What will I practice this year?

"What's up, Momma?"

 Whatever you practice

grows stronger.

 

Those five words stopped me in my mental tracks. They’re from a little book called Radical Compassion, by Tara Brach. A practice is intentional, whereas a habit is often unconscious, but in either case repetition creates a groove.

 

(1)       Only yesterday I was looking at the pages of my very first sketchbook, given to me by the Artist Christmas of 2004. It came in a wooden box (with carrying handle) that also contained pencils of all kinds, watercolors, brushes, and pastels. Trying out the pencils that first morning took courage on my part, but even in this first book, before any classes, there are a few drawings made as time went by that I see now as “not awful.” (Many, admittedly, are pretty lame.) Much more importantly, for each one I see, I recall the place, the day, the circumstances, such that together they constitute a kind of visual diary stretching from 2005 to 2010, many entries from winter months in Florida. More than does a photo album – because a drawing takes so much longer to produce – they bring the past back to me and give me pleasure. And so I inch slowly, in thought and preparation, back into my once-daily practice of drawing, a way of recording the ordinary stuff of my everyday life.

2006

2009

Big jump here. 

us

 

(2)       Giving and loving, in thought and action, is a practice for which my marriage was a school, and now that the Artist is no longer with me, I have been consciously and intentionally expanding outward that small,  personal world. How far can my loving intentions reach?This thought will connect to others (perhaps) in what follows.

 

(3)       In general, over my lifetime, humor has not usually been my first response to anything (and I can be obtusely literal at times), but lately I’m finding it a better response than my habitual reactions to a lot of situations. Instead of leaping to argue or withdrawing to brood, my slower response (because I am not a fast thinker) is gentle and often leads me to laugh at myself. Because whether or not another person intends to say or do something cruel or dismissive or presumptuous – and often they don’t intend that! – if I don’t feel I deserve it, why would I want to take it on and feel bad and launch an angry exchange? Or silently hold a grudge? If the other is speaking or acting from such a negative space, isn’t that just sad? Don’t they need, maybe, reassurance? At least a smile! – I don’t know. I’m just today beginning to work through these thoughts. (Note: Snippy or smart-ass humor would only be anger in disguise. Not what I’m talking about.)

 

Back to the drawing board

Drawing, giving and loving, laughing are all practices I’ve chosen to focus on in this new year. The last one on my list, (4) forgiveness, is the biggest challenge of all for me, but I am hoping that the others will help me get there. BLTN. Better Late Than Never. Mieux tard que jamais.

 

My bookstore Christmas tree dropped almost all its needles at once, making procrastination not an option for taking the tree down and putting away the ornaments, and that in turn cleared space in the front window to showcase other green plants, living plants, which received a much-needed beauty treatment, ridding them of dead leaves and cutting back where needed. Having live things indoors with me helps on these gloomy-skied January days.

Window greens

Because yes, the sky is grey, and the days are dreary and cold. “Do you miss Arizona?” someone asked. Mornings in the mountains of the Southwest aren’t much warmer than northern Michigan mornings, but I do miss the almost daily appearance of the Arizona sun and the way it brought the temperature up considerably by afternoon. So, the sun. And the mountains. I miss the mountains.

“When you were in Arizona, did you miss Michigan?” No, I said, because I knew I would be coming back to Leelanau in May. I didn’t have to miss Arizona in summers past, either, when I could count on returning to the mountains in winter. Life is different now. But it’s okay. I am not unhappy about where I am. This is my beautiful home, and when we finally get more snow, it will be even more beautiful. Update: It's Saturday, and it's snowing!

 

Only the beginning -'

There are exciting aspects to 2024 Michigan winter bookstore life, too. For one thing, the long-awaited release date for Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, draws near! As the buzz builds, my impatience grows! Meanwhile, in addition to the Tara Brach book quoted at the top of this post, I am rereading one of my favorite Walter Mosley novels, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (a book I find absolutely perfect) and have read William L. Andrews, the editor’s, introduction to a paperback edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, a novel (yes) by James Weldon Johnson that I will jump into as soon as I reach the last page of Mosley. Finally, from the Grath collection of river books, I most recently chose to read (or re-read? I don’t remember) a book titled Little Rivers: A Book of Essays in Profitable Idleness, by Henry van Dyke. Obviously, a book with such a title is not one to race through, so I read the preface and first chapter and then slid it back in its place, to pull out again perhaps on Sunday afternoon. 

