One More Market Day in Northport -- etc., etc.

Friday mornings in summer and early fall are special, thanks to the excitement of a colorful farmers' market with lots of local fruits, vegetables, flowers, bread, cheese, meat, jams and jellies and lots more, all set up down by the marina parking lot, just out of sight in the photo at left. The weather on the last Friday in August was a challenge for all concerned -- driving thunderstorm, horizontal rain, and hailstones, too! -- but September 6 gave us a beautiful morning. 

I like to get to the market early, before long lines form at my favorite vendors' stalls. It has been greatly expanded from the previous year's already wonderful array and is a social occasion for many local residents, along with a weekly shopping trip. Isn't that what a traditional market day is all about?

I had already bought green beans and tomatoes before making a beeline to Kathy's display for a bunch of onions, and it was a good thing I remembered those onions and went after them, because her cucumbers were on the same table, and what would my gazpacho have been without cucumbers? She threw in a couple of small tomatoes, saying they needed to be used right away.

From the Northport events calendar sent out from the NCAC (Northport Community Arts Center), it looks as if Friday the 13th will be our last market day of the 2013 season. I'd love to be wrong about this, but either way you don't want to miss this coming market day in Northport, if you're anywhere near. It is definitely the place to be in our small town on Friday morning.

Report of my Gardening and Gathering

It was a good year for strawberries and rhubarb in my garden. Delicious pies resulted, and there is still rhubarb in the freezer waiting to be canned as sauce. Later summer and early fall have brought wild raspberries and blackberries in abundance, with the jam-making ready now to move into its final phase.

Collards did well. Tomatoes were late but prolific. Sweet little orange cherry tomatoes have a growing habit much like the berries on deadly nightshade, accenting the mysterious family relationship between the edible and inedible. Acorn and butternut squash and pumpkins are looking good. But eggplant? What do you say to eggplant that doesn’t blossom until September? And my pretty little plum trees definitely need to be pruned this winter, branches eliminated so that the trees will put more energy into fruit and less into wood and leaves. It will be worth it. The small golden fruits with rosy skins are delicious.

Recent Photography Experiments

Overcoming shyness about photographing people, I have lately been doing just that – always and only with willing subjects, of course –and have been so pleased with the results that I asked a couple of friends if I could post their portraits on my photo blog. The first two, once they saw their pictures, said yes with no hesitation, and so, far from feeling as if I’ve “stolen their spirits,” I feel I’ve given them a mirror to see their beautiful selves and have shown those beautiful selves to others now, too. I would never do this without the okay of my subjects, but they seem very pleased, and that makes me happy.

Happy P.S. to this subject: A third friend said yes to my request!

One Sad Note

A poor young robin, adult size but still speckled, smacked into our front porch window early on Sunday morning. I’d gotten up early and was out there reading when I heard the telltale THUD! and went out to see what kind of bird had had the accident. Tried to feel for a heartbeat, but such a tiny heart it would be! I was clueless. Left it for an hour, hoping it was only stunned and would revive, but -- no such luck. Picking it up with a paper towel, I saw that the young bird had been feasting on late summer blackberries, and I hoped its short life had been a happy one.

How Others See Us: “America,” the European Myth

". . . like the first morning . . ."

John Locke started it, with his Second Treatise on Government. “In the beginning,” he wrote, “all the world was America.” He wasn’t talking about a particular continent or set of continents but about human social life before the establishment of “civil society,” before established cultural traditions and legal concepts.

What would human life conducted in a pure “state of nature” look like? Where Thomas Hobbes imagined the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” the constant warfare of “all against all,” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau envisioned “noble savages,” unspoiled rather than deformed by civilization, Locke (neither as pessimistic as Hobbes nor as idealistic as Rousseau) took a middle ground. Acknowledging and welcoming the advantages and protections conferred by civil society, he nevertheless saw their beginnings in the family, nature’s “first society,” with responsible adults working together to improve property and nurture children, long before there were laws or cultural traditions in place.

Locke’s idea of “all the world as America” fired the European imagination, as did the American frontier itself. Long into the 20^th century, Hollywood Western adventure stories were as popular overseas as in the United States, Western movies even at times copied and filmed in European countries (“spaghetti Westerns”), and that fascination is not over yet. Epic literary tales like Jim Harrison’s Revenge find huge audiences abroad. “Jim Harrison?” exclaimed a bookseller I asked in Paris about French translations of our friend’s books. “J’adore Jim Harrison!”

