Let’s See Where We Are

Still in the ghost town in Cochise County. Still moving through grief by getting outdoors every day with the puppy and otherwise feeding my book addiction, notes here picking up where I left off the last time:

 

4. Irving, Washington. A Tour on the Prairies (nonfiction)

 

Often my bedtime books are more serious in nature, in part because if I am all wound up in a novel, it’s easy for me to stay awake reading all night. Not that Washington Irving’s 19^th-century horseback travels on the Great Plains were dull, by any means. In fact, it seems he was quite the eager, adventure-loving companion, it seems. Not a sleepy Rip Van Winkle guy at all!

 

5. Swan, Walter. How to Be a Better Me (nonfiction)

Walter Swan (from the 10-cent sidewalk table outside the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox) had plenty of lessons to impart and decided to put them between the covers of a book. Homespun Western commonsense.

 

6. Maxwell, Gavin. A Reed Shaken by the Wind (nonfiction)

7. Ferber, Edna. Show Boat (fiction)

8. Simeti, Mary Taylor. On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal (nonfiction – uncorr. proofs, 1986)

 

I wrote quite a bit about the Maxwell book before I’d finished reading it, and that “quite a bit” can be found here. The same is true for Edna Ferber’s Show Boat and Mary Taylor Simeti’s On Persephone’s Island. The next book on my list, number 9, was sent by a friend back in Michigan. (Thank you, Laurie!) I’d seen the book before and not been drawn to it by the title, but my interest was piqued by looking more closely and seeing that the author was the creator of “Downton Abbey.” There are no heroes or villains here -- every character is a mix of admirable and repulsive qualities, and Fellowes is at his best when speculating on complicated motives. The Keillor novel is exactly what you would expect from the storyteller from Lake Woebegone.

 

9. Fellowes, Julian. Snobs (fiction)

10. Keillor, Garrison. Pontoon (fiction)

I include an image here (above) of book endpapers to illustrate why I was drawn to the light novel that spawned the 1950s Debbie Reynolds movie. The girl in the story was raised on a houseboat on the Mississippi River, so it is a book for my little houseboat book collection, and the story is innocent and charming, if thoroughly predictable.

11. Sumner, Cid Ricketts. Tammy Out of Time (fiction)

12. Jance, J.A. Unfinished Business (fiction)

13. Jance, J.A. Until Proven Guilty (fiction)

14. Abels, Harriette. Mystery on the Delta (fiction – YA)

 

Next came a mini-binge, as I devoured two murder mysteries back-to-back, followed by a YA mystery that was a cinch to solve early on, but, again, it was a story with a houseboat theme.

 

Then this past weekend I read two more serious nonfiction books, both of which moved me deeply. Kirkus Reviews thought Harlem is Nowhere, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, “suffered” from not fitting clearly into one particular genre, being neither strictly academic nor strictly popular. (What was that reviewer thinking? Sounds like marketing talk to me.) From my point of view, the genre-bending, genre-overlapping qualities of the book made it a rich reading experience from a very gifted writer. I was transported in time and place and felt as if I had been there, with Rhodes-Pitts as both a well-informed guide and my personal friend.

She had some surprising nuggets for a bookseller, too. While I knew most of the names of important Harlem people mentioned, a new one to me was book collector Arthur Schomburg, whose collection of black history, literature, art, etc. was eventually bought by New York Public Library with a Carnegie Foundation grant. The collection included “more than 5,000 books, 3,000 rare manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, clippings albums, and several thousand pamphlets.” Rhodes-Pitts spent many hours in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which she calls “as much a community center as a library, and a little bit of home. Highly recommended. 

 

Finally, a new friend back in Michigan sent me a copy of her memoir in manuscript, the story of finding and losing all too soon, to cancer, the love of her life – and going on from there, as one must following loss. Much familiar territory for me, but new ground, also, and Mary Robertson is a lovely writer, with a frankness and, perhaps surprisingly, a sense of humor that brought me to both tears and laughter, often at the same time.

