It's Reading Season

If you didn’t vote in Leland Township during this last election you probably didn’t realize that the Board of Directors of the Library were up for election. This is the first time in the history of the Library that we have had an elected board. When we were voted a millage in 2016 we also changed how we were governed under state law. At the time the Leland Township Board appointed members of the Library Board and this last week was the first opportunity for the Board to be officially elected by the public as required by those statutes. All the boards before that time were appointed by the Township and served in an advisory role.
What wasn’t reflected in the ballot this week was that three long time board members chose not to run but three other members of the community stepped up in their place and put their name on the ballot.
The three that chose not run, Georgia Rivers, Robert Soutas-Little and Powell “Smitty” Smith represent over 41 years of combined Library Board experience, with Georgia bringing over 20 years all by herself to that total. Being on the Board doesn’t normally represent a huge time commitment, but what it does represent is desire to serve, a strong sense of community and a love of the Library. It has been their guidance, along with all who have served with them over the years that has made the Leland Library one of the best anywhere around, and that has taken a lot of work, vision, and dealing with myriad challenges (like this year). They will be missed, and we can’t thank them enough.
We are very fortunate to have three board members remaining, Berkley Duck, Laurie Leppink Lisuk, and Bret Crimmins along with the three new members, Michael Fleishman, Jennie Berkson, and Alan Hartwick, all who have strong ties to the Library. They will serve four years and will be forever known as the first elected board of the Library.
We are so very fortunate to have so many civic minded people in our community who are willing to give of their time and knowledge to help guide the Library in the future, along with those that have gone before that helped to build such a wonderful legacy.

- Mark

November is an exciting month for us here at the Library. We're hosting our very first Leelanau Community Read (!) with other county libraries and a virtual poetry workshop with Mary Ann Samyn. After months of relative dormancy, it feels good to finally have a few fun things to look forward to.

But first, more on our Community Read: Next Wednesday, November 11 at 7:00pm, Michigan Notable Book author Erin Bartels will be joining Norm Wheeler online for a conversation about Erin's book, We Hope For Better Things. Erin will also be fielding questions from the audience. Here is the link for the program, if you'd like to join:

https://zoom.us/j/94992750192?pwd=d2tadW9DR3pTQno5bUFLenptaUMrZz09

Meeting ID: 949 9275 0192

Passcode: 024559

And if you haven't had a chance to read Erin's book, we still have a few free copies to share before our follow-up community conversations also with Norm Wheeler on November 18 at 2:00pm and November 19 at 7:00pm on Zoom. Just give us a call at the Library and we'll hold a copy for you. I'll also be sending the links to the discussion sections directly to everyone who has registered for the Community Read, so shoot me at email at programs@lelandtownshiplibrary.org if you'd like to sign up. Many thanks to the Friends of Leland Township Library for purchasing the books and supporting this program.

On Saturday, November 14 at 10:00am, Mary Ann Samyn will be leading another virtual poetry workshop on Zoom. It's completely free to attend. I was lucky enough to join in on Mary Ann's workshop in June, and it was such a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning. Here's the link to that program:

https://zoom.us/j/93153501324?pwd=dHhDME15MEZOa2V3MUZxaEplWUU3Zz09

Meeting ID: 931 5350 1324

Passcode: 467468

I know that Zoom can be a bit daunting if you haven't used it before. I too am a novice, but please don't hesitate to reach out for out help if you have trouble accessing a program link.

Laura

Thanks to a handful of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers, the Library has resumed offering personalized delivery of materials to patrons in our service area (Centerville, Solon, Cleveland, and Leland Townships) who are unable to visit the Library! Items are selected based on patron requests and preferences and will be delivered every three weeks (our standard check out period) by the volunteers. This service is free.

To request Home Delivery Service, Patrons can fill out a request form through our website, call 231.256.9152, or email Jake Moran, Assistant Director.

