Scenes & Thoughts From Life & Lit

"Can we play ball?"

 

This is what spring looks like. 

 

At least, it is what the month of March so often looks like here in northern Michigan, as the calendar announces spring in the midst of continued snow and ice. 

 

But a thaw brings its own troubles. Frozen mud ruts are jarring, but a slithery mud wallow can be much more difficult to navigate. And do we want the 70-degree temperatures in March that family in Minnesota and Illinois had recently? I should say not! Heaven forbid the “darling buds of May” be tempted to open any earlier and risk a killing frost!

Future Mudbath Here

Meanwhile, living in a book –

 

Published in 1859, the action of George Eliot's Adam Bede takes place in 1799 against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, but world-historic events are not the author’s concern. We are told the time only because the narrator insists that “all this happened, you must remember, nearly sixty years ago,” and so, she says, we should not be surprised that Adam exhibits a touch of peasant superstition along with his keen intelligence or that “Hetty’s sphere of comparison was not large.” The novel's world is a circumscribed rural world of a bygone past but also includes the inner, infinitely complex worlds of the people who lived there in that time.

 

Reading Eliot's classic novel in the 21^st century, it is difficult to view it, as many did in 1859, as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind.” Seduction, pregnancy, and infanticide do occur in the story, but hardly in “lewd” language. Of the seduction, we see only kisses and an arm around a waist, while the infant is more abandoned than murdered—criminal, yes, but neither violently nor without feeling—and between the seduction and the abandonment, the terrified flight of a young woman never before on her own in the world has her pregnancy named to us by the author only, circumspectly, as her “hidden dread.” There are no graphic scenes or language.

Winter continues.
Seasonal road season is not here yet.

Shocking readers was not George Eliot’s aim. Rather, she encouraged the enlargement of sympathy for our fellow creatures.

 

The story takes place at the turn of a century over 300 years ago. We see the faces of George Eliot’s characters as their own friends and families see them, and at the same time we feel the beating of their hearts as if those hearts were our own. Hopes, illusions, doubts and all the rest of the changing weather that passes through their souls we experience along with them as, along with what we see, there is what the author allows us to feel, which is more than we might for our own neighbors and friends whose hearts are hidden from us. As the omniscient narrator tells a story so universal that it might have taken place at any time in human history, we are introduced not only to people as they appear to each other but also to the inner lives of each. We see clearly the querulous, jealous mother-love of Lisbeth Bede, the near-worship of young Seth for his brother Adam, Adam’s hard and unforgiving judgment of those who lack his devotion to work, Hetty’s inability to feel sympathy for anyone’s feelings other than her own, and Dinah’s gentle saintliness that asks nothing for herself—and if Lisbeth and Seth and Adam, Hetty and Dinah were our neighbors we might stop with what we see and judge them by a single standard, much as does the voluble Mrs. Poyser, with her rock-ribbed sense that her view of things was the only right view. But granted access to their inner doubts, fears, and hopes, we share (if we are sympathetic readers) in the author’s sympathy for them all.

Weak sun trying its best to shine --

A friend and I were texting one recent morning about writers able to move readers to such sympathy. As I have long said of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, you might be unable, in real life, to tolerate sitting next to one of her characters on a long bus ride, but thanks to her insights into that character’s experiences and the marks it has left on the soul, a reader understands the why behind, for example, someone’s maddening anger or overwrought sensibility. By contrast, no subtlety or great knowledge of hearts is required to create a fictional hero or villain, only the willingness to play God and divide the human race into the saved and the damned. “An author needs a vision of human nature and unusual writing skill to produce characters that truly reflect reality,” my friend noted. 

Vision, skill—I would add that it takes generosity of spirit on the part of the writer, a largeness of soul. And a reader willing to open her own heart and mind to the vision of such a writer cannot help but feel increased sympathy for mankind in general.

 

How can it be that I never read this novel before? To think that I might have missed it entirely! It will be part of my mission as a bookseller to urge its reading to others, though I realize that not all readers will find it as compelling as I did because Adam Bede presents a couple of possible stumbling blocks for 21^st-century readers. 

First, there is the dialect. Repetition and context aid in translation, however, and a reader quickly realizes that ‘mun’ stands for ‘must,’ ‘war’ for ‘were,’ and ‘nor’ for ‘than.’ Also, the dialect is stronger in some characters’ speech than in others and occurs not at all in the exposition, so screw up your courage and dive in!