 

Many more thoughts percolating about enchantment and right and left brain stuff, but I will keep those for another day. 

To be continued....

Rain, Weeds, Books, Lists, Laughter

Beautiful custom outdoor table cover by Dolls & More

Rain and Weeds

We finally got a bit more rain. Not enough, but better than none. On Wednesday evening I finally began digging up spotted knapweed, having ignored its invasion for too long in my fixation on the larger and more obvious autumn olive. Both are plants that want to take over the world (at least here in northern Michigan), and while autumn olive grows to be a massive shrub and knapweed dies back every fall, both are tenacious and create a circle of death around them as they grow. Spotted knapweed turns Leelanau hills a beautiful lavender color in late summer, and bees enjoy it and produce delicious honey from their foraging, but left on its own it creates a nasty monoculture, with no room for the colorful diversity of native plants, and so, like autumn olive, knapweed is a plant I want to discourage as much as possible around my old farmhouse.

Clearing the way to my apple trees....

The rain started Wednesday evening. I don’t know how much fell during the night, but Thursday morning arrived wet and refreshingly cool. The temperature and humidity reminded me of a September vacation week the Artist and I enjoyed once on Manitoulin Island, but I got a grip on the reminiscing and told myself that the rain would make weeding easier – and since I didn’t have to water my gardens (rain having done that), I spent a productive hour with long-handled weed digger and spade, with many a pause to launch a tennis ball for Sunny with the Chuckit!©️. The fact that I kept busy otherwise with my weeding encouraged her to bring the ball and drop it at my feet (to get my attention), rather than keeping it to herself and grabbing it away when I reached for it, in her customary teasing way. Every day she learns a little more about cooperative play. 

(Sunny on a sunnier day)

Meanwhile, In the Garden

First monarda (bee balm)

Embryonic daisy

Hibiscus and turtlehead awaiting their entrance

Little chrysanthemum jumps the gun

Red daylilies coming along

Vegetables and herbs

Porch table sweet peas

 

Second Quarterly Report, 2023

Since the June page has already been torn off the calendar, it’s time for me to list books I’ve read in the past three months, April through June, and here they are: 

 

59. Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh (fiction)

60.             Logsdon, Gene. The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (nonfiction)

61.             Angelou, Maya. The Heart of a Woman (nonfiction)

62.             McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood(nonfiction)

63.             Sprigle, Ray. In the Land of Jim Crow (nonfiction)

64.             Bellow, Saul. Herzog (fiction)

65.             Salinger, J.D. Catcher In the Rye (fiction)

66.             Williams, Florence. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (nonfiction)

67.             Queen, Ellery. Cat of Many Tails (fiction)

68.             Backman, Fredrik. Anxious People (fiction)

69.             Lamott, Anne. Hard Laughter (fiction)

70.             ]Horowitz, Alexandra. The Year of the Puppy (nonfiction)

71.             Queen, Ellery. The Scarlet Letters (fiction)

72.             Jance, J. A. Nothing to Lose (fiction)

73.             Smith, Betty. Maggie-Now (fiction)

74.             Tyler, Anne. Noah’s Compass (fiction)

75.             Davis, Kyra, trans. (English to French) by Alice Boucher. Crimes, passion & talons aiguilles (fiction)

76.             Hubbard, Harlan. Payne Hollow (nonfiction)

77.             Tyler, Anne. A Beginner’s Goodbye (fiction)

78.             Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love (nonfiction)

