is really excited about thinking in images right now and also I can’t seem to muster the follow-through, so this is one of those “done is better than perfect” posts.
Trying not to be precious about year-end stuff right now because I’m feeling stuck, but here’s a big list of things I read in 2021! Reading was hard this year for…well, you know. All the reasons. I needed a lot of comfort food to get through the upheaval of moving home, and for huge swaths of time I felt as if I’d lost access to the part of my brain that thrilled to Alberto Manguel or Le Guin in the first part of the year. I’m still sort of there.
Read a lot of comics (thanks, Danielle’s studio library and also The Actual Library) because I started drawing a graphic novel and it turns out reading more comics helps your brain think in comics??? Who knew. I still feel like I’m scratching my way towards figuring out what really makes a comic work for me. It takes a lot to get me excited about them, which feels somewhat icky as a person who knows first-hand how much fucking time they take. But there it is!
Started trying to track rough start/end dates towards the second half of the year because I got curious. I’ll probably stick with that into 2022.
Bubble and The Liar’s Dictionary both made me laugh out loud. The Creative Habit and Always Coming Home reminded me how I got to be the way I am. I’m sure there are other books I felt feelings about but I’m just going to HIT PUBLISH.
Jez and I talked about bonsai trees a lot tonight. He’d gone to the Pacific Bonsai Museum. We talked about creative work that becomes a conversation between a craftsperson and a living being—a conversation that will outlast its originator. A conversation across multiple generations.
The oldest tree he saw dated from 1850.
2.
Lives stop, but life keeps going. Flesh begets flesh.
Great cathedrals were built by generations of stonemasons to whom the architect was a man who might once have greeted their grandfathers’ grandfathers. How agreeable, then, to believe in God.
To set stones on stones not for the architect but for eternity.
The Latin epitaph in one seventeenth-century cathedral translates: Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.
The words are carved in a disk of black marble set beneath the center of the dome. The disk was placed there by the architect’s son.
It’s easy to imagine the great man, but try to imagine the son who knows his father’s cathedral will be loved longer than the flesh of his flesh.
Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
3.
I’m in a cathedral. My dad is in the cathedral. Our friends and neighbors—we’re all in the cathedral, eighteen-foot tall and wool-woven. Ostensibly we’re saints, but anyone from town would look around and just see people they knew. She lost her house in the Thomas Fire. He passed away last Christmas from pneumonia. This is the real record.
I posed for the portrait in 1998. Before Y2K, but after the release of Spiceworld. When we saw the Cathedral open its doors in 2002, I was 13 and felt so worldly compared to the child self hung high on the yellowed walls.
The truth is: she’ll outlast me.
I haven’t been back to the Cathedral since, but I think about it all the time.
It was by this making of comparisons to analyse her feelings that Taryn returned from her period of healing to who she was, what mattered to her, and what was inescapable. Her troubles had pressed on her for weeks, not just ill health caused by the demon but the Muleskinner’s slow approach and what she thought she owed him—or worried he’d think she owed him. And there were other failings: how she took her former husband’s generosity for granted, and how little kindness she seemed able to show to her father. The rest of it—her book, the festivals, her agent’s and publisher’s expectations—receded. But what had taken the place of the pressures wasn’t Taryn’s own tranquillity; it was the land itself, the Sidh, promising always to be there, always to be the same. Promising also that it would be the same Taryn who stepped out with sound knees and clear eyes from this blue lake, or stone hearth, or apple shade. Come again, be again—that was its promise, a sense of permanence Taryn hadn’t felt since she was under ten years old and only able to imagine that she would always stay at Princes Gate with her grandparents, always find the same old Monopoly set, quoits, croquet hoops and mallets, the familiar punt, the cats—only a little indifferent whenever she arrived—but all as it should be, the same, permanent. The Sidh was turning Taryn into a child again, a child who knew everything sustaining would last. It gave her back that knowledge beyond faith—what the faithful meant when they said ‘faith’.
Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book
7.
I got a card at the Ojai Library last week. Walked into this building for the first time since I was a child and breathed the particular scent of spines and plastic and dust. Things were different, of course. Fewer shelves in the children’s section, no more chunky CRT monitors blinking green on black, keyboards shrouded in that satisfyingly tacky plastic skin. Keys you really had to punch to pull up the author of your choosing.
When I went looking for the books I remember devouring as a young reader, I found the same phalanx of Nancy Drew titles intact.
The Moomin novels, though, the ones I really wanted to see again, they were gone.