 

A more general stumbling block for many would be the novel’s opening pace. The story begins slowly and builds slowly. We see country people at their work and at their worship, the author in no hurry to cut to the action, her paragraphs long and dense with description. While impatience on the part of a reader will be ill rewarded, I can promise that once things begin to happen there are plenty of sudden scene changes and increasing drama.

Ice moving out of Omena Bay at last!

With eyes on the forecast –

 

I’m back in my bookshop today, for the first time since—was it really Thursday, March 12? Almost two weeks ago?! That’s what the double whammy of a couple feet of snow plus a debilitating cold will do to the most determined and intrepid bookseller. But she is back among the living, friends, and happy to be here for you once more.

Somewhere in the future will be more blue skies.

Without the blue snow!

And now? Will I take spring break next week along with everyone else in Northport, the public school and our hardworking friends at New Bohemian Café? Is there a road trip in my near future? Or will I stay put and be a destination for someone else? Much depends on the weather, my friends, as is so often the case in our extraliterary lives, but I am here this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, for sure, March 25-27, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., so stop by if the spirit moves you. 

And someday soon Sunny will be rolling in clover!

Going Places

Choosing a book is like choosing a road.

Going Places In Fiction

 

Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all.

- Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction” 

 

I want to pause here after this sentence, written by Eudora Welty in an essay called “Place in Fiction,” because I want to call your attention to the first thirteen words: “Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb….” This essay of Welty’s, which I encountered in a collection entitled The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, was originally published in 1957. The 1950s are generally portrayed as a time of calm prosperity in America, and yet Eudora Welty, a writer from Mississippi, would have had a front row seat from which to observe battles over school desegregation, 

yet another reminder that there is no short, simple answer to the question of what the Fifties were “like,” those years (as was true of the Sixties and any other era in the life of our country) having been different for different people in different parts of the country with different skin color or economic status. How much “mutual understanding” was there between the races, between regions of the United States in the 1950s? 

But let us return to Welty’s discussion of place in fiction: 

 

Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth.

 

Fiction, Welty writes in the middle of the following paragraph, “is properly at work on the here and now.” Even a historical novel must transport us to “the past made here and now,” and that is because for us to enter the world of the novel “we have to be there.” And so it is that “fiction is all bound up in the local.” 

 

A few of my friends become impatient with descriptive passages in fiction. They want action and accept dialogue only insofar as it advances plot. Not me. For me, whether in a short story or a memoir, classic novel or murder mystery, I take pleasure in the time an author takes to draw me into the locale of the story. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country begins with a lyrical passage:

 

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carrisbrooke, and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys in Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea….

- Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

 

Immediately we are in a specific place. Then, downhill from the grassy hills, he takes us to a different specific place.

 

The path is dropping into the red land of Ndotsheni. It is a wasted land, a land of old men and women and children, but it is home. The maize hardly grows to the height of a man, but it is home.

 

--It is dry here, umfundisi. We cry for rain.

 

--I have heard it, my friend.

 

--Our mealies are nearly finished umfundisi. It is known to Tixo alone what we shall eat.

 

The path grows more level, it goes by the little stream that runs by the church. Kumalo stops to listen to it, but there is nothing to hear.

 

The stream, dry for a month, does not run, and the women must walk to the river every day for water.

 

Kumalo is the individual through whose eyes we see his home, and when he makes the long journey to Johannesburg to search for his son and his sister, we hear the noise of the city through his ears and feel his confusion and fear. It is Kumalo’s truth, at home with his wife and in his meetings with other individuals in Johannesburg, that the novel allows us to see. 

It can take you somewhere you've never been before.

...For Book Reviews

 

Big news in the book world is the demise of The Washington Post’s “Book World” section, with its small number of fulltime reviewers and an ever-changing cast of guest reviewers. Was it reviewer Ron Charles who commented on NPR that there are now fewer fulltime book reviewers in the U.S. than the number of people who have walked on the moon? Whether fact or hyperbole, you get the point. As the number of newspapers shrinks, fewer and fewer of the surviving papers give any space at all to newly released books. Bestselling, big-name authors have the money of their publishing houses behind them because sales of their books keep the publishers alive, but what of small publishers, new authors, books that don’t fit neatly into a genre or niche with a loud and loyal fan base?

