In My Life, One Book Often Leads to Another

Neighborhood reflections

One day last week here in the shop, I started reading Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, quite a well-known book but unfamiliar to me except for its dust jacket. Wilson leads off his study with Jules Michelet, the French historian and natural history writer, and I was immediately entranced by details of Michelet’s life, but it was the way Wilson wrote about Michelet’s History of France that made me want to retire immediately and spend the year reading French history as written by Michelet! Though I wonder if even a year would be sufficient, since it is a 19-volume work.... Although, truthfully, I am not interested in the earlier volumes and would be content to begin with the Renaissance. As it happens, in any case, I won’t be starting that reading in the near future, as I cannot afford the editions I want and refuse to be satisfied with cheap modern paperback reprints. Content is most important, but I care about the physical object, as well.

 

Did you know that Jules Michelet is the person responsible for the term ‘Renaissance’? He lived from 1798 to 1874 and looked back on the end of the Middle Ages and subsequent flowering of culture and science as a true rebirth of Europe. People lived through the Renaissance without having a name for it. What will our age be called? Never mind—let's not take that road today!

Winter aconites have had many naps and reawakenings this year.

Taking a deep breath and consigning Michelet to my old-old age reading (along with those volumes of the vitalist philosopher Louis Lavelle that I bought in Paris decades ago) and skipping ahead in Wilson, I saw a chapter on “The Myth of the Dialectic,” and that led me to put down Wilson and pick up Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which so far I am finding much more reader-friendly than a volume by Adorno alone, one I am wading through in odd moments, page by weary page. It is a paperback reprint, as is the Dialectic, but both are quality paperbacks from a reputable publisher.

 

Edmund Wilson must share credit with a novel sent to me by a friend, however, a fictionalized life of Walter Benjamin, for sending me to Adorno. My friend did not care at all for Benjamin, at least in the novel, Benjamin’s Crossing, and I can see where the man would have been a difficult companion, but I do not find him altogether unsympathetic, especially after reading his short memoir vignettes in Berlin Childhood Around 1900. (Those are truly magical!) So the novel my friend rejected led me to several other books and lives.

 

You may recall, if you pay attention to my bookish meanderings, that a novel based on the life of Belle la Costa Greene led me to read her biography, also. Now, in part because of what I learned of her work for J.P. Morgan, I am reading a biography of Duveen (he is usually called only by his surname), the famous art dealer of that particular turn of the century, now over 100 years ago, and altogether I feel very steeped in the late 19^th and early half of the 20^th centuries. 

Current bedtime book

I appreciate the old-time, high-quality cloth binding under the jacket.

Does that happen to you? Does something in a book put you on the trail to other books? 

 

I vowed to stick to books today, after the over-the-top, nonliterary rant of my last post—not that I am apologizing for it, but this is, after all, Books in Northport. But dogs are an okay detour, though, aren’t they?

 

Sunny Juliet and I got to the dog park twice this week, on both Sunday and Tuesday, and she had a chance to play with her friends Daisy and Louie both times, and also with Jackson on Sunday. Sunny knows the word “friends” and perks her ears alertly when I ask her if she wants to see her friends. In that, she is like me. It was good to be with friends Monday evening to remember dear Larry Coppard, and a chance encounter on Tuesday at Samaritan’s Closet with friends I don’t often see had me smiling for the rest of my afternoon off. 

Outdoors at home

At home, I’m getting at the big job of raking my yard after the mess left behind by fall and winter, one bit at a time (with many pauses to launch tennis balls in the air for Sunny), and I’m happy to announce that all the snow is gone from our yard! For the time being, that is. It’s still April, after all.

In my favorite booth

And it’s also still cold, so I wore my puffy winter jacket when I went to meet another dear friend who had invited me to dinner at the Happy Hour. I timed my arrival a few minutes early, so I could sip my "brewski" (as the Artist used to say) while reading the introduction to Walter Benjamin’s  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, but my friend wasn’t far behind me. Quiet when we arrived, the joint was jumpin’ by the time we left. 

Friendship warms the heart on the coldest of Up North evenings, and happiness is the signature, as well as the eponymous, mood of my neighborhood roadhouse. (Ha! I've been looking for a chance to use that word 'eponymous'!) 

Everyone is happy here.

My friend, a fellow reader --

Is Our World Black and White?

On Wednesday morning the outdoor world appeared black and white to my winter-weary eyes. Stark. Empty of color. Warmer air and absence of wind were pleasant, but I found it hard to celebrate what struck me as a morose, monochrome landscape. Sunday's blue sky and sunlight -- so joyous! -- only made the return of grey skies that much harder to bear. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to capture the scene -- but the truth is that I edited today’s opening photograph to bleed out its color. The original looked like this:

 

Not only the deep green of pines but that subtle, rosy-plummy color of the cherry branches. I had to admit it: there was color in the winter palette. Not exactly a rainbow, but color nonetheless.

I love black-and-white photography and often find b/w images more striking (do we see those images as "timeless" because we associate them with photographs and snapshots predating color processing?), but I’ll go in the other direction today for a rule to live by: Nothing is ever black and white. We can always find color if we look for it. 

 

(Lately I’ve been dreaming in startlingly vivid hues. One dream segued from soothing, muted tones to garish red and gold. In the dream, I protested the hideous decor, yet that startling scene is the one I remember.)

