Deer Season, Among Books

Another morning through the windshield

 

Oh, baby, it’s cold out there!

 

Donuts are disappearing earlier in the morning, and you are apt to hear gunshots as soon as the sun is up. It’s firearm deer season! Time to keep your dog leashed and to wear some blaze orange yourself. Question: Why is it called blaze orange? Why not just orange? Anyone know?

Field corn harvest is underway in Leelanau Township. Many trees have been wind-stripped of their leaves by now, but you can go over to Karen Casebeer’s blog to see the remaining rich browns of oak leaves, and I’ll give my own pitch here for beech leaves, which also hang on after maples and other trees are bare. Sometimes leaves on very young beeches stay attached all winter long, thinning as the season wears on.

 

This is not a podcast.

 

This is not my bookstore.
It's a photo (of my bookstore).

Someone who still reads bound books printed on paper, still handwrites letters to friends and family, does not have TV, has never had a dishwasher (and feels no need for one) – it should not surprise you that such a person is not sufficiently up-to-date to produce a podcast, but you don’t need to see me, anyway. Or, should you want to see me, you are welcome to visit my bookstore. I’m presently here five days a week and plan to be here four days a week through the long, cold northern Michigan winter. Otherwise, what I have to share in a public forum I will share on this old-fashioned platform.

 

Isn’t it frightening how quickly our innovative, cutting-edge modes of communication become old-fashioned? Blogs are not yet completely obsolete, however, and I’m comfortable here. Web + log = blog, a kind of ship’s log that has no need of an ocean, a diary of sorts that anyone may read. Quite public enough for me.

 

 

This is not a Substack.

 

That’s where the action is these days: Substack. Professional writers, professional journalists, counselors, historians, and other professionals of every stripe can all be found on Substack. Friends have suggested I jump on board, but I am content to keep my amateur status. Should I ever write a book, I’ll do what I can to see that it sells, but in the ephemeral world of the blogosphere I don’t ask anyone to subscribe and pay. My paid gig is that of bookseller.

 

 

Writing Letters: Not a Paid Gig, Either

 

My family has always been a family of letter-writers. Back in the days when telephone calls were divided into “local” and “long distance,” frugality dictated written correspondence, except for holidays and birth and death announcements. “Getting the mail” is still, for me, an errand brimming with possibility, and I take pleasure also in popping a stamped envelope into the mail slot, addressed to a friend or a sister, anticipating the recipient’s surprise and delight. 

Love this postmark! Love USPS!

[Note to self: Write more notes and letters soon! You are falling behind!] 

 

My posts here on this blog are a form of letters, too, stuffed into metaphorical bottles and thrown out onto a metaphorical sea, not addressed to any one particular person but intended for anyone who finds them interesting enough to read.

 

 

Old Friends and New

 

More than once here, I have mourned the passing of old friends, and today I want to make clear that my sadness over those losses is no reflection on newer friends! “No one replaces anyone else,” a dear old friend remarked years ago, and I have never forgotten her words. No one can ever take the place she filled in my life and still holds in my heart, but my new friends have found their own places. The silver and the gold....

 

Not the morning I expected

 

On Monday, my day to accomplish tasks and errands that don’t fit in with days I’m at my bookshop, the weather was cold, the sky grey. On Sunday, the strong, bitter wind had made it difficult for me to stay as long at the dog park as Sunny wanted to stay, but she deserved some fun, so I stuck it out. Now on Monday morning my first task of the day was to load snow tires into the back of my car so I could take them to the garage and have them mounted for the season ahead. Then, what would I do with myself while the car was up on the hoist? Van’s Garage opens at 8 a.m., but the library in Leland doesn’t open until 10. Trish’s Dishes was the answer to my dilemma, and I was the first customer in the day, six minutes after they opened at 8:30.