 

15. Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa. Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (nonfiction)

16. Robertson, Mary E. I’m Sorry For Your Loss: One Woman’s Journey Through Love, Loss & Recovery (nonfiction – ms.)

 

So now the question is, what book will I finish next? It probably won’t be my current bedtime volume, Anthony Trollope’s North America. Trollope gives us a fascinating window into American life during the Civil War away from the battlefields; however, he gets carried away on many long, detailed digressions into earlier American and Canadian history that occasionally try my patience. I am most entertained when he describes cities and towns in his time that I have known in my own, and I was very sympathetic to his disappointment at not seeing the real “prairie” he hoped to see, for all the cornfields that had taken the place of those seas of grass. I felt the same way years ago in southwest Michigan after reading James Fennimore’s Oak Openings: I so wished I could go back in time to see that prairie as it was before clearing and cultivation, before houses and barns and electric and telephone poles and lines. Just as it would be thrilling to see the West without barbed wire everywhere! But this is one of the glories of reading -- magically slipping away into a past we never saw with our own eyes.

Reading the Miles: U.S. by Highway by Books

Looking east Monday morning

Anyone who’s glanced at my Books Read list lately can see a lot of vicarious living going on -- compensation, no doubt, for the road time that is usually mine in September -- but I didn’t exactly plan a long, multiple travel book excursion. Like much of my reading, it just happened.

First came a new book by Phil Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean.

Next I happened on an old Penguin paperback from 1979, Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey, by Richard Rhodes, pulled in by his descriptions of the Everglades in the first essay.

Then David and I both fell into Driving to Detroit: Memoirs of a Fast Woman, by Lesley Hazleton, so while he was having his turn...

... I picked up Bruce Stutz’s Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season.

That is, I read Caputo first, started Rhodes, put that aside to start Hazleton, began and raced through Stutz, and then went back to finish first Rhodes and then Hazleton. 

The book by Rhodes, oldest of the four, isn’t really a travel book at all but a collection of essays, many of which, however, involved trips to different regions of the United States, and since these places were often some of the same ones visited by the other writers – and some of the places each of them visited were visited also in by one or more of the others – I felt I was making multiple trips, stopping more than once in the same place, only to find it was not the “same” at all because of the writers' different perspectives. 

Finally, as you'll see if you stick with me through all this vicarious wandering, I came back to an old 30-year classic.

I have to begin by saying that the Rhodes, the not-really-a-travel book, was much more satisfying to me than Caputo’s road trip from Key West to Dead Horse, Alaska. Rhodes occasionally used the pronoun “we,” even mentioning his children a couple of times, but he didn’t bog down in mundane, trivial details of family travel but gave a wide-angle view with layers of historical depth of field. I could imagine myself there in the Everglades or wherever, which is what I most desire in reading of someone else’s travel. Any travel narrative, of course, is the story of the writer’s personal experiences, but too much I, I, I -- and especially too much trivial detail, as opposed to crucial detail of place and season and personal struggle or quest – comes between me and my vicarious, bookish experience, arousing my impatience. Escaping daily tedium is one of the joys of reading travel narrative, isn't it? 

While Caputo’s agenda was to drive from the southernmost point in the United States to the northernmost point, just because, Stutz set out to "chase spring" from south to north, his ultimate destination also Alaska. Hazleton’s more modest destination was the Detroit Auto Show, her route beginning in Seattle but circling widely and serendipitously south and east and north. The Rhodes essays explored first Florida and California and subsequently other regions and now-historical periods of the continental United States. Hazleton and Stutz paid more attention to American culture than Caputo and Stutz, but all four registered environmental awareness. His trip was singularly important to Stutz because it followed heart surgery. Hazleton was worried about her father's heart and made almost daily telephone calls to her parents in England (where she was born).

Early in his book, Caputo writes, “Without a design, a journey becomes aimless wandering.” Mentally I bookmarked that line with my skepticism as something to come back to later, and two questions were always hovering in the back of my mind: Does a journey need a design? Is aimless wandering pointless?

