If You Know Me, This Is Not News

Old school, Empire, Michigan

 

“Old School”

 

Yes, I am “Old School,” as the phrase is used nowadays – as an adjective for someone who clings to old ways rather than leaping (blindly, I would say) into every new technology that comes along and leaving the tried-and-true behind. Recently a friend told me about a family whose expensive home is completely “paperless,” and I was, frankly, appalled. Family members read books and magazines but don’t keep them when they have finished reading. Out they go!

 

My first thought was, how terrible that would be for babysitters! 

I was remembering a family I babysat for regularly in my old home neighborhood, a young couple who had only two printed items in their home, the current TV Guide and a tattered Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog. The parents stayed out late when they went out, there was only one child, and the parents paid well, but the barrenness of their home environment made the hours heavy going. These days, though, I suppose babysitters are simply glued to their phones after the children go to sleep. It’s a different world….

Three letters went out in the mail to friends this morning.

 

Someone who is “Old School” writes letters on paper, buys stamps for the envelopes, and trusts to the United States Postal Service to deliver. (Thank you, Benjamin Franklin and USPS!) One day last week I hit the jackpot and found four letters from friends waiting in my post office box. Jackpot!!! Letter-writing is not about immediate gratification but about taking time, “spending time” with absent friends, anticipation, and so much more. Follow this link to Leelanau Letter Writers and see if you might want to join a slow movement.

Well-used and well-loved road atlases from my home shelves --

A road taken....

Someone who is “Old School” loves maps – maps on paper! Yes, everyone can access maps on their phones and, in newer model cars, on screens built into the dashboard, but when you zoom in for detail, you lose the big picture, and I want both at once! I also want to make notes on the pages. A 2015 atlas is not “outdated” for me; it is redolent of trips taken and sights seen, possible roads as well as those remembered, because dreaming over maps is also another form of armchair travel. There are places I have never been, except through books and movies and maps. 

 

The ivy isn't plastic, either.

Writing checks is really “Old School,” and I make no apology for paying my bills with checks. How many companies do I want to have access to my bank account to grab what they say I owe? How large a balance do I want on my credit card to pay off every month? Fewer and fewer people bring either cash or checks to my bookstore, and I’ve adjusted to the changing times in that regard (there’s no staying in business without adaptation to change), but I prefer to pay my own business expenses and home bills by check. When told by another business a few days ago that they have “no way to process checks,” I was more than a little annoyed by that flimsy excuse. They had no problem “processing” the cash I handed over, and the “process” is the same: check or cash, deposit it in your business account! I have not stayed in business for over three decades by passing bad checks and do not care for the implied – though carefully disguised – insinuation. 

 

Home library bookshelves reflected on glass of photograph

Finally, being “Old School” means loving books!!! Printed books, bound books, books on paper – the descendants of the 4^th century Greek Codex Sinaiticus. Handier than scrolls, much lighter in weight than stone tablets, books properly bound and cared for can outlast the civilizations that produce them. Take a look at the Florentine Codex, a 12-volume work on the Nahua culture in Mexico, before and during colonization by Spain, with a general explanation of what constitutes a codex. A proud tradition of literacy.

 

For me, having my own home library is essential to feeling at home at all. Besides books, I also have many physical albums of photographs. Although more modern people (more modern than I will ever be) are content to store their “books” and “photographs” in a “cloud,” make no mistake about it: A cloud isn’t some physical warehouse in the sky; it’s just someone else’s bigger computer somewhere else, and that’s not good enough for me. I want to know that my photographs will be in my albums every time I open the covers, just as I want to know that the books in my home library will contain the same words, in the same order, every time I open to see and read those pages. No one is going to hack into some distant computer and alter my favorite histories, novels, essays, or poetry books!

 

(I don’t want “virtual nature,” either. I want nature, the real thing. What is the point of living on earth if we have to live as if we’re on a space station?) 

 

As I say, if you know me, none of this is news to you, and if we’ve never met you might guess at some of it because, after all, I have been a bookseller, with an open shop, i.e., a “bricks & mortar” location for over 30 years. Are independent bookstores all disappearing? The people who think so are not regular bookstore customers. Does nobody read any more? The people who ask the question are not readers. 

