November 2012 Newsletter - The Cornwall Library

November 2012 Newsletter Calvin Trillin Comes to Cornwall Venturing north from New York City to commit a blatant act of funniness in the Northwest Corner before the official start of our long, dark winter, acclaimed author and humorist Calvin Trillin will describe “The Life of a Deadline Poet” on Saturday, December 1 at what is expected to be a sell-out event to benefit The Cornwall Library. Mr. Trillin is well known as a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and as The Nation’s “deadline poet,” but in person he is equally droll. In reviewing a one-act show written and performed by Mr. Trillin, a New York Times theater critic called him "the Buster Keaton of performance humorists." The December 1 talk will be held at 5 pm at the Cornwall Village Meeting House, 8 Bolton Hill Road, in Cornwall Village. A festive reception at the Library – a short walk from the Meeting House – will follow. General seating tickets are $30 each. Reserved seating is $100 per ticket. Tickets may be purchased at the Library, which accepts cash, checks and credit cards. Copies of Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of His Funny Stuff will be available for purchase and signing at the reception. In October Mr. Trillin was awarded the 2012 Thurber Prize for American Humor for this collection. Could any award be more fitting than one named after the late Cornwall resident and great humorist James Thurber? Run, don’t walk to the Library to get your tickets. All proceeds will benefit the Library – and anything benefiting the Library benefits the town.

Books, Baseball, and Bach: Ben Wolff on Creativity On Saturday, November 10 at 4 pm, Benjamin Wolff will present a talk (with music) that celebrates the inventive power of constraints. Turning the common exhortation to “think outside the box” on its head, he explains why the box is a creative gift and demonstrates how restrictions should be seen as hidden opportunities. Wolff is a classical cellist and Professor of Music at Hofstra University. In addition to his performing career, he also delights audiences with elegant and rare insights into the way creativity works, presenting interdisciplinary programs at institutions such as NASA, the City University of New York, Rice University, Salisbury University, Yale University, Wellesley College, and Williams College.

New Winter Hours of Operation Beginning the week of November 5, the Library will operate on winter hours: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 10 am – 5 pm; Wednesday 2 to 7 pm; Saturday 9 am to 1 pm. (See below for the hours on Thanksgiving weekend.)

30 Pine Street • PO Box 126 • Cornwall, CT 06753 • 860-672-6874 [email protected] • www.CornwallLibrary.org

These hours will be in effect through Memorial Day Weekend.

Art at The Library Betty Krasne’s exhibit of pastels entitled “Northwest Seasons” will continue through November 10. Beginning November 13, Ellen Moon celebrates her “retirement” as Library Art Curator, a volunteer position to which she has given 15 years of extraordinary service, with a group show called “About the Sky.” “For the last five years I have been spending a fair amount of my daily painting time trying to paint clouds,” says Ms. Moon. “During that time I have met a number of other local and not-so-local artists who concern themselves with the sky. I have long wanted to draw that group of artists together for a show that gives a somewhat comprehensive look at the sky.” “About the Sky” includes one to three works of 10 artists using a variety of media and will be on view through December 15. The artists are: Ms. Moon, Erica Prud’homme, Don Bracken, Lori Blakey Welles, Lazlo Gyorsok, Tim Prentice, Ira Barkoff, Virginia Giordano, Katy Freygang, and Amelia De Neergaard. There will be an artists’ reception on Friday, November 23 from 5 to 7 pm.

Notes from the Book Selection Committee Since the Book Selection Committee seems to be conducting a seminar on the morality of reading, let’s consider the question of whether it is morally defensible to read for pleasure during the day. You would (or would not) be surprised to know how many crypto-Puritans are out there refraining from reading until the sun is over the yardarm. (This quaint expression may be one that your grandparents used in order to determine when they could sit down and have a cocktail, but it works equally well for other pleasures.) You would be amazed to know how many highly evolved people impose strict limits on their pleasure-reading, allowing themselves to sit down with a yummy novel only after the last dinner dish has been washed. In this world-view, reading is a controlled substance, and its consumption must always be postponed till work is done. American Puritanism dies hard. Reading only after dinner may protect your vision of purity, but it poses other problems. How, for instance, are you going to stay awake to do any reading at all? Across from you on the sofa, the Beloved nods over Swann’s Way, and bedtime reading lasts two minutes or two pages, whichever comes first. The Book Selection Committee has no idea how to rescue you from this dilemma. Talk is cheap, so it’s easy to say that you ought to throw off these shackles and read Jodi Picoult at high noon if you like. But we know it doesn’t work that way. You might, however, get over to the Library and inspect the new books, on the off chance that you’ll permit yourself to read one before sundown.


FICTION Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid These linked short stories by a young Israeli writer follow three young women from the same village whose carefree teenage lives are changed by their military service. Clare Clark, Beautiful Lies It’s 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and we meet the bohemian, cigarette-smoking photographer wife of a Scottish MP. Like everyone in this novel of political and financial complexity, she is haunted by the equivocal past. Ken Follett, Winter of the World The second book in Follett’s massive Century Trilogy is 960 pages long, but Follett fans won’t be daunted. The author has explained that his characters are “trying to survive a bigger kind of winter – one whose storms include Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s holocaust.” NON-FICTION Tom Reiss, The Black Count The first Dumas of note was Thomas-Alexandre – the mixed-race Napoleonic general who was grand-père to Dumas père and Dumas fils of literary fame. This swashbuckling biography reads as thrillingly as The Count of Monte Cristo, which may have been inspired by Thomas-Alexandre. Daniel Smith, Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety The author recounts his struggles with the kind of anxiety that results in panic attacks, bouts of insomnia, and thoughts of “existential ruin.” Paul Tough, How Children Succeed Tough argues that it’s not core curricula or high test scores that ensure success; it’s character, and character can be taught. This view may sound old-fashioned, but Tough vigorously defends it with very contemporary evidence.

Holiday Closing In observance of the Thanksgiving holiday the Library will close at 5 pm on Wednesday, November 21 and reopen on Saturday, November 24 at 9 am.

Meetings The Board of Trustees meeting will be held Friday, November 9 at 3 pm. The Town Committee on Aging will meet at the Library on Tuesday, November 27 at 7 pm.
