Shop News and Random Musings

Me with Bonnie Jo!

Bonnie was here!

Well, of course, we had a great time! Of course, the audience was delighted! One hour became three, as the conversation just would not stop. Everyone who had a question or comment or reflection had a chance to speak, and our guest graciously gave personal attention to each individual. 

Attentive audience

"Writers are the most generous people!” I remarked to Tree Man at home later in the evening. “Well, you know the good ones,” he observed, impressed with my guest author’s energy and presence. One audience member came back the next morning and told me she had heard Bonnie speak at a conference a few years back, and that was a good talk, she said, but rather formal, as befitted the occasion, so she really enjoyed the personal feeling of the conversation here on Friday.

“I loved her!” people keep saying to me. Yeah! BJC is the real deal!

Everyone is happy, but I am the happiest.

And this time—too often I forget!—in the midst of all the goodby hugs, almost at the last minute, I remembered to ask Tree Guy to take a photo of Bonnie and me together. 

If you missed it (or if, like me, you just can't get enough Bonnie), check out this interview with her online and read this terrific essay she wrote about her mother.

Second Harvest: Apples in My Life

Second apple harvest

Macintosh for winter storage? I don't think so! Better for applesauce in big quart jars or eating out of the hand. Larger, darker red fruits from the Baldwin tree, a nice tart pie apple, are what I will store in bushel baskets for winter. But where? Unheated basement or unheated second floor of farmhouse? Maybe a bushel in each place, this winter serving as a test for winters to come.

“Nous sommes devant la porte de l'hiver,” says the country wife in one of Jean Giono's novels that I read first in English and am now reading in French. November barely underway, are we in winter's doorway now here in Leelanau County? With the Sunday morning time change, we have earlier light at day's start but also earlier evening dark. Another double-edged sword, the general, universal story of life, in my philosophy in a nutshell. 

But Tuesday morning the outdoor temperature was 60ºF at 6:30 a.m.! It's another open door day in Northport! I should apologize for so many exclamation marks, but the balmy day amazes me.

Summer blooms have not stopped yet.

More Words and Images in My Life at Present

Focus on mulberry leaves

Let me start with the images. We have had a splendid autumn here in northern Michigan, and the temptation to want to capture every moment can be overwhelming, as if a digital photograph on a phone could contain the feeling of sunlight and the smell of fall leaves and prolong a perfect moment endlessly in the face of oncoming winter. And our phones, they are always with us! Click, click, click! You can see on this page that I am not immune.

Popples and milkweed

But travel back to 1987 with me, the first time I went to France. I had saved up enough vacation time on my job to spend an entire month in Paris, and not once did I leave the city: On rainy days, I would rationalize that it would be silly to go to Chartres in the rain, and when the sun returned I was loath to lose a sunny day in Paris. The other limit I imposed on myself was to venture out day after day without my camera. After waiting so many years to be in Paris, finally, I wanted to be there fully—not to document my experience but to have it. The camera, however, was often in my mind when I saw something I wanted to remember, and so I returned with camera in hand to some of those sites and sights on the two days that I dedicated to photography. Other pictures are only in my mind. 

Four weeks’ residence, two days dedicated to photography: That was my month in Paris.

It wasn’t only pictures, either. There are sounds I hear in my memory, recorded only there: the purling and fluttering of pigeons outside my window, the echoing chink! of spoon on china cup, women’s voices calling to each other from window to window, a waiter or salesperson’s polite “‘sieu-dame.” And the smells of diesel fuel, of fresh-baked bread, of rotisserie chicken, of chestnut trees in blossom.

So the other day in my car, I recalled that first time in Paris and stopped along my Leelanau roads here and there not to photograph but simply to gaze and tell myself to remember. I’m here now. Is this little musing less potent because it is accompanied by images?!

What is the difference? Am I less “here” at home than I was in Paris? I don't think so. 

