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My Bohemian Neighborhood

On Monday evening, out in the shade of a basswood tree, I finished Karel Capek's War With the Newts. When I first picked it up and began reading, I skipped the introduction to go straight to the story, and so I was expecting something other than what I found in the book's pages. Finally, about halfway through the book, I turned back to read the introduction. What I'd expected, you see, was some kind of roman à clef, a fictionalized account of political events of the post-WWI period in Czechoslovakia, and I wondered how much, if anything, I would understand of the story. Well, it isn't that at all.

Capek's scope is broader, his vision wider, and both plot and characters are much more original (I'm guessing) than any thinly disguised series of events between the two world wars would exhibit. I mean, a colony of surviving prehistoric newt-like creatures bred as cheap labor that eventually become "civilized" enough to overtake the world? Really?

Given that Capek was of the same generation as Kafka, it is astonishing how well the warnings of this very innovative novel speak to our twenty-first century world. Suspicion and fear of the Other, of course, are nothing new in human life. Today's unblinking focus on globalization, however -- the insatiable hunger for global markets, ruthless competition for faster, higher profits and ever-cheaper labor, the resulting instability and upheaval and terror in one part of the world after another -- all these facets of our world today can be found in The War with the Newts.

The story begins with a Dutch ship's captain who encounters the "creatures" off a South Seas island. Natives are afraid of them and call them "devils," but the captain sees possibilities in their ability to dive for pearl-bearing oysters, and especially in the little value the creatures place on the pearls. He trades them knives for pearls, after a while other tools for pearls, and the newts (not yet called 'newts' in the story) quickly gain an advantage over their one natural enemy, sharks.

It is the sea captain's meeting with a "captain of industry" that unleashes the eventual Newt Age upon the world. At first all is positive, everyone seeing nothing but an enlargement of prosperity -- for humans, anyway, if not for enslaved newts:

Real self-respecting men of the Newt Age will no longer waste their time pondering about the substance of things [questions of religion and philosophy]; they will only be concerned with their quantity and mass production. The whole future of the world lies in the continuous increase in production and consumption; therefore there must be still more Newts to produce and to devour still more.

Shallow-water, ocean-living creatures, the newts' special skill is in constructing dams offshore, and so they are shipped around the world and set to work building land, so that countries with ocean shoreline might increase their territory. Worldwide trade in newts is big money, uncomfortably like slave trade. Although of course those trading in newts and buying them as laborers insist that the newts are very well treated, groups form to agitate for newts' education (they quickly acquire languages) and rights. International conferences are held, international agreements hammered out by nation-states, but the newts are citizens of no state, and so no state feels obliged to negotiate with them directly. The newts, however, multiply much more quickly than the humans....

When Captain Van Toch first comes to the door of G. H. Bondy to discuss the opportunity awaiting anyone with the foresight to exploit the clever newts, Bondy's doorman, or porter, Mr. Povondra, might have turned him away. Van Toch was not known to Mr. Povondra and had no appointment. But for some reason he sees the visitor in, a very small decision that has very large consequences for the entire world and the future of the human race. And so, for several years, Mr. Povondra is an avid reader of newspapers and collector of clippings about the newts.

Mr. Povondra received day by day whole bales of documents in all the languages of the world, of which especially the papers printed in Cyrillic or in the Greek alphabet, in the Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil, Javanese, Burmese or Taalik script filled him with pious respect. "When I only realize," he used to murmur over them, "that all this would not have been without me!"

He is proud to have had, though a person very modestly placed, nowhere near centers of political power, a pivotal role in world history. With later events, his pride becomes regret, but there is no going back.

Capek's manner of telling his story borrows generously from nonfiction. He uses the format of newspaper articles in some sections, quotes from propaganda, scientific papers and presentation, and he makes extensive and occasionally hilarious use of footnotes. Some footnotes go on for several pages and take on the feel of short pieces of fiction in themselves.

Why is Capek's novel (he also wrote plays) nowhere near as famous as the works of Kafka? In the final chapter of The War with the Newts, the author argues with himself:

"...Listen, do you really want to let the whole of mankind perish?" 

The author frowned. "Don't ask me what I want. Do you think that through my will human continents are falling to bits, do you think that I wanted this to happen? It is simply the logic of events; as if I could intervene. I did what I could; I warned them in time.... I preached, don't let the Newts have arms and explosives, stop that hideous trade in Salamanders, well--you know what happened. They all had a thousand absolutely sound economical and political reasons why it's impossible. I'm not a politician or an economist; I can't change their opinions, can I? What is one to do? The earth will probably sink and drown; but at least it will be the result of generally acknowledged political and economic ideas, at least it will be accomplished with the help of the science, industry, and public opinion, with the application of all human ingenuity! No cosmic catastrophe, nothing but state, official, economic, and other causes. Nothing can be done to prevent it."