Other questions people ask: “Where do you get all your books?” and “Have you read every book in here?” The answer to the second question is no. As for the first question, there is no single answer. Some books I buy, some are donated to me, some are brought in by customers for trade credit. I don’t have time to spend running around to auctions and garage sales, but occasionally I’ll be invited to take a look at a private library and make an offer – or simply take off their hands as many books as I think I can use. In the past few weeks, I had a chance to look at three different collections that needed to be downsized or dismantled. Classics, being classics, are always in demand; in a village on the Great Lakes with a maritime history and a beautiful modern marina, boating books are always important for my collection; and philosophy, while hardly a bestselling section, is one of my personal specialties, so I was happy to fill gaps that had appeared on those shelves. 

Aviation had to move over in the bookcase with military history ...

to make room for more boating books, with more in the way.

Philosophy got a complete reorganization ...

from A to Z.

Audiobooks

 

Now, before anyone takes me to task for my old-fashioned ways, let me say that I understand perfectly well that as we age, there can be problems with eyesight or even trouble with hands, either making the holding and reading of physical books difficult -- or maybe you just want to listen to a book while on your stationary bicycle --- so this “Old School” bookseller has jumped on a modern bandwagon with libro.fm for your listening pleasure. Your audiobooks won’t cost you any more on libro.fm than you would pay the online behemoth, you can choose an independent bookstore to support, and naturally I will be happy to have you choose Dog Ears Books. Thank you!!!

Old school, Maple City, Michigan

High Season

A week ago our great-grandsons from Kalamazoo were here with their parents, and this past weekend it was my sisters’ turn to visit from their homes in Illinois. Orchard crews are at last harvesting cherries around my old farmhouse (tarts are ready later than sweets), and though I think every morning that the black raspberry patches must be almost exhausted, that fruit just keeps coming on, with blackberries ripening farther afield. Meanwhile, in the garden, squashes are taking shape, and tomato plants (started from seed) are finally flowering. I’m still waiting on cucumbers but pulled out spent cilantro and transplanted butterflyweed seedlings in the space created. They look good so far.

 

It is summer. High season. 

Sunny Juliet and I got to Lake Michigan again, beating the crowds by going shortly after sunrise. Neither of us has gone swimming yet, though. I’m letting her get used to the Big Lake at her own pace, wading into and out of the gentle waves without urging her one way or the other. Summer here Up North is time for work and play and company. Twin great-grandsons and their parents, sisters, stepdaughters, friends. Some have been here, others yet to come. Sharing places I love is an important part of my life. 

 

Sharing books I love is important, too, and my latest happy discovery – for which all credit goes to the friend who sent me the book! – is Molly Gloss’s The Hearts of Horses, which is hands-down the horsiest novel I have ever read. I was disappointed when The Horse Whisperer turned out to be more love story than horse story; there is a love story in the Gloss novel, too, but horses predominate. – Which doesn’t mean there is any dearth of human interest! 

 

I’ve always wondered at the lack of readership for World War I history. The “Great War,” it was called back when people thought such a global conflict surely could not possibly happen a second time around. (The period between the wars fascinates me, too.) Well, lately WWI seems to be following me so closely it’s treading on my heels. Sarah Shoemaker’s Children of the Catastrophe takes place in the years 1908-1922 (Sarah was last week's speaker in the library Summer Author Series here in Northport); T. C. Corbett’s The Drums of War draws on his diaries from World War I; and The Hearts of Horses takes place in that period, also. Although far from the fighting, some of the farmers and ranchers in Gloss’s novel are swept up in a jingoism that puts their German immigrant neighbors in peril. There is also discussion between the characters of the fates of the thousands of horses shipped over to Europe to become cannon fodder or shell-shocked survivors right along with the soldiers. 

 

The main story of The Hearts of Horses, however, takes place out West. It is no longer open, fenceless rangeland, but big-boned teenager Martha Lessen is determined to lead as free a cowboy life as she can and rides away from home to offer her services “breaking” horses. Martha does not have much in the way of social graces, but, perhaps because she was so sensitive to the feelings of horses, she wasn’t bad at picking up cues about people’s feelings without having to have everything spelled out for her. 

