I am the books I have read and the music that has moved me.

 

The Artist and I watched a movie on DVD the other night, a combination documentary/interview/concert called “Leonard Cohen: I am Your Man,” and although many of the songs and the performers covering them were unfamiliar to us both, the songs touched my core. They were of my era, and I felt as I do whenever I hear the songs of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez or (to a somewhat lesser degree) Joanie Mitchell, to name only a few.  

 

There are so many Dylan songs that carry me back to days of pre-adulthood that I cannot single out one, because whichever one I’m hearing in any moment does the job: “Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Blowing in the Wind,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “The Ballad of Hattie Carroll,” “When the Ship- Comes In,” “The Times They Are -Changin” – anything. For years, I told David I wanted mourners (I assume mourners)  to sing “When the Ship Comes In” at my funeral. “No one would know the words,” he said every time. But such a song of triumph!

 

As for Leonard Cohen, whom I recognize in hindsight as the epitome of sexy cool, I caught few of his songs (other than the iconic "Suzanne") when they first came out, but – as I say – it didn’t matter that I was hearing the words for the first time in the movie, because the mood and meaning were very familiar, being of my era. “Everybody Knows” was something I already knew. “The Tower of Song” made me say “Yes, yes!” because “paying my rent in the tower of song” echoes the Artist’s and my phrase, “He paid his rent in the Universe,” which is another way of saying that someone “got his work done,” in the sense that we understood what our work meant in the Sixties. Our work was what was important for us to do. It's what we most hope, perhaps, that people will one day say of us.

 

The books of my life make up another story, different and more varied in tone. They go back to Wind in the Willows and The Black Stallion, The Diary of Anne Frank, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, through Parnassus on Wheels, Shanty-Boat, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Waiting for the Morning Train, to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, South of Superior, Once Upon a River – and I’m leaving out so many! I have written of all these books at least once, some more than once, so will not repeat myself here but only say that books and songs are what I feel have formed me. I remember earlier years of my life, friends and boyfriends, all of them are connected to books and songs: books given, books received and shared, songs played on jukeboxes or listened to on road trips. 

 

This May 24^th is Bob Dylan’s 80^th birthday – “Astonishingly,” the Guardian begins. It is astonishing to those of us who first fell in love with Dylan when we were 17. The Guardian piece is really good. You should read it. Anyway, happy birthday, Bobby. With you, we are forever young, full of hope, determined to make a better world. 

 

Time, Youth, and Beauty

Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again. 

- Jim Harrison, Off to the Side: A Memoir

“Oh, to slow it all down!” writes a friend — but of course we can’t. Recent babies are already toddlers, schoolchildren are out of college and getting married and moving to Chicago, New York, Austin, and L.A. Sometimes we lose track of which acquaintances are still among the living, whereas close friends lost to the Reaper — always too soon! — remain in our everyday thoughts. 

If ever I did earlier in life (I can’t remember now), I certainly don’t envy the young any longer. The second half of the twentieth century strikes me as a satisfying time to have been alive in midwestern America, which is lucky, as I’ve never had a yen for time travel. One thing I think about often lately, though, is how my response to beauty has changed. In the presence of beauty I feel now, at the same time, both more detached and more joyful. There is no longer much of anything like desire in it and certainly nothing of envy. A beautiful young woman or handsome young man, like the wise face of an elder or a baby’s happy smile, simply makes me happy. And if in a particular face I catch glimpses of a beloved generation past, my cup overfloweth.

Our reading circle will be meeting next week to talk about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. One thing that struck me most forcibly about Woolf’s novel was that she seemed to present suicide as a response not to the unbearable pain of life but to its unbearable beauty. I’ll find out, I guess, if others read the book as I did. For the present, anyway, I cannot wish for a single moment’s lessening of beauty, nor can I imagine hurrying to take leave of it. Instead my heart cries out with my friend, “Oh, to slow it all down!”

Generation Gaps

Was the phrase ‘generation gap’ invented in the Sixties? I suspected so and found confirmation online. I had started wondering about that and other, more complicated questions after a brief but unusual conversation a few mornings ago in my bookstore, when a man younger than my son remarked to me, after we had found we had similar views on many current issues, that he thought, “no offense, but I think your generation screwed up our country.” I didn’t argue but have been reflecting on his opinion since our encounter. 