Good coffee. Warm, quiet atmosphere. Delicious breakfast burrito filled with vegetables and melting cheese, with a couple slices of melon on the side. My own little table up in the front corner, where I could look out and remember when my friend Ellen had her garden business and she and I planted daylilies in front of what was then her husband Bob Pisor’s Stone House Bread. Book to read, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Goldstein, not a book that would be everyone’s cup of tea but one I was finding delightful. A morning I had been dreading unexpectedly delivered bliss!

 

The Vienna Circle, of which Gödel was one of the youngest members, invited Ludwig Wittgenstein to join them, but he kept his distance. Probably just as well. Members of the circle never grasped the significance in incompleteness that Gödel himself saw there, and Wittgenstein was similarly misunderstood. In question for both were the limits of language and whether or not those limits are also the limits of human knowledge. Goldstein contrasts the two misunderstood geniuses, Wittgenstein the dramatically tormented and Gödel the silent, reticent sufferer, and the two men live in her pages. 

 

Bliss! Except for the empty tables, I might have been back in the Daily Grind coffeehouse in Urbana, Illinois, but besides the lack of other intently studious customers there was also the happy circumstance that I didn’t have to take notes and could simply enjoy my reading. I almost laughed out loud over Goldstein’s description of the way the Vienna Circle members, “sworn enemies of cognitive bewitchment,” worshipped Wittgenstein. I had a little taste of that in graduate school. A Wittgenstein study group (at the home of one of the professors) was practically a cult gathering, where LW’s texts were the sacred scripture, never challenged, although at times a member of the congregation would admit to being “puzzled” by a particular passage. ("Puzzlement" was permitted.) Following discussion, an acolyte served tea. All very formal and esoteric and refined and oh, so English! No, I was much more comfortable and much happier with my book and breakfast burrito and coffee, all by myself, a philosophe fauve, as my friend Annie once termed the two of us, both by that time far from the halls of academe....

 

After a heavenly two hours with my book, walking back to retrieve my car I encountered the only fly in the morning’s ointment, because what is more maddening than the roar of a leaf-blower? The roar of three leaf-blowers!!! Soon back in my car, however, armed against the future with snow tires, with beautiful guitar music playing as I drove toward home, I was eager to share a joyful time with Sunny Juliet by taking her to the dog park for the second day in a row, where I was glad to find the wind not quite as horrifically strong and cold as it had been the day before. 

"Wanna play?"

"Yes!"

 

More of the blaze orange story.

 

Its other name is “safety orange,” and the point is to make oneself (or one’s dog) highly visible against a brown leaf background or snow or blue sky, which we had pretty much already figured out, right? The other advantage of orange for hunters is that it’s not a color deer can see. They see blue and green, but orange to them just looks brown or grey. Okay, that makes sense, too. 

 

Here's another factoid new to me: “Caltrans orange” (no apostrophe, for some reason) is the name for the color as given by the California Department of Transportation for their construction zones and equipment. It’s easier to see in rain or fog than other colors, apparently. 

 

An article in the Paris Review, sharing from a book by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, On Color, gives more background, not on the blaze designation but on orange itself as a color term. Before the fruit came to Europe in the 17^th century, Europeans used yellow-red as the color term. In the 1960s people started calling it hunter orange, thanks to an article in Field & Stream. 

What color would you call this?

Safety orange, hunter orange, Caltrans orange, OSHA orange, the color is government regulated, but nothing I’ve turned up explains why we so often call it blaze orange. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Safety first!

My Concerns: Independence and Independent Access

Today’s post is a sequel to the one preceding, as I continue musing on the value of handwriting. I will try very hard not to beg the question or to exaggerate the case to be made in favor of cursive script. I'm also including some sunny winter scenes to sweeten the pot.

Why do we put a high value on health, other than the fact that being sick is usually no fun at all? Aside from the yucky aspects of illness, don’t we also love to feel strong and healthy, in large part, because it means we can do things for ourselves, because we’re not dependent on others when we’re healthy? Getting old brings changes much more serious and unwelcome than wrinkles and sags, white hair and dry skin. There is the inevitable losing of strength and energy, the dreaded “slowing down” -- in short, not being able to do all the things one took for granted when young and strong. That’s what makes old age such a drag!

