What are you missing? What do you love?

Taking a break from the hurdles--with her beloved tennis ball!

“You haven’t been posting as much about Sunny on your blog lately,” one bookstore browser observed recently.  In the old days of Dog Ears Books and Books in Northport, the Artist and our dog Sarah were the stars. 

Sarah in the bookstore

Now (though not in the bookstore) it’s Sunny who is my blog star, so here she is opening the show today before I go on to my usual bookish meanderings. Sunny Juliet is still a Naughty Barker, nowhere near the almost-perfect bookstore dog that her predecessor, Sarah, was for 13 years, but she and I are pretty bonded, her recall improves steadily, and she is the stronger member of our one-person, one-dog agility team, no question about it.

Gli Etruschi e io

La campagna

“The Etruscans and me”? Not really. Not me, personally. It’s D.H. Lawrence and the Etruscans I encountered in the author’s posthumously published book, Etruscan Places. But the title captured my attention, because whether a book is fiction or nonfiction, place-based literature, stories and experiences anchored in a village or a region, is what I find most compelling. 

Il lago

Etruscan Places, in addition to being very much anchored in place, is also very personal to the author. Unlike his fiction, this book’s style is more like letters written to a friend, with emotional responses accompanying Lawrence’s observations. He doesn’t only write about the Etruscan tombs, either, but includes by name all the wildflowers along the way, which (naturally!) I found charming. Judgments on history and the present day also begin on the very first page:

 

The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’être of people like the Romans.

 

Lawrence was not a fan of the Romans. He saw the Etruscans as a people living attuned to Nature (and was instantly drawn to them when he first saw some of their artifacts in a museum),  the Romans as a foe of that sweet life, wanting only to crush and dominate it. Whether he is comparing paintings or architecture, he sees everywhere the same contrast. The “impious pagan duality,” a phrase he uses only in order to reject it, “did not,” he claims, “contain the later pious duality of good and evil.” He sees the Etruscans as a more natural people, more accepting of death—which they saw as a continuation of life on earth, rather than existence in an entirely different kind of realm—and at the same time much more playful than the Romans who came later. 

 

Besides his observations on the tombs and the art in the tombs and his personal judgments on the art and how it compares to Greek and Roman and modern art, Lawrence notes wildflowers he sees along the way, what he and his companion saw in the villages and the countryside, and the different mood called forth by each place.

 

It is very pleasant to go down from the hill on which the present Tarquinia stands, down into the valley and up to the opposite hill, on which the Etruscan Tarquinii surely stood. There are many flowers, the blue grape-hyacinth and the white, the mauve tassel anemone with the red, sore centre—the big-petalled sort. It is curious how the anemone varies. Only in this one place in Tarquinia have I found the whity-pink kind, with the dark, sore-red center. But probably that is just chance. 

 

The town ends really with the wall. At the foot of the wall is wild hillside, and down the slope is only one little farm, with another little house made of straw. The country is clear of houses. The peasants live in the city.

 

Probably in Etruscan days it was much the same….

 

Bellissimi fiori

What Lawrence never states explicitly but what readers in 1932 understood is that the Italy of Lawrence’s investigative travels into history was also the Italy of Benito Mussolini, who had transformed the country into a one-party dictatorship, first by outlawing labor strikes and soon with the use of secret police, eventually allying his Fascist authoritarian state with Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. So when he writes about the “all-conquering Romans,” he is also heaping scorn on the Fascists, for the latter “consider themselves in all things Roman,” and he despises Romans and Fascists alike. 

 

Myself, I like to think of the little wooden temples of the early Greeks and of the Etruscans: small, dainty, fragile, and evanescent as flowers. We have reached the stage when we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realize that it is better to keep life fluid and changing than to try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments.

 

Only a little while later he asks,

 

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buidings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

 

We may well object here. How can anyone reject Michelangelo? But life in the shade of Fascism, along with the tuberculosis that was soon to bring about the author’s death, may have made him impatient. He did love the Italian countryside:

 

Such a pure, uprising, unsullied country, in the greenness of wheat on an April morning!—and the queer complication of hills! There seems nothing of the modern world here—no houses, no contrivances, only a sort of fair wonder and stillness, an openness which has not been violated. 

 

One morning I gave myself a complete vacation from news headlines and enjoyed, before my bookish day, immersion in my own “pure, uprising, unsullied” countryside. Deer in the orchard, ducks and loons on Lake Leelanau, Canada geese overhead, and everywhere the deep, rich, varied greens of summer! 

 

Una bella mattina! E vivo in campagna! Che fortuna!

 

But how long are we going to let ourselves be imposed upon, and how far will we let the impostors impose on us? Where and when is it going to stop?

