Cozy in the Bookstore

"Oh, the weather outside is frightful," indeed! Bitter, cold wind, sloppy roads, treacherous footing. No need to look at the calendar to know what time of year it is. Stephanie next door at Funky Mama's consignment shop is decorating her tree, and I'm trying to settle on exactly what I'll prepare and serve at our joint open house tomorrow (5-9 p.m., in case you haven't gotten the message for the last two days!), and both of us are trying not to freak out over the forecast of a possible storm tomorrow afternoon. Do we need a "snow date"? Right now I'm just hoping for the best. After all, weather forecasts have been wrong before (within the past week, in fact), and as the last person through the door reminded me, "People up here are used to winter." We are Up North, in all seasons! I type these words as blowing snow is almost horizontal, with the occasional swirling funnel....

Village OPEN!

Sewer work, which will go forward for another week, then resume in the spring, won’t get in the way of Saturday evening’s open house at Funky Mama’s and Dog Ears Books (5-9 p.m.). The crews knocked off early today (Thursday) and won’t be back on the job until Monday. Even when streets have been temporarily closed, the inconvenience has been minimal, progress encouraging.

The Christmas tree lights were on today at the T-intersection of Waukazoo and Nagonaba. Presumably they will be unplugged prior to the formal “lighting” at 5 p.m. on Saturday, but making sure ahead of time that all were in working order was a good idea on someone’s part.

My guilty pleasure today (aside from the last of last weekend’s Christmas cookies) is THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES, by Kobo Abe, my intermittent reward for small tasks accomplished. Hailed on the back cover of my Penguin edition as “one of the “premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century,” the novel is certainly Kafkaesque, as has often been noted. The protagonist sets out on holiday and becomes an unwitting prisoner and slave. Because of a stupid letter he left behind and a ridiculous insistence on being mysterious about his destination, no one will know where to look for him or even realize that foul play must have been involved in his disappearance. He has done nothing wrong. His rights have been outrageously violated. Nothing makes any sense. He protests, he struggles, he plots his escape. There is no avoiding the fact, however, that he must dig sand or die.

The sand is omnipresent:

“Because winds and water currents flow over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth.”

Like an ant-lion waiting in its trap for heedless ants, the woman at the bottom of the sand pit into which the amateur entomologist is lowered (for what he thinks will be one night’s lodging) greets his arrival with scarcely disguised pleasure, but he soon realizes that the sand itself is their captor, the woman as helplessly trapped as he, both of them dependant on villagers above the pit for the very water that keeps them alive.

More than in the writings of Kafka or Camus, physicality plays an unrelenting role in the story. I am reminded of the repugnance Sartre felt for the physical world: Abe’s awareness is as keen, without the nauseated rejection. Perspiration, urination, skin rashes, itching, mucous, saliva, skin (“soft, downlike bandage for the soul”) appear on almost every page.

Is Niki Jumpei an Everyman, the author’s message that we are all hapless insects trapped in a demeaning struggle for our brief, meaningless existence? One reviewer, David Mitchell, puts the question this way: Is this a story of salvation or damnation? I am two-thirds of the way through the book and not about to skip to the last page, but I doubt the last sentence would give a clear answer to the question, anyway.

Over and over, too, our Michigan dunes come into my mind--the difficulty of the dune climb at Sleeping Bear, the sand’s “angle of repose,” the “ghost forests” of giant buried trees, ant-lions and wolf spiders, Pitcher’s thistles, the fragility of dunes (despite the strength of sand and wind) and their vulnerability to erosion. What would Abe’s images of migrating dunes mean to me if I had lived my whole life in forested hills deep in the continent, away from the Great Lakes shore?

Briefly

Most of my mental energy today is going toward making up book order lists and planning for Saturday evening’s open house here at Dog Ears (and next door at Funky Mama’s) from 5-9 p.m., planning that involves lots of cookbook reading and the making of grocery lists. Lists, lists! Naughty or nice? One customer told me this morning that their family decided to give only books for Christmas, “no more junk!” Books are good! Cookies are nice, too, though!

Anyway, here are a couple of short items for today:

First, according to Franklin D.Martini’s book, THE MEANING OF DREAMS, the answer to my question this past fall, “Why Elephants?” is that “To dream that you see an elephant is a happy omen; it tells of peace and prosperity. To dream of many means you will gain fame and fortune. To feed one denotes a job change.” Fine! Peace and prosperity appeal to me more than fame and fortune, which would bring as many problems as they would solve, I’m thinking.

