Singin’ That Old Frank Sinatra Song

About halfway through my graduate degree program in philosophy, my then-advisor and I came to an unhappy impasse over a paper I wrote for his seminar on Nietzsche and Scheler. My paper was about Nietzsche’s quarrels with moral language. He wanted his meanings to be completely unambiguous. He wanted what I called a few years later, in my dissertation (under a different advisor), ‘univocity,’ that is, meanings with clear, bright, tight boundaries that could not be crossed. Nietzsche wanted to be the Autocrat of his meanings. But language isn’t like that. Wanting meaning to be that way is like wanting to create a playing card with only one side: peel away as many wafer-thin layers as you can, the card will still always have two sides.

My professor was not happy with my paper because my interpretation of Nietzsche was not one he recognized. He kept asking me to write more, but no matter how much I explained, it was always inadequate, although I think I made it as clear as clear could be and am sure readers untrained in philosophy will have at least some clue from the paragraph above what I meant. (“Wanting meaning to be that way is like wanting to create a playing card with only one side: peel away as many wafer-thin layers as you can, the card will still always have two sides.”) The professor never did get it and ultimately gave me a B++++ on the re-re-rewritten paper. There is something in academic philosophy called “the principle of charity,” which tells readers to assume that the writer whose work they are reading is not a moron and to make every effort to understand the writer’s position before criticizing it. The principle of charity is almost never extended to students. Why should it be? How could a student, of any age, possibly have anything important to say?

I had loved my superficial reading of Thus Spake Zarathustra when encountering it as a high school senior. The pages of my dog-eared paperback copy were black with underlining, the inside of the back cover thick with my personal index of topics and page numbers. The poetry seduced me. And don’t most adolescents feel like misunderstood outsiders? “Where the rabble drink, all wells are poisoned” -- one of my favorite lines! There was another about poets’ ink-stained fingers. Ah! But in the seminar room and at home in my spartan graduate student apartment I realized that my old infatuation with Nietzsche was dead and over. Twenty years past high school, all I could see in the writing was an unhappy misfit, railing at the whole rest of the world for not recognizing his genius. Jealous of Jesus, furious with God for not existing, and disdaining the “rabble,” Nietzsche made a preemptive strike against his critics, claiming that only in the future would he be understood. Clever move!

Sadly for Nietzsche, it is a feature of philosophy and history that no one has ever has “the last word.” To paraphrase Richard Feynman, we live our lives and make our mistakes, and then we die. I would add, and then our children and grandchildren and surviving friends and enemies get to say anything they like about us. Trying to have the last word, to forestall criticism, is like trying to fence in the meaning of words. Evolution of meaning and secret, coded meanings and reinterpretation and reevaluation are possibilities that will always exist, and no unhappy philosopher can hold them at bay.

During the weeks I was rewriting my Nietzsche paper over and over, I was unhappy – not because the work was difficult but because I knew my attempts were doomed in advance. A difficult assignment may be a challenge and a spur, as was my original self-assigned investigation of Nietzsche’s views on language. An impossible assignment, one given by another who will never be satisfied, is an exercise in futility. Fortunately, the seminar requirements offered a choice of options: one long paper for the semester or two short ones. I took the B++++ on Nietzsche and set him aside. Scheler and I were much more compatible, and the professor would not be threatened by my views on Scheler. Indeed, I received an A on the Scheler paper.

In those days, we did not all have our own PCs or laptops, and so the graduate student computer room, with its rows of monitors, keyboards, and printers, was where we ground out pages and pages of work, in company but only rarely in conversation with one another. Finally, during one of these rare conversations, a dissertation-stage student could hold back no longer on the subject of the professor whose seminar had cost me such agony and who was still, then, my advisor. “Save yourself!” this usually calm, sedate young man burst out passionately. “You’ll never finish with him! None of his students ever finish!”

That professor’s students did not complete their degree programs because their dissertations always needed more work. The way I thought of it was that he wanted his recognizable fingerprints on the work. Until it conformed to his views and style, it was “not ready.”