My customers and I trade recommendations.

Where do you learn about new books? I read reviews in the New York Review of Books (an article there persuaded me to read, at last, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove) and local publications, listen to reviews and interviews on NPR, read my daily “Shelf Awareness” newsletter, and make notes of books and authors recommended to me by my friends and bookshop customers and authors (overlapping categories). 

I look over the new arrivals at our local library. Also, as a dealer in used and rare books, as well as a reader of the old, I often follow up clues, learning of an author or a title in something I’m reading and then searching out the writers or work mentioned, which is what led me to Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. 

 

 

...In Books and Memory

 

Armchair travel! How I love it! Four decades or so ago, I was obsessed with the Arctic and sought out everything I could find about that part of the globe, particularly books written by women, such as Arctic Mood, by Eva Alvey Richards; Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter; and Spring on an Arctic Island, by Katharine Scherman. There is a wealth of armchair travel available in fiction, too, and I have loved visiting on pages of books lands I will never see in person. Thanks to reading, I have also “owned” horses!

I thought of them fondly as mine.

My memory travels are made possible by daydreams, old journals, photo albums, even by digital images stored on my phone. Looking this morning at images from three years ago in Arizona, I thought for the first time that, odd as it may sound at first, Arizona gave me something of what I longed for in my Arctic dreams—a challenging environment. The Arctic would have given me the challenge of cold and treelessness. Cochise County challenged me with relentless sun, with dry, thin air (thinner with every hundred feet of altitude), primitive roads beneath my tires, and loose, unstable gravel and rock underfoot. There were times when my endurance was tested.

Solo destination was more challenging than photo portrays.

While my yearning for the Arctic has evaporated with age, I am sometimes “homesick” for the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains, and reliving hikes with friends and dogs is a pleasure I feed by (besides my own writing and photographs) reading books set in the area, such as stories of Cochise and the Chiricahua Apaches, as well as J.A. Jance’s Sheriff Joanna Brady series. 

 

“Were you homesick for Michigan when you were in Arizona?” a friend asked. “No,” I said, “I didn’t have to be, because I knew I would be back.” Every winter in Arizona, on the other hand, was a gift I knew might not be repeated, and indeed my last winter in the ghost town was 2022-23, but I remain grateful to have had my time there and for the friends I made.

 

 

...At Home in Michigan!

 

“We live in a beautiful place,” the Artist used to say often, and since he’s been gone I’ve made that remark frequently to Sunny Juliet, as my dog rides shotgun with me in Leelanau County.

With dog on Michigan back road -- heaven!

Michigan’s two green peninsulas, their lakes, rivers, creeks, fields and hills, sandy beaches and rocky shores—my family fell in love with Michigan when we came camping in a heavy old canvas umbrella tent, back when I was 12 years old, and it has been my great good fortune to call Michigan home for decades since. 

What do you look for in a companion? Common values, interests, background? Sharing a love for Michigan, both the familiar places and those not yet explored, is essential to me. Then, please, let him be a woodsman. Well, okay then!

From the Tenth to the Twelfth

Looking out onto Waukazoo Street

December

Oddly enough, the name of our twelfth month of the year comes from the Latin word for ten, decem, thanks to an earlier Roman ten-month calendar. New months January and February were added on at the beginning of the year on the new Julian calendar, rather than at the end, in 45 BCE, making the old tenth month the new twelfth month. 

 

To a friend who remarked gloomily the other day that winter “hasn’t even started yet,” I gave my own Pollyannaish (not my nature--I have to work hard at it) view of December 21: That’s when darkness begins to retreat, days begin to lengthen, so I see the official first day of winter as a happy turning toward spring—and don’t try to talk me out of it! 

Morning sun! A rare winter treat in Michigan!

 When Is Your Work “Finished”?

 

French writer Albert Camus died in a traffic accident at age 46, and his last book, an unfinished draft manuscript, was found in the mud at the scene of the accident. Russian fiction writer Gogol completed only the first volume of his projected trilogy, destroying multiple copies of sequels that failed to satisfy him. American poet and novelist Jim Harrison died in his writing studio with an unfinished poem on his desk. 