That month of May in Paris, so long ago, I had no business to run, no home or yard to maintain, no dog, not even meetings with friends. A stranger alone in a strange city, I wandered freely through my days. Here at home, in contrast, my life is a normal non-vacation life of responsibility. And the older one gets, the faster time hurries by!

But on Sunday afternoon, after picking apples and putting up in jars another batch of applesauce and raking more leaves and delivering them to my compost pit, I proposed a drive, and Tree Guy fell in happily with the idea. And although my phone was with me, I stopped only once to click a scene. The rest of time we, both of us, drank in the season with eyes and ears and noses and delighted in sharing it then and there.

Sunday afternoon, Good Harbor Road

When the person in the shop says “Good morning!” 

Why do some people seem so absolutely terrified that responding to my friendly greeting when they enter my shop will commit them to—gasp!—buying a book! (A fate worse than death, right?) No, people, no, no, you can spend as much time looking (call it “browsing” if you take your time at it) as you like, and you will not be followed around or harassed in any way, and if you leave empty-handed I will wish you good day with a smile. It really is that simple. Naturally, I hope you do find something you want to purchase and take with you, along with the memory of a friendly bookseller in an adorable little village, but if not this time, maybe next time. 

Halloween

I did what I had to do. Bought candy. Showed up. Not my thing.

When you are starting out as a writer --

Everyone enjoys praise, which is another way of saying that everyone wants to be appreciated. Criticism, on the other hand, can be hard to take. 

And I am too old to pull punches! If everyone is handed a blue ribbon for everything they do, without reference to standards, the prizes are meaningless, and worse than meaningless prizes are missed opportunities for learning.

As a graduate assistant to a university classroom professor, one of my jobs was grading student essays, and I remember very clearly the time one student went to the professor to complain about her grade (I think it was a B+), certain she had been graded down because I disagreed with the position she took on the issue. The professor handed me her essay a second time, along with her letter of complaint, and asked me to respond to her directly. I did so, explaining that the reason for her grade was that the example she used, an analogy, did not support her argument but actually undermined it. I was grading her argument, not her conclusion. I added that her grades in the class were such that I was confident she would still be able to receive an A for the semester. Not only did she earn that A, but she also sat in the front row of the lecture hall from then on, her face open and eager and often smiling. She was a very good student and understood perfectly where her mistake had been. A couple of times in recent years I have heard a name on public radio and wondered if the reporter is that student from my graduate school days. I don’t know. But she definitely had the potential.

Fiction and journalism are important callings. The best fiction gives us intimate access to hearts and minds, experiences and motivations, unlike our own, and from that we can learn to look at people in our daily lives more empathetically. The best journalism—and by that I mean real journalism—provides us with facts, information, and understanding we would otherwise lack, important for the decisions we need to make in a democratic country, as well as in our daily personal lives. In both kinds of writing endeavors, therefore, standards are essential. Good grammar, yes, but also truthfulness and depth, if what is written is to be good for something more than mind candy or fish wrap.

I have made my own attempts at fiction and half-heartedly—and briefly—tried to find a publisher. When the otherwise encouraging replies were—bottom line—rejections, I considered self-publishing but decided that the quality I wanted to see in the binding would make the book too expensive. I couldn’t ask people to pay that price. In the end, I finally decided that while my fiction writing was competent, it wasn’t exciting—and that there are plenty of gifted writers dedicating their lives to producing exciting fiction and that my role in life is to present their work, not my own.

Know thyself. (See Halloween section above.) Know thy limits and thy gifts.

My tribe

Some people’s tribes are ethnic, some religious. Some consider others from their alma mater as their tribe (e.g., Wolverines or Spartans or Broncos). My tribe is book people. There’s a bit I wrote about that in here, so I won’t say it all again. 

But claiming a tribe doesn’t mean other tribes are enemies of mine! We book people could not live without the others! The farmers and lawyers, restaurant waitstaff and plumbers, doctors, pharmacists, electricians, truck drivers, teachers, and on and on and on. The world needs a vast diversity of tribes, and it needs them to respect and value each other’s gifts and contributions to our shared world. 

