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 steadily 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 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.

Stuff on Paper and Stuff in the Air

Can a smoker smell books? Paul's humor at work.

Pretty bottles!

Ah, yes, the smell of books! Real books! How many times have I heard people exclaim over it as they walk through my bookshop door? So isn’t my friend and fellow bookseller Paul Stebleton of Landmark Books in Traverse City clever for having bottled the scent? And that isn’t all he’s done: the labels and seals on the bottles feature more of Paul’s genius, as does the display in which the attractive bottles sit. Paul has generously given me an opportunity to sell “Scent of Book” at Dog Ears Books in Northport. It’s yet another demonstration of how booksellers with open shops generally treat each other as colleagues rather than competitors.

One book recently added to my “Books Read 2014” list came as a gift from my son’s wife. The Tyranny of E-Mail was published back in 2005, so it isn’t up-to-the-minute in terms of communication technology, but it was interesting, and I’m thinking it wouldn’t take a lot of editing to update the book, changing the title, of course, to The Tyranny of Texting. Freeman’s concerns about the number of hours modern Western humans spend checking-e-mail pale in the light of today’s “smart” phones and mobile “apps,” which not only have the ability to “tyrannize” users (who seldom consider themselves as victims in this arena) 24 hours a day but to track user movement in physical space, too, around the clock.

About eight years ago I decided to quit searching for a perfect printer and to do without one altogether. It was an unexpectedly liberating move. Anyone who wants me to post a flier can put it in the mail or drop it by the bookshop, but I don’t print out anything sent to me by e-mail. I’ll look at it, I’ll read it, but I don’t print out anything. When I want fliers of my own, I go to another business and pay for the printing. Same with photographic prints, and the quality is better than anything I ever achieved trying to do it myself, however highly the photographic quality of a printer was touted, and despite those expensive ink cartridges.

More recently I stopped going online at all from home. Further liberation! Mornings and evenings are now free of Internet, Facebook, and e-mail. Sundays I don’t check into the virtual world at all, and when I have a weekday off, one morning coffeehouse session is sufficient to keep me feeling “connected.”

The pleasure of a peaceful, uninterrupted home life is its own reward. My father used to say, when I was a kid and the phone would ring during dinner, “If it’s important, they’ll call back.” In my adult household, we are artist and bookseller, not surgeon and veterinarian, so any emergency that requires our attention can be easily handled:

Leave a message. We’ll get back to you. Or write me a letter. That works, too.

Stocking stuffer???

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.