I made my escape. Transferring to another advisor, I put together a committee. My committee members (three men) were as different from each other as they could be, in terms of their philosophical interests, but the one thing they had in common was a willingness to let me do my own work. They had their own work and no desire to take over mine. Instead, one of them would ask me a simple question or make a gentle suggestion, and I would go away and work alone for several more months. In the end, I finished, and I will always be grateful to my committee for giving me room to find my own way.

Working on a project that is mine makes me happy. Working to find my own way, my own words, my own writing path means the world to me. If I am pleased with the work – and I am my own severest critic -- I have succeeded; if it falls short of what I wanted it to be, it is not a success, whatever anyone else might say. The one thing that can make me unhappy with writing is having someone else trying to mold and shape my work to satisfy his vision rather than mine. If I were still working in an office, clocking in and out, receiving a regular paycheck – or even if I were still an undergraduate, taking required classes, doing required reading and churning out required papers – I would have to knuckle under to the demands of other people and give them what they want. But I would only be doing that in exchange for future freedom, and for me those exchanges are long past.

I no longer have time to postpone being myself. The stories and letters and blog posts and book reviews I write now are things I want to write, written in the way I want to write them. 

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?

Where Did That Lost Hour Go?

Snow and ice melting in the rain

Plum tree buds

Somehow I don't feel as if I've lost an hour, and that's because I treated myself to a lazy Sunday, a very old-fashioned, low-tech kind of lazy day. Trying to be your own doctor is supposed to mean you've got a fool for a patient, but my prescription for the 23-hour day was plenty of lounging around at home. 

For starters, there was the switch to Daylight Savings Time, but we’d also been out late on Saturday night. Well, late for us. We drove to Traverse City for an opening at the Dennos Museum Center, where our friend Rufus Snoddy had a beautiful and enormous installation, all new pieces, called “Wings of Icarus.” There was a reception for Rufus and another artist. The other man, Cressman from University of Michigan, also did large installation pieces. Painting and sculpture combined memorably in both artists’ work. Brad Aspey from Interlochen Public Radio interviewed Snoddy and Cressman on stage at eight o’clock, and I was glad we stayed for the talk because I’m still contemplating on Monday morning what Rufus had to say about the myth of Icarus. He did a work back in the 90s, he said, around four ancient Greek myths, but the story of Icarus was the one that stayed with him, speaking to him of modern life and modern man’s inability to listen to warnings and moderate his flights into technology to find a “safe passage.” The different sizes and colors and textures and patterns of the wings, along with different objects incorporated into them, Rufus said, came from his imagining all of us human beings with wings. “What would his wings look like? What would her wings look like?” In the work, beautiful single wings hang from the ceiling or from wall mounts and shift slowly as currents of air move them. When you think about it, it is like the world after the Apocalypse – still filled with beautiful fragments but empty now of the proud beings whose wings these were. So it is very beautiful and, underneath, achingly sad.

There is also a lovely exhibit of modern Japanese woven bamboo art currently at the Dennos. Altogether it’s a good time to visit, if you haven’t already. And you'll have to go there to see the exhibits, because I did not take my camera with me on Saturday evening.

Somewhere that night was another exhibit opening in town, a show featuring three modern pioneers of the region, one of them the late Reverend Marshall Collins of Northport. Somehow I had thought both exhibits were at the Dennos, but they were not, and no one at the Dennos could tell me where the other might be, although one of the volunteers carefully combed through the Northern Express, page by page, looking for an announcement. I’m sorry we missed that opening, as several family members of Reverend Collins are people I consider friends. I’ll have to find out where it is and see the exhibit another time.

The ride home was hair-raising. The air had warmed so that rain rather than snow was falling. Falling heavily. Lights gleamed and glared. Headlights in rearview mirrors, oncoming headlights. The white fog line along the sides of M-22 definitely needs repainting! Fog, too, began occurring in surprising patches. We were relieved to turn off the highway at last, more relieved to reach home, and most relieved to fall into bed! And so there was no hurry to get up by the sprung-forward clock in our house on Sunday morning.

Typed (on typewriter) and handwritten treasures -- thank you, dear friends!

