Quarantine Reading List | Megan Craig
Quarantine Reading List | Megan Craig
Megan Craig, Traveling in Place (with Rachel Bernsen), 2017, Yale Art Gallery.
If only there was time to read in this suspended animation of quarantine. But first there are first and fourth grade “classes” to oversee, PhD seminars to teach, meals to make, endless laundry, papers to grade, Zoom office hours, dishes, Zoom faculty meetings, the dog’s latest scrape with a raccoon, heavy rains, power outages, bedtime stories, and late nights with The New York Times that lead to even later nights.
Then, right when all hope seems lost, there are a few books on the bedside table. Luckily, I sleep next to a person who can tolerate the light of one lamp and the turn of a few pages. Nothing brings hope like the rosy faces of my girls first thing in the morning (before we have descended into the mundane chaos of the day), but in the dark hours after the longest days, here are three things I have read:
Upstream
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver died in 2019, and it is weirdly comforting to read things by extraordinary people who are not living through the current crisis. She knew how to look to the present sun, and her vision of the world makes you feel that the earth, though indifferent, is secure and alive. Her descriptions of turtles and rocks, streams, and skies, Whitman, Emerson, and other heroes are reminders of devotion. She’s tender and tough. When you wake, you can return to the familiar space of your room with a newfound sense of possibility in any random slant of light or glimpse of muddy ground. Couple her with some barefoot walking in a puddle or river of rain, while you read “Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness,” and you may even feel healed for a moment.
Megan Craig, Mastheads, 2019, felt, satin, silk, thread.
“Nameless” in Proper Names
Emmanuel Levinas
This is a short essay by Levinas, one of the leading European philosophers of the 20th century. It is not easy reading, but it is easier to digest than much of Levinas’s complex writing. Levinas was a Lithuanian Jewish thinker who lived most of his life in France, writing all of his philosophy in French. He served in the French army as an interpreter during the Second World War and was taken captive and held in a labor camp for French Officers in 1940 while most of his family perished in concentration camps (his daughter and wife miraculously saved by Maurice Blanchot and some brave Catholic nuns). He wrote this piece on the 20-year anniversary of the end of World War II. He is thinking about what it means to be 20 years past those experiences, 20 years past the Holocaust. He wonders what the new generation will learn about that history and how they will know it well enough not to repeat it. In plain prose, he itemizes 3 things the next generation will need to know: 1) how to do without material things, 2) the hope that even in the most destructive and destitute times human values can return, and 3) how to survive in isolation. I always think of this essay in hard times, and I’ve read it several times this spring.
Megan Craig, Ground, 2020, cornmeal, dimensions variable.
Belonging, a Culture of Place
bell hooks
You are home indefinitely if you are lucky and not working at a hospital or in some other essential business. So why not read bell hooks’s beautiful meditations on home and her love letter to Kentucky? Poignant reflections on race, inequality, freedom, anarchy, the wildness of the mountains, and the domestic objects of her childhood that are genuine works of art. Forget everything you ever thought you knew about Appalachia and learn from hooks to see a place from the space of deliberate return. I am teaching part of this text this spring alongside John Dewey’s Art as Experience, but I would read it anyhow just to savor the sense of gratitude and unbounded generosity hooks brings to the page.
Megan Craig, Memory Edit (i will never forget), 2019, felt, satin, silk, thread.
Megan Craig
Megan Craig is a multi-media artist and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Art at Stony Brook University. You can follow her work on Instagram @waterstreetprojects or online at www.megancraig.com
These recommendations are part of the Quarantine Reading List series. See the call for participation here.
