Closeup, Farther Away, Back Home Again

“You left the dog out!” 

 

No, I did not forget about Sunny Juliet, and she certainly did not spend the night outdoors! When Sunny is outside, I am outside with her, and when I am indoors, my little companion is with me there, too. But it’s true that there was not a single image of her in my last blog post, so mea culpa! Although Sunny is not a bookstore dog (Naughty Barker that she is), she is very much the dog of my heart and life and blog. So here is my dog girl, back again by popular request.

 

More around the home place

 

‘Tis the season of golden yellow, everywhere I look – forsythia, daffodils, and now—at last—the first dandelions! 

Buds are appearing on trees and shrubs, and all three of my peonies have emerged from their winter sleep. I saw my first blooming Dutchman’s breeches of the season on Saturday morning and cowslips, a.k.a., marsh marigolds, on Sunday afternoon.  

When the weather warms up (again: it had warmed once or twice but cooled down again almost immediately) and stays that way, at last, I’ll get busy cleaning my front porch. The Artist and I always lived on that porch from late spring to early fall. Though it isn’t the same without him, I’m still glad to have it, and Sunny likes it, too. But this weekend there was a different agenda in effect at my place: A neighbor teen came to help me fill an industrial-sized dumpster with trash to be hauled away. “Big job,” I texted a friend, and she texted back, “Not big—huge!” She was right. One of the dangers of rural acreage is the accumulation of stuff no longer useful, but I can now report significant progress on the cleanup, thanks to my helper’s young muscles and ability to heave heavy items over the dumpster wall.

After all that work, I tried to take a nap in the afternoon, but Sunny had other ideas, so we went for a little ride up to Northport by way of the back roads, which is where I saw the marsh marigolds—and thank you, Sunny Juliet, for not letting me sleep the day away!

 

 

Reading at home

 

I finished James A. Stimson’s historical novel, King Noanett, set in colonial America during the time of the English Civil War. The story was a blend, I would say, of adventure, history, and melodrama. The ending was particularly melodramatic, but I’m not going to give it away.

 

Friday night I began reading a novel by a Northport friend, Karen Mulvahill’s The Lost Woman, and came to the last page of that book early Sunday evening. One of the novel’s characters, Nicole, “lost herself” due to a series of difficult life events that took place during the World War II Occupation of Paris, and now, as an older woman, she has persuaded an art historian to help her recover paintings stolen from her parents’ gallery by the Nazis. Robert, the art historian, has his own issues—whether his secret dabbling has any artistic merit at all, as well as how he feels about clients who regard art as a financial investment—and he also has difficulties with relationships. As Nicole and Robert’s lives intersect, secrets involving other people come to light, helping both Nicole and Robert resolve feelings they have carried as burdens for years.

 

Mulvahill’s research is solid and also, I’m happy to say, woven seamlessly into her story. We don’t know at first how all the characters are connected to each other, but the author has her narrative threads well in hand and brings them together in a satisfying finish. 

 

Karen and I are having a little bit of trouble trying to figure out how I can acquire copies of her book at wholesale price to offer in my shop, the complication being that her publisher is in England, and the books printed and distributed, at present, only through the online behemoth. But don’t ask about it! When we find a solution, I will let you know!

 

 

Waking in the middle of the night

 

Waking not from but to a nightmare. 

 

    Try to imagine…

 

If Jimmy Carter had roared like a maniac dictator and danced around a lectern during a rally; 

 

If Bill Clinton had invited Bill Gates to head a newly created government department and fire as many career workers as possible in the fields of education, health, science, etc.;

 

If Barack Obama had taken the oath of office without placing his hand on the Bible;

 

If Joe Biden had planned a military parade costing tens of millions of dollars for his own birthday celebration, while looking to cut services to citizens and cut taxes for billionaires;

 

If any Democratic president had ever had people abducted off the streets or out of their homes and transported to a foreign gulag without benefit of due process!

 

The latest, most pitiful thing I have seen was the current president of the United States, asked by an interviewer if he is obligated to follow the rulings of the Supreme Court and to obey the Constitution, responding, “I don’t know.” –What was that oath of office again?

 

Well, he still has his supporters (where do they get their news?), but he has royally ticked off Catholics around the world for posting an AI image of himself as pope, and Lutheran bishops in this country have come together with an official statement calling him a ”danger” to religion in America. Sadly, he is not the only danger to our country, since almost the entire Republican Party has been body-snatched by the Project 2025 crowd….

A couple of facts:

Less than 1% of the U.S. population identifies as trans. Nonbinary is a real thing, though not the statistical norm. Information is readily available for those not afraid to educate themselves. You might begin here. 

As for crimes, the Biden Administration never had an “open border,” and as for fentynal coming into the country at our southern border, 80% of people arrested with the illegal drug are American citizens. Immigration is not a primary factor in illegal drugs entering the country, says the Cato Institute. See more information here. 

