Book Pairings

Immigration and our southern border

[Note: EXCEPTIONAL CLOSING (as the Parisians call it): Dog Ears Books will be closed this Sunday through Wednesday, Sept. 26. After that we will be OPEN for regular 11-5 hours Tuesdays through Saturdays through the Thanksgiving weekend]

“Pairings” — it’s a familiar idea these days in certain social and professional circles. What wine best accompanies an herbed goat cheese, a rib-eye steak, or a rustic apple tart? Which craft beer is a good accompaniment to seafood gumbo or a hearty chili con carne? The aim is to pair the glass to the dish so that their contents bring out the best in each other, the better to delight the palate. 

I was groping toward the notion of book pairings back when I suggested that readers of Hillbilly Elegy would find their reading experience deepened by going from J. D. Vance’s memoir to Nancy Eisenberg’s historical survey, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. The two books represent two different genres and different degrees of complexity, one a close-up, personal view, the other an objectification through history’s long lens, each book’s content helping to shed additional light on the other. I didn’t then have the phrase “book pairings” in mind, but it helps me now to clarify what I had then and have continued to have in mind when I recommend two books together.

Geology and beach stones

An obvious pair jumped out at me this summer, Lake Michigan Rock Picker’s Guide and The Last Ice Age and the Leelanau Peninsula. The latter provides about as much geological background as most people want, while the former helps to identify stones picked up on the beach. Nothing too heavy here. Again, however, the books are complementary. Both are also small and inexpensive, just right for the car glove compartment or bicycle panier.

Sometimes it might be helpful and salutary to effect an unlikely mating. How about the Death and Life of the Great Lakes, followed by Lake Michigan Mermaid? Narrative poetry does not have to thought of as an antidote or challenge to science but can be seen as a helpful adjunct, a reminder and acknowledgement of personal values and emotional attachments. And why should we have to leave beauty or feeling behind to face facts? What a foolish notion!

Facts and stories. Sometimes two books offer both together to enrich a reader’s experience. One example for me of is that of La Frontera (a book of history and many personal stories) paired with Lauren Markham’s The Far Away Brothers (focused on current events and stories of the experiences of two specific immigrant boys). Anyone concerned with questions of border security and/or immigration from Latin America would find these two books together providing an intense course of learning. 

A recent addition to my Books Read 2018 list, Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, left me more than a little exhausted with its historical examples and survey of current disasters-in-the-making. (That is not a criticism. I heartily recommend the book.) In conclusion, Diamond gives a few reasons for cautious optimism and specific prescriptions for action, but I needed more, something inspiring at an emotional, on-the-ground level, and I’m finding it in Wendell Berry’s The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings. Any of Berry’s books — fiction, nonfiction, poetry — is a good introduction to his thinking and writing and living, and these essays are no exception. Berry and Diamond cover much of the same ground but from very different starting places and with very different perspectives. 

The suggested pairings above, I see, have neglected fiction, and fiction pairs well with nonfiction, as I learned in an undergraduate course entitled “History Through Literature.” In fact, in looking back at my own posts I see I recommended If the Creek Don’t Rise, by Leah Weiss, to accompany Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash. Look here to read about the novel and see my reasons for putting it together with the memoir and the history book. 

And now, here is a completely natural, intuitive pairing of two novels. Have you read both? If not, why not?

Anyone else have a suggestion for a pair — or a trio — of books to be read together? Comments and additions welcome!

We need to change our ways!

Cold Enough to Crack Stones

No, not now, it isn’t. And it was not a record-breaking winter, either, in terms of cold or snowfall. But the most ordinary mild winter still leaves plenty of cracked stones behind, and as spring approaches, wind and rain conspire to keep a walker’s head down and eyes on the ground, which is the perfect way to spot Petoskey stones on the side of the road, far from the beach. Remember, at one time all of Leelanau County was underwater, so coral fossils can be found anywhere.

Some stones, albeit dry or dirty, exhibit a certain look that says, “Pick me up!” So you stop, pick it up and turn it over, and damp spots on the underside reveal what had been hidden when the stone was “face-down” in the dirt. You take it home and rinse it in clean water, and you feel happy. You have connected with ages past.