First, it’s important to remember that my generation, that of the 1960s, felt our parents’ generation and those before it had screwed up the country! We didn’t want to grow up to be men and women in grey flannel suits, selling our souls for big, shiny automobiles and houses in the suburbs and turning away from problems that didn’t affect us personally. We certainly didn’t want to see our world destroyed in senseless atomic war, a possibility the “Greatest Generation” invented and we inherited.

So hippies followed postwar existentialists in seeking lives of authenticity. Some went “back to the land,” and some sought spiritual enlightenment in music and/or meditation and/or drugs. Many fell for the dream of “free love,” finding that idea more honest than unhappy marriages they saw their parents suffering through and imagining foolishly that jealousy could be overcome with reason (a lesson it seems every generation has to learn for itself). But there was much more. Idealistic Peace Corps workers went abroad to other countries, the Black Panthers set up idealistic projects in urban neighborhoods, the American Indian Movement was born, and passionate kids from the North went South to sign up black voters. There were marches and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, a war we now know was started by accident and criminally pursued for years.  

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” we said, and I still believe that, but then the question is, was our generation part of solving any of the problems we faced? 

Here’s another question: Did our children’s generation do any better? 

And another: How will our grandchildren’s generation do? 

Except for laundry I’m taking a day off today, so I’m going to cut this short and leave my questions hanging. If you have thoughts or answers or opinions or experiences to share, I welcome them right here. You can leave a comment as ‘Anonymous,’ if you like, and that’s fine, too.

Realism's Youth?

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

You’ve heard before that the biological development of an individual repeats, in a compressed timeline, the evolutionary development of the species of which it is a member. What I’m wondering now – and bear with me, because this may be a stretch – is if something similar might happen in reverse with cultural movements, and I’m thinking in particular of literature. That is, might not a literary movement in its younger stages share the callowness of a youthful individual with limited experience, and might not that very movement, as it develops over time, practiced by individuals learning from their predecessors, grow finally to a mellower maturity?

My mind is still on Madame Bovary and on Flaubert’s preoccupation with corruption – physical, moral, and social. It seems to me very similar to the ordinary, nonliterary adolescent response to encounters with death, deception, hypocrisy and the like. Wounded youthful idealism enters a phase when anything apparently good or beautiful can only be seen as a disguise for underlying “reality,” that is, for what the youth now believes is the true ugliness and pointless of existence. Think Holden Caulfield. Everything in the adult world is “phony” at its core.

In the same time period that Flaubert was writing, there was a movement in France of poets called the “Decadents.” This group was given its name by Maurice Barrès, an anti-Semitic, anti-Dreyfusard writer and critic who had an early “fascination with death and decay," themes apparent also in Madame Bovary. The Decadents took it as their mission, as artists, to shock the sensibilities of the middle class, people whom they saw as narrowly and unthinkingly conventional. “Épater les bourgeois!” (“Shock the middle class!”) was their rallying cry.

To shock the middle class by showing them the emptiness of their own (middle-class) pretensions and claims to any cultural achievement higher than egotistical self-aggrandizement seems very much an important facet of Flaubert’s project. Isn’t nearly every character in Madame Bovary a little would-be well-dressed emperor parading around without clothes on?

And now I’m thinking that “Épater les bourgeois!” is also “dénigrer les bourgeois.” The early realist novelists and poets set out to shock the middle class by denigrating and insulting its members, by representing them as having no redeeming features, and isn’t that very like the typical rebellion of youth, with its rejection of parents and family background and values? Can we not see in the youth of this literary movement the same wholesale (though by no means universal or inevitable) alienation of an individual seeking to establish some kind of separate sui generis existence in the world?

Please don’t misunderstand me. I do not mean to denigrate the young by saying that boredom, revulsion, and obsession with the darker, more disappointing and upsetting features of life are typical of youth. We are all young once, even if many of us are no longer, and wrestling with life’s basic facts – idealism, corruption (both physical and moral), death, etc. – is an important part of living. Not to go through it would be to miss something important. No, my point is not an argument with youth but an observation on the development of a literary movement.

Would the realist or the Decadent himself identify with those he wanted to shock? Actually, Flaubert is said to have claimed, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"! What are we to make of such a surprising admission? That the author, like his creation, suffered crushing boredom in the provinces, looked with horror on the lives and aspirations of his provincial neighbors, felt himself above his neighbors and worthy of a more exalted position that the one he held in his own village? If so, is his self-identification with the character Madame Bovary not support for my idea that both writer and character were experiencing the trapped feeling of adolescence and, therefore, viewing “reality” with a jaundiced rather than an objective eye? Was early realism in large part sour grapes?

