libraries In the mid-70s, one of 75 new students at Carleton’s School of Architecture in Ottawa, Professor Glenn Milne asked us to draw a map of the campus. We protested that we didn’t know the campus yet, we were just getting our bearings. He insisted. My map showed a beeline from the school to the pool and back up to MacOdrum Library. That was it. Glenn pointed out how we each drew what we knew, what we were drawn to. My conceptual map included the path to the campus library, my happy place. I have always lived near a library. I brought home all the books I could carry from the children’s section of our old Benny Library in Montreal’s NDG, a haven for someone my size with my own library card. It had the same magic as Arto Monaco’s Land of Makebelieve in Upper Jay, New York where the castle, train and village houses were built to half-scale just for children. As a teen living a few blocks from the Carlingwood branch of the Ottawa Public Library, I would lay out texts, notebooks and references along a table as I studied. At St. Joseph’s High School, I volunteered for the library club with the other bookworms – my people. School, like home, was bustling; the library gave me quiet and a place to think. From this place of quiet I was fortified to rejoin the school crowds cheering on our football team. We returned to Montreal in 1973 and lived a few blocks west of the historic Loyola College, now Concordia University. Loyola’s modern Vanier Library appeared to be designed around a massive plaster copy of Michelangelo’s David. My friends and I would meet to study at the feet or behind the shoulders or in the favoured spot, beside the penis. David gave us a frisson of sophistication to match our studied indifference to male nudity on a giant scale. Now, I take out all the books I can carry from the Rosemount branch of the Ottawa Public Library around the corner. Rosemount is an original Carnegie library – a 103-year-old temple to books and learning. When I enter, I feel the same magic as I did in NDG. The Rosemount embeds Carnegie’s library ethic and aesthetics, his expansive gift to learning and to creating enduring libraries that are public and free.
Rosemount Library, 1918, courtesy of The Ottawa Citizen, April 24, 2006
I come home in 2019 from a trip to Italy, primed by the Italian art of living, from my relatives’ bubbling welcome in Le Marche in the east, to the angst of the latest Art Biennale in Venezia, to the familiar smells and sounds of Firenze with its heady mix of language, art and architecture in every narrow street, to a visit to a neighbouring prince’s rural villa, to, finally, a perfect wood-fired pizza at the airport before I fly. As I open the door to our Ottawa home I am greeted by the heavy red-blossomed hibiscus that shade bright windows in deep window wells. I return travel and language books to the straining shelves beside the desktop computer. In the living room I lay out magazines and books on the coffee table. I return a coveted art book to a shelf in the studio, sliding another out to compare a detail prompted by my visits to Benozzo Gozzoli’s artwork in San Gimignano and in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Firenze. I push aside the suitcase at the end of my bed, and spread out the art book and map, with notes and images of Michelangelo on my tablet, savouring them with memories of light striking the Duomo at different angles. My bed as studio, as stage, as retreat.
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