Nonstop by Tomi Ungerer

One of the characters in Tove Jansson’s novel The True Deceiver is a children’s book illustrator who is sick of her world-famous characters. The only thing she would like to paint is the ground itself; baroquely intricate scenes of moss, spruce needles, and alien lichens; but it is the ridiculous cartoon characters with which she crowds such landscapes that she must draw to make a living. She is a slightly comical, but also tragic character; one who has experienced financial success and critical recognition in her work, but at the expense of the sort of art she would really like to make.

This dilemma is a pedestrian one among artists of all kinds: it’s comparatively rare to be able to make a living from one’s own creativity on one’s own terms; and the stranger one’s artistic sensibility, the slimmer the margin becomes. This makes the career of children’s book author and illustrator Tomi Ungerer—who died in 2019—all the more remarkable. It would be an understatement to call his books atypical: they are irreverent, eccentric, artistically-idiosyncratic, hilarious, and often deeply affecting. Further, they’re willing to tangle with otherwise verboten themes in children’s literature: imprisonment, social ostracism, Nazism (Ungerer himself grew up in Alsace during the German occupation), violence, abandonment, crime, and cruelty.

Nonstop is the final work in an intransigently odd bibliography of over 140 books. It is a beautifully illustrated book, but it doesn’t begin with an image. It begins with a blank, pink page and the following passage:

Birds, Butterflies, and rats were gone.
Grass and leaves had withered.
Flowers had turned into memories.
Streets and buildings were deserted.
Everyone had gone to the moon.

This terse, nearly-affectless series of statements introduces the reader to the world of Nonstop, a kind of post-apocalypse sans revelation, absent of familiar life except for two wanderers: Vasco and his shadow. Vasco—a figure with a blue suit and a green hat whose face is always obscured by said shadow—wanders through empty, gray urbanscapes, guided by the shadow—who literally points the way—while narrowly avoiding various hazards: collapsing buildings, tidal waves, random explosions, and packs of hungry tiger tanks. The shadow leads Vasco to an insect-like creature called Nothing who asks Vasco to deliver a letter to its wife. When he finally meets Nothing’s wife, she asks him to take her infant child, Poco with him. The rest of the narrative follows Vasco, his shadow, and Poco as they move from danger-to-danger, searching for a place of safety.

So much for the narrative, which in Ungerer’s typical fashion is at-once straightforward and enigmatic. Nonstop is fundamentally a visual work, though. And as a space for the imagination, it is especially mesmerizing: surreal and somber with broad swathes of color in bleary, muted tones; depopulated landscapes filled with long, opaque shadows; cold and matte shapes softened by flows of water; tilted geometry; darkly-blurred and opalescent watercolor horizons; ominous labyrinths; black moons; abandoned machinery; and “globs of lilac gelatin” draped over black grids. As my wife pointed out to me, the images of Nonstop have a clear visual consonance with the metaphysical art of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. Like Chirico’s paintings, the scenes of Nonstop are paradoxically empty but hugely-suggestive, lonely yet brimming with an intangible, cryptic anticipation of presence.

Would this children’s book be a good book for children? I can certainly see it having an impact. It might be a challenge to understand—it might be so even for adults—but challenges can be rewarding. It is a bleak book. Or rather, it depicts a world that is bleak: scary, unstable, dangerous, and with no guarantees. It’s a corroded cosmos of pollution, climatic uncertainty, war, and abandonment. But it’s tinged with mystery and wonder as well, the darkness of its dim vision gilded by a faintly mythic aura as in the most desperate of fairy tales. Strangest of all, it manages to convey a kind of weird faith in the world—not, to be sure, a faith that everything (or, for that matter, anything) will turn out all-right. Instead, this is a faith in the capacity to listen, to adapt, and to care for others even in what must be recognized as total catastrophe. This is a book that shows what it means, in philosopher Terry Eagleton’s phrasing, to have hope without optimism. As the last work of an artist, Ungerer’s strange and subtle Nonstop feels more than anything like a gift, a veridical hallucination telegraphed from the far side of an abyss.

NOVEMBER 2020

A Note From Mark

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