Now, quick: Why is a book cover like a stone on the ground?

My general advice to anyone contemplating book cover design is that the cover has to say, “Pick me up!” in a loud, clear voice. Then, when a browser opens the book in hand, what’s inside has to say, “Don’t put me down! Take me home!” In addition, one of the rewards of books can be connection to other worlds, far from us in time and space.

And so, because spring is on the way, on Wednesday (St. Patrick’s Eve) I got busy with general cleaning and rearranging at Dog Ears Books, my aim to have the whole place say, to anyone who comes in the door, “Slow down. Take your time. Explore. And pick up treasures to take home.”

As for my own reading, am still caught up in the essays of Camus and still falling asleep each night over The Tale of Genji, but it’s thrilling to get outdoors again, too, for longer and longer walks, as the last of the snow disappears from woods and fields. Back roads are great. Cross-country even better.

A Book, a Stone, the Weather, and Another Book

Weather Report and Forecast

Predicted gale-force winds moved in on schedule late Thursday, whipping Lake Michigan up into a roaring monster, but we did not have the damaging, tree-dropping wind speeds that some downstate areas experienced, nor did we suffer (yet! fingers crossed!) power outages. Sarah and I managed our morning walks on Friday – first near home, followed by a north-of-town expedition -- in a spitting rain, cold and kind of nasty but not heavy enough to warrant the annoyance of carrying an umbrella.

Wet, windy weather is supposed to keep up through Saturday, but Sunday and Monday (my “weekend”) we should have calmer, warmer days. And while the NOAA forecast talked about two inches of snow accumulation on Saturday, the predicted high of 40 degrees makes me doubt we’ll see much snow on the ground. Not for long, anyway. Up in the 50s on Sunday? Good for wrapping up the last little bits of yard work around the old farmhouse.

Stones

One side

On that north-of-town walk Friday morning, I had my head down most of the time, partly to keep wet rain out of my face but also because the unpaved road, for some reason, seemed to have a lot of enticing stones lying on the surface. My attention to them was rewarded when I’d about given up hope. The markings on this hexagonaria were as clear as if it had just been tumbled in the surf, several miles away.

Other side

Book Review: THE MARE

Mary Gaitskill’s most recent novel really deserves a post all its own, but I want to post, not postpone, my response to the novel, so here goes:

You don’t have to be horse-crazy to love The Mare, you don’t have to love children to fall in love with the girl called Velvet, and you don’t need to have experienced firsthand either the painful yearning of childlessness or the struggles of a single parent in poverty to feel for both Ginger and Silvia as they negotiate through trial and error their own challenges and their separate efforts to do what’s best for Velvet. Come to this novel from whatever experience you have, and the author will take you to new places. Another voice in the book is Paul, Ginger's husband, but femaleness is in the foreground, from Velvet's urban school to the stable next door to Paul and Ginger's suburban home.

Gaitskill’s story is told from the perspectives of various characters – primarily through the experiences, thoughts and emotions of Ginger, Paul, Velvet, and Silvia – as these shift through time and through their interactions with each other, with minor characters, and in the various worlds they inhabit and visit. “It it a YA novel?” David asked. No, I told him, not at all. “Well, is it a coming-of-age story?” Well, partly, and it’s been called that, but I find it much more. Each character is living through multiple story lines and trying to find the path forward.

Nothing is simple. Numerous critics cite the author’s awareness of emotional complexity, of characters with so many emotions they overflow. Although Gaitskill has always been called “unsentimental," at least one reviewer found this new novel overly tame. Readers will decide for themselves. Reviewers, after all, are only readers whose opinions are published, so it is not surprising that their opinions will vary and sometimes conflict. Here’s an excerpt from a review by Hannah Tennant-Moore that better expressed what I found in the novel: 

In The Mare, Gaitskill writes of race, parenting, early adolescence, and horses with the same tender complexity that marked her earlier work on sex and relationships. The book is written from inside the minds of its main characters. The perspective changes frequently, sometimes from one paragraph to the next. Together, these overlapping inner monologues offer a full portrait of the visible and invisible factors at play in each scene.