If I were reading nothing but nineteenth-century literature, the question of youth vs. maturity might never have entered my mind, but as a catholic and voracious reader I found the contrast leaping from the juxtaposition of successive books read, a contrast particularly acute between Madame Bovary and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. McCann’s characters come from many different walks of life, and their struggles are with much more than Emma Bovary’s boredom, yet through all their backsliding and failure, and in prose every bit as beautiful as that of Flaubert, one never feels the author is holding them up as disgusting examples. He does not tear away veils of hypocrisy to show pettiness and corruption but gently moves aside veils of materialism, even squalor, to show human beings capable, from time to time, of expressing love and recognizing beauty.

One of my all-time favorite novels is Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. There are characters in Smith’s story that one might not choose to sit next to for a long bus ride, and yet the author manages to present even her least attractive people from the inside and with sufficient complexity such that we understand why they behave as they do and feel sympathy for them. (I should note that she also does this in very simple language. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a remarkable literary achievement, deserving of a more prominent place in the literary canon than it is generally accorded.) And while Let the Great World Spin and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are both New York novels, I reject out of hand any objection that their urban context vitiates my argument. My main point, after all, is not to contrast urban and rural literature but to suggest that Smith and McCann represent mature practitioners of literary realism in their ability to present flawed characters with sympathy. In the work of these authors (and many other outstanding writers of the twentieth and twenty-first century), I want to say that realism itself has achieved maturity.

Have I made a case? The beginnings of one? What do you say? I put the question particularly to my small town friends.

Do Not Mistake Me For Alan Arkin

Looking Back to Where I've Been

At five, acting was already a fever in my blood, and somehow I knew, even then, that the decision was made and there would be no turning back. ... I never changed my mind.- Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life: A Memoir

No one would mistake Alan Arkin for bookseller P. J. Grath! It's pretty unlikely, too, that anyone would take me for him, coming up to me at a restaurant and asking, “Mr. Arkin, may I have your autograph?” But I’m reading his memoir, An Improvised Life, struck by his deep insights about acting, and at the same time thinking about e-mails a friend and I have been exchanging, reminiscing about our respective high school years, I can’t help comparing Arkin’s lifelong obsession with acting to my youthful performance dreams.

For me, a long life on stage and on celluloid unrolled only in imagination. Clearly, then, my ambitions did not burn as brightly or as steadily as those of Alan Arkin (or Jodi Foster, Meryl Streep or Denzel Washington), but years ago, for quite a while, I was the female, teenaged Walter Mitty star of many exciting daydreams, enjoying in advance a fantasy future that I never, as it turned out, seriously pursued much past the age of eighteen. Who now would ever guess?

Piano lessons began for me at the age of five but lasted only a year. I could handle half an hour of practice a day, but when the teacher upped the ante to an hour I dug in my heels. My parents shrugged and decided I must not want to take lessons very badly. All my life I have wished that teacher and parents might have consulted me before that decision was made. Maybe the adults would have realized that 30 minutes a day for a six-year-old was plenty, or maybe we could have compromised on three-quarters of an hour. In any case, it didn’t happen. I was clearly not destined by Fate to be a pianist.

I had, however, a completely unfettered imagination, and whether on long vacation trips or simple errands near home, the car window was my proscenium window, through which I projected myself into complicated scenes unrolling in the passing landscape (cornfields or suburbs, mostly, with occasional railroad tracks), scenes that would have astonished my parents, blissfully ignorant up there in the front seat. At home, our big old backyard apple tree was sometimes a tropical island, sometimes a spaceship. I also practiced different expressions in the bathroom mirror, imagining myself in the wildest of situations. (Doesn't everyone?) And years before the term “Drama Queen” was in common use, my mother felt its need when confronted by my histrionics.

Fortunately for my mother’s sanity, the city school instrumental music program came to her rescue. In fourth grade came try-outs for band and orchestra, and I was selected to be a violinist, a path I followed for nine years, all the way through high school graduation.