What do most European tourists want to see when they visit the United States? New York, the Grand Canyon, Disney World, and Hollywood. A few may fly over Chicago and get an idea of Lake Michigan, but it is the open, empty expanses of land, the young mountain ranges, the soaring skyscrapers, and the Disney fantasy that best answer European preconceptions of our land.

I was reminded of the myth of America when I picked up Paris la Grande, by Philippe Meyer. Ah, Paris! Surely the antithesis of Chicago, wouldn’t you imagine? But immediately in the opening section the author astounds me by writing of Paris as “cette espèce d’Amerique où chacun peut espérer donner à sa vie un nouveau départ.” Paris, he is saying, is a kind of America -- because (and here comes the myth) one can come to Paris to start a new life on a blank slate! Coming either to Paris or to America, he believes, you can leave small town traditional life and escape your neighbors’ eyes and judgment!

When I was in graduate school, a friend from Ethiopia who had had a very French education up to that point was astonished to find that large numbers of Americans, like “country people” anywhere in the world, maintained attachments to specific regions and landscapes and to life in far-flung towns and villages. My love of Michigan amazed her. Why would I, an educated person, identify so strongly with a particular section of the country? Wasn’t “America” a more universal concept and therefore a more appropriate object for my devotion? She was also surprised to find intense religious feeling among so many Americans. Before coming here, she had imagined America as a land where inhabitants looked only to the future, relying on nothing but science and law, feeling no inhibitions and respecting no traditions.

But that’s just it. Even America is not “America” in that sense – it is not, that is, the mythic “America” -- and it never was. Before Europeans “discovered” the continent, different peoples called different regions of the land home, and while some of them moved from one place to another with the seasons, it rarely occurred to any of them to leave the familiar entirely, without any reason, and strike out for parts unknown. Tradition is part of human life. Our first attachments can only be local.

Paris has its own traditions, and, like Chicago or Cincinnati, many of its neighborhoods are small towns in themselves, peopled by inhabitants who immigrated to the capital from an outlying province or a foreign country, bringing with them their food and customs. Like New York, Paris can be provincial, too, and much of its charm lies in that fact. Meyer recognizes as much, I learn as I read on, but it is still the possibility of anonymity in the metropolis that attracts him and, he believes, attracts most people who come to make their home there.

Isn’t the possibility of freedom in anonymity the attraction of most cities as opposed to small towns? I don’t see it as particular to Paris, much though I love Paris. Meyer’s migration from Versailles to Paris has much in common with Alfred Kazin’s escape from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and I found the delightful feeling of freedom myself in Cincinnati, where I could roam the streets and neighborhoods like a tourist no one knew (like Chiang Yee’s “silent traveler”) and then go home alone to my little student apartment to read and write.

Paris as “America”! Leave it to a Frenchman to come up with such a startling and controversial concept!

Can you imagine a French family coming to live in Northport with the expectation of escaping neighbors’ eyes? In our little village? And yet, ain’t we America, too?

* * * 

Another local note: En cherchant le vert du commencement du printemps ce matin, je l’ai trouvé! Not yet visible from the road, the first wild leeks are up an inch or two in the woods.

Spring is beginning to spring

Revisiting the Old Fabulist, or, Could You Love a Book That Looked Like This?

Pretty rough shape: "reading" copy

nice design

You see I did not exaggerate when I said my old book of Aesop’s Fables was falling apart. On the other hand, how could I throw away a book with such beautiful illustrations?

Designer Harrison Weir and engraver J. Greenaway get high marks from me. 

The Fox and the Crow

The paper stock is good quality, too, stout and strong and unfoxed despite the book’s great age, and the translations by Reverend George Fyler Townsend (1814-1900) are pithy and direct. In short, this is exactly the kind of book—not good enough to sell but too good to discard—that often finds its way into my heart and my tattered, dog-eared home library. Not every book in my home is a waif or a stray, but many are, as I’ve admitted on other occasions.

