I couldn’t find Louis Macneice’s poem in our library, so I purloined it from teh internets.

The British Museum Reading Room

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted, readers
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge–
Honey and wax, the accumulation of years–
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,
In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
And cherishing their hobby or their doom
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
This is the British Museum Reading Room.

Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles–the ancient terror–
Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

July, 1939.

Maybe Richard Altick’s description is more poetic:

“In its circular reading room . . . countless books have been prepared for, or in some cases, such as Das Kapital and and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, actually written; and in the adjoining Department of Manuscripts scholars have, for generations, pored over the papers of hundreds of famous authors.”

I was going to bitch about how our library listed “Historical New York Times” under “H,” but they’ve made finding it a bit easier for us non-librarian types in the past week or so. I’ll have to find something else. “Think like a librarian. Think like a librarian.”

We sit on the cusp of a new Age of Enlightenment, an age (probably renamed the Age of Bio-Science) in which all the secrets of life will be revealed in order to yield band-aids that perform skin grafts and genetic body modification.

Ever sensitive, some artists have picked up the scent and are making art to reflect the coming cultural shift.

There’s been a surge in somatic mixed media art such as the type produced by Laura Splan, who integrates biological materials with fiber arts to produce drawings made with blood-based ink or viruses recreated in doilies. It’s clear she’s been a major (if unspoken) influence on Emily Barletta, a New York-based artist who crochets yarn sculptures in the form of bacteria, cells, and other biological structures. Her first solo show opened at Art Star gallery in Philadelphia.

In her artist statement, Emily shares that she suffers from a spine malady that forces her to manage pain on a constant basis. She writes that the current pieces in the show manifest her own fascination and obsession with what’s going on in her body and the realms of biology. I like this kind of art because it’s a representation of the way God created life, one cell, bead, stitch at a time. I can’t wait for artists like Emily or use neuro-science research to investigate new ways of representing feelings such a pain, sorrow or elation as they zoom about our bodies as electrical currents or hormonal messages.

Coincidentally, Laura Splan’s work will be part of a group show called “Pricked: Extreme Embriodery” at the Museum of Art + Design in New York, opening November 8th.

gives whole new meaning to the term “body of work”

shout out to Gilding the Lily for renewing my appreciation for extreme embriodery

image of work by Emily Barletta

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