Rabbit readers

And the radicality of books

I'm still recovering from having had covid and complications from it. I'm glad I was vaccinated or it could have been much worse. Even though I'm better I'm still healing so I've been reading more than drawing lately. But I did do a little in my sketchbook this week which I'll intersperse within the tale of my upcoming one-person fine art exhibit and a description of one of my new artworks.

My exhibit will open, first Friday, June 5 at Burnt Bridge Cellars!! I've created a new art series full of colorful whimsy because when things are hard in life the mundane world becomes both grounding and magical. My exhibit is titled "Mundane Magic"

My new artwork is being prepped for display by the Aurora Gallery... Amy at the Caplan Art Designs gallery is fielding questions and sales... Mark and Burnt Bridge Cellars are serving up excellent food, wonderful wines and magnificent live music! (Reservations for dinner can be made here.)

Last week I shared a new painting that was inspired by the history of the pencil and its role in pro-social development of humans and human flourishing. Link here.

The bound book has been an equally powerful landmark in human flourishing. The ability to record the things of life by handwriting them in a blank bound book and the ability to reproduce books themselves both were revolutionary advances.

Nowadays, we take both blank and printed books for granted but throughout time many people, Black people and women most notably, have fought exceedingly hard for the rights to read and write. (I'll include a list of links for more details in the footnotes below.¹ )

For all of the mundanity of blank and printed books they are still major tools in the formation and processing of knowledge. We still struggle today with the ongoing attempts at censorship of books and attempts to control who can and cannot read and what is “permitted” to be written or read in the first place. (See also Stephen Colbert…)

Here’s my new painting inspired by these thoughts about books:

I Heart Reading
By Clancy
4 feet tall, 13 inches wide
Acrylic on flat canvas

As I created I Heart Reading I was also thinking of the magical transformation of written words into comprehension - as depicted in the thoughts of my rabbit character. I chose a rabbit because of the fertility of words, images and the potential understandings.

Finding reliable relevant information, thinking clearly about it and then building a scaffolding of thoughts that's helpful to human flourishing seems to me to be an integral part of the human condition. There's no shortcut for doing the work of constucting and maintaining a personal mental structure for thinking well.

These thoughts seems relevant to our current times.

How humans structure knowledge is a topic I can geek-out on, as is literacy in general. I did indulge in these topics, especially related to reading, (links below if you want to indulge too) as I worked on I Heart Reading but I'll keep it simple here: throughout our entire lives we construct our own thinking abilities. Often this mental structure forms without our direct awareness and effort, we “luck” into thinking well or poorly at a given time. Sometimes we get tricked into thinking in ways that cause harm to ourselves. Sometimes we learn to, or remember to, slow down and think about our own thinking which often leads towards thinking better and making more careful decisions.

The mundane tools of the pencil and books have directly contributed to the ability of humans to think about their own thinking, to the ability to practice that art and, over time, build more beneficial coalitions within oneself as well as with other people. The ability to think well as an individual, and to think well as groups of people, is a safety feature in general human flourishing.

Our written records are our human life ring flotation devices.²

Abusive people try to limit, obscure, confuse, manipulate and control the thinking of themselves and other people so that they, the abuser alone, will benefit. It's about domination.

Decent people try to expand, brighten, clarify, respect and release the thinking of themselves and other people for the benefit of everyone. It's about mutual support.

People have fought hard for the ability to read and write. People have fought, and still fight, for the ability to choose their own subjects to read and write about. People have fought hard to develop and maintain the mental, emotional and physical resources with which to withstand hard times by being able to grasp the life rings of literature and literacy.

This is why I support public education, public libraries and independent bookstores. They’re our havens in the midst of this fight.

If our written records are life rings then schools, libraries and bookstores are our rescue boats.

Fictional novels have long been fought over. Women have been discouraged from reading them, for example, just as much if not more so than nonfiction.

I think of all of this often. And I certainly did while making I Heart Reading.

It's still a radical, revolutionary act of defiant resistance to read books.