I got up relatively early, anyway, and finished a letter started to a friend a couple of days before. Handwritten on paper. Then made banana bread. Made coffee for David. (I’m halfway through my six-WEEK--NOT six-MONTH! period of abstinence from coffee, alcohol, and potato chips and approaching confidently the home stretch.) Made us a big breakfast to enjoy in bed, along with “Prairie Home Companion.”

Later I made myself comfortable on the living room couch and did a spell of writing, putting that aside after about an hour to go on with reading A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines. A friend of mine who has read all his books had told me she thinks he should be much better known than he is, and after only 46 pages I agreed with her wholeheartedly. – but that is a subject for another day.

Later, making up for getting up early, I took a nap, right in the middle of the day, right there on the couch. When I woke up, David and I read side by side and talked about what we were reading and had a few pretzels, and then I fixed supper for us, still in my robe.

After supper, David decided to out for a while, and I had the only modern part of my lazy day, reading e-mail, but when that was finished I went back to my book, finishing the last page – for real – just as David was walking in the front door.

Okay, watching a movie on DVD is fairly modern, I guess, but the movie was the perfecting ending to my day of writing and reading. “Liberal Arts” has several bookstore scenes (two different bookstores, one in New York and one in Gambier, Ohio); all through the movie characters are reading and discussing books (one I recognized by its cover, although the title and author name were not spoken aloud or shown on screen); and quite a long sequence of the movie has two of the characters composing and handwriting letters on paper to each other, letters sent through the mail and drawn eagerly from envelopes to be read and re-read. The final bookstore scene in New York is rather a paean to books, as two characters sit on the floor between rows of shelves, books piled on the floor around them. It isn’t entirely a “bookshop movie,” but I’d definitely mention it in that context were I writing again of my best-beloved genre.

Hazy orchard with fog beginning to thin

It was still raining this morning -- the world white with mist and fog and sparkling with raindrops -- but we are not  lazy today. The world is calling us out into it!

More melting snow

P.S. A note in French, handwritten inside a beautiful notecard featuring a photograph of a round barn, awaited me at the post office, along with two review copies of new books. I love the post office! I love real letters and real books!

P.P.S. The other exhibit, I found out online, is at the History Center in Traverse City, the place I will always, as long as I live, call the old library. We'll go there on our next trip to town.

Reporting for Life, But Briefly

Quick, short note today. First, thanks to everyone who commented on my recent post on book titles. Anyone who hasn't left a comment yet is still welcome to do so. The more, the merrier!

I don't have a lot to say today because (1) I've been reading too many books to stop to write about any of them; (2) the sun is shining, and the snow is sparkling, and it makes me giddy; and (3) I have a fresh letter from a friend that arrived in my p.o. box today that I can't wait to open over another cup of herbal tea. Sigh! The luxury of reading a real letter -- on a sunny day of stars on the snow -- still recovering from laughing my way through The Guinea Pig Diaries, by A. J. Jacobs -- Sarah at my side -- David not far away. Life is good.

Ever Pick Up a Book for Its Title?

Spring Sun, Winter Snow

A bookselling and publishing newsletter called “Shelf Awareness” comes to me every business day in my e-mailbox, brimming with the latest corporate bulletins, bookstores being opened, sold, and closed, media events scheduled, and so forth. One of SA’s regular features, “Book Brahmin,” interviews authors and asks a series of questions, such as [What’s] on your nightstand now; Favorite book when you were a child; Your top five authors; Book you’ve faked reading; Book you’re an evangelist for; etc. The format is more or less the same each time, but the feature always different depending on the interviewee.

When the question comes for the writer to name a book he or she has “bought for the cover,” however, many (most?) deny they have ever done such a thing. Even those who admit to having pretended to have a read they never read deny they have ever bought a book for its cover. I wonder what the answers might be like it they were asked about the title rather than the cover. A cover gets my attention first, but a title can really hook me in.