In Capek's novel the humans, by using newts to enlarge land for nations, diminished the shallow seas necessary for the newts' survival. It was only a matter of time before the exploding newt population demanded their seas back. The humans had dug their own grave.

Science fiction, political satire, dark humor, fanciful dystopia, innovative literature. War With the Newts is all that and deserves to be better known and widely read. If you don't believe me, here is someone else's pitch for the book.

*  *  *  *  *

In a much happier frame of mind, we will visit freshwater shoreline on Thursday evening, beginning at 7 o’clock, when photographer Ken Scott and painter Kaye Krapohl come to Dog Ears Books to share their stories behind the beautiful book featuring their work, Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions. Please join us!

Recently: Eastern Europe and Me

Kathleen Stocking’s essay about her Peace Corps teaching experience in Romania probably kicked it off. “Something Else Week” is the title of one of the essays in Kathleen’s new book, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale.  Then, can Russia be considered Eastern Europe in some sense? Letters from Russia, by a Frenchman who traveled to Russia in 1839, surprised me by how much 19^th-century czarist Russia sounded like things I’d read and heard about life in the U.S.S.R. in the 20^th century.

The late Tony Judt wrote of past and present all over the world, but one of his special areas of interest and expertise was Eastern Europe, a geographic area he felt had been sorely neglected by Western historians. While I may never make my war entirely through Postwar, many of Judt’s essays posthumously edited by his widow and published under the title When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 either focus on or somehow make reference to Eastern Europe.

Halfway through my reading of the Judt collection, I plucked from my bookstore shelves Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, by Slavenka Dakulic, and took it home to read. Cafe Europa is a book that’s been in the shop for a while now, without anyone buying it and carrying it off – luckily for me, or I might have missed reading it. The author, born in Croatia in 1949, writes of the changes her native land has seen in her lifetime and the difficulty of shaking habits, mental and social, that may be holding back the arrival of truly responsible democratic citizens. Again and again in Drakulic’s essays comes the theme of the rewriting of history, still going on in Eastern Europe although Communism is gone.

Tony Judt was concerned with rewritten history, also, as was the Marquis de Custine when trying to understand Russia under the czars and where it might go from there. You might say that an interest in Eastern Europe leads naturally to a concern for honest history, given the way the subject has been mistreated in that part of the world. Not only there, of course, but to an important and serious extent, beginning in the past and continuing in the present. Another feature common to Judt’s and Drakulic’s essays is the idea that “Europe,” as a unitary place, the salvation of smaller countries from Russia to the Atlantic and the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, is itself a myth, a vague article of faith with little correspondence to reality.

Time for a switch to fiction – and what jumped out at me? War with the Newts, by Karel Capek, with a little upside-down caret over the ‘C’ that I can’t find in my “insert symbol” menu. This novel, “considered by many to be Capek’s greatest book,” is in the “satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut,” according to the blurb on the back. I also find there this account of the author:

Karel Capek (1890-1928) earned recognition as a journalist, playwright, and novelist in Prague before and just after the First World War. In the Czech Republic of the 1920s, his reputation was broadened by the international acclaim that greeted his play R.U.R. as well as subsequent novels and stories....

What did I expect? Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I found inside the covers of this paperback novel. This “Eastern European” novel, at least as far as I’ve read so far, is set mainly in the South Seas, where the captain of a freight-carrying and pearl-fishing expedition boat encounters a colony of – well, we are not sure yet what they are. Newts? Lizards? Tritons? They live in the ocean but are very dexterous and quick verbal learners. Preyed upon by sharks, the tapas (as the narrator calls them, following local native practice) bring up pearl-bearing oysters to the captain subsequently trade him pearls for knives, and eventually learn not only how to open oysters with the knives but how to use them to kill sharks. The plot has thickened considerably! What next? I’ll let you know how it goes. The real question will be how much of the political satire I am able to decode from the story.

And in my Bohemian country neighborhood, as you can see, the farms are doing well. 

Summer’s Busy, Warm, and Swiftly Moving Days

Bookseller Pamela Grath introducing author Kathleen Stocking

There you have it! Another author event, and for a change I got into a picture with my guest speaker for the evening, Kathleen Stocking, thanks to friend and customer Kirk O’Green.