Then, you might want to take a brief look at the dizzying World Clock site. (Thanks, sister BJ, for calling this to my attention.) I could only watch the figures race upwards for a couple of minutes before becoming overwhelmed and turning back to printed paper pages, but the question stays in my head: What kind of world will we leave to our grandchildren?

Books, 'Books,' and Non-Books

That heading seems to include about everything under the sun, doesn’t it? I read Anna Quindlen’s yesterday afternoon (the one with the title that complicates punctuation of any sentence one drops aforesaid title into) and browsed again, appreciatively, in EIGHT DOGS NAMED JACK, Joe Borri’s short story collection just out this summer, reflecting again how fortunate I am to have work that I love. Then I started another new order list, sold a few books, moved others around, and finally—because it was Monday, and the UPS delivery was the big event of the day—went home early to begin reading a manuscript.

There’s more to having a bookstore than reading books, however, and late evening found me catching up on bookkeeping, a job that brought on a very different set of reflections, such as, “Why do they call accounts ‘books,’ anyway? What a libel on the pleasures of men and women!” I did think of the ancient Egyptians, though, and their careful record-keeping, and that reminded me once again of how easily we remember the alphabet, thanks to the little song, but how difficult it is to put the multiplication tables to music, hence the necessity of writing numbers down. ‘Books’ before literature, in other words. (Sigh!)

My use of the category ‘non-books’ means different things on different occasions. Since Sunday breakfast with Chicago ‘outsider art’ collector Susann, I keep thinking of the artist she introduced us to, Stella Waitzkin, and Waitzkin's shelves of what appear to be books but are actually sculpted polymer resin pieces, innocent of words. ”Words are lies,” the artist said. Her non-book constructions were lovely on the shelf, but what, I ask myself, did she do for stories?

The books in the photograph above are real and were not harmed in the making of the image.

Wild and bitterly cold gusts of snow-bearing wind are blowing untethered Christmas trees down the streets of Northport. Don't you wish you were here?

This Time of Year

It’s beginning—the time of decorations and shopping and parties and cookies, of wrapping gifts and trying new recipes and never having enough time and the time one does have going by much too fast. It’s the time of year for a bookseller when new book orders are coming in one right after another, and the question comes up sometimes, “Who was it who ordered this, anyway?” And if I don’t remember, will the customer call or stop in to see if his or her book is here (I hope)?

As thoughts turn to food, it’s a good time of year for cookbooks (not that there’s ever a bad time, other than—for me—September, when all I want to do is go on vacation to recuperate from summer), but it’s just the best time of all for children’s books! As someone who started in used titles and added new later, I’ve hit on what I consider a pretty good strategy for ordering children’s classics: I look for an “anniversary edition” whenever one is available through my distributor. THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT… THE LITTLE PRINCE… THE WIZARD OF OZ, etc. Who doesn’t want the original illustrations? When it comes to something like THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, published in countless editions and the dream of countless illustrators, I look for tried-and-true artists, such as Tasha Tudor.

And this is neither a cookbook nor a children’s book, but I can’t help being happy that Anna Quindlen’s GOOD DOG. STAY is out in time for Christmas and that it’s in hardcover with a paperback price. That is the perfect combination!

This morning, digging through a closet in search of a certain set of tree ornaments, I found our little Nikki’s Christmas scarf from last year. David had the same idea I did, which was to tie the scarf around her framed portrait here at Dog Ears Books. The words to a contemporary seasonal song drift through my mind: “This is how I see you / in the snow on Christmas morning.” Good dog! Christmas won’t be the same without you!

Closing Time

When dark comes on at the end of day this time of year, the bright, cheery lights indoors seem all the brighter and cheerier, and it’s hard to turn the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, lock the door and leave the bookstore to walk out into the slush (underfoot) and chilly wind (head to toe). On the other hand, it was wonderful to walk into the house tonight, where the lamps and fire were already lit and David offering to fix dinner.