I loved this book. I loved it for its complexity, its eschewing of easy answers, the way the author avoided both pat solutions and the tragic outcomes any reader cannot help but fear its characters will meet. I wonder, do we think that only fiction plunging its characters into fullblown tragedy is “realistic” or “serious”? Because I loved this book also for its redemptive moments, the kind that life really does offer from time to time but that literary novels so often withhold. The picture-perfect “photo finish,” after all, is not the end of the book. That is the climax, yes, but it is followed by a much more nuanced and less simple denouement, with many hurdles yet to come for all the characters. Is that not realistic? Life is never "over" at the end of a book, as long as the author has not killed off all the characters.

Finally – and this is not a particularly literary note – I loved this book especially (my friends will not be surprised to hear) for the very important role played by horses in the story. I’ve had more than enough of books with beautiful horses on the covers and only a few scant paragraphs, if that, where horses appear inside. Fugly Girl isn’t a beautiful horse, either. Her name tells you that, right? But Velvet sees the horse, and the mare sees her, and the two develop a bond. In fact, it’s amazing that someone without a horsy background, as I believe I read about Mary Gaitskill, was able to make the horse environment and horse-human bond come so beautifully and quiveringly alive.

Ferocity. The ferocity of a mare, of a strong woman, the ferocity that shy outsiders must find inside themselves if they are going to find an independent path forward in life. Never before have I encountered a novel that gave me, in combination, the difficult modern realism of Bonnie Jo Campbell and the heart-soaring magic of Walter Farley. 

As I say, you don’t have to love horses to read this book, as I hope all of my blog readers will. It's on my order for books I'll have by next week.

P.S. I see I did no plot synopsis for this book. You could follow one of the links to another review and get it, but here's mine: 

A childless married couple, Ginger and Paul, sponsor an inner-city child at their home for two weeks in the summer, and following the official two weeks, Ginger, unable to lose the girl's presence, arranges for her to continue visiting and to return on weekends after school starts. There is a riding stable next door, where the girl, Velvet, falls in love with a dangerous, abused mare. The stable houses an interesting cast of characters (besides the horses), one of whom is Pat, the manager, who gives Velvet riding lessons in exchange for work. Ginger is jealous of the real mother, Silvia; Silvia -- a Dominican immigrant and single mother -- afraid for her daughter's safety; and Paul, feeling neglected, falls into an affair with a graduate student; while Velvet's life is complicated by the onset of puberty and new feelings towards boys, as well as the hurtful shifts of girl alliances. Does Ginger really love Velvet? Is she helping or hurting the girl? Helping or hurting her marriage to Paul? Is Silvia an abusive parent? What is her relationship to her young son, and why does she seem to love him so much more than her daughter? Will Velvet be destroyed in a tug-of-war between Ginger and Silvia? In the violence of her city neighborhood? By taking too many chances with a dangerous horse? How will all these characters negotiate the difficulties in their lives? None of my either/or questions can be answered that easily, and no question about the story can be dismissed with a simple yes or no.

For whatever answers you can find to whatever questions this book asks you -- and for pure enjoyment -- read the book!

Reading Circle Report

This is a relentless post, isn’t it? Will it never end? Soon, but before it does I want to say a few words about Chaucer. Our reading circle met to discuss Canterbury Tales, and along the way we celebrated, for three different members of the circle, a retirement, a recovery from surgery, and a published short story. Cake and bubbly!

Published writer, Fearless Leader, bookseller, book and bubbly

Not everyone in the group read all the tales. I finished the last page of the book only an hour before our meeting and did not have time to finish my notes. I had to make the notes because it was so confusing (to me) trying to keep the names of the tales and their stories straight. “The Miller’s Tale,” for instance, is told by the miller, but the main character in it is a carpenter. In another tale, the Reeve, who used to be a carpenter, gets back at the miller by turning the tables and telling about a cheating miller who gets his comeuppance. That’s in “The Reeve’s Tale.” The first story in the collection is “The Knight’s Tale,” but many other tales also involves knights. Some of the tales are quite bawdy, others bawdy and scatalogical, others very serious and even downright boring.