Election Day

Need you ask? Of course we are a voting household! Tree Guy turned in his absentee ballot on Monday, while my plan was to be at my polling place when it opened at 7 a.m. on Election Day, so I drove to Northport this morning in the dark, on rain-gleaming roads through sleeping fall color.

Earlier in the morning, a question came into my head. Hearing echoes of Winston Churchill in the early days of World War II, I wondered: Will this be the beginning of the end, or will it be only the end of the beginning ? That is, will we see (as I hope) the end of policies of unmitigated cruelty and corruption, the destruction of physical monuments and desecration of lofty ideals—or are we only at the beginning of permanent division in a hate-filled, disunified country? Is there to be a general, belated waking up—or a plunge with eyes closed into deeper nightmare?

Halloween is over for another year. Election Day will reverberate through every day to come. Do the right thing, my friends! 

Book Review: THE SPIRITS

Not every family gathering for the holiday meets the happy Norman Rockwell standard. Instead, deeply held differences of opinion can be all it takes to raise loud, angry voices. Add in memories of childhood trauma, plus a holiday outburst remembered from the year before, and you have the nervous tension of the fictional Whitby family anticipating their annual Christmas Eve dinner together.  

The Spirits, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s fourth novel and most recent book (released Oct. 13), is a departure from her previous long fiction. Both literally and metaphorically, the fictional setting is more interior than outdoors this time around. 

The Spirits shares with Campbell’s first novel, Q Road, a compressed timeline, giving us this time a family on Christmas Eve: widow Linda Whitby, her four children, and the older son’s girlfriend around a dinner table for most of the story, the living Linda somehow a less substantial presence—at least in the mind of Sis, to which the author gives us access—than her late husband, Henry, bullying patriarch and father of Sis, Doug, Trevor, and Beth. 

Is Doug’s girlfriend, Mary (the surprise non-family guest at the table), a stand-in for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens? She does use crutches to get around, having been struck by lightning when young and told she would never walk again, and her general outlook on the world seems bright and happy (Tiny Timish), but when I read the novel I didn’t put too much weight on that as a literary allusion, even if the author intended it. Instead I met Mary and her boyfriend’s family as I would meet any new people here in Michigan, curious to see how they would reveal themselves—to me, the reader, to each other, and to Mary, the newcomer. 

While Mary is a catalyst for the direction taken by the holiday dinner table conversation, it is primarily the thoughts and feelings of Sis Whitby that the author gives us. Sis is tormented by Christmases past, both the Christmas of nine years ago, when her father died, and the one only twelve months past, when she herself was the cause of a blowup the family has yet to put fully behind them. Sis carries a load of guilt for both previous Christmases and longs to confess and be forgiven, but fear of another dinner table explosion chokes back her words. What she doesn’t realize is that other family members have their own confessions to make and that everyone has given a different interpretation to the father’s death nine years earlier.

Along with page-turning suspense, we encounter in The Spirits Campbell's usual signature preoccupations, Sis’s devotion to the world of green growing things and a country family’s growing, harvesting, and preserving of its own food. These authorial preoccupations are never peripheral but are intrinsic to her stories. In this case, it is in caring for trees and other growing plants, if anywhere, that Sis will eventually find redemption and salvation. 

Like Rachel Crane in Q Road, Margo Crane in Once Upon a River, the Zook women in The Waters, and Campbell herself (at home in rural Kalamazoo County with her donkeys and her husband, “darling Christopher), Sis Whitby is rooted in Michigan soil, and I am one Michigan bookseller grateful to Campbell for putting us on the American literary map.

Bonnie Jo at Dog Ears Books, 2015

Author at home with one of her donkeys

Rambling Post in Need of a Unifying Title

 

Beautiful colors of ash leaves in October

Timely reminder first:

Bonnie Jo Campbell at Dog Ears Books!

