In and Out of Our Cages

Get ready. Get set.

The Big Day

 

Leelanau UnCaged! Such a happy day! Weather this year was perfect, too, but even a little drizzle in one or two past years didn’t manage to dampen spirits much. This is a day when everyone comes home to Northport. Or comes out. Or comes up! From wherever you start, our village is the destination on the last Saturday in September. Streets are closed off to traffic, so a little walking is involved. It’s good for you! You’ll notice big smiles on faces. Even the many dogs on leashes seem to be smiling. Note also that these shots were made before the start of the festivities.

12:30 p.m. The drums, the drums! Their hypnotic beat invites dancing and hand-clapping. The sun is shining, and the sky is blue over Northport….

Now it's underway....

…A woman buys a book on learning French, and when I ask if she’s going to France, she says, somewhat sadly, that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get there. I recommend Montreal (“You can drive there!”) and tell her a little about the trip the Artist and I made the year I turned 50, including an unprepossessing little town in the countryside that had the most beautiful Parisian pastries imaginable. She likes the idea and thanks me enthusiastically. 

 

A Canadian visitor … friends from Traverse City … A pair of women in the street on stilts with mushroom hats and bags ….

 

6 p.m. So many old friends, repeat customers, and newer acquaintances. Good conversations and good sales. Happy noises from the street. Now and then someone comes in looking frazzled, needing only to sit down quietly for a few minutes. I slowed down one young woman (not frazzled) long enough to photograph her book bag from NYC. I was at the Strand once!

Sorry for blurry image. I was hurrying.

What started to feel like a brief lull (interrupted several times—no problem) gave me a chance to eat the salad I’d brought from home and rehydrate with some Vernor’s. Have I mentioned that it was a summery day? That it felt like June? I barely got past my bookshop door all day but didn’t feel confined at all; with so many people flowing through the door and so many conversations, I felt very much a part of the day, so happily occupied that it was impossible to keep continuing tabs on the day hour by hour….

 

 

What Came After That?

 

I must admit Saturday was a long day, though. For me it began with a meditative minivacation in the interior of the county, because I knew it would be a long day for Sunny, too. (You can see scenes from one of our three Saturday morning walks here.) The next two days, also summery, were also very busy but more Sunny-focused, with dog park, extensive and relentless raspberry cane pruning, and grass mowing on Sunday, followed by our agility session with Coach Mike on Monday morning, afternoon autumn olive eradication (a never-ending program), and more mowing in the cool of the evening after dinner with a friend at the Happy Hour. Whatever yard work I do, you must understand, is done in spells alternating with tennis ball play, so my dog girl is not neglected.

Do all photos of Sunny look the same?
But cute, right?

We here in Leelanau are enjoying our “second summer” of 2025, this blessed respite—without humidity!—before cooler temperatures arrive and stronger winds strip the trees, preparing the scene for winter—.  Ah, but we have fall color yet to come, so let’s not run ahead of ourselves. 

Indoors

Outdoors

 

Reading It Differently

 

It appears that I have rejoined the old Ulysses Reading Circle after absenting myself from meetings for over three years. Recently we got together to talk about The Stranger, by Albert Camus, and naturally I needed to reread that slim classic, as it had been several years since Meursault and I were last together. Here is what I wrote about the novel nine years ago, as well as what I wrote about another novel springing from the first, the second one imagining the story continuing from an Arab perspective. 

 

The only thing different in how I read The Stranger this year was that I now see it as the work of a young writer. Looking into that, I found that Camus was only 28 when he wrote the novel, 29 when it was published, so perhaps—I really don’t know—he had yet to come to his humanist conclusion, a conclusion based on the premise of absurdity but not resting there. What do you think? I can imagine that. I can imagine a young man deciding that life is absurd and that nothing matters and then, as he matures, realizing that absurdity is not a conclusion but only the first step on the path of affirming the value of life. He was 39 when he published The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Whether or not the author based the character of Meursault on someone he knew, and whether or not that someone had Asperger’s Syndrome is really peripheral to the argument that took Camus, eventually if not right from the start, from absurdity to humanism. If only my friend Hélène were still alive! She knew Camus in North Africa during World War II.

 

 

O, the Irish!

Doesn't this scene look Irish?

 

My literary love affair with Irishman Niall Williams continued through History of the Rain. Can anyone deny that no one does words like the Irish? As for affirming the value of life, all the novels of Niall Williams that I have read so far do that, and what better reason to read fiction in these troubled and troubling days?