I thought of this today when adding another book to my “Books Read 2013” list and, glancing down the 2012 list, saw the fabulous title Why the Tree Loves the Ax, a title that still gives me shivers! Then there is A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Irresistible! (On the repellent side of the equation  are books I avoided for years because of their titles, books like Ethan Frome and Bleak House.) Also, when I look at lists of bestsellers, it sometimes seems to me that there are certain words that are magic in titles, words like stone(s), river, water, lake, road, summer, winter. Of course, there are more, and you have your own, I'm sure.

So I’m curious. Do you notice feeling different levels of attraction and repulsion to titles of books and sometimes fall under the spell of certain words in a title? Do you ever begin reading a book for its title?

More Old Southern Memories

No, Dawn, you are not looking at spring in Michigan but winter in south Florida, these pictures coming to you from from quite a different place and years after they were taken. Yes, today’s post is a reprise of one of two trips we made to Everglades City and environs. The little waterside restaurant is (was?) in Everglades City. Along the Gulf coast of Florida, common restaurant specialties are blue crabs, stone crabs, and alligator. Sometimes there is mullet on the menu, as well. Remember the line from the song, “Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high”? I always thought the “fish are jumpin’” part was hyperbole, but no! The fish really do jump right out of the water! They hurl themselves into the air! Those are mullet, and their antics never ceased to delight, amuse, and entertain me. Mullet is a small, bony fish, but when you’re in Florida, it’s local, and enjoying local food is a big part of being somewhere else.

Remember the day we went out into the ocean looking for an island with a beach? Here are a couple more scenes from that excursion.

The photo directly above is sea grape. Sea grape manages to be both ubiquitous and wonderful, a neat trick.

Not far from Everglades City is Chokoloskee Island, which is pronounced by Chucka-luskee. There is an old store on the island that dates back to the days of Mister Watson, so memorably captured in Peter Mattheissen’s Killing Mister Watson, which I began reading in Michigan before this trip and finished in Everglades City. Why do I have no pictures of the store? Well, you can see the pictures -- and read about the murder -- here. When we visited the island, there was a sweet little restaurant, colorfully decorated, with a menu that featured interesting vegetarian choices, and towering over the little building and its flowery outside deck was this tall tree. Now that is something you don’t see in Michigan, either! Papaya! It you would like to try growing a papaya tree from seed, click here to see its life unfold.

To the north of Everglades City is a nature preserve called the Fakahatchee Strand, where a remnant of Florida’s oldest cypress trees escaped being felled to become ship masts—or, more recently and much less nobly, garden mulch. Please do not use cypress mulch in your landscaping! Cypress, like mangrove, is crucial to flood control and is “harvested” for short-term profit at the expense of homes and businesses and lives! Companies harvesting the trees will tell you that they replant, but establishing a seedling cypress is infinitely more difficult than planting pines in Michigan fields, because the seedlings cannot survive prolonged, intense flooding exacerbated by the removal of the mature trees. Storm surge easily uproots them and washes them away. In other words, the flooded land from which centuries-old trees is taken will not necessarily be hospitable to seedlings because it is no longer the “same” habitat.

Look up. Look down. There's something to see wherever you look. Look carefully.

‘Strand,’ by the way, is an important word in Everglades vocabulary. In what looks to the first glance like stagnant swamp, there are almost imperceptible moving currents constantly refreshing the water. You might think of the cypress strands and rivers of grass as wet prairies and the hardwood ‘hammocks’ as islands comparable to prairie oak openings. When a delicate natural habitat like this is destroyed, restoring it becomes a huge, expensive project.

My delight in jumping fish was matched by David’s enthusiasm for strangler figs. He could not stop marveling at these subtropical parasites -- but neither could he be serious for long.

Here is a good summary of different kind of Florida habitats. It is another world from Michigan and equally beautiful and captivating in its own unique way. Here in northern Michigan, it’s a very different winter story.

Undercover Thoughts

Thursday afternoon, last day in February: more snow sifting down. Sometimes the wind blows it at an angle, and sometimes it drifts lazily. Half an hour after David left this morning, his tire tracks no longer looked bright and new but like all the other tracks from earlier in the week. Unlike last year at this time, we have a pretty good, deep snow cover.