What do you look for in a travel book? Do you want a basically light-hearted road trip, complete with dogs? Go with Caputo. If it’s serious commentary on environmental, cultural, and historical issues you favor, let Rhodes be your guide. Amateur birders and geologists will probably want to hitch a ride with Stutz (and I learned a lot from him). 

In the end, after reading all four, I decided Hazleton was the guide for me, and anyone (this would not be me!) obsessed with the American automobile would be well advised to travel with her, too. Hers is a story to appeal to a much wider audience than “car guys,” but those guys will find plenty to love in the book. Hazleton wasn’t looking for the fastest, shortest way to get from Seattle to Detroit, and neither was she afraid to get out of her vehicle and hike trails or even to plunge into a cold mountain lake when one presented itself. There were arranged rendez-vous spots, a lot of serendipity, and one wrenching personal loss along the way, but the focus remained primarily on the road, on the countryside, and on the people she met.

One way Hazelton definitely has it all over Rhodes (whom in general I liked a whole lot) is that, with her imagination and her own experience, she can truly imagine the experiences of others, whereas Rhodes can only, as is true of far too many male writers, imagine male experience, writing therefore as if any human life experience, however far from a biological sex role or social norm, must come always in gendered form. This attitude is as tiresome as I, I, I, me, me, me. Here's how it goes: Men, men, men, women, women, women. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Guys, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how it is!  The experience of girls and women is not run through a filter reminding us at every moment of our existence that we are not men! That is, we do not see you men are the real experiencers and ourselves only spectators of you, you, you! So get a damn clue! Whenever as a young girl I saw a running horse or waved to a train engineer, there were no intervening daydreams in my head about boys coming between me and that beauty and power. (Rhodes imagines girls imagining the waving boys becoming the future engineers to whom they will wave. Seriously?) No, what I saw was my world. Experience is absolute, no matter whose it is.

Phew! Where was I? Oh, yes....

With four cross-country accounts newly added to my Books Read list, I felt it was time to re-read the American road classic of my lifetime, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, brought to mind by this passage from Lesley Hazleton:

...The moment I joined [inadvertently] that interstate, with its huge semis and high speeds, I seemed to have left Arizona behind and entered another world that existed only in long, straight two-hundred-foot-wide swathes. I was driving at an enforced remove from the landscape, as though someone had placed a clear, plastic tunnel over the road. The world of the interstate forced out the real world. All I could hear was traffic. All I could smell was burned gasoline. And with ears and nose assaulted, even my eyes felt dimmed. 

 The interstate, I realized, is an exercise in sensory deprivation. 

Lesley Hazleton, DRIVING TO DETROIT: MEMOIRS OF A FAST WOMAN (1999)

The passage goes on, but anyone who knows me can hear the Yes! This was the vicarious road experience I wanted, and to prolong it I pulled out a battered paperback copy of Blue Highways.

Least Heat-Moon starts out. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He avoids expressways. He meets people. Here is a scene in a little Tennessee holler:

...He cranked up an old Edison phonograph, the kind with the big morning-glory blossom for a speaker, and put on a wax cylinder. This will be ‘My Mother’s Prayer,’” he said. While I ate buttermilk pie, Watts served as disc jockey of Nameless Tennessee. “Here’s ‘Mountain Rose.’” It was one of those moments that you know at the time will stay with you to the grave: the sweet pie, the gaunt man playing the old music, the coals in the stove glowing orange, the scent of kerosene and hot bread. “Here’s ‘Evening Rhapsody.’” 

 - William Least Heat-Moon, BLUE HIGHWAYS: A JOURNEY INTO AMERICA (1983)

Okay, he’s wandering aimlessly, yes indeed he is, and I would not trade this aimless wandering for the most carefully designed road trip in the world. Serendipity comes along with risks, and this is my kind of travel and my kind of travel reading.