Last time around, I wrote of the difficulty of scheduling summer events. So much is going on, every week of the season, that it is impossible to find a date that won’t conflict with something else. Kathleen and I chose our date before realizing we would conflict with the annual Leelanau Conservancy picnic. Then I found out it was also the first night of “The Music Man” and, if that weren’t enough, also Northport Village Council meeting night. Another spell of warm days, what people elsewhere might term a “heat wave,” was somewhat discouraging, also, to a bookseller without air conditioning (although I always think A/C for one or two weeks a year is plain silly, so I don’t want it). Would it be just the two of us?

One by one and two by two, e-mail and Facebook acceptances trickled in. Then I would see someone on the street who said, “I’ll be coming on Thursday for Kathleen’s talk!” So I assured my guest she would have an audience. “At least nine people,” I told her.

So David and I set up chairs, as usual. I mixed punch. We kept most of the gallery lights off to avoid excess heat, and people began to arrive. I introduced Kathleen, as you saw above, and she began to tell her story. Meanwhile, people kept arriving, and I kept squeezing more chairs into the gallery until, all told, we had at least twenty-five people in the audience, an amazing outcome on a warm evening with so much else going on throughout the village and township.

Lights off so as not to increase heat in gallery

And the audience loved her! I thought they would never let her go, even after she moved out of the gallery and into the bookstore, preparatory to saying good-night. If there is anything as gratifying to a bookseller as having a gracious writer as guest, it is having a warm (you should excuse the adjective), appreciative audience for that writer.

Kathleen Stocking

An author event is like a holiday, long anticipated and then, unbelievably, a past event. Kathleen Stocking’s books, however, I will be re-reading, as well as selling, for a long time to come, from Letters From the Leelanau through Lake Country to her latest, The Long Arc of the Universe.

Water in sunlight

“Possible thunderstorms after eight p.m.” or even “after midnight” never did materialize. The orchard workers, out shaking cherry trees long after midnight, were no doubt glad the rain held off, but my little home boardwalk garden was thirsty on Friday morning. Out came the hose! And then there was farm market, and then another bookstore weekend began.

Summer! Swiftly flow the days! There are only momentary pauses in which we catch our breath before plunging on to the next summer event. At Dog Ears Books, that will be another Thursday evening, August 10, with photographer Ken Scott and painter Kaye Krapohl sharing stories from their adventurous series of hikes around our beautiful Leelanau peninsula, memorialized in Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions. Hope you can join us again next week!

Momentary pause

Conflict! Every Way You Turn!

Timely photo unconnected to text that follows

Imagine (asking readers to imagine seems to be a theme of mine this week) two headstrong individuals in the same organization, each determined to rule alone as autocrat. That’s a recipe for conflict, whether the organization is a nation state or a high school club. If only the two would-be autocrats could join forces and work out ideas together, then go even further and present their ideas to the organization for feedback, what wonders they might achieve! Am I dreaming?

And then there is the national political scene, but I’m not venturing into that minefield today, except to say I am so glad not to have chosen a life in politics!

Idealism, pragmatism, or blind dogmatism; out to win at all costs or hoping to change the world; in it for self or for country – anyone who chooses a life in politics has got to start out with or quickly develop a thick skin, because it’s one thing to realize that no one, even dear self, is universally beloved and quite another, I’m sure, to be ducking slung mud on a daily basis, in public. I have chosen to dedicate my life to a different realm of what Greek philosophers called “the good,” that of literacy and literature and scholarship and art. And yet, even the quietest life presents conflicts, as I’m sure every reader is aware.

Some are small, momentary, and easily resolved.

Whether to linger over coffee and pastry or go for a walk with the dog – that was my first conflict last Wednesday morning, but I resolved it fairly easily by sitting in a park with Sarah for a while, sharing bites with her, and then doing our one-mile walk. No doubt a mere mile was not enough to counteract the effects of the pastry, but that was not a conflict for me, because I don’t have energy to fret about calories in the summer.

Remember those lovely yellow flags not so very long ago? Already Joe-Pye-weed has taken their place as streamside flowers in bloom, and there is loosestrife, too, and also – oh, good heavens! – a few very early goldenrod blossoms rushing the season.

Look closely....

Goldenrod!!!

Loosestrife is an invasive alien we are called upon to despise as an enemy, but I can’t help loving its colorful spires and old-fashioned evocative name. Loosestrife sounds much more poetic than “conflict resolution,” doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine a flower with the latter name! At least in English it seems impossible, but maybe there is a lilting Japanese or Ojibway phrase that would do the job beautifully.