I’ve spent much of yesterday and today under warmer covers, woven and polar fleece throws, trying not to move too much to set up another round of coughing. It isn’t any horrible flu, just a bad cold, and I think I’m on the recovery side of the upside-down bell-shaped curve. Another upside has been plenty of reading time. Finally, after lo these many years, I’m getting around to reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Before that, I devoured a fascinating memoir, the subject of the remainder of this post:

Avi grew up in an Orthodox family. The basketball team at his yeshiva high school was called the MCATS, as in Medical College Admission Test. Avi quit the MCATs at the age of fourteen to devote himself to the study of Torah and traveled to the West Bank during summer vacation to study more Torah.

Talmud Camp in the ancient Judean heartland, a.k.a. the Occupied Territories -- this was my paradise. Even my parents, who were religious, were concerned about my fervor.

No who knew Avi when he was growing up would have predicted he’d end up in prison.

He didn’t go directly from the schoolhouse to the Big House. For a long time he seemed to be going nowhere. As his classmates from Harvard were establishing themselves in careers as doctors and lawyers, getting married and having children, Avi drifted into part-time work as a free-lance obituary writer.  Even a similarly rudderless friend found this development astonishing, pointing out, “You’re not exactly living the dream.” Something had to change. He saw an ad for a job and decided to apply. He had no background in library science (or in social work) and until he saw the ad hadn’t known that such a job existed, but now he set his sights on the position: prison librarian. For him the choice was clear: “It was either law school or prison.”

Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, by Avi Steinberg

NY: Doubleday, 2010

I was offered a loaner copy of this book with only a minimal description of what it might contain, but I accepted the loan eagerly. Our country has the largest percentage of its population behind bars of any country in the world (Russia and Rwanda come in second and third), you don’t have to live in a huge urban area to know people who have been sent to prison, and yet the average white Joe or Jane Doe whose life has not yet been touched by this reality buys into the myth that American prisoners are a privileged class. If facts about prison violence are cited, Joe and Jane shrug and shake their heads. No, no, sorry! Anyone in prison is there for having broken the law, for having violated someone else’s rights? Why should they have any rights at all? That’s the argument I’ve heard in classrooms and around coffee tables. Loss of liberty is seen as insufficient punishment: the horrors of prison life are just what prisoners deserve!

Running the Books starts off as far as possible from being a retributive diatribe. Actually, the book begins with such broad strokes of humor that I kept wondering if the author would ever say anything important, not only for society but for himself, anything that he felt and believed deeply. Was it worth taking the time to read? Would I learn anything? Oh, well, the funny parts were funny. For example, would the author pass the drug test required for employment, or would his hair sample reveal that he had smoked marijuana a few weeks before? Then, no one ever gets his name right. ‘Avi’ is too unfamiliar for inmates and fellow staff. “’What is that, French?’” And so I read on, entertained and curious. I was an unsuspecting fish, and the author was just playing with me. In time he would set the hook, so gently and gradually that I barely noticed.

Naturally, this smart, naive and inexperienced young man who looked years younger than his actual age encountered situations for which he was unprepared. Of course, he made mistakes, as he is the first to admit. On the other hand, he and the more hardened staff members didn’t always agree on what constituted a mistake. Should he, for example, file reports on prisoners he sees leaving notes in books for other prisoners, i.e., using books as illegal mailboxes? He wants to believe both what people tell him and that he can be an agent of change in their lives. Is he in for a rude awakening. Well, yes and no. Mostly yes, but not always in the ways you might expect.

One of Avi’s duties in addition to running the library was teaching writing classes, one to men, another to women prisoners, and one of the women in his class wanted to do nothing but stare out the window. What would the appropriate authoritarian response be to make clear to this prisoner that he was in charge? Jessica was the woman who stared out the window, but I’m not going to tell you why or what Avi did about it or how Jessica’s story ends.

