Arrivals and Departures (because I couldn’t think of any appropriate title)

My constant companion, here all along!

 

Fall Hours? Don’t Ask!

 

I thought I had fall bookshop hours figured out, but now I just don’t know. I’ll be here Tuesdays through Saturdays whenever I can get here, until 4 p.m. if possible, but you might want to call first if you’re making a long drive solely to visit Dog Ears Books. So let's say,

Tuesday, 11-3

Wednesday-Friday, 11-4

Saturday, 11-5

CIRCUMSTANCES PERMITTING!

And truly, if we're being honest with ourselves, isn't this all we can ever say about where we'll be at any particular time? “CIRCUMSTANCES PERMITTING!”?

 

 

My Recent Reading

 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a “Books Read” list, so I’ll do that in the near future, someday soon when it’s time to get something new here on the blog and other inspiration fails. Back early in the summer, overwhelmed by a number of aspects of life in our 21st century world, I binged a private detective series, The Sanibel Island Detective, by Ron Base. More recently, looking for a multibook getaway, I took home the Rabbi Small books that had been sitting on my mystery shelf for far too long, waiting to be discovered—not that I hadn’t mentioned those Harry Kemelman titles to browsers, adding that they were some of my favorites, but no one took up the recommendation. Fine! I re-read all four books with pleasure!

Having loved This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams, I’m now reading another novel set in the same rainy Irish village, The Year of the Child. Our Leelanau weather this post-Labor Day week is appropriate to reading of life in Faha: wild and woolly, windy and wet. I would find it difficult to live in such a consistently rainy part of the world, but I love the slow, loving, detailed descriptions Williams gives of his characters and their homes and relationships and interactions. 

 

Readers looking for fast-paced action need to look elsewhere than in the pages of Niall Williams’s novels. His belong to a category I call “slow books,” the kind you sink into and wrap yourself up in, coming to view his characters as old friends. Also, if you are an impressionable kind of reader, you’ll want to have plenty of tea on hand (in the village of Faha they brew it dark and strong), although I’ve been making do with hot cocoa these chilly, windy, rainy September evenings.

Wet, windy, wild and woolly September!

(And yes, here in my bookshop, customers must bear with my listening, once again, to Rosanne and Johnny Cash singing “September When It Comes,” a haunting song that moves me almost to tears. And yes, I have linked it in previous years.)

 

 

My Suspicious Mind

 

We all have our suspicions, don’t we? Especially when it comes to the thinking of those with whom we disagree. Some proponents of gun rights have actually claimed, publicly, that liberals are happy when there is another school shooting incident, because they see it as strengthening the argument for stricter gun control! How could anyone believe and say such an outrageous thing, that anyone could be happy to have schoolchildren terrorized and killed? And yet, people who say they love “freedom” so much have said such vile things against proponents of stricter gun control. I would search for an example to provide here but would rather keep my blood pressure in a safe range.

 

The NRA claims that “gun control doesn’t work” (and when you've read that article, you’ll want to read about the NRA and guns in Ryan Busse’s book Gunfight: My Battle against the Industry that Radicalized America), but clearly they are using a different set of data than that cited by the editors of Scientific American, who say “The science is clear: Gun control saves lives.” I won’t give a long list of links here, but do a search yourself for “gun control arguments” and see what turns up. 

 

The gun issue, though, is tangential to my most recent suspicion, so I’ll leave you to make a connection if you see one. What I’m thinking these days is another school issue--the state of Florida’s plan to end mandatory vaccinations. I won’t comment on the ridiculous parallel between mandatory vaccination and slavery! I mean, really, people! What does strike me is the likelihood that more families may decide to keep their children out of public schools for fear of infectious diseases, and if that happens, shrinking enrollment would shrink school faculty and support staff and possibly close some schools—and isn’t that just what the privatize-everything people would love to see happen? Another thought: those who count on creating an ignorant electorate would be overjoyed to see American public education destroyed!

 

My Parallel Lives

How many lives do each of us live at one time, and how many of them do we share with others? 

 

I have, obviously, what you might call my mundane life—the everyday, ordinary, recurring circle of days that each of us has. Much, though not all, of my mundane life is public, since I am not retired but still work in my retail bookshop for a living, and so I go most days to that bookshop in the village of Northport, Michigan, where I regularly meet year-round locals, seasonal residents, visitors from other parts of Michigan, and travelers far from home. I also meet authors of books, some established and some just starting out, and that's always interesting. And then there are also the insatiably curious. For instance, I am often asked, “Where do you get all your books?” and I tell people the truth. “They come to me.” After 32 years in business, people know I am here, and they think of me when  pruning their home libraries and/or rehoming inherited volumes. 