Wolf and Sheep

Cattle and Butchers (only cattle shown)

The Oak and the Reeds

“The Tale, the Parable, and the Fable,” reads Townsend’s Preface,

are all common and popular modes of conveying instruction. Each is distinguished by its own special characteristics. The Tale consists simply in the narration of a story either founded on facts, or created solely by the imagination, and not necessarily associated with the teaching of any moral lesson. The Parable is the designed use of language purposely intended to convey a hidden and secret meaning other than that contained in the words themselves.... The Fable partly agrees with and partly differs from both of these. It will contain, like the Tale, a short but real narrative; it will seek, like the Parable, to convey a hidden meaning ... by the skillful introduction of fictitious characters; and yet, unlike to either Tale or Parable, it will ever keep in view, as its high prerogative, and inseparable attribute, to inculcate some moral maxim, social duty, or political truth.

The Fable, continues the Preface, “conceals its design ... by clothing with speech the animals of the field, or the beasts of the forests.” Thus the Fabulist (isn’t that a marvelous word?) offers his lesson indirectly, seeking to charm us into seeing his truth. Both the action of the Fable and the lesson it contains should be simple.

The narration should relate to one simple action, consistent with itself, and neither be overladen with a multiplicity of details, nor distracted by a variety of circumstances. The moral or lesson should be so plain, and so intimately interwoven with, and so necessarily dependent on, the narration, that every reader should be compelled to give to it the same undeniable interpretation.

There should be no confusion about authorial intention with a Fable, no need of literary criticism at the graduate school level to get at meaning. The Fox and the Crow? Crow has a piece of cheese. Fox wants cheese. Fox tells Crow how handsome he is, how beautiful his plumage, and suggests slyly that his voice must be equally beautiful. Gullible Crow opens his beak to sing. Uh-oh! Every flatterer lives at the expense of his listeners! This one I memorized in high school in the La Fontaine (French) version. La Fontaine rewrote Aesop as Pullman, following many others, has rewritten the Grimms. 

There are many wolves, foxes, crows, frogs, and lions in Aesop, wild animals with very human characteristics. There are also sheep and cattle and horses and asses and cats and dogs. Lots of dogs. It’s interesting to see how the Fabulist (I am in love with that word!) portrays the different canines and what lessons he finds for human beings in their predicaments. Occasionally a human being appears but never by name, only as a boy or a “Labourer” or some such stock character. There are many mice, perhaps most memorably “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse,” which to this day continue to inspire children’s book illustrators.

19th century

Today

Charles Panati is the author of Words to Live By: The Origins of Conventional Wisdom & Commonsense Advice (Penguin, 1999), and it should probably not be surprising that many of these truisms are attributed to Aesop and have been handed down since the 6^th century B.C.E., Here are a few examples:

• “Gentle persuasion Is better than force” is the moral of “The Contest Between the Wind and the Sun”;
• “It is better to bend than to break” comes from “The Oak and the Reed”;
• “Practice what you preach” from “The Quack Frog.”
• “In dangerous times, wise men say nothing” is the moral of “The Lion and His Three Counselors”; while
• From “The Hen and the Fox” we are to draw the lesson, “Beware of insincere friends”; and, finally (for this very brief list of examples),
• “Treat others as you want them to treat you,” the Golden Rule, Aesop’s version, comes from “The Eagle and the Fox.”

A complete list would go on and on. The credit for “Ignorance is bliss,” however, goes to English poet Thomas Gray, and according to Panati, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings” comes not from opera but is a black saying from the American South. So now you know, in case anyone asks.

Looking for a good closing for today’s post, I turned in the Panati book to his section called “The pen is mightier than the sword” and there found, though it includes no mention of reading or writing or book learning, Aesop’s fable of “The House Dog and the Wolf.” The dog brags of easy living and luxuries but then admits that he is often chained. Here is the end the story in two versions:

Townsend: Then said the Wolf: “May no friend of mine ever be in such a plight; for the weight of this chain is enough to spoil the appetite.” Panati: As the wolf started back toward the forest he said, “Good night to you, my poor friend, you are welcome to your dainties—and your chains. As for me, I prefer my freedom to your fat.”

MORAL: Lean freedom is better than slavery.

Do you have a favorite among Aesop’s fables? And do you think your dog would change places with a wolf?

The Dog and the Wolf