The prison librarian finds himself helping to edit one prisoner’s life story and guiding another inmate through applications to culinary school, and in fact there are as many stories in this book as there are characters. The book is divided into only two parts, Part I and Part II, with only two “chapters” in each part, and these divisions are pretty much irrelevant. Important section divisions begin anywhere on a page, in boldface type, and are signaled by headings such as Job Training, Blueberry Muffin Day, Stopping the Waves, or some other, sometimes surprising title. And so this book contains, besides stories of individual men and women, what I called the other day “essay islands.” The first that stopped me in my tracks was a section headed Prison Doors: A Brief History. It begins like this: “The prison occupies a former dump and incinerator site.” On the following page we read --

It turned out that the common metaphor of prison as a warehouse was actually not a metaphor. South Bay was a warehouse district. There were auto-body shops, mason depots, a methadone clinic, sundry bombed-out buildings, the headquarters of the Boston Fire Department, the Transit Police. But mostly just streets of warehouses and a chorus of beeping, produced by the backing up of delivery trucks. Sometimes it felt as though the entire place was inching backwards.  

And in a way, it was. South Bay is rumored to be sinking into the sea. Although a landmass for generations – having been filled in a century ago – seagulls still swarmed the skies. Perhaps they sensed the rising tide.  

Signs of the End were everywhere.

Steinberg stands in front of the prison one day to study its architecture and compare it to what he has read of the faces of prisons at various times in American history. He sees nothing either uplifting or judgmental. “The structure,” he reports, “repelled all imagination. It was two cereal boxes.” Still less was there any of the symbolism that Nathaniel Hawthorne described in the first chapter of The Scarlet Letter. Has the modern prison abolished dread? Hardly. The true prison door today is found “safely out of public sight,” inside of the building,” and is far gloomier than Hawthorne’s old oak door surrounded by roses could ever have been. Prison Windows is another essay island, standing out nearly self-contained from the text that precedes and follows, and there are others -- yet they draw power, too, from the personal stories of the surrounding text. Without the stories, a reader might be able to shrug at the essays and dismiss them. The essay island titled Delivered, the opening section of Chapter 4, begins with the brief sentence, “There are various reasons to cry in prison” and ends with the prison librarian “initiated into an ancient club: those who cry alone in the darkness of prison.”

“What’s it about?” That is a question often asked when anyone recommends a book. In this case, the subtitle gives big clue clue, but what else can be said to someone wanting a capsule summary? I can say the following, without giving away any of the book’s specifics: Avi learns (and shows) that people inside prisons and people outside are not that different, after all, if you take away the uniforms and rules; he also learns, long after she had died, that his horrible, negative grandmother had been, like many of his inmate library patrons, a prisoner of loneliness; and he concludes, contrary to his predecessors' posted sign reading BOOKS ARE NOT MAILBOXES, that books indeed are mailboxes and that this is one of the functions of a library--to carry messages through space and across time.

This is a book review and a recommendation. Running the Books is now available in paperback for $16 and is in stock at Dog Ears Books.

Essay Islands

The phrase ‘oak openings’ is saturated with romance, its meaning not on the surface of the words but hidden in history, evoking a landscape long ago erased by settlers and farmers. If you visit today what was once the tall grass prairie, you will see only flat, cultivated fields laid out in squares and rectangles, bounded by straight country roads. Before the white man came? It was a sea of grass, grass as tall as a man, a sea extended as far as the eye could reach. The wind played on its rippling, swaying surface as wind plays on the waters of the ocean. Only movement in the grass gave away the presence of animals making their secret ways beneath the surface. And the oak openings were not clearings in a forest but occasional islands of tall trees interrupting the otherwise featureless expanse of grass. The ground stood higher there. The trees soared. The ‘opening,’ reached by myriad secret paths worn by paw and moccasin through the tall grass, provided shelter for many different varieties of prairie life.

Sometimes in a longer book, one of fiction or memoir, islands of essays stand out. This is famously true of Melville’s Moby-Dick, and it is true of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journey to America. The latter work boasts two essay islands rising up following pages of notebook entries alphabetic and nonalphabetic, de Tocqueville’s various American experience told and retold in different forms according to the focus the author was bringing to it at that time. The notebooks are fascinating and well written but workmanlike and repetitious. And then come the very brief “Journey to Lake Oneida” and the longer “A Fortnight in the Wilds,” standing out from the rest and calling unforgettably.