Playing in a large junior high and then high school orchestra gave me experience in rigorous practice, group discipline, and individual effort, with the heady rewards of performance success. Our junior high band and orchestra made a once-in-a-lifetime journey by train to the National Music Festival in Enid, Oklahoma, living on our chartered train during the festival and coming home to be greeted by the high school band, in uniform, playing for us at the station. In high school there were numerous contests at the district, regional, and national levels, and one year a cultural exchange with a high school orchestra from Toronto, Ontario. The orchestra room, for me, was what the locker room must have been to the school jocks. We too worked hard and traveled to compete against other schools. In addition, we had the music. We made the music. It was thrilling. I belonged to something serious that was bigger than myself, something that drew me out of my books and imagination and forced me to deal the reality of other living, breathing humans.

For the most part I had become an actor so as to hide, to find my identity through pretending to be other people.

And yet, while I prepared for and competed in solo and ensemble contests, along with all the regular rehearsals and twice-yearly concerts, I never dreamed of becoming a career violinist. Carrying my violin case to and from school, I was a secret singer and actor living in the borrowed identity of an instrumentalist!

Here’s how it went my freshman year: the one public high school for the township shared its campus with the township junior college, and we baby boomers were practically bursting the seams of the beautiful old limestone block building. The swimming pool was converted to a classroom to house three homerooms, one of which was mine, and still there was not space enough for all of us. The solution was to put freshmen on half-days. The early part of the freshman alphabet began at 7:30 a.m., and when this group was dismissed at noon – no lunch on campus for freshmen – the latter half of the alphabet started its half-day. Overlapping the early and late halves of the day was the period and a half when band, orchestra, and choir met. So my French class started at 7:30 a.m., and when the rest of my morning group left school for the day I went to orchestra.

That year I had my first date with a boy who drove a car, so that we did not have to be driven on the date by his mother or father. I think he was a junior., but it was not a long, memorable romance. The one evening stands out in my memory not for the boy but for the occasion: he took me to the senior class play, “The Curious Savage,” the first live stage play I’d ever seen. I was completely stage-struck! As the audience flowed out after the final applause, I was rooted to the spot, still staring at the now-empty stage, where a new world had opened to me. I had no desire to leave that scene of magic.

Another highlight was the annual “operetta,” as we called it. My freshman year the operetta was “Showboat,” and playing in the pit orchestra, in an old-fashioned, honest-to-God orchestra pit in front of and below the stage, added fuel to my performance dreams. Singing and acting! That was the ticket! Shows in succeeding years were exciting, but nothing surpassed or even equaled “Showboat” in the thrilling impression it left.

When our orchestra prepared for a concert, the woodwind, brass, and percussion sections were augmented by instrumentalists borrowed from the band, but the line between those who sang and those who played instruments was a border never crossed. Since all three music groups practiced during the same hour and a half, students had to choose. Choir members could not be part of band or orchestra, and students who played in one of the instrumental groups could not join the choir. As an orchestra member, therefore, I was not eligible to try out for a singing role in the annual musical stage production, but that was no barrier at all to my fantasy life.

Leaving school after orchestra, the morning students long gone and the afternoon students already deep into their second hour of class, I was not part of a rowdy mass exodus (my best friend and neighbor went to school in the afternoon) and enjoyed a solitary daily walk through what I remember as mostly a warehouse and small manufacturing district, under the railroad viaduct, and through downtown to catch the city bus that would take me out to home on the edge of town. On these long walks I would sing aloud with great dramatic abandon, falling silent only on the rare occasion that I noticed another pedestrian within hearing distance. Downtown and on the bus, I would again fall silent, but once out on the edge of town, walking from the bus stop to our house on the last street before fields of corn and alfalfa began, my voice would soar again. Hymns, popular songs, musical comedy, my own improvisations on childhood themes – I was not quietly humming to myself but giving my all to an invisible audience. How amazed and astounded my schoolmates would have been to see and hear me in what I took to be my true identity! In my memories of these musical walks, it is always spring. “It Might As Well Be Spring,” in fact, was one of my favorite songs, but there were hundreds of others. “Summertime” was another.

By my senior year, popular music on radio was well into the folk music revival. Somehow I got my hands on an inexpensive acoustic guitar and learned a few chords, and somewhere my sister and I found cheap, full-length “granny” dresses in bright cotton prints. My sister did not share my devotion to Joan Baez (“Someone dies in every one of those songs!” she pointed out with a meaningful look), but we had been singing together in the kitchen, in the car on vacations, and in church choir all our lives, and now that she was a freshman we were in high school together, so we worked up an act for the school talent show and subsequently took it “on the road” to a hootenanny at the Catholic high school in a nearby town. In the summer we hit the beaches of Lake Michigan with mournful Appalachian tunes. I dreamed of a recording career, spending unbelievable amounts of time mentally writing and rewriting liner notes for the albums of my future work.