 

Some people find it tragic when writers’ last works are not completed. I find it inspiring. 

 

Is this an old Chinese saying or something that can be traced to Japanese samurai Miyamoto Musashi? “A man builds his house; then he dies.” My husband the Artist took it to mean that living meant working toward a goal, “building one’s house,” and that having finished the house down to the last perfect detail, there was nothing left to do but die. And so, the Artist’s thought continued, it was best to have many unfinished projects, goals to anticipate, and reasons to get up in the morning. Having finished all projects meant no more reason to live, as he saw it.

Unfinished, unsigned --

From time to time I wonder what people do with themselves when they retire, sell their houses, stop driving, and move to senior apartments. Some, I’m sure, remain socially active in their new environments, but what about life outside of socializing? What would I do if deprived of my housework, yard work, dog responsibilities, long walks and drives, travel, gardening and foraging, and my bookselling life? Reading and writing would remain, as long as my eyes and mind cooperated, and maybe I would even get more writing done—actually hold myself to a daily schedule! (There’s a concept, eh?) Physical tasks, though, have always been fruitful interludes during any big writing project (say, a doctoral dissertation) I’ve ever had. Washing dishes or raking leaves, shoveling snow or taking a long walk or drive—anything to jog the mind out of a rut, because getting away from a desk re-opens space for thoughts and words to find each other in the happy, cooperative way they can stubbornly refuse to do when a writer sits too long in one place. 

 

The Artist and I talked about taking a very long, meandering way home from Cochise County, Arizona, in the spring of 2022, driving north as far as the Badlands of South Dakota (he’d never seen my birth state) and then east to the Twin Cities of Minnesota (to visit kids and grandkids). He had in mind an experimental method for casting his wax sculptures and looked forward to trying that, also. A friend asked if he left unfinished paintings. Of course. But that’s just it. He went into the hospital that last time already looking forward to coming home and going on. He was living, not dying, until he died. For Harrison, life was writing poems, and so Jim, too, caught mid-poem, despite his acknowledged loneliness in the months following Linda’s death, was still living up to the end. 

 

“We must draw a lesson from this,” say the Chinese. What lesson do you draw? I say, don’t finish your house and call your life over. There is always more to do, and it’s good to keep living as long as you have breath.

 

 

Mailman Wisdom

When Stephen was laid off from a high-paying job as some kind of business consultant in the early days of the COVID epidemic, everyone else was laying off or being laid off, too, which is how Stephen found himself taking the test and training to become a rural mail carrier in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his home territory. Accustomed to feeling smart as well as being well paid, Stephen was overwhelmed by his new job and discouraged by mistakes. One day everything came to a head when he forgot that a house on his route was vacant, stuck his hand into the mailbox, and was attacked by hornets. “I can’t do this,” he tells a fellow carrier who has been helping him with the new route. Her advice is simple.

 

“…It’s like this for everybody. Just show up one more day. Just deliver the rest of this stuff and you’ll be done for today.”

 

“Okay.” 

 

“Don’t quit today.” 

 

-      Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

 

 

A friend and I were talking about how difficult life can be, especially these days, what with aging (for us), and political division, and what feels to us like the tearing-down of the America that had been built during our lifetime, and we acknowledged how easy it can be to slip into depression and say, “I can’t do it!” We talked about how often people say, “Take one day at a time,” when there is, after all, no alternative! 

 

When I told her about the mail carrier saying, “Don’t quit today,” she liked it as much as I did. Really, “Take one day at a time” and “Don’t quit today” may look like the same advice, but don’t they feel different somehow? For me, when things look particularly gloomy, “Don’t quit today” is all I need to promise myself. Not quit today? I can do that! I’m not looking at a whole long string of “one day at a time” days, just this one day I’m in. Don’t quit today. All right!

 

(I don’t need to tell myself that every day or even most days. Most days are either neutral or brightened by what Dana Frost calls “forced joy,” or begin and end in downright deep gratitude. Once in a while there are spots of bliss. It’s just good to be able to pull out a mantra that works when you need it.)

Postage stamps are miniature works of art.

I found Mailman an inspiring book. In one early chapter, I feared the author was going to bog down in procedural minutia, but I waded through those pages and was glad I did, because knowing how much the job involves makes Grant’s livelier stories all that much more vivid, and without ever having worked for USPS, I can appreciate and identify with his feeling for the postal service. They don’t cherry-pick profitable routes! USPS delivers to everyone. In that regard, they are like public schools and similarly foundational to the social infrastructure of the United States.