Bonnie's suggestion was that we plan to do as we did with her last visit, which is to give her a chance to chat informally with customers who want books signed. If a crowd builds up and clamors for more, she is willing to read an excerpt for us, but you should feel free to drop in any time between 4 and 5 p.m. next Friday and not worry that you'll be late.

A Seth Family Story

Giving a visiting out-of-town friend a little township scenic auto tour on Monday, for the first time when I saw the sign for Seth Road it linked up in my mind with poet and novelist Vikram Seth, as I am currently reading his book titled Two Lives, though the road and the author have nothing to do with each other.

Two Lives begins with Seth's own antecedents and life and then goes on to detail the life of “Shanti Uncle,” his father’s brother, and Shanti’s German wife, Henny. “Vicky,” as his family sometimes called him (with no suggestion of femininity), had traveled from India to England for education and lived with his aunt and uncle off and on in London while in school, the three growing very close. Years later, his Aunt Henny suggested that he interview Shanti Uncle about his (the uncle’s) life, and those eleven long interviews formed the first basis for a book that eventually included the second life, that of Henny, when a trunk of old letters she had written and received turned up in the attic of the house Shanti had bought when he first set up his dental practice, the house where he brought Henny as his bride, and where both lived until their deaths.

Shanti Seth served in the British Army as a dentist until he lost his right arm below the elbow in bombing hear Monte Cassino. The story of how he was able to retrain himself and return to dentistry is itself a testament to courage and perseverance. He had met Henny and her family in Berlin while in dental school and was one of a social circle of the daughters’ friends, both Jewish and Christian Germans, in the 1930s. You can see where this is going. Henny eventually was able to emigrate and go to London, where she and Shanti were once again in the same social circle and eventually married, but her mother and sister were trapped in place, a brother overseas having squandered money that was to help the family emigrate, and they were eventually “transported” and died, Henny’s mother in Theresienstadt and sister Lola in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Author Seth only learned of this history after the trunk of letters was discovered, motivating him to do further research. Henny had never spoken of this part of her family history to him.

A 1948 letter to Henny from her best friend back in Berlin closes with these words: 

"I am reading Seneca, and it makes me think of how old Herr Mahnert once left his rucksack on the train, and then declared as a distinguishing feature that it contained Seneca’s The Happy Life. Reading is still the best thing. I always read in bed till I drop off to sleep…."

Two years earlier, Henny herself had written to that same “old Herr Mahnert” that she could find “no solace or peace” in the case of her mother’s and sister’s deaths. 

"You can understand [she wrote] that I hate each and every German who has been connected with the Nazi Ideology. This naturally does not hold good for the people like you who, I know, have always been against the beastly Nazi Regime from the very first day. I know, that some of my old friends changed with the time as the tide changes with the moon and you cannot blame me if I despise such people. I know ’to err is human, to forgive divine,’ but the way the Nazis have erred is inhuman and can never be forgiven and, I hope, never be forgotten."

In recounting the life stories of his uncle and aunt, the author generally lets them speak for themselves. In one of the later sections of his book, however, he allows himself to speculate on the past and the future of our world. He asks why Germany was such a lightning rod for so much of what happened in the 20th century (“Berlin shaped the first half of the twentieth century, and epitomized the second”) and comes up with the following reasons: communism played a “crucial role,” both theoretical and actual; Germany made “singular contributions” in “science, quasi-science, and pseudo-science”; German pseudo-science led to and supported a German belief in their own superiority as well as the inferiority of other peoples; finally, there was Germany’s geographical location between East and West, fueling its determination not to be overtaken in either direction but to expand its own territory, having taken a path toward imperialism when the German states unified in 1871.

Seth speculates that the “terrible tragedies both caused by and inflicted on Germany” could serve as a lesson for the future, the way that the postwar Marshall Plan avoided the punishing repercussions that followed the “Great War” and laid the groundwork for a more lasting peace in Europe. But will we learn from the 20th century? Is there any sign that the world has learned the terrible price of war? Seth raises the possibility without full confidence and says of his own hope:

This may well smack of wishful thinking; all too often one finds among the very people to whom wrong has been done a blindness to the suffering of those whom they are wronging.