“Journey to Lake Oneida” shows de Tocqueville and Beaumont at the height of their youthful romantic dreams. Years before Alexis had come upon a book called Journey to Lake Oneida, the story of a young French couple who fled early revolution to take refuge on a remote island in America.

There, cut off from the whole world, far from the storms of Europe and rejected by the society that saw them born, these two unfortunates lived for one another, each consoling the other for their unlucky fate.

“The book,” de Tocqueville wrote, “left a deep and lasting impression on my mind.” The story makes a deep impression on readers’ minds--not only the story of the young French couple but the effect it had on Alexis and Gustave who searched for their traces years later. Before they made their journey the two dreamed of searching for this couple on their island.

We often talked about it, and always ended by saying, sometimes laughing, sometimes sadly, ‘The only happiness in the world is on the shores of Lake Oneida.’

It was a place they felt they had known long before they ever saw it.

If “Journey to Lake Oneida” is a romantic island in de Tocqueville’s book of numbered and dated notebook entries, “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” is much, much more. The essay was begun on the first of August, 1831, written in its entirety on the steamboat The Superior, and concerns not the tall grass prairie of lower Michigan but the stands of virgin forest that covered its eastern and northern parts and the native populations of these lands. He notes in beginning that “the further we got to the northwest, the further did the end of our journey seem to flee before us.” Valleys and rivers bore Indian names, and they were told in one place that there had been Indians there ten years before, five years before in another place, but the forest had been felled before their arrival, the Indians disappeared.

Man gets accustomed to everything. To death on the field of battle; to death in hospital; to kill and to suffer. He gets used to every sight. An ancient people, the first and legitimate master of the American continent, is vanishing daily like the snow in sunshine.... In the same spots and in its place another race is increasing.... It fells the forests and drains the marshes.... The wilds become villages, and the villages towns. The American [settler], the daily witness of such wonders, does not see anything astonishing in all this. This incredible destruction, this even more surprising growth, seem to him the usual progress of things in the world. He gets accustomed to it as to the unalterable order of nature.

Searching and wondering, following the forested shores of Lake Erie, Beaumont and de Tocqueville come at last by steamer to bustling Detroit.

So nothing is harder than to find anyone able to understand what you want. You want to see forests, our hosts said smiling, go straight ahead and you will find what you want. They are there all right around the new roads and well-trod paths.

When I expressed my own impossible wish to see the southern Michigan prairie, meaning to see it as it had been, an endless sea of grass punctuated by isolated oak openings, I was told to drive south of Kalamazoo, and there it was. No, that wasn’t what I wanted to see. The two Frenchmen were more fortunate in their wish. When they mention wanting to visit Saginaw, the response tells them they are on the right track, much to their host’s incredulity. Uninhabited wilds! Woods full of Indians! Meant as warnings, the words fall like promises on the ears of the Frenchmen.

Finally the real journey is at last underway, travel into the heart of wild America. At Flint Rock, “fifteen leagues” from Saginaw, the Europeans on horseback entrust themselves to a pair of teenage Indian guides for a sum of two dollars, and now they learn what it is to be utterly dependent on others for their survival. The Indians were at home in the forest, a white man “incapable not only of being his own guide . . . but even of finding the means to sustain life.” The forests too were utterly unlike anything in Europe. Here dead trees were never cleared away, and among the fallen, often half-rotted limbs and trunks all manner of other plants pushed and climbed and twined. “Life and death meet here face to face as if they wished to mingle and confuse their labours.” At midday, when the wind and birds fell silent, the absence of sound filled the immensity, filling the Europeans with a “sense of isolation and of abandonment.” They had at last found the elusive American wilderness.

Reaching Saginaw the next day, they find Indians, French, English, Americans and mixed-blood residents, and de Tocqueville notes that, even in a settlement numbering only thirty souls,

Colour of skin, poverty or affluence, ignorance or enlightenment have already built up indestructible classifications among them; national prejudices, and prejudices of education and birth divide and isolate them.

In separate paragraphs he adds and details the divisions made by religious differences.