 

 

Thinking About Thinking

 

One of the privileges of having a bookshop is the opportunity to engage in conversations that go beyond small talk. Early this morning I was thinking about an exchange from last week. In the course of that conversation, a customer-friend whom I greatly respect expressed concern that today’s students don’t know how to think. I forget what led us to the topic, but I took exception to his tentative statement. Admittedly, my example was from a previous decade. Would results be different today?

 

My example: I was teaching a class of university freshmen. The assigned reading, which we discussed over several weeks, was John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which Locke presented in a series of numbered paragraphs. Anyone unaccustomed to 18^th-century writing would find the English of the Treatise somewhat challenging, so when one student asked if they could have it “in translation,” the rest of the class laughed appreciatively. Locke, however, is far from incomprehensible. It is simply that readers of his work have to do more than let their eyes take in a series of printed lines. Recognizing individual words is not sufficient. It is necessary to think along with the writer to understand his words. 

 

When the student asked his humorous question, I was moved to expand the assignment. For each numbered paragraph, I required my students condense its meaning into a single sentence. The shorter and simpler the sentence the better, as long as the one-sentence summary fully expressed the meaning of the paragraph. Each of these written assignments, as I recall, was given credit but not graded. 

 

The results? Excellent. My students could think. They could understand. Most of them would not have bothered if not required to do so, but they had the ability. 

 

No one picks up a musical instrument for the first time and is immediately able to play music. It takes work. It takes practice. Those who can’t be bothered to work will not achieve competence, let alone excellence. Not everyone will become a virtuoso, but anyone can make progress. 

 

The sentences generated by some of my students were elegant. Some were pedestrian. Some were awkward. But for every, say, twenty paragraphs, most students were able to get a pretty good idea of the author’s meaning, and when there was a particularly difficult paragraph, usually several students stumbled over it, and so we worked through it together. 

 

(Will “Artificial Intelligence” do away with the human need to think, in somewhat the way the internal combustion engine has done away with our need for horses, which in their time did away with our need to walk long distances? Already there are “thinkers” who tell us that AI is smarter than we are and that we should hand over the reins. Talk like this makes me happy to be closer to the end of my life than I am to the beginning, and I could digress endlessly on that point, but will resist the temptation….)

 

Yes, a different morning, but not long ago.

So this morning, thinking again about thinking and why we humans so often resist it, I decided that part of the answer could be called laziness, but I think that label puts an unnecessarily negative spin on the matter. As members of the animal kingdom, we are primarily creatures of action. To survive and flourish requires that we provide ourselves with nourishment and shelter, avoid danger, and cooperate on projects that none of us could accomplish alone. (It is that way with other social mammals like wolves and elephants. The longer the gestation period, the longer the dependence of young on adults, the greater the need for cooperation.) In the natural world—forest or plains, jungle or mountains—avoiding danger often means judging and acting quickly, and our brains and what we think of as our 'intellect' developed for those situations. (I wanted to give a link here to Henri Bergson and his explanation of the task of the intellect, but nothing I found online put what I wanted in a nutshell. You just need to read a whole book. I recommend Time and Free Will.) Now, facing the complex situations of advanced societies, it should not be surprising that we resist long trains of argument and want to “cut to the chase” and “get on with our lives.”

 

So without calling it laziness, let’s give as one reason that people—not only young but people of any age—resist deep thinking: They have lives to live. 

But that can’t be the whole story. I think often, especially these days, thinking is not only difficult but can be threatening. Again, our brains evolved to avoid threats, not to embrace them. So if some person or institution gives me simple answers and lays out my role, isn’t it safer for me to accept and follow? Who knows where independent thought might lead? Some of my most cherished beliefs and loyalties could be thrown into question! I could even find myself banished from my tribe!

 

I’d gotten that far in my thinking about thinking this morning when I found, by happenstance, an email message bearing on the very subject I’d been exploring. David Shapiro, in his most recent Substack, has identified another cognitive bias to be added to those put forward by Kahneman and Tversky a few decades ago and expanded on by others since then. Shapiro calls his new addition ‘apprehension bias.’ Put simply, if we don’t understand something, we tend to assume it must be wrong. In his words,

 

Apprehension bias is the mental shortcut where one equates intelligibility with truth and unintelligibility with falsehood. It’s a metacognitive miscalibration: confusing my ability to understand with the actual validity of the claim.