- Vikram Seth, Two Lives (HarperCollins, 2005)

Each leaf lives but a season.

What lessons can we draw from the past, and how?

Looking around at conflicts today in so many places, it is difficult to be optimistic about the world’s future. It is also difficult to imagine forgiving, in the future, those who at present are changing with the time “as the tide changes with the moon,” going along with brutality on the part of our own government—or at least shrugging and turning away as if it doesn’t concern them. I can forgive a wrong done to me—but wrongs done to others in my name? That is entirely different.

Which reminds me (lightening the tone for a moment) about the time a friend tried to convince me that the Universe was setting “lessons” for each of us as individuals. I didn’t buy it. (I can’t see the “Universe” having me under a microscope!) “But I do try to learn from my experiences,” I told her, “so pragmatically there’s no difference between your belief and mine.” 

She didn’t buy that! “One of us has to be right and the other wrong,” she protested. 

I held to my position and still do, because if one of us were right and the other wrong, (1) how would we ever know which was which, and (2) (as I said to her then) what difference would it make, as long as both of us tried to learn what we could?

Fall color of shasta viburnum

"Why do human beings never learn from history?” another friend asked. 

Who knows? I think a large part of it is that our own lives are so short—history so long!—and we have a hard time learning from something we have not been through ourselves. Knowing is nothing like experiencing. And even then, two people never experience the “same” event the same way.

Don’t we all know people who have grown wiser with age and others who have grown more foolish? What can we conclude from that?

But I seem to have painted myself into a corner here, so it’s probably time to stop talking about lessons.

From My Little Corner

Coming into the village

It is peaceful in my little corner of the world. In Northport I read and sell books and buy and order more. At home I wage war only on invasive species, usually autumn olive (and a single nasty buckthorn so far; I hope there won't be more). I read at home, too, tend outdoor plants and engage in agility work and tennis ball play with Naughty Barker, take walks with her and Tree Guy. 

An unusually grim mood invaded our usually placid domestic space when Tree Guy belatedly learned of the slaughter of over 400 trees in our nation's capitol. The trees were cut down in violation of a court order, the devastation getting underway just before 5 p.m. of the recent holiday weekend--timing impossible to see as coincidental. 

I realize that my preceding paragraph provides no relief from “the violence of the political internet,” as one person commenting referred to my blog last week. While neither engaging in violent rhetoric nor inciting violence, I have definitely referred to it. Why? Because it's there, and I can't pretend it isn't, and while these recent dead are trees and not human beings, it is yet another example of wanton destruction, occurring daily, not visited on us by nature but by human beings, and haven't we seen enough for the entire rest of this century (barely underway)? 

The old Bob Dylan song keeps going through my head, as I ask myself, “How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?” People I know! Fundamentally—I truly believe it—decent people, somehow at present blind (willfully?), who will, surely, one day wake to ask themselves how they ever—? But what point is there in going over this again and again? They won't see until they let themselves see, and then their hearts will break as ours break, day after day, now. Or do they see and not care? And how can that be?

For relief from the violent present, I turn to living green things, to stories set in other times and places, and to my canine and human life partners. We are so, so lucky. We are here now!

And I have the best job in the world! 

What's so great about being an indie bookseller? I spend my days with books! I don't have a boss, and I don't boss anyone else. 

Book by a retired conservation officer

I meet interesting people all the time, each day presenting delightful surprises I could not have predicted the day before, fascinating people from all over, some of them writers, all of them readers, with backgrounds varied far beyond the confines of libraries and academic classrooms. 

There are parts of the world in which the life I lead would not have been possible for someone like me--a woman running a business (albeit a tiny one!) in books, with full control over the titles I stock. No one tells me what to wear or what hours my shop must be open or what books I must sell or any that I am forbidden to handle. I do not take these freedoms for granted, any more than I take for granted other ways my life has been and continues to be fortunate.