 

…By the time she took work breaking horses for George Bliss, her method was to come into the corral with a little buggy whip and brandish it – she almost never had to touch the horse…. At the same time, Martha always acted as if there was nothing to get excited about, figuring the horse would eventually get the same idea; so she’d begin singing to him quietly….

 

And from a different moment in the story: 

 

It wasn’t clear to Martha how she could be any help to the Kandals, either of them, but she didn’t feel it would be right to leave. She stood a moment trying to think what else she could offer to do [she had fed the chickens and stirred up the kitchen fire already], and when her mind failed her she said, “I’ll just sit down with you, if that’s all right, until the doctor gets here.”

 

A simple story in many ways, The Hearts of Horses goes along in its steady way, documenting, if you will, the lives of fictional people in an isolated community until they are as real to us as our own neighbors. I am eager to read more of Molly Gloss, though I have to admit I hope there will be horses in her other books, too. 

Long, SURPRISING (to me) Postscript:

As I was in the midst of drafting this post, a woman brought in a box of old books she wanted to sell, and one of them was the second volume of a two-volume set showing "the World War," i.e., the one we call World War I or the First World War, in photographs. What are the odds? That war again!

The captions to the photographs are heartbreaking. The soldier sitting in a bombed-out wall opening (second of four above) is writing home from the battlefield:

 

‘JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE MOTHER”

“Somewhere in France,” begins the letter which Clarence E. Ford, Company C, 308^th Field Signal Battalion, 83^rd Div., is writing home, Sept. 1, 1918. “Somewhere in France” was a shell hole in a garden wall at Chateau-Thierry.

 

Following that photograph is one of the First American Army assembling, and below it a detail showing the horses. The caption to a photograph of captured German prisoners (not shown here) has a headline reading: “HATE IS A MANUFACTURED INGREDIENT ON BOTH SIDES.”

I do not focus on the horses for lack of concern for the men. In fact, more than one photograph of a destroyed village notes that the laughter of children is no longer heard there. But since it was a conversation about horses that brought the war home to Molly Gloss’s characters and her readers, I noted particularly any of the war photos showing horses. The last one here is entitled “GASSED HORSES” and reads as follows:

With their ribs sticking out as in death and white mucous [sic] coming out of their blind eyes, these gassed horses are being brought back for inspection. For many of the suffering beasts inspection will seal their death warrant. 

And what can I say after that??? Except, how can human beings do such things to horses -- and to each other, when the world we have been given is so very beautiful? 

No, I do have a more cheerful closing today: Tonight’s guest, the fourth and last in the Summer Author Series (sponsored by the Friends of the Leelanau Township Library), will be Soon-young Yoon, whose book is entitled Citizen of the World: Soon-Young and the UN. I highly recommend her book. It contains short, readable essays on various projects with which she was involved around the world, and it is full of hopeful stories of people making differences in all manner of good ways. That's 7 p.m. at the Willowbrook Inn on Mill Street in Northport.

We are tested in many ways.

 

Will Sunny be on trial Thursday morning? It will be our first puppy class! Will the other puppies be younger, smaller, and less obstreperous? Will we "pass" the class, or will she be so wild that we'll be kicked out? She’ll be excited, I know, when we enter the big working arena, as her dog mom repeats a calming mantra to herself to calm her nerves!

At least puppy class will give me a break from Widowland, this strange new challenging country I now inhabit. Some widows tell me, “It gets easier,” while one said the third year was worse than the second, and yesterday I was told, “It doesn’t get easier. It gets worse.” Obviously, experiences vary across the widowed population. One woman could not bear to look at old photographs or read old letters, whereas I cannot keep from what are to me precious and tangible evidence of past happiness. 

Evidence. There’s a concept that brings me to larger national events. Hearings proceed on the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and while many Americans are glued to their TVs, just as many (or so it seems) are steadfastly avoiding the unfolding story. I have neither television nor the leisure to watch it nonstop if it were available, but I have tuned in on the radio a couple times in the car and have read news summaries of various days’ presentations. 

I was distressed, though, when one friend said her reason for not watching is that the hearings are a “show trial.” What? The term “show trial” indicates the pretense of a trial (i.e., not a hearing or hearings but an actual staged trial, and a rigged one at that), in which the verdict has been decided beforehand, with evidence often manufactured and confessions of guilt forced. Example: the Stalinist show trials that took place from 1936 to 1938. 