79.             Darkshire, Oliver. Once Upon a Tome (nonfiction)

80.             Weinstein, Lawrence. Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us(nonfiction)

81.             Bellow, Saul. The Theft (fiction)

82.             Harper, Michele. The Beauty in Breaking (nonfiction)

83.             Springer, Tom. The Star in the Sycamore (nonfiction)

84.             Ozeki, Ruth. The Face: A Time Code (nonfiction)

85.             Harrison, Jim. Sorcier (fiction – Warlock in French translation)

86.             Harding, Paul. Tinkers (fiction)

87.             Frank, Michael. One Hundred Saturdays (nonfiction)

88.             Ingall, Marjorie & Susan McCarthy. Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (nonfiction)

89.             Raphael, Lev. Assault with a Deadly Lie (fiction)

90.             Bloom, Stephen B. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality (nonfiction)

91.             Underhill, Robert. One Cold Coffee (fiction) 

Sweet peas and bachelor buttons

Books That Have Made Me Laugh Out Loud

This might be a hazardous list to make public -- one person’s belly laugh is another person’s groan, after all -- but I’ll chance it. Just for laughs. In no particular order, then --

 

Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods: David and I laughed so much over this book that “Big mistake!” became one of our favorite code phrases.

 

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: If someone had told me this was a funny book, I would have read it years before I did.

 

Richard Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Just thinking of a certain sentence in this book makes me laugh. (It’s near the top of a left-hand page.)

 

Abigail Thomas’s A Three Dog Life: Her observations on parenthood at the beginning hooked me right away.

 

Gogol’s Dead Souls: The conceit (in old-fashioned sense) of this novel, left unfinished by its author, cracks me up every time. 

 

Matt Cook’s In the Small of My Backyard: --Which is poetry!

 

Helene Hanff’s Underfoot in Show Business: Stage-struck young woman goes to New York City in the 1930s with big dreams. How could this not provide laughs?

Goofy girl! She always makes me laugh!

“Toujours gai” -- and Snow at Last!

Friday morning surprise

archy seeks to vary his diet

I’d been up since six o’clock, smiling over Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel, the antics of two transmigrated souls, one formerly a free verse poet, the other Cleopatra, now embodied respectively in the forms of a cockroach and an alley cat. The stories come directly from archy, still a poet but now also a necessarily resourceful little cockroach who can only pound out his adventures and reflections by jumping on one typewriter key at a time, landing on his head with all the force of his little body. Unable to work the shift key, he makes do without capital letters and punctuation.

boss i am disappointed in 

some of your readers they 

are always asking how does 

archy work the shift so as to get a 

new line or how does archy do 

this or do that they 

are always interested in technical 

details when the main question is 

whether the stuff is  

literature or not

Now inhabiting a cockroach’s body, archy has a new view of life: i see things from the under side now

But it is mehitabel the cat who so often steals the show. While protesting that she is “always a lady” and “toujours gai,” mehitabel’s amorous adventures take place within a perilous life of want and near-starvation, and she is not above tearing the ear off some tomcat who promises her luxury and then fails to stand and deliver. Neither do periodic litters of kittens cramp mehitabel’s style for long. She knows she will end on a garbage scow, but until then,

i never sing blue 

wotthehell bill 

believe me you 

i never sing blue 

there s a dance or two 

in the old dame still 

i never sing blue  

wotthehell bill

Underneath the humor and courage of these entertaining characters is the pathos of life in the America of World War I, Prohibition, the stock market crash, and subsequent Great Depression. In “pity the poor spiders,” archy is saddened by roach exterminators and shares the sad tale of a spider who bitterly lament the advent of flyswatters:

curses on these here swatters 

what kills off all the flies 

for me and my little daughters 

unless we eats we dies

The mother spider’s mate, “lured off by a centipede,”  made no excuses for abandoning his family but said only as he left them, “tis wrong but i ll get a feed.”