 

Shapiro opens his discussion with an example from the history of science, Alfred Wegener’s 1912 theory of continental drift, the first scientific statement of what later developed as plate tectonics. People, even in the scientific community, could not make sense of continental drift and ridiculed Wegener. They didn’t understand what he was saying, so they concluded, at that time, that he must be wrong.

 

Does this return us once again to my students and their desire to be able to read 18th-century Englishman John Locke “in translation,” i.e., simplified? Are we going around and around like squirrels in a cage? “Thinking” the same “thoughts” over and over and making no headway?

 

Postscript:

 

Coincidentally, a followup conversation later this morning with the same customer-friend as last week sparked for me the realization that ‘apprehension’ itself has a useful double meaning, which Shapiro probably intended but did not point out explicitly. In the word 'apprehension' are united ‘comprehension’ (understanding) and ‘fear.’ Can fear block comprehension? Can understanding do away with fear? Or can a person manage to avoid the bias and both understand and fear at the same time? If so, what is the payoff? 

Think about it—if you dare!

In closing, some shop scenes on this sunny Thursday, October 2, 2025:

My Lovely (Lucky!) End-of-September in Leelanau

Northport celebrates! 

Although a little slower in general, the month of September brings its own highlights and excitement, not the least of which is Northport’s fabulous street fair, Leelanau UnCaged. “Get out of whatever cage you’re in,” a sign urged in a previous year, and the John Cage-inspired event brings music and dancing, art and crafts, food and drinks out onto Waukazoo, Nagonaba, and Mill streets. 

Sign on Mill Street

As a business proprietor, I spend the day indoors, 10 hours straight this year. (You might not think people at a street fair would come into a store and buy books, but they do, bless their hearts!) Before opening, however, I walk around with my camera to photograph our town making preparations. 

Setting up the dance stage

Cheerful volunteer Ty Wessell on Mill Street

Vendors on Nagonaba Street

My friend Sally getting ready

Waukazoo Street vendors setting up early

New Bo warning: only BREAKFAST sandwiches today!

Added string of beautiful birds this year

With this year’s absolutely perfect weather, I had my shop door wide open all day and could enjoy jazz coming from just up the street. Lovely!

 

After all that excitement, my Sunday at home was pretty much a day of rest. Only minimal mowing and raking. The gardens needed watering, of course, because after a single night of precipitation we are still waiting for more rain. Sunny and I worked on the hurdles and weave poles, and we got in a little Frisbee practice, too. Sunny, nunca te rindas! You’re getting better and better! 

I haven’t given up on my morning glory vine, either, and look! When these unfurl -- !!!

Early morning and late evening these days, as September turns to October, I have been spending a lot of mental time in Alabama and am now traveling all over the country with a band. Other than cowgirl, singer with a band was my other dream life for years, but it’s the magic of reading that takes me on these journeys, and my author-guide and companion is a writer I should have met long before now – but so should other avid readers, and so far no one I’ve asked has been familiar with his name. Does that make me feel better or worse? I was not alone in my previous ignorance, but such a writer deserves to be far better known in his own country.

 

Albert Murray, novelist and poet, music critic, essayist, and biographer, was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916. Britannica says of him that his writings “assert the vitality and the powerful influence of black people in forming American traditions,” in particular, that jazz and blues styles developed “as affirmative responses to misery.” Among many awards he received in his lifetime, from a variety of groups, Murray won the very first Harper Lee Award in 1987.

 

My Library of America volume contains all four of Murray’s semi-autobiographical novels, beginning with Train Whistle Guitar (title alone gave me an appetite for that one), and I’m now well into Seven League Boots, a hero’s journey in music. It didn’t take many pages of Train Whistle Guitar, however, before I began looking forward to future readings in years to come. I want to read other books of his, too, especially The Omni-Americans and South to a Very Old Place.

 

Monday, believe it or not, I had an appointment to have snow tires mounted, because yes, winter will come (last year it snowed on Halloween), but first Sunny and I went for an agility session for Coach Mike, and we had a great session. We concentrated on my giving hand signals to Sunny without vocal commands (except for “Tunnel!”) and giving more commands to her from a distance so that I am not trying to run the course as fast as she can run it. For the sake of documentation, we slowed the action to a few successive stops for the following photos, with Sunny on the “teeter,” Coach Mike on my phone, and me with Sunny. When we are actually running the course, there are no more treats at the end of the teeter -- we just race to the next station! 

Teeter: uphill,

Downhill,

Target area and reward.