 

Why we (I and others of my ilk) keep harping on current events

 

The question was asked, Why do Democrats care so much about ICE raids and deportation of immigrants? Why don’t they worry and demonstrate instead about other unsolved problems in our country, such as the plight of the mentally ill or the homeless or people suffering from natural disasters? Years ago, one of my uncles took me to task for donating to the ACLU, arguing that they had done nothing for disaster relief that week. I forget what the specific disaster was, but I explained to my uncle that the mission of the ACLU was not disaster relief and that I had donated to Lutheran World Relief and indicated that my donation was to go to that week’s specific disaster, for which LWR had promised to provide 100% of donations so targeted. 

 

Supporting one cause does not mean ignoring others.

 

There are always ongoing issues we care about and contribute to and work for year after year. Most of us contribute regularly to various nonprofit organizations, each one with a different and important goal. I have a sponsored child through “Save the Children,” donate annually to the Michael J. Fox Foundation (for Parkinson’s Disease), and generally give to disaster relief funds through Save the Children or Lutheran World Relief, besides making annual donations to the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center. Memorial donations are an opportunity to give to specific hospitals or churches or libraries (wherever they may be) or local organizations.

 

The reason to pay so much attention to "this stuff” right now—to pardons for insurrectionists; firings of judges for being impartial rather than partisan; arrests, detainments, and deportations without due process—and to demonstrate and to continue to spread the word about what’s happening is that our country, the country we love, is at a critical crossroads. Democracy is in crisis. Understandably but tragically, many Americans, including the young, have stopped following the news, and this is how authoritarianism takes hold. 

As Eric Holder, the 82nd U.S. Attorney General , wrote recently: 

Right now, core pillars of our democracy are under attack – including a free press and educational institutions that teach independent and critical thinking. This isn’t isolated or random — this is an intentional effort by the far right to weaken the very systems we have in place to ensure the health of our democracy. They are dragging us toward authoritarianism. What’s happening now is NOT normal. 

 

If law enforcement and the judicial system are replaced by authoritarian goon squads of revenge, no one will be safe, and all those people Democrats are accused of ignoring will be among the victims, simply because they are so vulnerable. The fight for American ideals is not choosing to care only about, for instance, immigrants. It is about assuring a future in which everyone in this country is accorded dignity, in which everyone’s humanity is recognized and respected.

 

 

Back to the Books

 

On Wednesday evening, August 13, Dog Ears Books will host Timothy Mulherin, author of This Magnetic North: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan. These conversations with northern Michigan residents from all walks of life (he interviewed over 75 people for the book), explore the topic of “relocation,” how it may be (some think yes, some think no) changing the face and character of northern Michigan, and what different people think of the changes and hope to see in the future. 

 

Do you see our area changing? If so, how do you feel about it? What do you want us to hold onto, and what could be improved upon? Are there things you miss about the Old Days?

Kinda "old days" in Northport

Older days in Leland

We were all young once.

August 13 promises a lively discussion with this author, who splits his life between Indiana and Leelanau County, so mark your calendar and don’t forget! I’ll issue reminders, never fear.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Italy recently.

(Random photo of mine. When taken? Why?)

 

My visits to Italy happened through the magic of books, of course, and here are three that transported me to places I’ve never been before.

 

(1)       Spender, Matthew. Within Tuscany: Reflections on a Time and Place

 

As potters are often secretly obsessed not by ceramics but by fire, so sculptors are sometimes obsessed not by carvings but by stone. And the craftsmen who work in quarries do not think about stone, they think of the mountain. In all three cases it is a question of sublimating a mean passion for a grand one. Man makes his little artefacts, but it is the live material as nature brought it forth that remains the challenge.

 

Anyone who has ever traveled or lived in Tuscany or dreamed of so doing will want to read this book, but it will have special meaning for artists (as the quote above makes clear), horticulturists (olive harvesting and oil processing are described in great detail), historians and lovers of ancient history (the author is fairly obsessed, to use his word, with the elusive Etruscans), and anyone who has ever read Dante at all seriously.

 

Sculptor and painter, as well as writer, Matthew Spender and his wife, Maro, came from London to Siena in 1967, intending to live there for “a year or two,” but life had other ideas in store, and before they knew it they had established an Italian life. With their two little girls in school, Spender joined a community band (a clarinetist, he says unkind things about violins) and researched several aspects of Tuscan history, along with pursuing his art. Matthew Spender is the son of poet Stephen Spender. Maro, an artist herself, is the daughter of painter Ashile Gorkey, whose biography Matthew Spender authored. The family backgrounds of both Maro and Matthew are complicated by dysfunction and sparkling with famous friends, but if a reader knew nothing at all about the author or his family, Within Tuscany would still be fascinating and beautiful reading.