 

The trials were held against Stalin’s political enemies, such as the Trotskyists and those involved with the Right Opposition of the Communist Party. The trials were shams that led to the execution of most defendants. Every surviving member of the Lenin-era part was tried, and almost every important Bolshevik from the Revolution was executed. Over 1,100 delegates to the party congress in 1934 were arrested.  The killings were part of Stalin’s Great Purge, in which opportunists and Bolshevik cadres from the time of the Russian Revolution who could rally opposition to Joseph Stalin were killed. He did so at a time of growing discontent in the 1930s for his mismanagement of the Soviet economy, leading to mass famines during periods of rapid and poorly executed industrialization and farm collectivization.

 

-      https://www.historyonthenet.com/stalin-show-trials-summary

 

My friend did not mention Stalin but pointed to the Watergate hearings, which she finds unproblematic, because “most Americans thought Nixon was guilty.” (If his guilt was assumed beforehand, wouldn’t that have been a “show trial,” if it had been a trial and not a hearing?) The whole point of a hearing is to decide if there is enough evidence to proceed to trial. If the prosecution’s case is weak, perhaps there will be no trial, but if one does take place, the defense at least has a good idea of what it will face in the courtroom. From the little I have heard and read, plenty of evidence that we did not have before (example) has been placed before the public in the January 6 hearings, reams of it now public record. Of course, self-selected segments of the public can choose to avoid looking at the record, lest their opinions be challenged by documented facts....

Then there is … Facebook. Here confusion between hearings and trials reigns supreme, with the addition of those refusing to follow the hearings or dismissing the evidence (without having heard it) objecting to the procedure they do not understand and are not following. Example: One comment on a friend’s Fb thread reads: “This Stalinist inquisition has NO rebuttal or cross examination.” (Ah, there! Someone has brought in Stalin! See above quoted passage and compare and contrast Stalin’s trials to today’s hearings.) Well, it happens that the former president did issue a rebuttal statement, twelve pages, and here it is. Typically, he repeats claims already found to be baseless and attacks the current administration’s record, which is not at issue in the hearings. As to cross-examination, that would take place at trial stage, if criminal charges are brought. 

As Abraham Lincoln might say were he alive, in a larger sense America itself is on trial today. Can a nation conceived and dedicated to equality under law long endure, and are we dedicated to the task of preserving our heritage? 

The Enduring Nature of the Written Word

My son came up from Kalamazoo for a five-day visit over the Thanksgiving weekend, and somehow on Sunday morning we found ourselves pawing through an old trunk I had not opened for years. Oh, the treasures that emerged from that archive! 

There were letters he had written me from camp when he was a kid and a little stash of hand-made “coupons” he’d given me as a gift, coupons I could redeem for various chores he would do around the house. “And you didn’t use any of them,” he noted. “I didn’t want to give them up!” I told him. “They were too cute!” Another gem was a handwritten note from a girl in his grade school class, asking me for a copy of a snapshot I’d taken of the two of them at Ian’s birthday party. “I want to see how romantic we look,” she wrote. Or rather, she printed. They must have been in third grade then, not yet learning cursive writing. 

Copies of letters my grandmother had written to my mother were there, along with a copy of a letter one of my aunts had written to my mother, all of this fascinating correspondence concerning the revelation of an old family secret. I read the letters aloud to my son, refreshing my own memory with the details. I’ll keep in mind this winter the fact that my mother’s parents were married in February of 1918, making it a century ago three months from now. 

I found a box of color slides from photographs I took during my two years in Cincinnati (1987-88) and will have those made into prints and also stored on DVD very soon. (The architecture of Cincinnati fascinated me, as did the hilly terrain. It was rich territory to explore with a camera.) I also found handful after handful of photographic prints, some dating back fifty years or more. The color was not always the best, but everyone in the pictures was recognizable.