Sounded important to me

Mine is a human life. Conflicts arise from time to time, and, as does everyone, I have my worries and struggles along the way. In time, death will come, as it comes to all. That, as Tree Guy says, is “part of the deal.” We did not make the deal. We were born into it, given the gift of life, and accepting that is accepting all of it, including death. Okay! I gratefully accept.

What's New Around Here?

Besides Bonnie Jo's new book and upcoming visit, I have a few other new titles to share, one special one a little book on the stars.

I don't recognize many constellations. Half a dozen at most. I can't tell you when it occurred to me that learning names of the stars given to them by ancient Greeks who never set foot on North America soil was a little strange for us here in Michigan. and Next I began to wonder what names Native Americans gave to our familiar northern constellations, a question that led me to this book: 

Whether at home in Michigan, where Orion appears over my barn, or out in southeast Arizona those five winters past, where I saw the same stars in the high desert sky, the familiar constellation gave me a feeling of home. That feeling is enhanced now by learning the Ojibwe name, Wintermaker, or Biboonikeonini. Yes, that fall constellation tells us what is soon to come. Familiar. Part of home. As familiar and homelike as the yipping of coyotes in the dark.

Moon before dark...

Color is a developing story. So is my bookshop.

Sunny in the morning sun 

We have been having a spate of lovely mornings so far this October. Spate. That’s an interesting word. A large number of anything, definitions of the word say, although a few add that it usually refers to bad things. No, no! Lovely mornings are good! They are beautiful gifts, and we can never have too many of them! 

Barbara clouds at sunrise

Wild aster festival

A bend in the road

(For a very early morning sight, look here.)

Sometimes I make notes or lists ahead of time for a new blog post; other times the writing becomes a seat-of-the-pants improvisation. (Fiction writers are sometimes said to be “plotters” or “pantsers,” the former planning and charting a novel’s action, the latter just seeing where the action takes the story.) One reason I omitted from my last post the visit from a dear friend of 60 years (!!!) and her husband is that somehow, unbelievably, she and I completely forgot to have the guys take a picture of us together, and I was writing my post largely from photographs (except for the book stuff), so there you are. Terrible me! Sixty years! Jeanie, how could we???

If I work from photographs today, this will be another pantsed (seat-of-the-pants) post, and it looks like that’s what it’s going to be.

Always ready for fun

The World Around Us

Again, because I was unable to photograph it, I keep forgetting to record my sighting of a red-bodied dragonfly along our daily two-track road a few weeks back. Entrancing! Was it a common darter? A meadow skimmer? I confess I prefer the name meadow skimmer, so that's what I want to think it was. 

Red is not as common in nature, it seems to me, as green or white or yellow. Cardinal flower stands out for that reason alone. In this season, it is the leaves of the pin cherries that enchant me. 

What could be lovelier?

Virginia creeper?

Garden and Orchard Notes

Wanting to introduce Tree Guy to my favorite area nurseries, I drove us to one on the way home from errands in Traverse City, not intending to buy anything but simply to luxuriate in the arboretum atmosphere--until I saw something that had to come home with me, a little native shrub with the most beautiful fall color imaginable.

American hazelnut planted Monday

I was a goner! It fit in the car, and before sunset it was in the ground near my boardwalk perennial border.

Although shrubs involve more initial cost than most perennials, I am coming to think they might be a better bargain. How many so-called perennials have I planted, only to have them disappear after two or three seasons? Also, like a tree, a shrub it its beautiful self for at least half the year. Long ago I fell in love with a viburnum (var. 'Chenault') for its fall color, having no idea what it would look like when it flowered in summer. That shrub I planted in Northport in the late 1990s is still strong and healthy and beautiful, so I have high hopes for the shasta viburnum a friend brought me from a garden being bulldozed, another new member of my garden family.

Shasta viburnum planted Tuesday

I disassembled my strawberry tower to bring it to the bookstore for the winter. Maybe the plants will die, unhappy without a dormancy period. The whole tower was an experiment, anyway, wild plants not fruiting that I dug up along the back of my house, so there was nothing to lose.