The cockroach makes do with apple parings left in the newspaperman’s wastebasket but pleads for “a crumb of bread” sometime, while mehitabel’s adventures are as much about food as art or love. In one particularly haunting piece the cat, now with one frozen, crippled paw and nowhere warm to sleep, must dance all night.

whirl mehitabel whirland 

show your shadow how  

tonight it s dance with the bloody moon 

tomorrow the garbage scow  

… 

whirl mehitabel whirl 

leap shadow leap 

you gotta dance till the sun comes up 

for you got no place to sleep

mehitabel remains "toujours gai"

I can’t help wondering if the social commentary aspect reached many comfortable, well-fed readers at the time these pieces first appeared. Illustrations by George Herriman, the creator of “Krazy Kat,” undoubtedly contributed to the reception of archy and mehitabel as comic characters — which, of course, they are, and that implies no contradiction.

As I said at the beginning, though, I was up early, reading, while darkness still surrounded the cabin, and when I finished my book and looked out the windows, what a surprise! We’d only been expecting a rainy day and maybe some snow up on the peaks. Instead, peaks are hidden from view, and snow blankets every twig. Snow is all around us.

wotthehell - as mehitabel would say. archy would add, in words rather than sign, exclamation mark

Morning Thoughts on Shandeism

“Heat is in proportion to the want of true knowledge.” 

“…that chapters relieve the mind….” 

- Laurence Stern, TRISTRAM SHANDY

After a morning on snowshoes and a couple sessions snow shoveling, I was too worn out to meet with my reading circle. I hope hope they had a rowdy, cheerful, Shandeish evening, and I look forward to hearing about it! This morning, strength recovered, I was looking at dog-eared pages of my Tristram Shandy to see what passages (other than the short snippets above) particularly caught my mind, snagged my attention like burrs in a dog’s coat and still need twisting out. (Stern is contagious, isn’t he?) Chapter 21 of Book Three is one such:

— Inconsistent soul that man is! — languishing under wounds, which he has the power to heal! — his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge! — his reason, that precious gift of God to him — (Instead of pouring in oil) serving but to sharpen his sensibilities — to multiply his pains, and render him more melancholy and uneasy under them! 

These observations relate directly and literally to Tristram’s father and the broken door hinge, but the wider application is clear, not only for his father but for all the world. Steve asked me on the phone about “lessons” Sterne gives us. Surely this is one! When the power to heal our wounds lies in our own hands, we should pour on the oil! Continuing to suffer needlessly — even using our mental powers to increase our suffering (“sharpen his sensibilities”) — is a refusal of God’s gift to us of knowledge. Sigh! I’m afraid I am particularly guilty of this foolishness when awake in the wee dark hours. Ah, the inconsistent soul!

The very end of Book Four contains the passage I referred to in a previous blog post but hadn’t the patience to go back to find at that time. Sterne tells us what Shandeism is and how it 

opens the heart and lungs…, forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely through its channels, makes the wheel of life fun long and cheerfully round. 

It is in the next paragraph that he describes the kingdom he would choose, if choose he might: “a kingdom of merry laughing subjects.” He adds that, in this kingdom of his, the subjects should be “as wise as they are merry” (not using their reason to multiply their pains, I take it), which would make him “the happiest monarch, and they the happiest people under heaven.” In a way, I think you might say that readers of the book, while they are engaged in reading it, are the merry laughing subjects Sterne imagined, that in his novel he has created his kingdom for our happiness. Does this seem too large a claim? I think it is what I felt as I began to enter the spirit of the book and looked forward every night to re-entering its world. Steve asked what I most enjoyed in the novel, and that is my considered answer this morning.

Finally, there is a long, long section titled the author’s “Preface” (though it appears between Chapters 20 and 21 of Book Three!) that addresses the author’s intention in a different manner, placing it more directly in contrast to the foolishness of the “civilized” world — but here allow me, like Sterne, to interrupt myself, because I turned back from the Preface to the Introduction to see what light Cedric Watts might shed on a part of the book that seems so important to me, and there I was grievously disappointed! 