The romance of “Journey to Lake Oneida” was certainly touched with tragedy and melancholy, but it was quieter and more remote, more imaginary, existing in the minds of the foreign visitors who knew only the merest outlines of the story. “A Fortnight in the Wilds” tells of more immediate experience, of tragedy unfolding and growing alongside happy and confident progress in what was for Europeans the “New World.” Like another son of civilization, historian Bruce Catton, de Tocqueville sees back into the past and forward into the future to realize the tragic losses that are the cost of progress. Even as he is privileged to see with his own young eyes some of Michigan’s still-trackless forests, he is every moment aware that they will soon be gone.

The facts are as certain as if they had already occurred. In but few years these impenetrable forests will have fallen. The noise of civilisation and of industry will break the silence of the Saginaw. Its echo will be silent. Embankments will imprison its sides, and its waters which today flow unknown and quiet through nameless wilds, will be thrown back in their flow by the prows of ships. . . .
 It is this consciousness of destruction, this arrière-pensée of quick and inevitable change that gives, we feel, so peculiar a character and such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America. One sees them with a melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them. Thoughts of the savage, natural grandeur that is going to come to an end, become mingled with splendid anticipations of the triumphant march of civilisation. One feels proud to be a man, and yet at the same time one experiences I cannot say what bitter regret at the power that God has granted us over nature.

“I cannot say what bitter regret”—these are the words of a sensitive nature combined with piercing vision and range of comprehension.

In my Faber and Faber edition of Journey to America (London, 1959), “A Fortnight in the Wilds” is less than fifty pages long. By itself it would be a small book, but I have long wished that someone would publish it on its own, perhaps with an artist’s illustrations. Nothing else I have read gives such a picture of Michigan’s forests before the days of large-scale lumbering, and nothing else gives, either, the “mixed blessing” sense of civilization come to the wilderness.

We cannot travel today to the tall grass prairie or to the virgin forested expanses of our home state, except in books and imagination, so with this post you must make the pictures in your mind.

Road Trip: Everglades City and Environs

Courthouse, Collier County

I was going to make you guess where the photo above was taken but then decided not to be so coy. It is the courthouse in Everglades City, Florida, and you'd never believe what-all goes on there. Besides trials, that is. Well, if you go in the side door--I think it's on the left, but my memory could have me turned around; it's been a while since our visit--you'll find a little library where the librarian, along with loaning out books, also sells fishing licenses. And what else? Seems there was some other thing you wouldn't expect, but I've forgotten now.

Serious commercial crabbing

When we visited Everglades City (and it might have been over a decade ago), there were already signs that the simple little town had been "discovered." Big, fancy new houses were going up, raised on tall piers in case of hurricanes. Our hostess got a bit frustrated with me for taking pictures of derelict boats and dumpsters and piles of old crab pots, but to me the working docks are the most interesting part of a waterfront--

Vultures on roof

--even when vultures rather than pelicans are gathering. There were many of both and other kinds of birds, as well. And more than birds!

These alligators are not lawn ornaments

One day we made a drive east on the Tamiami Trail to photographer Clyde Butcher's gallery, located on a small piece of high ground surrounded by the Everglades. David thought these alligators were sculptures. They were not. They were real. I was glad I had not tried to pet one.

Across the road

How many kinds of wildlife can you spot in the photo above?

 The Everglades has the fascination of time travel. It is a primeval world. The ferns and cypresses, strangler figs, strange and wonderful bird cries, reflections of light on dark waters, cypress knees (or knobs) and parasitic plants and bromeliads and more and more and more. It isn't hard to see why a photographer would find enough work for an entire lifetime here.

But it can be frightening and hostile, too, if you're unfamiliar with it, and there are no beaches in the Everglades. As is true along more of Florida's coastline than you might imagine, it's often necessary to go offshore in a boat to find a sandy picnic spot. 

Out past the mangrove islands...

...a sandy beach!

Look very closely at the beach, and in the distance you might spot two tiny figures. Those are the captain and first mate of the boat that took us to the beach, the same people who lodged us in town during our stay.

The sun was setting as we turned back toward land. It was another beautiful south Florida sunset, the end of another lovely day with friends.