Had Chaucer completed the story cycle he proposed, there would have been four tales from each character (two on the way to Canterbury and two on the return trip), and the Host would have chosen the one he deemed best, treating the teller to dinner. Since we never get all the tales, we don’t know which the Host would have chosen (although some he would not have chosen are obvious, when he interrupts to say the story-teller is boring the audience), so we can only choose our own favorites. The Knight and the Wife of Bath are two of the best known, but my two favorites are “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” and “The Franklin’s Tale.” The former is a beast tale, reminiscent of Aesop, with the moral that one should beware flatterers. In the latter, a knight and his lady love marry, agreeing that neither wants to dominate the other, and they overcome obstacles to end up still together, still happy. In neither of these tales is anyone murdered or cuckolded.

Yes, I like happy endings. Don’t need them every time, but once in a while they ring true -- and are a great relief.

New addition to bookstore wall

Even Stones Are Not Forever

The moving of stones is the course of history, and of rubble and forgetting.
 – W. S. Merwin, The Mays of Ventadorn (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2002)

Friends of ours were in Scotland recently. As always when visiting the U.K., they spent quite a bit of time searching for megalithic sites, ruined abbeys, ancient churches, and especially for stone circles. Kilmore Stone Circle, thousands of years old, they had found years ago, hidden away in a dark pine forest, within its own clearing in the forest. On this trip several such destinations eluded them (one obviously fallen victim to the clear-cutting of a pine forest), but they did at last succeed in reaching hidden-away Loch Buie Circle and felt more than repaid for all their efforts.

Stone “ruins” in my neighborhood are not ancient by European time measure, but an old farmhouse fallen into its foundation in the 1960s and overgrown since with vegetation gives me some feeling of communing with those who came before us here. Here is one I saw for the first time last Monday, on a walk with a friend. It is very difficult to photograph, overgrown as it is with vegetation. Photograph at left is close-up of one side wall; those below I tried with fish-eye mode to get in more of the walls.

The trail at the new Clay Cliffs Natural Area north of Leland winds back and forth with long switchbacks up a gentle grade, with only short steep portions, and it comes out at a platform over Lake Michigan, giving onto an almost aerial view. The beach is a long way down, and you don't get there from here.

In my memory of that day, my first on the Clay Cliffs trail, however, the most vivid image will be one not captured by my camera. Beyond the undercut edge of the clay bluff, a closely curled leaf caught my eye. Its erratic jerking and twisting could not be accounted for by breezes, as other leaves nearby were still or, at most, gently drifting through the air, and so, abandoning our survey of the vast surface of Lake Michigan before us, my friend and I watched the dancing leaf, just beyond our reach. We were spellbound, entranced, mesmerized, and I convinced my friend that there must be a caterpillar wrapped up in the leaf, spinning a coccoon. “But it’s hanging in midair!” “No, it must have spun a filament to hang its coccoon from.” My friend called this my ‘hypothesis,’ so we looked as closely as we could but the filament I had ‘hypothesized’ remained invisible to our eyes.

The leaf continued to gyrate in the air, sometimes spinning, sometimes jerking up and down. I was sure the gyrations could only be caused by something inside the leaf, a creature that had pulled the leaf around itself like a cloak and was now at work spinning a winter home, its spinning movements causing the entire leaf to swing. That original silken thread must be very strong, my friend and I marveled. We were so caught up in the drama that had we brought chairs along with us we might have stayed an hour or more, watching this real-life nature documentary. We spoke of coming back in a few days to check up on the creature’s progress but at last started on the return leg of the path.

Most of the trees on this land have grown up since it was originally cleared, perhaps only since it’s no longer farmed, but one field remains open, cut for hay each year by a farmer on the other side of north Lake Leelanau. From that hayfield, one can see across clear to St. Wenceslaus Church. During the winter, did the original farm family take a horse and wagon across the ice and up the hill to attend mass?