Its earlier incarnation

Moving for the winter

More and more of the plant world is shutting down as the days grow shorter. The time for rest will soon be here. 

A late statement of color

The big harvest and preserving push at present involves apples. Peeling, slicing, saucing and drying. So far, I have two batches of sauce in canning jars and a second batch of slices in the dehydrator.

Adventures in Reading

Sounds like a schoolbook, doesn't it? As a lifelong reader, however, and bookseller of over three decades, I have to admit that many of my life's adventures are vicarious, found in the pages of books. One that held me spellbound was Venture to the Interior, by Laurens Van Der Post, although when I read about his life after reading the book, I wondered if I had been completely taken in. Were his facts really facts? Were the emotions he recounts what he truly felt? The morning those doubts assailed me, I began reading a memoir by Vikram Seth, Two Lives, and then watched a video of an interview with Seth, interested to note that he considers himself primarily a poet, although the world knows him chiefly as a novelist--much like Jim Harrison, I couldn't help thinking, the market (and how crass that word sounds in this context!) for poetry being so much smaller than that for long fiction.

Then there is nonfiction, which can be as fascinating as any novel written and as beautiful or heart-wrenching as any poem. Three nonfiction books in my recent reading, if they must be given a category (because nonfiction is not really a category, is it?), would have to be called anthropology. Two are called that, another subtitled “oral history.”

Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, by Zhang Xinxin & Sang Ye, with a preface by Studs Terkel, is a collection of stories made in China, inspired by Terkel's collections of Americans' stories. The man and woman who put these stories together were themselves Chinese, born in 1953 and 1955, respectively, Zhang having worked as a nurse and a factory worker before establishing herself in journalism, Sang trained as an electrician who also turned to journalism and modern Chinese history.

John Langston Gwaltney, who received part of his training in anthropology under the late Margaret Mead, collected in Drylongso (that word means “ordinary” in the Gullah language of coastal Georgia and South Carolina) the stories of black Americans of all ages from many different walks of life as his 1970s field study, which he called a “portrait of core black culture,” because as a Black man he felt his people had not been accurately represented in standard social science. Rather than concentrating on poverty or dysfunction, he looked for the ordinary, the drylongso, of Black American culture, and those who spoke with him (many of whom had known him all their lives) did so trusting him with their stories.

Ōkubo Diary: Portrait of a Japanese Valley, by Brian Moeran, was also an account by an anthropologist, but it was very different from Chinese Lives and Drylongso, in that Moeran, the author, (1) was an outsider, a Westerner, and (2) gave his own observations of the life of the Japanese village from a subjective, first-person standpoint. His Japanese wife came from an urban rather than a rural background and so was almost as much an outsider as he was (both spoke Japanese but not the local dialect); however, they bought a house in the valley, hoping to settle there permanently and that they would eventually be seen as “belonging.” Two years later, those hopes were dashed. 

Zhang and Sang, like Gwaltney, allow their subjects (for want of a better word) to speak for themselves, and as readers we feel we are meeting these individuals directly. Fascinating as Moeran's book is, we never have that same feeling. We are given only his stories of the people among whom he lived, and so, like him, we are held at a distance from their lives. Like him, we remain an outsider.

I'll be getting back to Vikram Seth soon. But Tree Guy and I will also be having more company this month, and there is still a lot of fall work to be done, too, around the home place. 

We are still learning, Sunny and I.

One of my favorite portraits of her

Last Monday may have been our last agility session for the season, or we may have one more, depending on the weather. Be that as it may, I asked Coach Mike to take a couple pictures of Sunny and me on the course, and this is what I have:

Sunny and I do pretty well at everything except the weave poles, so I am determined that we will focus on those next summer. Practice, practice, practice! It is the key to success in so many endeavors.

Endings can be beautiful, too.

Besides lovely October dawns, we have also had some spectacular fall sunsets. Those are the Manitou Islands out there on the horizon.