 

Children’s books, bright with illustrations, draw us into their pages at an early age, and as adults we can still be seduced by beautiful books of photographs or drawings, but think about black lines of type on the page of an unillustrated book and how easily they disappear when you read, converted to lively, moving images you "see" as if you were amidst them. “Make mind movies,” the grade school teachers now say to their pupils, because just as a movie screen takes over imaginations and erases for a time our immediate physical surroundings, so the room around us can vanish when we let ourselves be captured by a story on pages we turn one by one, barely conscious that we are turning pages. 

 

And so I’ve been far from Michigan lately, reading two biographical/autobiographical books, a hybrid term I use because the author of Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn, Jonathan Cott, intersperses his chronological narration of Hearn’s life with many long excerpts from the subject’s own writing. Hermann Hesse’s Autobiographical Writings, on the other hand, contains short pieces all his own. Although both Hearn and Hesse led interesting lives, Hearn’s to me was fascinating, and his writing much more vivid. His early journalism, in fact, was downright lurid, his appreciation for beauty and simplicity coming to the fore in his years in Japan. But I was saving Wandering Ghost for bedtime reading, so it was the Hesse compilation I took to my neighborhood tavern, the Happy Hour, on Tuesday afternoon, anticipating that my friend would be a few minutes behind me for our rendez-vous.

How much did I read while waiting? Very little, of course! Surrounded by warmth and memories, curious about strangers at the bar and in the other booth, I spent more time soaking in the familiar, well-loved atmosphere than turning pages. How many happy hours did the Artist and I spend at the Happy Hour? And his exceeded ours together, as he often stopped on the way home from Northport while I was still in my bookstore. He was a regular....

 

Another friend once told me that she studied library science because she loved books, only to discover that her first job as a librarian left her little if any time to read on the job. Such is not the fate of a northern Michigan bookseller in winter. The only problem facing me most days is which book to pick up next, with so many tempting choices within reach, and I am always carrying volumes back and forth between home and bookstore. Soon, though, I will begin my second reading of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters, because that lushly sensual story is a perfect antidote for winter's silent, superficially monochrome reality. 

A Weekend in Which Precious Little Reading Was Done

Here I am with my sisters and mother at the North End on Sunday morning. We went there for breakfast after attending the service at Bethany Lutheran Church on Mothers' Day, and Kristi kindly took our picture before we left. We are all readers (all of them brought bags of books for Dog Ears!), but we didn't do much reading over the weekend. They arrived late Saturday afternoon, and after dinner we became engrossed in a nearly impossible puzzle, involving multiple challenges. First was answering the "Who said that?" question on the quotation pieces and matching each quote with the correct historical personage, actor, philosopher, general, or whatever. This phase results in a forest of paired pieces, all of which then have to be joined together, along with some blank and almost-blank pieces, to form the puzzle. We started on one table, had to move to another, and finally split into two teams, younger sisters in one room, oldest sister and mother in the other room.

Can you say 'OCDC'? Can you say 'frustration'? Can you say, "Oh, my aching back"? So yes, on Sunday morning we went to church and out to breakfast, but then it was back to the puzzle, which we worked at until dinner time -- and dinner had to be on the front porch, as there were no more available tables in the house. No one picked up a book all day!

Monday we started the day with a shopping spree at the Pennington Collection in Northport. Sarah's store is so colorful I couldn't stop taking pictures while my mother and sisters shopped. 

After stops at the post office and bookstore, we drove south to Traverse City and explored Building 50 at the Grand Traverse Commons. My family didn't take long to figure out that they wanted to try out Black Star Farms Tastes, so we had a light lunch of spring vegetables (carrot and beet slices, pickled garlic, and ramps), country terrine, and various cheeses with our wine. My mom and I both bought bottles of the dry Riesling, although we liked everything we tried.

A visit to Building 50 isn't complete for me without a stop in at Landmark Books. It's always good to catch up with bookseller Paul Stebleton, and I was happy to find a nice copy of National Velvet, a classic horse story I haven't read for many years. 

We caught up with David, back from his downstate road trip, on the front porch at home before we made our way to the Happy Hour for dinner. 

In the picture above, in case you were wondering, David is amusing my mother by making his hand into a duck. (Maybe you had to be there.) Below, my sisters posed for me in front of David's large semi-autobiographical art installation. 

The Happy Hour.... It always is. My sisters were happy to find some IPA beer, and I was happy to learn that it was from Marquette, up in the U.P. When time came for dessert, two went for peppermint ice cream, and the other two shared a giant cream puff with peppermint ice cream and hot fudge. Which two were which, do you think?

Naturally, I didn't go three entire days without reading. In fact, I made serious headway early in the morning and late at night with the novel currently at my beside, The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson. It is not peaceful bedtime reading. It is a horror story, in fact, with very little relief, but so masterfully and convincingly and compellingly written (how on earth did the author manage?!) that I practically propped my eyes open to go on reading, and sometimes I'd fall asleep for a while, only to wake up to find the light still on, which was all the encouragement I needed to read a few chapters more. I highly recommend this novel to courageous readers. Besides being a fictional tour de force, it also serves as a reminder to any American reader how very fortunate we are to be living in this country. The contrast with my weekend family visit could not have been more striking.