Issues of gender and immigration, however, are guaranteed to stir fear and are intentionally used by the Republican Party to activate their base. (Immigrants have been a convenient political diversion and punching bag for as long as our country has been in existence.) Meanwhile, far-reaching dangers are pushed to the margins by sensationalism: 

Married women who have changed their names, although citizens all their lives, will have a much harder time voting; cuts are being made daily to government programs that benefit and protect veterans, children, and elderly Americans; the American military is being turned into an offensive force, rather than simply defending our country; the richest men in the world will, if they get their way—and under the current administration, who can doubt they will get their way?—benefit from mammoth tax cuts, burdens of those cuts falling on the majority of non-wealthy Americans; the president is planning a parade on his birthday that will cost tens of millions of dollars, at the same time that he posts an AI-generated image of himself on social media as POPE; and our poor, politically battered though materially wealthy country, once a beacon of liberty around the world, has become a pariah state. THESE ARE REAL AND PRESENT DANGERS!

So by all means, MAGA folks, focus your attention on foreign drug dealers and trans Americans, and let the autocrats steal our freedom and destroy the common good while you're looking the other way, if that’s what you want. I only ask you to please open your eyes and see clearly just what you are doing! 

 

 

At the same time—

 

Take a deep breath! Ordinary life in the hinterlands goes on. New books appear, old ones bob to the surface, spring wildflowers appear, work demands attention at home and in Northport, and the days grow longer and lighter and, although erratically, gradually warmer. Today is Monday, and I planted radish and chard seeds, while blissfully innocent (ignorant?) dog girls and boys continue to have fun. Bless their hearts!!!

Spring is here, and if you're reading this, you're alive! So happy cinco de mayo, friends!

Days of Distraction

Sticking to business isn’t always easy during the distracting holiday season. Add to the usual seasonal distractions all the political furor of 2016, and you have a recipe for scattered attention. But when loyal downstate customers turn to their Up North bookseller for holiday gifts, that bookseller has to come through, and I’ve been happy to oblige, along with filling requests and queries from closer to home. And for those looking for gift ideas, I’ve tried to come up with a few original thoughts, aesthetic, historical, and inspirational. Board books for little ones have been big sellers this year. I can hardly keep them in stock!

Once our pack turns toward home, however, my thoughts turn to welcome domestic distractions: what to fix for supper and what book to settle in with afterward. One of three different books I’m reading at home these evenings is The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, the story of a fifteenth-century hunter (“perhaps the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance”) of ancient classical manuscripts and how his rediscovery of On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, influenced the course of Western thought from then until now. I loved the way The Swerve began with the author’s happening on and purchasing a copy of Lucretius for its cover illustration and only later, opening the pages, falling in love with the text of a work previously unknown to him. Serendipity! The thrill of used books! Oh, lovely distractions!

Our weather here Up North has turned very cold. Last night and all day today the wind has been fierce, with a forecast is for big storms tonight, possibly delivering as much as ten inches of snow to cover our still-bare (as of this afternoon) cold ground. The Christmas tree in Northport has already looked good but will look even better with snow on the branches.

Can You Score Higher Than a Goldfish?

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. 

-      Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 1770

The quote above appears on the dust jacket front cover of Tony Judt’s book, Ill Fares the Land, which takes its title from Goldsmith. Judt made the point more prosaically:

This is still the case. It is the growing inequality in and between societies that generates so many social pathologies. They generate internal division and, sooner or later, internal strife—usually with undemocratic outcomes. 

-      Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010)

Not much over 200 pages, with short chapters and generous page margins, Judt’s book can be read in a relatively short time. The catch is that it must be read attentively. As always with this writer's work, his encyclopedic knowledge, skillful synthesis, and a superlative command of the English language demand -- and deserve -- focused reading.

The other day I began drafting a blog post that grew and grew to unwieldy length, an alarming and self-defeating result since my topic was reading attention span, distractions, and multitasking! How could I hope to hold anyone’s attention for that long with my own poor words on a screen? So here’s only a bit from the beginning of what yesterday's word avalanche-in-draft:

---

How do you or I compare to a goldfish when attention spans are compared? (The site says “gold fish,” two words, but the color of the fish, as I’m sure we all agree, is irrelevant. Red fish, blue fish, one fish....) The answer might surprise you. But then, upon reflection, you may also think, as I did: How many things does a goldfish have to pay attention to, anyway? How many distractions typically divert the attention of a goldfish from its usual focus (whatever that may be)?

Pursuing my own questions about attention spans, I gleaned from another online site these four points directly relevant to multitasking:

Multitasking reduces level of performance.

Studies find individual variation in concentration amid distractions, but everyone’s overall performance declines below a fairly low multitasking level.

The more adept a brain at excluding distractions, the better the memory, the more learning.

When distracted, we rely on “habit memory” rather than on processing new information.

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I’ll stop there. Much of what I went on to write had to do with new scientific information and how ill-equipped are most Americans, even those who think of their perspective as very “scientific,” to evaluate the findings presented in mainstream media. Maybe that’s a topic for another time.

Today, however, I’ll simply close with a lament for all the young people – for all the Americans, young and old, but especially for the young, the audience Judt hoped to reach -- who will never read Ill Fares the Land or other similarly thoughtful books that go beyond the shallow “two sides” of what passes for political debate in the United States today. Beyond labels, beyond slogans, there is a wealth of history and educated, intelligent, carefully considered opinion that would inform us and enrich our national conversation. Tony Judt was one of those voices, and, while he is no longer among us, we still have his books. Hearing what he had to say, however, demands that we take a break from multitasking and engage with his thought in a focused way. This one small book is both deep and dense. For this reason, it is demanding reading.

The thing is, when you close a book like this, you’ll go on thinking about the ideas in it for a long time.