Currents: News from the Library on the River ... in Leland
DECEMBER 2019
A Note From Mark
Many people will be getting new electronic devices as gifts this holiday season and I wanted to share some library-related things you can do with these gadgets. As I have said many times before, we will always be a library that values good old-fashioned books that you can hold in your hands, flip pages, and have a connection with a medium that goes back many centuries. But we are also a library that keeps up on the latest technology, and in this day and age that means electronic-based resources.
The most prevalent of these resources is our e-books and audiobooks that are available through the Up North Digital Collection. We team up with a consortium of libraries in our region to provide a wide variety of titles including bestsellers and popular releases. This collection is accessed through our website (lelandlibrary.org) under the Library Services tab and can be downloaded to digital devices using an App called Libby. Also, under this tab are many of the other digital resources we provide such as Transparent Languages, which is a language-learning program, and RB Digital Magazines which provides online access to over 100 popular magazines. Another service highlighted on this webpage is MeL.org, which provides what may be the best of old AND new. On the MeL website you have access to the collections of virtually every library in Michigan and are able to have these old-fashioned resources (books) checked out to you and delivered to our Library, all using a modern internet-based system.
A new feature that I wanted to highlight this month are audiobooks through RB Digital (also accessed on the Library Services page of our website). This service is provided by the Mid-Michigan Library League which is a library cooperative of which we are a member, and you will need to download the separate RB Digital App. This system was recently upgraded from around 7,000 to over 33,000 titles, and lets you check out a book without a waiting list. Because an unlimited number of people are able to check out the same title at the same time, these audiobooks are not new bestsellers, but with this large selection we are sure you will be able to find many titles which will interest you.
All these digital resources are accessible using your library card number and a password pin which in many cases is the phone number we have associated with your patron account. If you have any questions about these or any of our other services, please give us a call.
Happy Holidays!
Mark
MARK YOUR CALENDARS! Upcoming Events & Closures
Friday, December 6 at 10:30am Children's Storytime: Hibernation/Bears
Wednesday, December 11 at 3:00pm Money Series | Unlocking Your Charitable IRA
Friday, December 13 at 10:30am Children's Storytime: Matching Mittens + A Holiday Wreath-Making Workshop for Parents and Caregivers with Gaia Nesvacil
Friday, December 13 at 11:30am K-2 Storytime
Wednesday, December 18 at 2:00pm Let's Talk About Great Writing with Norm Wheeler This program is supported in part by Michigan Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Friday, December 20 at 10:30am Children's Storytime: Holidays
Tuesday, December 24 LIBRARY CLOSED FOR CHRISTMAS EVE
Wednesday, December 25 LIBRARY CLOSED FOR CHRISTMAS
Wednesday, January 1 LIBRARY CLOSED FOR NEW YEAR'S DAY
For more information on Programs and Events at the Library, please visit our website.
Programming Update
As I write this today, over 1600 people have attended library programs so far this year. And when I think about that, I feel tremendous gratitude to each of those people for choosing to spend one of their most precious resources--their time--here at the Library learning and growing with us.
As many of you know, I'm not from Leland. I had rarely been to Leland before Sylvia Merz, our former Director, offered me the position as Program Coordinator at the Library. And yet, in the 2.5 years I have been here, I have found a sense of community that I have not felt in any of the many places I have lived as an adult. And that's because of you, our patrons, and also our volunteers, our board members and of course, Jake and Mark.
During my time here I have also been learning and growing. I have learned more about the kinds of programs community members might want to attend and what time of day they would most likely be willing to venture out of their warm homes to attend such programs -- ie. not after dark during the winter, and certainly not the first nice day of spring or what might be the last nice afternoon this fall. 😉
Kidding aside, to me what our program attendance represents is 1600 occasions when folks chose to come to a program and connect with this community despite the obstacles they faced: They came when the weather was awful. They came when the weather was perfect. They came even when it was inconvenient to do so. And that is a really amazing thing.
2019 isn't over yet, but I'm already looking to 2020 and all the wonderful programs it will bring. If you're travelling over the holidays or call somewhere else home during the long winter months here and you see something another library is offering that sounds interesting to you, I hope you will let us know. I'd love to get something like it on our 2020 calendar too.
This book—any book by László Krasznahorkai—is challenging to even begin to explain. As the book proper opens—in a distinctly shabby town, in a bleak Hungarian winter—a world-renowned former byrologist, referred to only as “the Professor” and living in a squalid shack, ends up firing a gun to disperse his daughter—who the Professor has never met and who is demanding money from him—and the company of local journalists with her. Meanwhile the entire town—but especially the multitudinous minor functionaries of the local government—is in a clamorous uproar of near-messianic expectation at the news of the return of a certain Baron Wenckheim from Argentina, whom they expect to be fabulously rich and therefore able to reverse their collectively declining fortunes—without valid reason, as it turns out, since the Baron is something of a holy fool, one of Krasznahorkai’s recurring Myshkin-like figures whose purity renders them unintelligible to the everyday world, and who in this case has blown his family fortune gambling. This is just the beginning of a long book, and things only go downhill from here: complexifying in bizarre, inexplicable, and sometimes unfathomable ways as the apparently limitless skein of characters in the town try—and almost invariably fail—to come to terms with the breakdown of their world.
Did you follow all that? If no, I wouldn't let the impenetrability of it concern you. The experience of reading Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming has less to do with plot and character as such—though the plot here is engrossing and the characters are fascinating creatures—than it does with the torrential, sprawling flood-tide of language. Krasznahorkai is a writer in the tradition of Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett: unrolling virtuosically long sentences; long as in tumbling avalanche-like over multiple pages, where the insanely loquacious rant becomes a rhythmically-rigorous form of art prose. One of Krasnahorkai's translators referred to his writing as "a slow lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type", but in Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming—thankfully for less courageous readers—the sentences are at least broken up into discrete paragraphs. The narrative shifts kaleidoscopically from character to character, every serpentine sentence dedicated to one situation, or individual, or—particularly in the case of the hyper-mentating Professor, who ironically refers to his digressionary thought-processes as “thought-immunization exercises—one single chain of thought. That may sound intolerable, but the rhythm of the prose, once you've grown accustomed to it, becomes entirely engrossing, even unobtrusive. And it's worth the adjustment: Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is a vast, bleakly-hilarious, absurd, fascinating novel, one which can't really be compared with any others.
-Jake
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