And human independence goes way beyond the physical. Americans generally consider a driver’s license, a valid passport, plenty of money, and freedom from debt as possessions and states to be desired. Being grounded as a teenager, going to jail or prison as an adult – the punishment in each case is loss of freedom and the curtailment of choices – but crushing student debt, burdensome mortgages, and payments on credit cards and/or new cars also place restrictions on independence.

Are you with me so far?

Okay, how about this: I can’t help believing that real, sustainable, and continued intellectual independence and efficacy demand an ability to function in the absence of electronic devices. I’m not arguing against ever using the devices. How could I do that and not be a complete hypocrite, given that I composed this essay on a laptop device and uploaded it to the Internet? My argument is, rather, that we should not become so dependent on them that we are helpless when the power goes out. We need basic competencies.

For a long time, parents and grandparents have been worrying that children relying on calculators are not learning basic skills in arithmetic. Well, why should they? They have calculators, so why should they bother calculating in their heads or on paper? Isn’t learning to do that a waste of valuable time?

Math skills make a good subject for me to defend because math was always my weakest academic subject. If I could, I would have avoided it altogether after third grade.

But now, as an independent adult, I don’t have to trust blindly in a cash register total or what a clerk tells me “the computer says,” because I can estimate the cost of my selected items before I got in line. I don’t even have to take a calculator with me to the store and hope the battery doesn’t go dead, either, because I learned addition and subtraction, multiplication tables, and estimating (that last, for me, the most difficult) back in my school days. I do it in my head. Estimating did not come naturally to me, and my math anxiety, supplemented by innate stubbornness, resisted it for a long time. Why look for approximate answers when I could do the calculation and get an exact number? Now I estimate on a daily basis and am thankful to have the skill. I have three avenues open to me – mental estimating or exact calculation, calculation on paper, or resorting to a calculator. Isn’t that range of possibilities preferable to dependence on the electronic device?

My mother learned shorthand when she was young, and I never did, but I did learn cursive handwriting and also developed my own idiosyncratic abbreviations for note-taking in college and graduate school. Relying on someone else’s notes would have made me very nervous. How could I know another student had understood the lecture or captured all the important points? In all honesty, I admit that I only took a typing class in high school because my parents insisted. Moreover, having that skill as “something to fall back on” – their argument -- worked against me for a long time: I kept falling back into jobs I hated! But finally I got it together to finish an undergraduate degree and go on from there, and being an excellent typist still serves me well.

Touch typing, that is. All fingers employed. One hundred and twenty words a minute. No two-thumbs texting or pathetic hunting-and-pecking with forefingers! 

      

I won’t reiterate here all my reasons for valuing books on paper a topic I’ve covered before (most recently here), but I do apply similar reasons to my case for handwriting. That is, I value it not simply out of nostalgia or because I grew up writing by hand or because ink is retro and cool, but because I can write on paper wherever I am, without an expensive device, without charging cords or batteries, without rare minerals having been extracted from the earth and without sending plastic and worse to landfills, and because I needn’t trust in a “cloud” to store my words or a sophisticated system to transmit them. With pen and paper, I exercise independence.

Blogging would not exist without the Internet, and those of us who participate obviously use electronic devices to share our thoughts. Blogging takes place only by virtue (!) of a virtual world. But my entire life would not be over if my online life came to an end. The truth is, I like being offline at home, and I like being disconnected when I’m out walking with my dog. That, of course, is a matter of preference. Perhaps others would feel their independence – their powers – diminished in the circumstances I find so freeing. I get that. I do.

But that’s my point. I can go back and forth. And that, I think, the ability to live in different worlds, to use different tools and media, as circumstance demands or as preference indicates, is the greatest degree of independence possible.

What does it matter, one of my readers responded (on my Facebook link to the earlier post), the form of communication young people use, handwriting or texting or some other digital means, since all are ways to communicate. True, but to me this is like asking why learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and estimate if you have a calculator. For that matter, given the availability of audio books, why be bothered to read? Why not just listen to someone else doing the reading?