As it happened, the day I met my friend to walk the trail I’d just that morning finished reading Merwin’s book about medieval troubador poets and his own life and explorations in rural southcentral France. He writes of finding an old farmhouse, buried in vegetation, such as was the farmhouse I was to see only a few hours after reading his description:

The thicket of brambles had grown over the path to the front door, which faced south toward the road, and had made its way up onto the roof, into the tiles. To the left of the parched front door buried in its thorny tangle, another, older doorway, like a barn entrance, had been bricked up.... I peered through the hole into the half-dark of an empty, ruined room.

He writes also of the neighborhood chateau (something my northern Michigan neighborhood definitely lacks), built and rebuilt over the centuries, its stones at times sold and carted off to pay the taxes, finding their way here and there in other buildings of the region -- here part of a barn, elsewhere adorning a house, etc. Trees and stones: we tend to think of mountains and stone buildings as fixtures, but Merwin tells us differently; like forests, like orchards, they rise up and are taken town, either by man or by nature.

Stones lie wherever they are as though they had always been there. Our awareness of our own pace in time keeps us from recognizing that the motions of stones are akin to those of snowflakes and molecules, and to us the moment in which they lie seems like an unchanging condition, and they come to exemplify permanence. So the Venus de Milo looks to us as tough she had never had arms at all, and the ruin appears to have been the truth of the chateau from the beginning.

Merwin was only in his 20s, a young poet just setting out in life, when, thanks to a bequest from a relative and his own frugality in investing it and leaving the principal untouched, he managed to buy an old farmhouse in this magic, troubador-haunted region. He tells us that, for him,

...the awareness of the deep past was inseparable from the lure of the land, which soon held me there, and the structures themselves appeared to me as palimpsests of unsounded age....

This, I think, is what it means to love a place. One loves its history as much as the trees and wildflowers and hills of one’s own lifetime. To live in a place, truly, means living with its past as well as its present. And isn't that a lovely idea, the structures as palimpsests?

I was particularly happy with Merwin’s observation that the “crumpled” landscape of the Quercy was yet farmed, when first he came there, by the practice of ‘polyculture,’ or what we in the midwestern United States know as diversified agriculture. Isolated as the communities were, it made sense for them to be self-sufficient. Besides, their land was in no way suited to large fields and heavy machinery. Here in Leelanau Township, as well, farms here tend to be very human in scale, and recently there has been a turnaround across the entire country, with more and more small farms coming into production under the hands of a young generation. This is not “turning back the clock.” It is working with rather than against nature – and living as a human being rather than as a slave to mechanical industry – and preparing a happy, healthy future for generations to come, as well as enjoying our present good fortune.

Stones may move or be moved, over the course of the earth’s long history, by nature or by man, but we are here for only a short time, and while here, “we must cultivate our garden.” 

September Dreaming

Agate Beach, Grand Marais, Michigan 

“What do you do up there?” people sometimes ask when they hear we’re going to the U.P. again. We are not summer campers or winter snowmobilers, so how do we pass the time on vacation? Basically, we walk and talk, drive and look, read, draw, dream, and share our dreams. Obviously, one of the places we walk is on the shore of Lake Superior. Wind gusts, breakers crash and pound, and beautiful stones are tumbled about with each succeeding wave.

Looking west

Looking east

Winnebago

When we’ve had enough of exciting wind and waves, we retreat up the beach to behind the treeline. One morning found us at a sheltered picnic table, David with his book and I with my sketchpad. Another day it was old fishing boats that had us dreaming. Arbutus used to fish out of Naubinway, but it was Vagabond that stirred David’s imagination this year. While I was busy with my camera, David was mentally refitting a fish tug to serve as a live-aboard studio cruiser.

Arbutus

Vagabond

H-58 between Grand Marais and Munising is a paved road now, and we have mixed feelings about that. It’s much easier on vehicles and drivers. On the other hand, one no longer has the general feeling of traveling through and into the past--except that this year, during a “pit stop” for Sarah in an old, logged-over area, I stumbled upon something I’d never seen before. 