 

It is a somewhat strange book. Part memoir, part historical commentary, the author reveals his own occasional awkwardness pitilessly more than once. His lens is at other times a long one, focused on previous centuries, before turning back on himself in close-up. But always, the writing intoxicates. Musing on Bruce Chatwin’s dream of death and how not even the art we make, though it outlives us, is destined to be immortal, Spender writes of these art objects:

 

For a while they can act as shields against total annihilation, our death first, their death and the eventual death of the planet as it whirls around an exhausted sun, awaiting its own eventual extinction, each finality fitting in the other like Chinesse boxes. For me, the outstretched hand of painted flesh from a painted sleeve will do, stretching to support me as I approach the tunnel, before the blinding light. 

 

I don’t fit into any of the categories of readers I said would love this book, but I did love it and highly recommend it. 

 

 

(2)       Leon, Donna.  My Venice and Other Essays

 

Donna Leon is an American writer who has lived for many years in Italy. She writes murder mysteries set in Venice. That’s all I knew when I picked up this book. 

 

My dream city is Paris, although more than one friend feels the same way about Venice, which has never been on my short list at all. But reading about Venice? I’ll do that. 

 

What a surprise this book was! I adored and delighted in this opinionated group of essays and how the author does not pull a single punch! She says she will never live in the U.S. again, but she does not see her adopted home city or country through rose-colored glasses. 

 

It is difficult, even in the midst of my thirty-year love affair with them, to say that Italians have anything that could even vaguely be called a civic sense.

 

Much as I loved this book and highly recommend it, however, I’m finding I don’t want to say too much about it or quote too heavily, because you need to discover it for yourself: Some of you will love it, some might outright hate it. (This I infer from the review I read after writing how I loved it. Not everyone did.) I’ll warn you that Donna Leon calls dogshit shit, not poo, and when one of her essays is titled, “It’s a Dick Thing,” she means just that, but she doesn’t hate dogs or men, never fear. Give it a try -- and get back to me with your impressions, please! 

 

Inspired by her essays, I’m now reading one of her murder mysteries now, Doctored Evidence, which in turn was inspired by an annoying neighbor, in real-life Venice, who kept her television at an unbearably high volume, night and day, despite repeated complaints….

 

 

(3)       Smith, Mark Gordon.  Tuscan Echoes: A Season in Italy

 

Mark Smith’s story is closer to that of most American visitors than the two foregoing books, in that he did not make a long-time home in Italy. That is, he had lived in Italy as a child, with his family, in the 1950s, but only after many all-too-brief visits as an adult was he able to arrange to live in Florence for 18 precious weeks, beginning on the first of May.

 

Time became the gift that provided opportunities to take in quiet moments and places, to capture the special essence of Italian life. Even now, I need only close my eyes to feel the heat of that Tuscan season. There were days when an infinite clear blue sky soared overhead, hot breezes shrilled the cypresses of cloisters, olive trees shaded fields of straw punctuated by bright red poppies, and aisles of Chianti grapes marched forever up every hill. On every day, in every corner turned, a new discovery was made; with every museum entered or church visited, there were thousands of other events that reached out to be remembered. As the seasons turned, leaves blew at my feet and, eventually, the rains of fall arrived. 

 

I don’t know how to interpret breezes that “shrilled the cypresses” and can’t help wondering if he was really looking at “fields of straw” (perhaps some grain?). I do recognize that sense of discovery, every day, around every corner, familiar to me from my own first month in a rented room in Paris, venturing out every morning safeguarded by talismans from friends, armed with maps and high school French, coming “home” at night to sit at the dining table with my landlady, each of us with paper and pens and dictionaries at the ready in case of a communication puzzle. One month for me, eighteen weeks for him – time enough to settle in and feel deliciously at home, reveling in the “gift of time.”

 

And yet -- I was disappointed in Smith’s book. To me it read like  letters written to family back home rather than personal diary entries or letters to a close friend. Also, all three of today’s books were written in the first person, so why did only this one strike me as relentlessly “I, I, I”? There were too many unnecessary details about “heading” here and “heading” there and turning corners and sitting down and not nearly enough detail about, for instance, what he had for dinner at the fabulous restaurant mentioned. And while I wouldn’t have wanted him to be curmudgeonly or dissatisfied, was every single moment of those eighteen weeks golden? Unlike Spender and Leon, a reader has little sense, from his writing, of this author's character or idiosyncrasies or his life apart from these eighteen weeks.