As for me, I’ll listen now and again, but I would certainly not trade literacy for listening. Neither would I give up handwriting (or touch typing) and be confined to poking my fingers and thumbs at a tiny screen.

Here’s another thought: Most Ph.D. programs have traditionally had foreign language requirements. Some gave that up to allow computer “languages” as substitutes, which seems suspect and squirrelly to me in most cases. A language is not, after all, a code. The intention of the original requirement was to ensure an ability to read important texts in their original language; a secondary benefit that comes with second-language acquisition, however, is the realization that many of the concepts we take for granted in our native language are not universal. Different people divide the world up differently. They see the world differently. It’s important to learn that. It’s the difference between learning to converse and read and write and think in a second language and having to rely on a program or “app” to translate for you.

So as far as the ability to read historical documents is concerned, what if future students of history were required to learn cursive handwriting in the same way they might be required to learn Latin or French or Russian? As a specialized professional skill? I can imagine the day, not far in the future:

LANG 350: “Cursive as Foreign Language”

And for many people, if an ability to read historical documents is all that’s at stake, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the vision. Well, here’s what’s wrong with it from my point of view, and it’s the same thing that’s wrong with giving up on learning second languages (or learning to read, for that matter) because “smart” machines can do the work for us:

Having the machines should make our worlds bigger, not smaller; enlarge our access to the world rather, not shrink it; give us greater flexibility and choice and independence. Not stunted brains and overgrown thumbs.

And I’ll stop now to ask, as the scary truck driver asked a hitchhiking friend years ago, in an ominously threatening tone of voice after subjecting her to his extreme political views, “Agree or disagree?”  If you disagree with me, though, that’s fine and dandy, because I’m enjoying thinking about the pros and cons of cursive writing on this winter’s day. It’s a pleasant mental vacation from the season’s national political campaigns and primaries, isn’t it?

Earlier Experiences of Defeat – and One Memorable Victory

Many people expressed fear at the very idea of a spelling bee the first year I tried to get a team together, and many since have shivered at our team's experiences. There are a lot of memories involved in these fears, so I went back to visit some of my own this morning, memories not having to do with spelling victories.

I was my grade school spelling champion in third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, but that doesn’t mean I escaped the experiences of losing and even of outright humiliation. A fast runner and excellent tree climber, good with addition and multiplication tables, in upper elementary school I started falling behind in math and sports. Story problems made my blood run cold: they were not the kind of stories I checked out of the school library, that’s for sure! Long division required estimating, but who wants to guess? Give me a surefire algorithm, or forget it!

Then there were gym classes and playground sports. Who but the shy, nearsighted, undersized child can understand the fear of a ball coming right at you? In volleyball games, I ducked rather than jumping toward the ball. At home plate, bat on shoulder, I was cringing before the pitcher even threw the ball. In my elementary school days, boys and girls played together on softball teams. Two people would be chosen by the teacher (these eager beavers volunteered to be chosen, of course) to select the rest of the members for their teams. Back and forth, they took turns choosing. Who was always left until last, so that the team whose turn it was to choose last simply got stuck with me? When our team was in the field, I was in the outfield, looking for four-leafed clovers, picking dandelions, and praying the ball would never reach me. Usually it didn’t. (That’s why I had been sent out there.) Sooner or later, though, when our team was up to bat, the turn came around to me, and that was the worst, as the other team would call out jeeringly, “Easy out! Easy out!” They were absolutely right.

Then came junior high and even more nightmarish mathematics, but this was complicated by scheduling. I was in an accelerated homeroom in seventh grade but also in orchestra, with only one other girl from my homeroom, so while the rest of our class was having accelerated math, we were in orchestra, and later in the afternoon we had math with a regular, non-accelerated class. (Fine with me!) Ah, but then the powers that were decided it was unfair for two young violinists to be deprived of accelerated math, and they re-rigged our schedules so we could have math with the rest of our homeroom. For me, this was disaster. The rest of the class had covered two years in one in seventh grade. We violinists, on the other hand, were skipping from seventh to ninth grade. I wouldn’t have minded skipping a year of English, but a year of math? Going straight to algebra? NIGHTMARE!!!