How, in the old days, did you “get your bearings” in the trackless forest? Here’s how:

That made my day! Of course, there's a lot more to the story, and here is just a sample:

Bearing trees are a special kind of witness tree which the surveyors notched, blazed, and scribed in a standard way to facilitate the relocation of the survey corner should the wooden corner post or corner stone be lost or moved. The surveyor was required to note for each bearing tree: 1) its type (~species), 2) its diameter, 3) its distance to the corner, and 4) its azimuth or “bearing” from the corner and hence its applied name. These are the actual data associated with an individual bearing tree that ecologists use. Witness tree is a broader term that includes trees that were marked on line or near the corner, generally without the required distance and bearing notes required of a true bearing tree. Thus true bearing trees, line trees, and generic witness trees were distinguished in the field with appropriate inscriptions (BT, LT, WT respectively) and are distinguished in the notes as well. Bearing trees were required at both the standard corners of the rectangular survey grid and at points on the survey lines where the surveyors were forced to meander around impassable areas such as lakes .  The NHIS Bearing Tree Database Contains only records of true bearing trees at the standard survey corners. 

For the rest, go to the Minnesota site where I found the information above. Sorry I could not find anything directly bearing on Michigan's current data collection project. 

Books for Looks?

This was our Saturday afternoon homecoming. Can you blame us for staying home on Sunday with books, magazines and old newspapers?

A friend who braved the weather yesterday to visit Dog Ears Books brought me a section of the New York Times from earlier this month. For those of you who missed the article my friend knew would interest me, “Selling a Book by Its Cover,” you can find it online here.


The idea is that a well-stocked library is part of the design of a house. It’s part of interior decoration:

Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.

It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé....

Not all clients rule out the possibility of reading their home décor--some, for instance, want only books in English for that very reason—but others are happy to have stacks of books all wrapped in white (or black) as “design elements” in a room where nothing is left to chance, presumably in a house where every tschoschke and its position on a table has been carefully planned. (I guess some people really live like this.) My friend was appalled and thought I would be, too. Well, I can’t see much value in books as nothing more than stacks of white or black, but shelves of real, readable books? Maybe someone will read them—if not the people who paid for the house, then their guests or their grandchildren.


But are we, as one trend-spotter in the article claimed, turning codices (the old word codex is now new again, distinguishing a printed, bound book from an e-book) into fetishes? Fetish! That’s pretty loaded language. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing and making an argument, I looked around my own house and came up with more questions. Why do we photograph natural objects and put those photographs on our walls? Why do we (some of us) have stones and shells and animal bones on our bookshelves, along with the books. Is that small mammal skull a fetish? Those deer jawbones? (Where did my deer jawbones get to, anyway?) Is there something all of these objects on shelves have in common?


[Caveat, disclaimer, disclosure, whatever: There has never been an interior decorator involved in our house. I probably don’t need to say so. Surely our books and bookshelves speak for themselves. Just remember that that’s beside the point, okay? Don’t get distracted! What do books, shells, stones and skulls have in common?]

Here’s what I think. We are physical inhabitants of a physical world and also spiritually connected both to one another and to other aspects of the world, and so we bring into our individual home spaces some of the objects from the larger world that make that larger world our home, too. This stone connects me to a beach covered now by snow and ice. A walk on another beach hundreds of miles away turned up this shell. Finding jawbones of a deer down by the creek years ago, I felt my connection to an individual animal I might never have seen but who was, for a while, a neighbor, and the little raccoon (possum?) also was another being like us, once warm and alive, needing food and shelter. Like these animals, we will one day lose our warmth and life, but even then, like the stone and the shell and bones, we will leave some traces behind.


Every book on the shelf contains human life. Traces, lives, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, events. Readers and non-readers alike sense that books connect us to other human beings in our own and in earlier times, every book a product of other inhabitants of our home, this earth. Wanting them around us, it seems to me, is recognition of their value. Whether or not it constitutes fetishism, I leave for others to decide.

I am fairly well convinced, though, that I need to make crisp new dust jackets for the 25-volume set of the complete works of Mark Twain in my bookshop, its covers worn and faded by the years. A lot of people do judge books by their covers--at least, the cover gives them their first impression--and to many the look of the books on their shelves is important, so Mark Twain needs a facelift. Unless someone comes in to buy the set before I get around to the beautification project. And I have all those stones and shells and bones to handle and rearrange before I start making dust jackets. First things first.