Clean and desirable, worthy of shelf space

My place of business is also a place of personal friendships and meaningful conversations, and it includes too the frequent indulgence of a latte from the New Bohemian Café, as well as walks to the post office, library, bank, and grocery store, and so in all these ways, although I have lost my beloved life partner and although I work in a small village, I am far from isolated, and in that I am most fortunate.

But then I have, as do we all, a less public mundane life in which I maintain my home and land, work and play with my dog, and face the challenges of widowhood and aging, along with all manner of smaller challenges that come with the materiality and machinery of existence, but in this, too, other people come in and out of the scene, thank heaven! I text daily with sisters and friends, put notes and letters in the mail and rejoice to find notes and letters in my own post office box, occasionally share a meal with someone, and generally draw comfort from my little circle as we trade recipes and laughter and stories of our small personal worries and triumphs along with larger, global concerns, serve as listeners or advisors to each other when needed, and in general bolster one another’s morale. “O, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?” 

 

Living, we spin webs of connection.

In my less public mundane life I follow gruesome political news, write letters, and take my small stands with like-minded others. And so the life of the mind, as it is often called, obviously overlaps the mundane, or at least it does for me. Political (as well as literary) concerns are essential to my work and to most of my relationships, and yet these are also part of my private, solitary life, the life I wake to in the dark. It may seem paradoxical to call political concerns private rather than public—and as I say, the private and public do overlap in the life of the mind—but those middle-of-the-night wakings, when I remember once more, all over again, with a shock, that the nightmare of American political life is reality, not merely a bad dream, then although I know I am far from alone in such awakenings to dread, I feel most alone. What do others do? What I do is reach for a book. Because what else can I do in the middle of the night except try to calm my soul and return to sleep?

I remember all too well the night of September 11-12, 2001. The Artist and I lay awake in the dark, listening to the radio, taking what comfort we could in each other's presence as our minds wrestled to understand what had happened and worried about what would follow. Then sometime in the dark of morning, long before sunrise, he got up and began moving about. “What are you doing?" I asked. “Packing,” he said. “I think we should go to Grand Marais.” It was what we had planned to do on September 12, but the events of the 11th had left us shaken and unsure. 

That was the first time I ever crossed the Straits of Mackinac without my heart lifting, but we took up residence in Room 11 of the old lumberjack hotel and a day or two later joined the community in a memorial service in the tiny little Lutheran church, and it felt right to be there. Together.

 

The name of the rose continues to signify.

Now in sleep occurs my most private, most solitary life, the unsharable life of dreams. In the best of them I am reunited with the love of my life, and then it matters not what we are “doing” in any dream sequence, because whatever we are doing or talking about, whoever else might be in the scene, wherever it takes place, what matters is that we are together again, I see him again, talk to him, hear his voice, and I wake very reluctantly from the most ordinary dream scenes to a world from which the Artist has departed.

 

Obviously, all these strands I have called “parallel” are not separate (and so not really parallel at all) but braided together, some strands visible to others, friends or strangers, some shared only with those closest to me, and the dreams my purely private life that no one else living can share.

 

My Home Comforts

 

Ambition in the kitchen has taken a back seat in the September slow-down. Although I still have berries in the freezer, so eventually more jam must be made, there is no urgency, and I didn’t buy a large enough quantity of peaches to warrant canning, only enough to enjoy with yogurt and blueberries and then, with the last few, in a small rustic fresh peach tart. So there we were on the porch again, I with my peach tart and hot cocoa and Niall Williams novel, Sunny Juliet with a fresh beef bone, rain beating a tattoo on the metal roof. I must say, life was pretty cozy at home that evening, despite raging insanity in the world at large. Whatever comes in the future of my small life or the large, crazy world, I am right now a lucky woman.

In My Little Corner of the World

  

She was a glamorous librarian, whose image lends panache to an often undervalued profession, an astute collector who shaped an internationally renowned library of rare written and artistic treasures from around the world. 

-      Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (2007)

 

This is the second book about the life of Belle Greene that I have read since the beginning of the year. The first was a novel, The Personal Librarian (2021), by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray, a fictionalized account of the famous librarian’s life and career. Both books spent considerable time dwelling on Greene’s racial heritage, her lengthy, on-again-off-again affair with Bernard Berenson, and her many other flirtations and possible affairs. I turned to the biography after the novel in hopes of learning more about the bookish aspects of Belle’s life.