The sun is coming up later these days in northern Michigan and setting earlier, but while it shines it is bright, bright, bright, and has given us a beautiful “locals’ summer” September. I am counting my blessings and thinking about which organization to donate to for hurricane and flood relief in the South, where the sun was not shining recently, many died, and millions are without power. Unimaginable devastation -- time for Americans to come together....

Shifting of the Gold

Goldenrod & bracken have both gone dull.

Although goldenrod’s bright color has already dimmed in Leelanau, I look forward to the near future gold of tamarack. Anomalous among conifers, tamarack trees change from green to gold and then, acting like leafy deciduous trees, shed their feathery needles as winter approaches. By the time the tamarack trees are bare, bracken fern on the ground will have gone from green to yellow to brown, from spring soft to fall stiff to winter brittle. (In hunting season, bracken crunches underfoot.) Some Leelanau bracken has a head start on that seasonal change.

Tamarack in U.P.

I made another quick run up over the Mackinac Bridge on Sunday, rewarded by a porch visit with my dear friend, author Ellen Airgood, who took half an hour away from cookie baking for our chat. Cool U.P. air plus rain called forth my sweatshirt. When last up to see my friends in June, I hadn't taken a warm jacket, which Ellen rightly branded a "rookie mistake." I was better prepared this time around.

Hot cocoa at the Uglyfish Baking Company hit the spot, too.

It was great to catch up with Ellen, talking dogs, books and reading and writing, plans for cozy winter days, and life in general. My drive back south felt longer than the drive north, with pouring rain from Newberry to Traverse City, but the trip was worth it to have time with my friend, and I was safely home in bed by 9 p.m. with book and dog.

My current bedtime reading is a Library of America volume that includes all four of Albert Murray’s semi-autobiographical novels, starting with Train Whistle Guitar. Besides fiction, Murray wrote quite a bit about jazz and blues, and much of his writing has a jazzy quality to it that is simply delightful. This writer won me with his very first paragraph:

 

There was a chinaberry tree in the front yard of that house in those days, and in early spring the showers outside that window always used to become pale green again. Then before long there would be chinaberry blossoms. Then it would be maytime and then junebugtime and no more school bell mornings until next September, and when you came out onto the front porch and it was fair there were chinaberry shadows on the swing and the rocking chair, and chinaberry shade all the way from the steps to the gate. 

 

-      Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar

 

Despite the heavy rain I drove through farther north, I learned the next day (a bright, sunny Monday) that Leelanau had only gotten a fraction of an inch, and the weather app on my phone showed no hope of further rain until next week. But then during the day on Tuesday, the wind shifted, and with that the weather forecast also changed: Rain on Tuesday evening, rain Wednesday, rain Thursday? Dare we hope? I write this on Tuesday evening, waiting for rain…. Hearing coyotes....

Having done a little mowing and raking on Monday, I did more raking Tuesday evening and a little edging around my perennial border, with frequent breaks to launch tennis balls for Sunny Juliet, and after supper we went outdoors again for Frisbee and agility. She is figuring out the weave poles! Her Frisbee catching is improving! She loves any activity that we do together, and while she eagerly accepts little treats for a good performance, sometimes it seems the activity itself is sufficient reward, which of course is the best scenario possible. Do what you love; love what you do.

My reading of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile had me so excited that I signed up to “follow” him on Facebook, but I should have known better, because just as I enjoy conversation more with one or two or three people than in larger groups, I’ve never been a very good follower, either, and by halfway through Taleb’s Skin in the Game I had fallen out of love -- possibly for trivial reasons, but aren’t reasons for falling out of love often trivial? 

For one thing, Taleb seems to think no one could really enjoy Proust but would only carry the books around to impress people. Is that the only reason why people carry around the Wall Street Journal or the Economist or a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Some, I’m sure, but really, is it too much of a stretch to acknowledge that different people have different interests and pleasures? 

Then – and this is really trivial! – in his list of all the ways people he does not admire show themselves to be wimps, he notes that they never curse on social media. Well, if cursing is such a sign of superiority, why does he spell ‘bullshit’ in his book ‘bull***t’? Prithee, why so coy? I don’t often read half a book and quit but probably will with this one. Like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, I’m finding the going repetitive, the repetition self-indulgent. 