[As a member of a group of folk singers,] in my naïveté I thought singing . . . would be an entrée into the theatre. But of course no such thing happened.

An English teacher had encouraged me to try out for one-act plays in my sophomore year, and the apex of my high school career was a role in “Camino Real,” by Tennessee Williams, a play we took up through district and regional levels to win first place at the state level. Illinois! And we were not even a Chicago school! We were crazy with disbelief and drunken joy, and nothing in my life up to then compared to the intoxication of being part of that ensemble and that triumph. It was an experience that solidified my longing for the stage.

I sent away to New York for brochures from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but when they arrived my mother put her foot down. No acting school – out of the question – I would go to university or nowhere. So I went dutifully to university, my dreams still secretly intact, where I joined the University Chorus and signed up for a class in voice and articulation. A major in “speech education” let me take classes in acting and other aspects of stagecraft.

. . . Ah, but then I married early, dropped in and out of college, had a baby, and the years began speeding by. I did a couple stints singing with bands and a little community theatre when my son was small. . . . Went back to school and studied drama for a while (my son helped me learn lines and was stage-struck in his turn by his first experience of live theatre) but then was seduced by philosophy. . . . Now, all these years later, I cannot even bring myself to commit to a community choir and never consider trying out for community plays. It is no longer part of my life.

For me, then, performance turned out to be the road not taken. So Alan Arkin and I don’t have all that much in common, do we? And here my little story sputters and coughs and loses momentum and grinds to a limping halt. . . .

And yet, and yet.... Does any passionately imagined dream ever die completely? (Ask Walter Mitty!) There is enough of mine left that I read books like Arkin’s hungrily, gleaning insights very meaningful to my undeveloped actor’s heart. “And who knows?” I say to David. “Someday I could be the Grandma Moses of American cinema!” Bless his heart, he thinks I could, too! But no, it's more likely those old melodies will find their way into my writing.

(“What are you doing?” David calls from the living room. “Reading Alan Arkin. I love Alan Arkin!” “I like him a lot, too,” David answers, adding, “We should have him over sometime.”)

It always amazes me that some people can know from childhood or even figure out in high school or by their college years what they want to do for the whole rest of their lives. I can trace easily in retrospect the path that led me to becoming a bookseller, but it isn’t a destination I saw far in advance. Writing – in my case, far less than a career but much, much more than a hobby -- is the only thing I’ve always done and still do that means the world to me.

How is it with other people? When you were five years old, what future did you imagine for yourself? Did other dream careers come along later? Are you living your dream? If not, is that all right? Maybe better than what you dreamed?

Wherever They’re Going, They’re On Their Way

Northport Class of 2012

The class motto of Northport’s 2012 graduating seniors was “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way,” a quote from American poet Carl Sandburg, and a more refreshing group of well-spoken young people would be hard to imagine. They were serious and funny by turn, but their every word was honest. “We didn’t always love each other every minute,” they admitted, referring to historic feuds and fights along the path from kindergarten to graduation, “but here we are.” Still together. Setting off into the world.

Salutatorian John Petoskey

Valedictorian Nina Muller

Commencement speaker Steve Wetherbee

Is graduation anywhere else like this? A commencement address that includes a banjo? A little “flower girl” (Olivia Craker) giving out, from a basket on her arm, flowers (white orchids) to all the seniors on the stage? Seniors producing flowers (white lilies) from under their chairs to take down into the audience and present to parents and guardians? After diplomas have been handed out, the slide show (that's what the big screen in the top photo was all about), with pictures of each graduate, from baby photos to senior portraits?

Every year I, like many others in the audience, have more grey in my hair and am further in time from my own graduation. This year’s class was not yet born the first summer of my bookstore in Northport. The connection I had to the school during the years I tutored there has weakened, more a feeling in my heart now than an item on my daily agenda. And yet, Northport graduation never loses its magic for me. I wonder if these young people know how many people are made happy just by the sight of them on the sidewalk? They are our future.

So congratulations to the Class of 2012:

Megan Elaine Henderson

Austin Glen Miller

Anina Lee Punahele Naegeli Müller

John Minodeé Petoskey

Forrest Alexander Rogers

Chelsea Renee Wack

Francis Mitchell Wanageshik

Best wishes to you all as you go out into the world. May you work hard, do well and do good, and may all your dreams come true.