Week 7: Did you know you can take a break?
quick post for a quiet week
Because of the pancetta, Indiana substituted Spring break with three //Wellness Days//, one of which landed on Wednesday this week, freeing me from Zoom’s unforgiving grasp for 8 hours. In lieu of class, I watched two Bibliographical Society of America events on YouTube while working on the paint-by-numbers canvas that my partner gifted me for my birthday of me and my beloved cat sitting on our front porch. I’m still thinking about both videos, but here are my brief thoughts:
Candid Conversations: Booksellers and Librarians was an illustrative and informative conversation between Heather O’Donnell (of Honey & Wax Books, who is also my boss) and Charlotte Priddle (Director of Special Collections at NYU) about what booksellers and librarians should know about each other’s working styles and professional needs in order to collaborate more effectively. TL;DR: please communicate with one another reasonably and with patience (a lesson for us all).
Dr. Derrick Spires’s lecture on Liberation Bibliography was a profound syllabus for teaching bibliography (and book history) through attending to and repairing racism, anti-blackness, and sexism, among other harms. He spoke at length about deprioritizing the bound book in bibliography and looking to other material forms of 18th and 19th century textual transmission (pamphlets, broadsides, flyers, etc.). We mustn’t be beholden to the codex! Bound books were (are!) expensive and often not very mobile. I’m all about smashing the codex hierarchy.
Spires also made a point during the Q&A about treating the literary canon as a flexible, ever-evolving core, rather than a set of, say, 100 works by white writers to which we occasionally add the works Black writers. Instead, liberation bibliography refashions canon by centralizing the works of Black writers, rather than make them ancillary or additive to those of white writers. It was one point among many that stuck with me.
Housekeeping and Birdseeding
house
What I read this week:
I finished Morgan Parker’s There are things more beautiful than Beyonce, which I thoroughly enjoyed
I also read Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave, her memoir of her life leading to her poetry. It is masterful. I finished the last page and said out loud, “She is a genius.” And she is! One of two people to be named United States Poet Laureate three times.
What I’m currently reading:
Natural Enemies of Books: A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography. This is the March book for the Bookish Book Club of which I am a part. It has a lot of facsimiles in it, which I always find fun.
bird
Our bright red cardinal has returned. I really enjoy his chattering.
More later.