A very modest collection of receipts and tissue wrappings from purchases (e.g., cheese) made in Paris appeared. I could never bear to throw away any scrap of paper that came my way in France, with words printed in French and sometimes a reproduced line drawing of a shop front or of the Eiffel Tower. You must understand that I shivered with pleasure over the phrase “vêtements d’hiver” (winter clothes) scrawled on a box in the closet of the apartment where I first stayed in Paris. Four years of high school French and the smattering I’d picked up before that from my father had not fully prepared me for the wonder of being in a foreign country and actually managing to make my way around in another language, one I felt I’d learned in a way somewhat similar to the way I had learned to read music, another mysterious, magic, “other” language. It worked! I felt like a gifted code-cracker!

But there is plenty of magic in English, and I was thrilled to discover in the trunk a couple of irreplaceable family items I had been afraid I’d lost forever. Before they married, before they had even met, my father and my mother, each separately, collected into little books their favorite poems. In 1974 the two books were given to me. With the exception of one verse my father composed with his high school French, my parents did not themselves write any of the works in their books, but their selections are windows into their youthful sensibilities. 

What did these two young people have in common? What aspects of their personalities were very different? Some overlap between the two collections gives clues, as do the majority of items found in one book but not in another. 

Neither book has either table of contents or index, but my father’s, titled “Favora Quotation Gilberti,” dated1941, begins with an “Indication of general trend…” listing eight attributes: amusing; slightly risqué; cynical philosophy; toward celibacy; satire; truism; good phrasing; and romantic: beautiful and healthy sentiment. Not everything in his book is a poem. Many entries are simply pithy sayings, and many verses and pithy sayings are attributed to “Anon,” for example this ironic observation that gives the lie to my entire thesis today:

Lives of great men all remind us 

As their pages o’er we turn, 

That we’re apt to leave behind us 

Letters that we ought to burn. 

There is no indication which heading he would have assigned here. Cynical, probably. There was more of cynicism and satire in my father’s collection than in my mothers, but both had generous helpings of romantic choices. And both include pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though I note that my father attributes the latter’s words to “Elizabeth Browning,” omitting the poet’s family name, while my mother invariably used all three names.

My mother’s collection includes Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I don’t find as many entries from “Anon.” as my father had, but a few, such as the two lists “Helps for Daily Living” and “Married Wisdom” have no attribution. (Actually, the latter, which is the first piece in her book, says “Author Unknown.” Could it be that favorite of my father, “Anon.”?!) My mother’s collection also has more entries from women, the names often unfamiliar to me. There are also fewer humorous pieces in my mother’s book, so Richard’s Armour’s “A Thousand Times No” stands out: 

Some take great pride in saying No, 

They scorn an easy Yes. 

Assent is sign of weakness, so 

To none will they confess. 

For utterance of No they live, 

Nor would they have you doubt it. 

They’re very, very negative 

And positive about it!

At the end of my mother’s collection, following Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time” and Sarah Dunnings’s “These Things I Love,” comes a list of dated topics for what looks like a music class, “Hints for Song Leaders,” “How to Present a New Song,” and finally a recipe for Helen’s Peanut Butter Cookies, but my mother’s name appears nowhere in her book.  

Besides family memorabilia, I found in the trunk many bundles of letters from friends, a few with literary associations. There were two letters from Jim Harrison, one from Joyce, Jim’s assistant, three from Guy de la Valdene, and one from poet Dan Gerber, all these resulting from typing, proof-reading, and editing I’d done for him and Guy and Dan back in the old days. 

Then there was a xeroxed copy of the wonderful handwritten journal my sister kept on her first trip (with now-husband Bob) to the Boundary Waters, up from Minnesota into Canada, her first wilderness experience, with canoe portages and camp coffee and losing her camera to a black bear! I read aloud from the pages to my son (with David listening from the next room) and especially loved the full page listing of all the sounds of the wilderness, none having anything to do with traffic or phones.

All these memories are priceless to me, despite the mustiness of a trunk that had been closed for years. 

As I held color slides up to the light, exclaiming over the images, my son made a comment about digitizing old media files, and that’s well and good, I suppose. But if hard copies are not kept, if only digital files remain, I worry that those files could become unopenable black boxes to future generations. They are not, after all, human-readable, and as the technology to read digital files advances as breakneck speed, earlier readers become so much junk. There is also the question of “where” the files will be stored. In a “cloud”? As my son noted, “A cloud is just someone else’s computer.” 