Reading my notes of the trip – images, bits of conversations, ideas – I hunted a structure in the events, but randomness was the rule. ... [L]ater that afternoon, a tactic returned to me from night maneuver training in the Navy: to see in deep darkness you don’t look directly at an object – you look to the left; you look at something else to see what you really want to see. Skewed vision.

Aimless wandering and serendipity remind me of what David and I remember as "the scary place," a tiny mountain hamlet perched high at the end of a narrow, climbing road, a place we never would have gone had we known ahead of time how frightening would be the ascent -- and, even worse, the turnaround to descend -- or if we had stayed on major expressways while driving from Avignon north. But we didn't stay on the main roads, and we had no reservations anywhere, so we have a vivid memory of fear and of the conversation I had with two astonished women living there and could hardly believe that a couple from près de Chicago (my usual geographic explanation of where we were from) had ventured such a trek.

Closer to home, there was last fall's walk out through bracken and old pine stumps when I stumbled upon the bearing tree. 

Aimless wandering? What can be better?

There is an element of memoir in both Blue Highways and Driving to Detroit, but the personal details given, whether of divorce, melancholy, anxiety, grief, or just plain discomfort and impatience, always have to do with what is an important personal journey, and this lifts them above daily diary minutiae. 

Looking west Monday morning

As for my own life, at present the road is still unrolling without me, except for my beloved back roads near home, and today under blue sky and sunshine I have no complaints whatsoever. (Is it only coincidence that the conversations all around me this morning in the coffee house have to do with long-distance travel? We kid ourselves if we think we are not a migratory species.) Actually, even under grey, cloudy skies on Sunday, it was worthwhile being out on the county roads, observing young, feathered families. Some of them will stay the winter, and some will fly south. 

Grand Marais; Seed Time; Mark Twain; Reading and Gender

Grand Marais, Michigan

Yes, it’s another day of potpourri rather than an extended theme, and I’ll open with the news that Grand Marais, Michigan, our favorite little town in the Upper Peninsula, is the winner of a Reader’s Digest contest in which anyone could vote, and anyone could vote any number of times. Given that latitude and the monetary incentive, little Grand Marais turned up the heat and beat the drums and managed to accumulate 1,281,724 votes--not bad for a town with a population of 350, eh? The good news is that the town will receive $40,000 for the civic project of their choice. The not-quite-as-good news is that estimated costs for needed work on the harbor run into the millions. Anyone have grant money available for a good Up North cause? Harbors of refuge are few and far between on Lake Superior. A book on Grand Marais published by Arcadia in their “Images of America” service is available at Dog Ears Books, for those who want to explore from the comfort of an easy chair until snowmobile season gives way to black fly season. GM, you know I’m teasing! You know I love you dearly!


Seeds of Dreams

Indeed, it is that time of year, the time when a northern gardener’s thoughts turn to spring and the planting of this year’s garden. It will be many weeks until the soil is clear of snow and ready to be turned, and I never plant anything “tender,” such as tomato plants, outside until Memorial Day, no matter how warm the weather in May, but gardens are made as much of faith and hope as of sweat and toil, and before the time for hard labor arrives it’s glorious to revel in seed catalogs like these gorgeous beauties!

When I take a break from the catalogs, I turn to books, and one I’m discovering for the first time this year (a “classic” in its field, I’m told by those who are way ahead of me) is Suzanne Ashworth’s Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners. General chapters begin the book: “Botanical Classifications”; “Pollination and Flower Structure”; “Maintaining Varietal Purity”; “Seed Cleaning Methods”; and “Seed Storage Techniques.” I should say, perhaps, though the subtitle already said as much, that this book is not a technical treatise for botanists but is a truly practical guide. Where in your home will you find a spot that provides “constant warmth at a specific temperature”? Ashworth suggests the top of a refrigerator, warning against trying to germinate seeds from the Solanaceae family (tomatoes, eggplants, peppers) near a gas stove or water heater, as natural gas can inhibit germination. Who would have known or guessed that? Germination rates over years of storage for different vegetable seeds is another example of a handy tip. For example, half of the onion seeds you save, if properly dried and stored, will be viable two years later.