These are the books I've been reading:

Broke-ass Women’s Club by Sharon Sala . I've read this title twice now. It's firmly on my “books to cheer up by” list so it gets reread whenever I need a pick-me-up!

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi. This one is new to me but I'm loving the depictions of art and kindness in it!

Exhibit stuff again:

I've made a collection of all the new art for my Mundane Magic exhibit on my website link here. On that link you can click and enlarge images and see everything.

I wrote a long blog post about my painting Buffalo Gal Going Out Tonight describing how it had been censored but how that censorship led to deep friendships and a whole lot of fun. Link here. Here's an image of my painting with “inappropriate content ” that my blog post is about.

Friends have sent me get-well cards and letters which have brightened my recovery days! Thank you all!!!

The painting on the wall above the cards in this photo is by Bev Jozwiak a local artist.

And Susan Niemann by way of wishing me well sent me a mugshot of one of her favorite mugs that I've made! (Link here) Her photo made me smile so big!!! Thank you!!!

Seeing my own fun mug again inspired me to make a new mug-bowl with my drawings of reading rabbits. I enjoy having soup or cereal out of mug bowls while I read… (mug-bowl link here)

Hare To Read mug-bowl by Clancy

Thank you again for being here… and for reading!

1. A list of links about reading…

"Men are less likely to read than women. At the same time, men are more likely than women to use AI tools such as ChatGPT, excessive use of which likely has a similar negative effect on people's cognitive abilities to not reading. Combine those two trends, and the literacy crisis we’re heading toward may end up affecting predominantly men."

• "77% of women read at least one book per year, vs. 67% of men (2024 -2026 - trending down for men, up for women)
https://www.apexaba.com/blog/reading-statistics. Average US reads about 12 books per year. Canada 17 books. Germany 48 books. (US not worst but more middle to lower) https://www.apexaba.com/blog/reading-statistics

https://dataopedia.com/reading-statistics/

Other links about reading
https://havenread.blog/the-history-of-reading-how-books-have-shaped-culture-and-humanity

About "Papyrus" by Irene Vallejo
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/papyrus-invention-of-books-in-ancient-world-1.7133127

Anti-literacy laws
https://oaklandliteracycoalition.org/literacy-by-any-means-necessary-the-history-of-anti-literacy-laws-in-the-u-s/

The long fight for intellectual freedom
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2024/09/03/censorship-throughout-the-centuries/

A History of censorship
https://palmbeachstate.libguides.com/c.php?g=1402722&p=10380715

A timeline of censorship and liberation
https://pen.org/censorship-history-book-bans/

Women have particularly fought for the right to read
https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/circulating-control-womens-book-battles-1880-1930

Women's fight to be able to both read and write
https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/articles/international-womens-day-the-fight-to-read-and-write

Reading has been considered "dangerous" for women- reading novels were most "controversial"
https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2012/06/11/a-history-of-women-readers-belinda-jack-discusses-the-relationship-between-gender-and-literacy/

2. [Re oligarchs] “Their vision is shared by fascists who seek to rewrite history. Ten years ago, I encouraged Americans facing autocracy to write down their values and experiences so they can be cognizant of outside attempts to change them. Now those records are at risk. It is a strange feeling to endure mass surveillance and an attack on our individual memories at once. We all feel it, but shared alienation just feels like alienation.
One solution is to record your words in ways you can control. I hate that Microsoft Word and some printers now require subscriptions to work instead of letting you own them and use them in private. They have managed to cheapen self-expression while making it more expensive. The future may lie in the past: pen and paper, typewriters, other analog tools. But it is difficult to share your ideas without using the internet, which means battling algorithms, censorship, paywalls, and AI fakes. They want you to trade your humanity for chatbot hallucinations. They want you to surrender. Don’t.
As Zora Neale Hurston said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” We need to override the oligarchy. We need to connect with each other now, and we need to leave an accurate history for future generations. It has never been so hard — or so important — to be a human being in public."

Overriding the Oligarchy