I’ve never liked the idea of keeping my photographs or books in a cloud, anyway, and I wouldn’t want to reduce precious old letters from friends and family and photographs of same to someone else's storage black box. My old black trunk has served me well. And I have always been in love with paper and with holding physical objects in my hands. 

Sliding sheets of handwriting from envelopes (first appreciating the beautiful postage stamps), turning pages, shuffling and stacking snapshots and slides are pleasures I have no intention of foregoing, as long as they are available to me, and I hope that will be for the rest of my life.

I Gotta Lotta Nerve

As ready as we're going to be....

You need nerve to run a bookstore in the first place, and you need even more to mount bookstore events. Friends approaching a recent event of their own were understandably nervous ahead of time. “What if no one comes? What if too many people come?” I assured them that it was impossible for “too many” people to show up, and that if “no one” came we could simply adjourn to the bar, but that it was unlikely there wouldn’t be a good crowd. Then, to ease their concern that I would think their concern misplaced, I assured them, “I go through this every single time I have a bookstore event.”  And it’s true. What if no one comes? What if the author forgets? What if the books don’t arrive in time? You gotta have nerve, friends.

Anyone who’s read this blog recently knows that my bookstore event of Memorial Day weekend was complicated, for the first time ever, by an unexpected delay in delivery of books. To be more precise, no books were even delivered: David drove down to Glen Arbor on Friday afternoon to pick up the first of the three boxes I needed to satisfy local demand, and we faced the signing with insufficient supply. You gotta have nerve--although I must say that it’s easy to be nervy about certain things in Northport, where bookstore and village and country loyalty make for very patient, understanding customer friends. 

So thanks to a gracious guest (who arrived early and stayed late), photographer Ken Scott, and a gracious bookstore clientele, we had a lovely, lovely time on Saturday, with only a small number of disappointed individuals who turned up not having gotten word about the limited supplies. Everyone loved having relaxed time for conversation with the photographer (a first meeting with him for many), and the large matted prints he brought for display and sale brought the winter's ice miracles right into my cozy spring bookshop.

Where my real nerve showed up, though, and the initial act prompting the theme of today’s post, was my pulling out my camera to attempt a photograph of an accomplished photographer like Ken Scott. No, not even like Ken Scott, but Ken Scott himself, the very man. Oh, man, what nerve! I could hardly recognize myself in the moment of action. But Ken Scott I recognized, and I have to say I was very pleased with this candid portrait:

And now it’s time to start gearing up for the next bookstore event, featuring (at the latest count), eleven poets from the beautiful new book, Poetry in Michigan. Poets committed to reading their work at Dog Ears Books on June 13 are Patricia Clark, Dennis Hinrichsen, Linda Nemec Foster, Joy Friedler, David James, Josie Kearns, Bill Olsen, Anne-Marie Oomen, Mary Ann Samyn, Alison Swan, and Keith Taylor.

We’ve never had such an event before. Will it be like herding cats? Surely not. Will the poets outnumber the audience? I want a really good turnout for so many poets coming all the way to Northport! Summer 2014 also marks the 21^st anniversary of Dog Ears Books, and that being the case, I’m thinking of the Poetry in Michigan reading event as the coming-of-age party for Dog Ears, which surely calls for cake, wouldn't you say?

The official 21^st anniversary is on the 4^th of July, but goodness knows there will be too much going on then for a bookstore birthday. No, I don’t have enough nerve to try to pull that off! So June 13 it is going to be -- Friday the 13th!

Back in the Woods Again, Part II

Cutest FOOT!

As this is Part II, you may want to refer to Part I to compare some of these. My top photograph here, for instance, is a single track in the same trail as the two prints I called the "dearest" in Part I. This one is dear, too, don't you think?

The animal double-registers, i.e., steps in its own tracks.

Another hopper--this one obvious, eh?

Remember the foot-dragger? Here is the length of stride.

Little underground trail revealed

Back down the hill

All in all, this was one of my most exciting and satisfying days in the woods ever. And then it was back down the hill and back home to inspect photographs more closely and open my tracking book for another kind of excitement. Life is good! It's good to be back on my feet and back outdoors again.