Rather than end this sorry tale in the quagmire of later high school mathematics and my sorry SAT score on the math section, I’ll tell you of one triumph, because it meant so much to me that I’ve never forgotten it.

Freshman year of high school. A combined township high school and junior college population of five thousand students. Freshmen on half-days because of overcrowding. Country mouse dropped into noisy, exciting pushing and shoving of urban life. Classes with complete strangers. And, because of that eighth grade (nightmare) experience with algebra, dropped into a geometry class with sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The only freshman in the class.

But geometry was better than algebra. It was visual. You could look at the problems.

So one day the teacher posed this question to the class: A bicycle tire has some object – I forget, but say it was a piece of chewing gum picked up from the pavement – stuck to it. As the rider proceeds down the street, what figure in space describes the path of the piece of chewing gum? The hands of confident students shot up into the air, and one by one they gave their solutions, but all were wrong.

I thought and thought and could see it in my mind, but was it even possible that I could be right? At last, with everyone else wrong, I raised my hand and gave my answer. The teacher asked me to come up and draw my answer on the blackboard. It was right.

The rest of the class could not keep quiet. “The freshman got it!” one jock exclaimed in disbelief. “The freshman got it!”

A little embarrassing but mostly music to my ears! So much better than “Easy out!”

Guest Book Review: THE ARCHIMEDES CODEX

The Archimedes Codex, by R.Netz and W. Noel (DaCapo Press, 2007), 312pp. (nonfiction).

This is the fascinating true story of a very old and valuable book (or codex, as it is termed by book historians) and the efforts necessary to restore and read it. The story begins almost 800 years ago.

In the Middle Ages, around the year 1229, a monk in a monastery is given the task of writing a book of prayers. Before he begins writing, however, the monk needs to construct a book in which to record his prayers. In the monastery’s library, he finds an old book written on vellum (animal skin) in a style of Greek that he can’t read, so he takes apart the book, erases the Greek writing as best he can, writes his prayers in Latin over the Greek and reassembles the book.

By a quirk of fate, the old book the monk used was a 400-year-old copy of writings by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, originally written on papyrus around the year 200 B.C. The fact that these original writings were exact copies of Archimedes’ writings (none of which are in existence any longer) would make the little prayer book extremely valuable, if only the monk hadn’t erased the old Greek when he wrote his prayers, but unfortunately there was no way of reading the erased words with the technology available in the 13th century—or at any time until very recently.

But then, fast forward: the prayer book is purchased in 1998 by a well-to-do businessman with an interest in history. Gambling that he can develop a new method of reading a book that has been erased and written over (this kind of book is called a palimpsest), he pays over $2,000,000 for it. The Archimedes Codex is the story of the team this purchaser assembles and their search for a brand-new way to be able to decipher the writing under the prayers. To give you an idea of the size of their task, it takes the team four years just to disassemble the book so it can be tested! At the same time, other members of the team are developing, with the latest physics of light reflection and refraction (and with the use of computers to interpret the data), a method of having Archimedes’ original 2000-year-old writings reappear. When this is accomplished, the experts in ancient Greek need to translate the text into English, which is especially tricky because the Greeks originally wrote only in capital letters without spaces between the words. How all this is accomplished is a fascinating story. It sounds as if it would be very technical, but the book is written by two team members who are teachers as well as historians, and they explain everything very clearly and with lots of diagrams and photos.

This book is great reading for anyone interested, as I am, in the history of books and writing, as well as in mathematics, science and computers, and you’re going to learn a whole lot of neat stuff as you read. For instance, did you know that all writing was done in capital letters until the ninth century when the monks copying old writings to be preserved found they could get more writing on a page if they used small letters that could be run together?

- Bruce Balas, Omena, Michigan

P.S. from PJ: To read about the wonderful world of books from another perspective, go to Jerry Dennis's blog today. It's a humdinger!