Why my second reading of the Introduction by Watts disappointed me: It had seemed so helpful before I read the novel, and so it is in terms of literary history, but as I go back to it now I find his analysis of the novel itself tedious and often downright clumsy. For example, he goes on and on about ‘frustrated or impeded communication’ and ’threatened potency,’ and he seems to feel the need to translate ‘hobby-horses’ for us! How insulting! And how peculiar is this passage: 

He [Sterne] frequently addresses the reader, who is variously regarded as female, male, and multiple….

Well, for heaven’s sake! Why would the author not imagine such a variety of readers?

Back to the Preface, though (which begins on page 85 of our Wordsworth Editions paperback). Sterne begins by referring to wit and judgment: all that the Creator gave him of both he intended to put into this book. Next he quotes his critics and imagines all of them, himself included, writing with every possible particle of wit and judgment. “Bless us! — what noble work we should make!” But no, on second thought he realizes that with the flowing of so much wit “we should never agree amongst ourselves” and thus would issue “nothing but mischief among us….” Ah, but then the fountain of judgment would surely mend all the discord!

From page133 on I grow dizzy! Musicians and artists, statesmen, physicians, judges, clergy — all writing books, all blessed with every possible drop of wit and judgment! What a nightmare! — We may skip to the analogy of the two knobs on the back of the chair frame, the most ornamental parts of the chair. Well, of course they are Wit and Judgment (what else could they be?), and one knob without the other, the author writes, would look ridiculous, so it is better to be without both than to have one and lack the other. Poor John Locke! Did he lack wit? Do we truly judge those most lacking in wit to be graced with the highest judgment?

Well, not Richard Sterne, that's for sure. No one can say that he lacks wit -- or judgment, either. His wit shows us where our judgment fails — e.g., not fixing that door hinge! — and his judgment reminds us that wit will restore our merriment and keep us happy and well balanced, despite the idiocies of the world.

*****

[Note to Facebook friends wondering about realism and how it differs from other kinds of fiction: In this regard, the Introduction by Cedric Watts is very helpful. Watts traces the development of the novel back to comic and satiric literature, then sees the branching off of realism and romance (two distinct strains), with clear distinctions between Richardson’s didactic realism and Fielding’s satire. Tristram Shandy jumps the realism fence over and over: “In Tristram Shandy, both the inner, fictional world of the narrative (telling of the characters’ inter-actions) and its outer, discursive world  (In which the narrator parades his personality and narratorial difficulties to us)” — well, then, here Watts gets back into his ’threatened potency theme,’ a theme he claims connects the fictional and the discursive, but you see by the two worlds of Tristram Shandy is not a novel in the strict realist tradition. When we read a realist novel, we enter into its world; Sterne continually reminds us that he is making up that world as he goes along. Does that help? Please remember that I was never an English major! And please any proof-reading errors, too!] 

Out in the Country, But Far From Dead

The lines of the Scottish poem came into my head as I waited for my screen to come to life.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead 

Who never to himself has said 

      This is my own, my native land!

Okay, that was a digression. Couldn't resist. Back on track now.

I don’t generally underline in books. But when it's an old 60-cent paperback, and someone else has already underlined a lot in it and spilled coffee on the cover, and when the pages are literally falling out, for Pete’s sake – then I feel completely free to underline to my heart’s content.

Our reading circle’s latest self-assignment was Gogol’s Dead Souls, a book I’ve read more than once before but always enjoy re-reading, because just as you can't step into the same river twice, a book is always a new experience each time you enter its world. 

This time around I was very conscious of the ways Gogol refuses to keep to any recognized literary formula. Not only is Chichikov an anti-hero, but the author himself keeps intruding into the narrative to remind us of his characters’ failings (not just Chichikov, all the characters) and to plead for our sympathy. He mourns, in particular, the negative reception his protagonist is sure to find among critics and general public and how that will all bounce back on him, the author. Oh, poor me! An author such as I, “who dares to bring all that he sees into the open,” is much to be pitied!