 

Coming from a family of letter-writers, I absolutely love the United States Postal Service! Their service is priceless! But how many of us know how hard the work is, how efficiently it is managed at the over 40,000 local offices, and what a downright bargain it is compared to postal prices in other parts of the world? Thank you, Benjamin Franklin, and thank you, U.S. postal workers, past, present, and future!

 

And now, a little shameless self-promotion

 

First, I’ll boast on behalf of my village and say that Northport’s holiday-decorated tree is easily the most beautiful in the county. Of course, you know I am completely unbiased, right?

 

What I have on offer now at Dog Ears Books is a postcard featuring that beautiful tree (from 2024), and on the reverse side, where you put a postage stamp and address to someone you want to remember with a written message, are the words “Happy Holidays from Northport, Michigan!” 

I’m asking 94 cents a card, so that with tax it’s just a dollar, and I’m also selling a dozen cards for the price of ten: $9.40 + tax = $10. You may not send out hundreds of cards for the holidays, but there are surely a dozen people in your life whose hearts would be warmed to having a greeting from Northport. Anyway, I’m hoping that’s the case.

 

New Playground!

Now that snow is falling and piling up and drifting along our driveway and in the yard around the old farmhouse, once more we have periodic morning visits from a snowplow. Sunny finds it alarming to have a truck drive right into the yard, but the great part for her comes after the truck leaves, having cleared a big new playground for us! Room for the bouncy ball to bounce! Room for Sunny to run and leap after a Frisbee! Maybe that old snowplow isn’t such a bad thing, after all!

Summer Days Are Very Full

 

Always perky in the mornings -- and most other times, too.

This first photo is out of sequence, because Sunny Juliet is such an attention magnet. Our mornings, however, start much earlier, in the 5 a.m. dark, when Sunny's dog momma makes herself a first mug of strong coffee. 

Mug from the U.P. Do you know that place?

The sky is growing light. We can get up now and start out into the world.

Most often when Sunny and I have little mini-vacations before my work day, we head south (go to my photo blog to see the most recent morning south of M-204), but when the morning includes an agility session out in Cherry Home it makes more sense to go north, and stopping at dear little Woolsey Airport is a temptation there's no reason to resist.

Helpful hint: August 2nd will be a good time to visit Woolsey Airport. Get there early and watch the planes come in! Another reason to be an early bird is to get your pancake breakfast before the line is too long. 

After that stop, I ducked down a nearby unpaved back road. These are some of my favorite places -- what I call Leelanau insolite!  I learned that French word--in the context of travel--to mean out-of-the-way or off-the-beaten-path. Only today did I stumble on the fact that it used to be part of the English language too but is now considered obsolete. Interesting. 'Insolite' is obsolete....

Off the paved road, anyway --

We still had a little time before our agility session appointment, so returning to the morning-quiet "highway," I drove as far as the old original Cherry Home. It had been years since I'd been out that way, and the buildings looked beautiful in the morning light. That was where we turned back, but it seemed very worthwhile to have gone that far.

The road continues to Leelanau State Park and the lighthouse.

But now let's turn to books, because my bookstore is where I spent six summer days a week. My "ancient" section of children's books got a shot in the arm the other day with half a dozen Walter Farley books, all first editions and only one lacking its colorful dust jacket. (There are a few newly arrived Happy Hollisters, too, but horse stories that excite me more.) Bookstore inventory changes on a daily basis, the new as well as the used. I am delighted to offer some great titles in reprint from David R. Godine and can personally vouch for Jane Brox, Laurie Lee, and Clémentine. 

An older title illuminates the London Blitz in letters from one who was there.

I wrote about the new books above, along with Respectfully Yours, Annie, on one of my other blogs, so you can learn more here.

In the evenings--at least on an evening when it's neither raining nor does grass need mowing--my old farmyard is a place where I can relax in the shade, tossing tennis balls for Sunny to chase and sharing the occasional potato chip with her while currently the blossoming linden trees (basswood, to be more specific) are humming and thrumming with bees. Sometimes, of course, I'll take a book out there, too.