*****

 

My advice: If you want a happy tour guide, take Smith; if you want opinionated irreverence from an insider, Leon is your woman; and artists, you will definitely find Spender the most revealing of what concerns you most. But perhaps you have favorite books on Italy to recommend yourself. Or another part of the world. 

Where have you traveled lately through the magic of books?

Meanwhile, as we ease into spring here in southeast Arizona, this is right where I am when I leave the books behind and step out my door.

The Oddness of a Small Italian Coincidence

Up, up from the Inferno and through the Purgatorio we climb with Dante, our fearless tiny band of readers, and as we climb I realize more and more the aspects of this work that speak most clearly and compellingly to me. They are not the long inventive passages, the pictures conjured out of the poet’s imagination. No, those I labor through, like one lost in a dark wood, but from time to time I fall upon a sunlit clearing where fresh breezes play.

Even as sheep that move, first one, then two,

then three, out of the fold—the others also

stand, eyes and muzzles lowered, timidly;

and what the first sheep does, the others do,

and if it halts, they huddle close behind, 

simple and quiet and not knowing why....

Do you see them, the simple sheep? What about these gamblers?

When dicing’s done and players separate, 

the loser’s left alone, disconsolate— 

rehearsing what he’d thrown away, he sadly learns; 

all of the crowd surrounds the one who won....

Whenever Dante describes something of this world, our world, it rings familiar and true to me, though I am no more a sheep farmer or shepherd than I am a gambler. The parts of the Purgatorio that mean the most to me are not otherworldly at all but this-worldly, as when in the Inferno he recalled a busy shipyard or used the analogy of Italian rivers to drive home the point of his vision. So too when in Canto VI of the former he apostrophizes his native land--

Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows,

you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas,

no queen of provinces but of bordellos!

--it is his native land on earth that grieves his spirit, just as Wordworth poured out his sorrow in “” when he wrote--

MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

O raise us up, return to us again,

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way, 

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

Harsh seas or stagnant marshes, both poets turn to nature—earthly nature—to express their desperate feelings for their governments and the politics of their times, and however little we know of the details of those periods we have a sharp sense of the writers’ discontent and longing from the figures of speech they use, for nature is nature from one century to the next.

The small coincidence came yesterday, when David picked up some magazines left behind to be picked up by anyone who wanted them in the lobby of our public library. One of them that caught my eye on the table last night after dinner was the September 2011 issue of Harper’s, its cover promising something on Dante within! Opening eagerly, I turned to a piece by Elif Batuman, the story of her participation in a “Danta Marathon” in Florence in the spring of 2009. As I read, I was wondering if this would be something to take to our group meeting on March 1, something to share with the other toilers through Dante’s three-tired afterworld, but then, near the end, the writer turned on its head what has been written by a couple of famous Dante interpreters:

For both Lukács and Auerback, meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where figurae are fulfilled and totalities formed. Mortan existence is, by contrast, incomplete, illusory, secondary. But I think the opposite can be said, with equal accuracy: it’s the afterlife that is a tissue of illusions. Dante’s afterworld may be highly structured, but he invented that structure himself, synthesizing classical mythology, Christian theology, and medieval demonology. Dante’s afterworld, drawing attention to its own eccentricities, paradoxes, and loopholes—it’s Dante’s afterworld, based in his own experiences. Seen from this perspective, the only thing that’s indubitably real, the only thing everyone can see and agree on, is the stuff of this life—all the stuff that Dante himself studied with such interest and love. Is Paradise more real than all that? Is it better? Is Paradise enough to compensate for the loss of the world?

Batuman’s view is not at all a denial of Dante’s poetry. She simply points out that what gives the poem life springs from this world and are ever part of it.

Postscript:

I used to think it was a shame that my own beautiful part of the world is not better known, its lovely corners and vistas not as famous as those of the Italian hills or the English lake country or even the states on the American Eastern seaboard. In my view, northern Michigan lacks nothing in a comparison of beauties. What is absent here are the associations: We have no centuries of battles, no lives of world-famous, no buildings dating back centuries. But if we did? Would life be better for those of us who live here?

Now I've changed my mind, and it isn't resignation. I am thankful for the historical and literary obscurity of my home ground. In the woods I may come upon an old rock that looks to me like a grindstone from pre-European times, or a former small clearing now filling in with young trees may reveal, among the weeds, an old iron tractor wheel, and those signs of earlier lives are quite enough. They are quiet signs. No stone fortresses on hills, no rivers running with blood or fields littered with ghosts of fallen bodies. Just woods and orchards, seeps and creeks, people now as then quietly going about keeping themselves and their families alive. We have stories here, but they are stories of ordinary people.