My advice: Read Antifragile. It’s worth reading. If you want an introduction to it, you can start with The Black Swan, but Antifragile is meatier, and you can get the black swan idea there. As for Skin in the Game, the book’s basic point is that you shouldn’t take advice from people with nothing to lose. Naturally, there are sub-propositions and logical inferences, but you can read a few chapters at the library. Or, if you want to buy a paperback copy from me, I have two available at the cover price of $20.

(I had a third trivial reason for falling out of love, but who cares?)

Still in love with: Michigan! My life as a bookseller. My dog. Proust. My country life. My friends!

There she is, writer and cookie baker extraordinaire!

THIS SATURDAY: Northport’s annual street fair, LEELANAU UNCAGED!!! 

Get ready. Get set. --

Snippets

  

Outdoors Nearby

 

Days are cool now, in the low-to-mid 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but nights are not much cooler (low 50s), so the transition from summer to fall creeps along thus far in small increments. In corners here and there, fall colors begin to sing, but for the most part the world is still green, even if (except for the brightness of rain-refreshed grass) a tired sort of green that seems to say it’s getting ready to give way.

In Swann’s Way, the opening volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust wrote of hawthorns in blossom, and the summer I first read those descriptions of the family’s walk alongside the flowering hedges, I was obsessed with hawthorns. Whenever the Artist and I went for an evening drive, my eyes searched in vain for hawthorns. Later, in another summer, I found one on the hill between our farmhouse and the neighbors’ house on the slope where our dogs used to meet for play. And now there are two or three closer to me, one in my meadow, another bearing its fruit closer to our south boundary.

 

“Hips and haws,” I muse, admiring the bright red berries and thinking of a character in The Borrowers, Homily, Arietty’s mother, so reluctant to leave their indoor home and take up a long outdoor search for fugitive relatives, imagining and mourning in advance the poor diet they might expect: nothing but rose hips and hawthorn berries. To my ear, that sounds as poetic as milk and honey, but the hawthorn berries are small, mealy, and tasteless, I find. Better to leave them for the wild things, although I do love seeing them.

Here, anyway, is a morning Continental breakfast of reading snippets, just small bites to go with morning coffee.

 

On Rereading

 

How can you be objective in the face of a book you love, which you have loved, which you have read at different times in your life? Such a book has a reading past. In rereading it, you have not always suffered in the same way—and above all you no longer hope with the same intensity in all the seasons of a life of reading. … The animus and anima quests do not yield the same riches at every age in the life of the reader. Above all the great books remain psychologically alive. You are never finished reading them.

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

 

(Is life too short to reread books? Are there too many people in the world [and is life too short] to hold onto old friendships? In the past two days I have reread Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River and am now embarked, once again, on her Q Road. Her characters find much more sustenance outdoors than mere hips and haws.)

 

On Attention

 

Attention is not just another [cognitive] function…. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to….

 

So it is … with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.

 

Science, however purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object…. Yet this highly objective stance … is itself value-laden. It is one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment….

 

Attention also changes who we are…. [B]y attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so … we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think and feel.

 

-      Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

 

(Not only the company you keep socially, but the movies you watch, the books you read, the music in your ears, etc. is continually shaping and reshaping you [I/me; we/us]. As race car drivers say, “Where your eyes go, your car goes.” Similarly, where your attention goes, your heart and mind go. Do we live increasingly in a hall of distorting mirrors? I have ordered for Dog Ears Books the new book by Naomi Klein with her investigation of that idea, so stay tuned. And by the way, the left brain, which McGilchrist calls the emissary, rejects facts incompatible with what it already "knows.")

 

On the Comfort of Rocks

 

How can I convey the comfort I find in reading geology? Rocks don’t care. They have no needs or desires of their own and cannot suffer pain or hurt feelings, and neither do they heed ours. Rocks award no prizes, mete out no punishment. They have stories of their own but do not—cannot—clamor to be heard in their own voices, and that lack of argument is restful, even when the subject of an essay is volcanic eruption. There are eruptions, yes, but no wars.

 

      - P. J. Grath, “What I Like Is Sometimes (But Not Always) What Others Like,” Books in Northport, Dec. 27, 2012

 

 

And there you are, here we are, already into the second half of September, with Leelanau UnCaged coming up on Saturday the 30^th. Not only will my bookstore be open on Waukazoo Street, but we will have a special offering of our own that day: 

 

 

DOG EARS BOOKS PRESENTS:

“TWO POETS READING”

106 Waukazoo St., Northport

Saturday, September 30

(during Leelanau UnCaged)

4 p.m.

Fleda Brown

 

Michael Delp