Having finished DINNER AT ANTOINE’S (and even having guessed the murderer, though not from putting together clues, at which task I am hopeless), I turn again tonight to my economics shelf here at home (which is in no way a “home economics” shelf), opening ONE MARKET UNDER GOD to the last page bookmarked, about three-quarters through the book. The topic is brands and the new “discipline” of account planning, evolutionary successor to what we used to call simply advertising. A Ph.D. in anthropology is the recruiter’s new dream candidate, as long as the degree-holder in question brings along no “values” baggage.

As usual with a book of this kind in my hands, this one bristles like a hedgehog with gummed tags (brand name omitted). Here’s the beginning of a paragraph where the author steps forward from his dispassionate reporting stance and makes it personal:

“I confess: The way the word is used in marketing literature, I am an extremely ‘cynical’ person. I doubt advertising. I scoff at brands. I do not believe that Macintoshes make you ‘think different’ or that Virginia Slims help you ‘find your voice.’”

Author Thomas Frank goes on from there to explore--with appropriate, rational cynicism--Nike’s search for ‘authenticity,’ that is, an approach to advertising that won’t seem like advertising because its ‘stars’ come not from Hollywood but from the working class or even the ghetto. Frank “can’t help but marvel at the effort it would require to achieve a comparable level of visibility for the actual concerns, not just the authenticity, of working-class life.” The desperate search for what he calls “redemption through sport,” that search exploited by the commercials in question, is the flipside of the coin whose face is “starvation wages in Indonesia.”

It’s morning on the other side of the world. The sun and moon are impartial.

Sticking with This One

One of these moon images was yesterday’s, taken in the late afternoon on Thanksgiving Day through our friends’ east-facing living room window. The other is the same moon this early evening, caught in the branches of an ash tree along our own driveway.

My resolve to read DINNER AT ANTOINE’S (which I keep wanting to call MY DINNER WITH ANTOINE, confusing the book title with the title of an unrelated movie) was tested severely early on in the story. So many characters introduced, the writing so relentlessly expository! Then the black servants appeared on the scene, selflessly devoted and speaking almost incomprehensible dialect! It was all a bit much, and I was slogging half-heartedly along, thinking how like a soap opera the story was, wondering how much I could stand, when an unexpected suicide caught me by surprise. Well, that’s different! And then an enterprising young police detective announced to a startled family that the death was no suicide but murder! Murder most foul! So then I was hooked and am now halfway through the book.

Turns out my browsing turned up the best Frances Parkinson Keyes title for me. The author wrote many other novels set in New Orleans, all of which make at least passing reference to the restaurant, and all doubtless full of rich local color and fashion, but DINNER AT ANTOINE’S is the only murder mystery she wrote. It’s good light reading for the holidays. Next week will be soon enough to get back to heavier stuff.

Pleasantly busy day at the bookstore today, with lighted, decorated Christmas tree in the window and a cookie table in the corner to welcome friends and shoppers.

Work-in-Progress Report #1: Jerry Dennis

Jerry Dennis’s most recent book, THE LIVING GREAT LAKES, explored a subject he can’t leave behind. Here’s what this Traverse City writer has to say about what he’s working on now:

---

“I’m well along on a new book, A WATCHER ON THE SHORE, which I expect to send to my publisher about a year from now. The shore of the title is both literal and figurative: the one ringing the five Great Lakes; and the one we’re born onto, where we’ve erected our cities and composed our philosophies, where we spend our lives telling stories around campfires at the edge of the unknown.

“For most of the past year I’ve been living in houses on the five Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, staying for a week to a month at a time in places that interest me, including Northport’s own Cathead Point, where I stayed in a beautiful house all of last January. The other places I’ve stayed have varied from a two-room log cabin on Lake Superior to a 20-million-dollar mansion on Lake Michigan—a dozen or so in all, each drenched with character and each offering a widely different view of the lakes. My usual routine was to spend the evenings reading, the afternoons out in the world exploring, and the mornings writing, using as a guide the ancient Japanese essay genre called zuihitsu, or ‘following the brush.’ (The ‘brush’ in my case is a Sarasa Zebra 0.7 black pen.) It’s been a new way for me to compose, and has opened up many possibilities for surprise. When I started writing about stones on the beach, for example, I found myself meditating on randomness and beauty. Waves during a storm suggested the myths in almost every culture that created order out of the primordial chaos. The death of loons from botulism led to an inquiry into our place in nature and how our attitudes about it are changing.