 

She worked in the Princeton library and pursued “informal studies of rare books and illuminated manuscripts,” as well as taking a few classes there and elsewhere along the way, and then Greene, who acquired no degree and had no academic standing, was hired as J. Pierpont’s “personal librarian” at the age of 26 and remained with the library through the death of its founder and on throughout the life and death of the founder’s son, retiring only shortly before her own death that same year (1950). What I wanted to know was more about how she acquired and built on her knowledge of rare books and manuscripts, and while much of that remains a matter of mystery and speculation, I found hints in Ardizzone’s biography, most tellingly perhaps this one: In April of 1949, when the Morgan Library mounted an exhibit in her honor, Lawrence Wroth (historian, author, and John Carter Brown librarian at Brown University) gave a speech in which he “likened her ability to recognize quality to the gift of perfect pitch in a musician, and noted that her ‘inherent taste’ had been molded ‘through years of association with great men, great books, and great productions of artist and craftsman’” [quoted in Ardizzone, 2007].

 

Certainly Greene took advantage of every opportunity to learn from those with whom she came in contact—scholars, collectors, and dealers—but I believe, from what I have read, that her “inherent taste” and natural “ability to recognize quality” formed the basis on which all subsequent learning was built. Knowledge can be passed from one person to another, insatiable curiosity can reap much from books and experience, but what the Artist and I called “the eye” seems to be much more a matter of natural gift. Some people never develop “the eye” (or, in music, “the ear”), despite years of study.

 

Benedict and Murray’s novel was my first encounter with Belle da Costa Greene, but once on my radar she started to turn up again and again. Shortly after the novel, I read Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, and there again was Belle da Costa Greene, receiving letters from Curtis asking for her intercession with his patron, J.P. Morgan, so that now I can hardly look at one of Curtis’s magnificent portraits without thinking of Greene and Morgan and how Curtis was so determined to publish his 20-volume great work that he agreed to take no salary for himself but only use Morgan’s money for expenses. Belle Greene did not always reply to his letters; Curtis must have seemed very much the uncivilized frontiersman in sophisticated New York.

 

How fascinating it is to assemble even a few pieces of the enormous jigsaw puzzle of the turn of the 19^th century to the 20^th, and to learn something of how great names of the past weathered earlier wars and economic crises in our country! Greene was far from destitute, thanks to her position at the Morgan Library, but the stock market crash of 1929 pretty wiped out what she had been saving for her retirement. As it turned out, however, retirement played almost no part whatsoever in her life. 

 

Then, reading the acknowledgements at the end of Ardizzone’s book, I came upon this surprise: 

 

…Conrad Rader wisely refused all offers to become my full-time unpaid personal assistant, but he kept the cats out of the office and the dishes washed, dragged me out to Warren Dunes at least once a week, and provided a calm center in my life. For that and so much more, I dedicate this book to him. 

 

Warren Dunes? Sure enough, I see now on the jacket, the author (who teaches at Notre Dame) lives in Niles, Michigan. She is a Michigan author!

As for the rest of my recent reading, I binged through seven books of a detective series (it was not the complete series), books about The Sanibel Sunset Detective, by Ron Base, given to me by a friend, and then I boxed them up to send to my baby sister, who is recovering from a broken leg. She will pass them on to our other sister, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are back in Northport sometime this summer. The stories are action-packed but also include more than a few laughs. True escape reading!

And now it’s back to Robert Reich’s Aftershock; Yvonne Sherratt’s Hitler’s Philosophers; etc. The serious stuff.

 

Dog and Yard Notes

Difficult to get much in the way of decent photographs at the dog park, even with a phone, but Sunny and I managed to get there to see friends both Sunday and Monday of the last two weeks. Rapidly disappearing snow in our yard makes tennis ball play and Frisbee a lot easier at home; however, socializing is as important as exercise—for both of us.

In general, my yard is in great need of attention—raking, mostly, at this stage of the season—and yet it’s encouraging already to see bright green hellebore leaves, now that the snow covering them is gone. I absolutely love hellebore and thank my friend Susan every time I look at the ones she gave me. Stay posted for the lovely blooms. On the other hand, if you were looking for one of my inimitable political rants, see here and/or here. No need to wait for that stuff!