All those things that an indifferent eye fails to notice—all the slimy marsh of petty occurrences into which we sink, all the multitude of splintered everyday characters who swarm along the drab, often painful road of life—he shows them clearly in relief, thanks to the power of his merciless chisel, so that the whole world may view them. This author will not receive world-wide acclaim, nor will he see tears of gratitude or feel the unanimous enthusiasm of hearts he has stirred; no sixteen-year-old girl will throw herself at him, giddy with admiration for her hero; it is not for such as he to become drunk at the sweet sound of his own words; and, of course, he cannot avoid trial by his contemporaries, a hypocritical, unfeeling court, which will pronounce the characters he has created with such care insignificant and vile, will assign him a dishonorable place among authors who have insulted mankind, will ascribe to him the traits of his own characters, and will rob him of his heart and soul and of the divine flame of talent. This is so because his contemporaries will not recognize that microscopes ... are just as wonderful as telescopes....

“I’m showing the world as it is, people as they are, and of course I’ll pay the price for my honesty!” the author complains bitterly. Do you feel sorry for him, or are you laughing?

I laughed. Somehow in the context of the novel -- and though passages like these leave the story to one side for as long as they last, and so are not really “in the context of the novel” – somehow even these passages come through time as comedy, as if Gogol, dressed as a clown, pushes Chichikov off-stage for a few minutes, takes center stage himself, and cries the tears of a clown for a laughing audience before going over to drag Chichikov back into the spotlight.

George Lucas, of “Star Wars” fame, says he quite consciously followed the structure of Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero's journey: Departure, initiation, return. With Gogol, on the contrary, we meet the anti-hero Chichikov already well launched into his journey. He is no longer young. His quest is absurd. Only after ten chapters of misadventures does the author give us Chichikov’s background, the story of his childhood, youth, adult trials, and the inspiration for his journey. “Departure” is the final chapter of the book! And the journey is not over, either, when the book has been closed. Gogol intended Dead Souls as the first book in a trilogy. He completed one of the sequels but burned it before he died. 

It’s difficult to see what Chichikov would have done for two more volumes and what kind of conclusion the author could have found for his tale. No matter, I say. I find this novel ever so much funnier and more believable and satisfying than Gogol’s famous short stories.

There is another story formula that Dead Souls does not fit. -- In fact, as many formulae as there are, it’s a safe bet that Dead Souls fits none of them, but the one I have in mind was laid out by Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher mystery novels, in a talk he gave in Traverse City at the National Writers Series. Here’s the formula: There is a town with a problem it cannot solve. A stranger arrives. He solves the problem and is rewarded. Think of the riddle of the Sphinx, which no one could answer until Oedipus appeared on the scene.

Well, Chichikov comes to town as a stranger, but the village where he lands had no obvious problem before his arrival. It's a place where nothing much seems to happen at all, which is why everyone is so delighted to welcome a stranger. But then Chichikov's bizarre, incomprehensible business deals get everyone stirred everyone up and give rise to even more bizarre speculations until all hell breaks loose! And far from laying to rest the fears he has produced, Chichikov is lucky to escape with his own skin!

As he did in his short stories, Gogol again trots out generalizations and stereotypes –

The haven was familiar, just as the inn was – the kind of provincial inn where, for two rubles a day, a traveler can get a quiet room, with cockroaches peeking out of every corner like raisins....

-- but with his own distinctive, remarkable additions, e.g., those cockroaches “like raisins”! Stinginess, he tells us, has “a wolf’s appetite and grows hungrier the ore it devours.” And who can forget the picture of Plewshkin, with his black eyes like darting mice!

In a way, Chichikov and his quest to acquire “dead souls” – that is, to acquire, by purchase or outright gift, deeds showing him as the owner of serfs who have, in fact, died since the last census, relieving the seller of the tax liability and gaining for himself, he hopes, collateral that will qualify him for a generous government loan – serve as a scaffolding on which Gogol builds the portrait of a pre-Revolutionary rural Russian village. Looked at it this way, the village is the main character of the novel.

I don’t know. I need to think further about this. Actually, I’ll run it by the others in the reading circle and see what they think. But be honest now -- weren't you relieved to find a literary topic rather than a political topic here today? 

Earth keeps turning, sun keeps shining....