Side Roads

Closeup in the blogosphere

 

Occasionally (not continually or compulsively) I look at the stats for this blog and learn how many people for a given period—24 hours, 30 days, all time—have looked at the blog and also how many looked at specific posts. The latter numbers always interest me, showing me where something I might have written years ago has suddenly found new life for a handful of readers. I always wondered why an old post reappears that way in a particular day’s stats. Why, for example, did three people on Thursday morning look at from my old 2018 post on writer Thomas Mann? I was curious enough to give it another look myself to see what I’d said about that German writer seven years ago.

 

Our “intrepid Ulysses reading circle” had decided to read The Magic Mountain after realizing that we had read classics from France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Japan, as well as from the U.S. and England, but had read nothing from the German tradition. I even admitted to the group that I had avoided German literature and felt I needed to get over my prejudice. I tried The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse, but thought it would unduly tax the patience of group members (it’s a very strange “story,” if it can even be called a story), and so, somehow, we landed on The Magic Mountain, and I wrote about it for Books in Northport.

 

By early Friday morning, when I looked again (my curiosity now augmented by having begun a post on the subject), I saw that over 30 people had chosen to view a 13-year-old post about art, old books, and ephemera. Why? Was there something in the labels that attracted them? Heaven knows. I don’t.

 

 

Oh-So-Ordinary!

 

My reactivated appreciation for flowering annuals steaduly increases. For years, I looked down on them, wanting only perennials (more expensive), but one genus and species at a time the annuals have crept back into my heart. 

Lobelia may have been the first to return. That intense blue! And the way it keeps blooming throughout the season, while perennials come into bloom once and all too soon finish up for the year. Three or four years ago I discovered bacopa and have bought plants every summer since. Like lobelia (and they go together beautifully), it continues from time of purchase until frost, blossoming and fading and blossoming, again and again and again. I like bacopa with begonias, too, tender begonias that make such a splash all summer long. It’s October now, and they are still going strong. 

The really ordinary annuals, of course, are the ones you can easily and successfully plant from seed, such as marigolds or snapdragons. Snaps often volunteer (from the previous year’s seeds?) or—believe it or not, this happened with one clay pot I left on the porch last year—occasionally go dormant and revive in the spring, without benefit of warmth or watering while they chill! I wouldn’t count on it, but it's happened in my life. 

 

And as for marigolds? How could I ever have thought marigolds weren’t special enough to be part of my life? Outdoors and indoors, they continue to brighten into the fall. They also remind me of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” an enchanting movie, and the wonderful, long novel by Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy. Here is a strange thing, though, in that link to the movie. The site omits on its list of “stars” (you can find him by digging deeper) Dev Patel, who was, in my mind, the heart and soul of the film! 

 

 

Does old-fashioned mean outdated?

 

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal was headlined “Young People Are Falling in Love With CDs and Digital Cameras.” The young woman introduced at the beginning of the piece also uses paper maps and “calls the local cab company when she needs a ride.” (I want to cheer for maps and cabs!) A certain segment of teens and twenty-somethings, we are told, has had it with screens and “are resurrecting digital cameras, flip phones and CDs.” Maybe, too, they want to have their own music and photographs safely in their possession and not off in a “cloud,” which, my son informed me long ago, is nothing but “someone else’s much bigger computer” (which also requires ENORMOUS energy inputs and maintenance!).

 

My digital camera's storage card,
compared to size of postage stamps

I shared the article with a bookseller colleague, commenting to him, “They forgot books,” because I have noticed in the past few years that more and more young people, who have grown up with electronic devices and see them as completely ordinary and unexciting, albeit useful, are thrilled to get their hands on a book printed, bound, and published in the 1800s. They hold such a book carefully and turn its pages with something like reverence. Again, and even more so than with keeping digital images in digital files, these objects are something you can take home and possess securely. They aren’t going to disappear, as items from a digital library can do, and when the power goes out, you can read a book by kerosene lamp, as I have done. 

 

My colleague agreed with me about books and added that the WSJ article had also forgotten to mention typewriters. He, Paul Stebleton of Landmark Books in Traverse City, has made a sideline specialty of manual typewriters. While I don’t use one these days (there are one or two in my house), I remember my first one fondly. When a key stuck, I could turn the old black machine upside-down and fix it myself. I could and did change the ribbon myself. Maintaining that typewriter gave me a kind of independence that few of us have when our electronic devices malfunction.

***

 

Blogging, gardening, legacy media (!) – where can I go next? How about specific books? The last one I finished was E.B. White On Dogs, edited by his granddaughter, Martha White. Long a staff writer at the New Yorker, White is probably most widely known for his children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, and for The Elements of Style, but his Here Is New York also remains a classic. On Dogs (how could I resist?) includes some of the author’s short New Yorker pieces, a couple or so longer essays, and quite a few personal letters. Often the letters have only a brief passage about dogs, but I was glad to have the entire letter each time and to read about the author’s homey country life, with pigs and chickens and other animals, in addition to dogs. 

 

Martha White writes in “A Note to the Reader,” following her introduction, 

 

…The letters … are more casual in style, and my Tilbury House editor was surprised to find that the co-author of The Elements of Style did not always get his that and which correct, especially in the early years. Our hands-off policy [not correcting the writer’s grammar] nearly killed her.

 

Which goes to show that all of us have things to learn as we go through life!

 

And there! I have kept things light today, for a change. Feel free to breathe a sigh of relief and thank me, but do not mistake this lightness as a promised change of direction for future posts.

Daisy and Sunny take a break.