The bulk of the pages of Seed to Seed deal not with generalities but with specifics—families and species of vegetables, the families arranged alphabetically, beginning with Amaryllidaceae, the onions, leeks and chives, and proceeding through Valerianaceae, Indian corn salad, with all your common favorites in between and a few you might never have tried before. For instance, I’m keen on attempting to grow okra this year (“Okra seeds will maintain 50% germination for five years when stored under ideal conditions”), and while I knew the plant came from West Africa, I am surprised and oddly delighted to see that it is a member of the Malvacea family, a relative of the humble and lovely old-fashioned farm hollyhock.

Supplementing my garden, whatever I end up planting and growing, will be the summer farm market in Northport, and a book to help me with new ideas for the tables will be Fast, Fresh & Green: More than 90 Delicious Recipes for Veggie Lovers, by Susie Middleton. Oh, boy, sweet potato fries!!!

Mark Twain’s Meanderings

First, my confession: I’m not a huge fan of Mark Twain. When I finally got around to reading Huckleberry Finn, I was astounded and dismayed by the last few chapters of the book and the way the whole story fell apart. It reminded me of movies where the people making them started with a good idea and then didn’t know how to wrap it up. I mentioned here in the blog a while back that David and I were reading Life on the Mississippi at bedtime. For quite a while we were thoroughly engrossed and entertained; disappointment came when the narrative (to use the word loosely) jumped a large chunk of years, skipping from the author’s days as a pilot to a later pleasure trip he made down the river with a friend. Those later chapters weren’t nearly as good as the ones that had gone before.

Now a review by Andrew Delbanco in the New York Review of Books of the new Twain autobiography (the first of three volumes came out this winter) confirms my feeling about Twain’s writing, while offering the reviewer’s positive assessment of what he calls “incoherence” in Twain’s books. Delbanco quotes from a 1895 essay by Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” in which the author admits (boasts?) that “to string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and purposeless way” is his way of going about the task. Well, that explains that, doesn’t it? (Does it?)

I was particularly struck by Twain’s complaints about writing, as opposed to talking, which was his real talent. Another passage quoting the famous story-teller was this:

“With pen in the hand,” he said, “the narrative stream is a canal: it moves slowly, smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is a little too literary, too prim, too nice.”

What would Mark Twain have to say about writing on a laptop computer, with AutoFormat and spelling and grammar checking programs second-guessing the writer at every turn, all this in addition to the neatness of typeface on a screen, which seems to shout at the writer to produce finished, blemish-free prose or poetry? On the other hand, the speed of typing on a keyboard (as evidenced by sloppy and/or fiery, spontaneous e-mails from friends who hit “Send” in the heat of emotion without saving to a “Draft” folder for later, calmer revision) would seem to bring writing closer to speech, and thus closer to the “wandering and purposeless” style, the unpolished spontaneity favored by Twain.

So here’s one question for today: Is the computer keyboard or the yellow pad and pen more likely to prime the writing pump and make a story flow?

Did Reading Change Her Life? Yours? Mine?

Going through boxes under my desk at home (same place I found the treasure box of postcards), I ran across a book loaned to me by a friend with a “Please return” Post-It note inside. The book was How Reading Changed My Life, by Anna Quindlen. It’s a very small book, and I enjoyed reading it but commented to David that I didn’t see how reading had changed the author’s life at all: She began as a reader and has remained a reader, to the extent that she prefers reading to all other activities, including travel and outdoor recreation. (Hmmm, always? I’m a book-lover but can’t go that far.) What I want to get into today, however briefly, is Quindlen’s speculation that women read differently from men, men for information and women for “connection,” and this, she thinks, explains why so many women are in book clubs, while so few men are. Do women more often than men share books with friends? Is reading more often part of a basis for friendship between women than it is constitutive of friendship between men? My own experience is that we readers, male or female, often form relationships with other readers, and these relationships often involve the sharing of books, but I don’t see the gender difference Quindlen finds. How do you see it? Sarah awaits your comments!