“As with all my books (and, for that matter, my life), I’ve proceeded without much planning, following my instincts and trusting to serendipity. Along the way I’ve been fortunate to receive a great deal of assistance, starting with the generous people who invited me to stay in their houses. I’m also nearly speechless with gratitude to the Kellogg Foundation, Wege Foundation, and Great Lakes Fishery Trust, which have provided grants to support me while writing the book, and for Tim Ervin, Becky Ewing, and others at the Great Lakes Water Studies Institute and Northwestern Michigan College, who facilitated the grants. They’ve given me a wonderful gift, the result of which, I hope, will be a rich and deeply textured work.

“Now I’m home for the winter, writing every day in my studio/sanctuary in the loft of our stone barn, and spending evenings by the fireplace with Gail, reading novels and playing cribbage.”

---

Thank you, Jerry, for this window into your writing world, for all the books you have written, and for those yet to come.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

In Town and Beyond

It’s cozy today at the bookstore, with jazz on the CD player and boxes of decorations and holiday books to unpack. Even the bank was cozy this morning, where the view toward the harbor through the Thanksgiving-themed window also shows the Christmas “Toys for Tots” collection sign and heavy construction equipment parked on the street. Everything is going on in town at once: the sewer project, Thanksgiving dinner shopping, Christmas decorating, last-minute gardening. The weather is mild, making everything easier for a while.

Yesterday’s big news item in the book world was also on the regular evening news on NPR. It was the new report from the National Endowment for the Arts saying that while “reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors." Also, "the percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.” There was a bit about time spent reading vs. watching TV, but I haven’t seen a statistic yet for being online. Does what you’re doing now count as reading? Maybe you should get offline and pick up a book!

But if you’re looking to entertain yourself online for a few minutes a day, try feeding the hungry while testing your vocabulary. For every correct answer, you’ll be donating ten grains of rice to the needy. I checked this out on Snopes, where the status of the rice donation “legend” is given as TRUE. Donations are paid for by advertisers whose banners appear on the page. Once--the word was ‘malinger’--I wanted to choose NONE OF THE ABOVE for my answer, but that choice was not available. That’s a minor quibble.

Through a Glass, Dreamily

My morning drive to Northport was made interesting by virtue of light rain. Traffic was nonexistent. I was able to stay under 40 mph and leave the wiper speed on low. Pulling off the road for a minute, I captured this impressionistic view of Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern through the rain-streaked windshield.

Now, unprepared with new thoughts this evening, I’m pleased to have rediscovered the commentary on Kipling I thought was lost forever, and here it is:

---

Another family member writes, “What's up with those people who read the last page of the book first? I know lots of people who do, but it wouldn't occur to me in a million years to want to do that.” Me, either, Maiya. What’s up with that, indeed? But, well….

When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I got up to read for a while and picked up a strange little novel by Rudyard Kipling. In childhood I loved The Jungle Books (which my father and I read together over and over), but how different an author can appear at different stages of a reader’s life and when a different book is in question! THE LIGHT THAT FAILED is a rather horrid little story, I must say.

It begins with two unhappy children, unrelated orphans being raised by the same dreadful woman. The children buy a handgun, and the reader thinks murder is at hand, but no…. Then we skip ahead many years and find the young man on the banks of the Nile, determined to make his way as an artist by first becoming a wartime newspaper illustrator.

Later, back in London, Dick finally recognizes at last that he must be true to Art and not sell his soul for easy popularity. How does he come to see this? By running into Maisie, the companion of his childhood, also determined to be a painter, also focused blindly (as it were) on Success, as he was up to that point.

Well, Dick and Maisie do not make a pair, because she will not. When he goes literally blind, however, a friend of his travels to France, where Maisie has gone to study painting, and brings her back to nurse the man who loves her. But that doesn’t work, either. She is too selfish and runs off without even bidding him a proper farewell.

Backtrack to another woman, hired as Dick’s model, who set her cap for the artist’s best friend and mentor/benefactor. Dick foils the plan, but the woman reappears later to destroy the last masterpiece Dick paints before his eyes give out!

Thus both wickedly selfish women are booted offstage by the author, and Dick dies in his friend’s arms, off on a battlefield somewhere.

Was it a battlefield? Where? I can’t say because, while I did not read the last page of this book first, I did lose patience and skipped several chapters, turning to the last page out of curiosity. Enough!