More vexing for the bookseller in a summer tourist town are schedule conflicts that plague efforts to assemble audiences for author events. Impossible to find a date when no one else has something going on! Tuesday evenings are out for much of the summer (township library author series), and Friday evenings in Northport are for Music in the Park, and both the libraries series and Music in the Park are traditional, classic, wonderful public gatherings with which one would not want to conflict, anyway. Every weekend, it seems, has a festival going on somewhere in the area.

So I hit upon Thursday, thinking to land safely on an evening not already crowded with obligations for my target audience of friends and readers and bookstore supporters – but alas! Back to that unfortunately true sentence two paragraphs back: It is impossible to find a date when no one else has something going on.

Kathleen Stocking and I had agreed on Thursday, August 4, at 7 p.m. for a presentation she would give in connection with her new book. Kathleen has traveled all over the world in the past twenty years, always circling back to her Leelanau home when between trips, and she has a lot to share, and it is an honor to have her agree to give a talk in Northport. All good! Imagine, then, my dismay when a local visiting the bookshop looked carefully at our flier for the event and observed that the Leelanau Conservancy’s annual picnic is the same day!

Kathleen and I had already announced the event and put out publicity. We’ve been telling everyone. Too late to change the date now! “What will be, will be,” Kathleen Stocking observes philosophically.

Here are my suggestions:

(1)        It is possible to go online and bid on auction items, rather than waiting for the physical gathering. That’s one idea. Do that.

(2)        Another thought is that the picnic begins at 5:30, and Kathleen Stocking will not be speaking at Dog Ears Books until 7 p.m., so it would be possible to go to the picnic, place a couple of silent auction bids (if you didn’t do it earlier online), and then come on up the last six miles to Northport.

Of course, if you hadn’t planned to attend the Conservancy picnic, you don’t have that particular schedule conflict, and as for others, there may be a way around them, too. (3) Having family or friends visiting? Bring them along! It’s free entertainment, the talk will be lively and stimulating, and you can get ice cream nearby afterwards.

Please think about squashing us onto your calendar for August 4th! You’ll be glad you did. How many people do you know who have taught in a private school (under armed guard) in El Salvador and taught in the Peace Corps in Thailand and Romania? Her experiences gave her plenty of food for thought, and she will share many of her thoughts with us this coming week, as well as signing copies of her book for anyone who cares to purchase.

Morning Reading: Back for the Last Few Chapters

“Do you have time to read?” one of the first people in the bookstore door asked me this morning? Not so much here at work, I told her, but I get up early. This morning I read between 7 and 8 a.m., but I’m often up by 5 or 6 a.m. (more time to read) or occasionally up at 3 a.m. to read a while before falling back to sleep for the rest of the night.

(How could I sell books if I didn’t read them? When I told my sister once that I felt guilty about reading, she sternly told me to buck up: “It’s part of your job!” There’s another question behind that one, however: Why would I want to sell books if I didn’t read? For the challenge alone?)

Thursday was a surprisingly busy bookstore day, with annual visitors from Chicago, part-time residents from Pennsylvania, old Leland neighbors, and others who have become dear friends over the years. There were first-time visitors, too, as is often the case in summer. So when I woke in the middle of the night and thought about getting up to read on the porch, I managed to go back to sleep instead and not get up until the sun was up, too,

and that’s when I finished the final gripping chapters of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo.

The undercity in the book's subtitle is a slum called Annawadi, a makeshift settlement cheek-by-jowl with the official city’s modern airport and high-rise motels. Annawadi residents live in shacks built of whatever materials they can scrape together, and they make their lives pretty much the same way they build their homes, children sorting through garbage for recyclable materials they can sell to buy food for their families. Around the airport a tall fence plastered with advertising keeps the poor at a distance and hides them from international travelers, one floor covering advertised promising to remain BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER ... FOREVER ... FOREVER ....

Katherine Boo spent three and a half years, with three different interpreters, interviewing residents of Annawadi for this book, determined to learn how ordinary low-income people, especially children, were navigating “the age of global markets.” Over and over, she found them improvising and adapting.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a nonfiction book, extensively researched, that reads like the most gripping of novels. We come to feel we know various characters intimately and share their struggles and defeats, hopes and dreams. Katherine Boo in her “Author’s Note” at the book’s conclusion writes:

Just as the story of Annawadi is not representative of a country as large and diverse as India, it is not a neat encapsulation of the state of poverty and opportunity in the twenty-first-century world. Still, in Annawadi, I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time.

In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction.

Much else that reads like fiction in this book is not, for example, the boy Abdul’s musings about water and ice.

Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably little different, constitutionally, from the cynical, corrupt people around him.... If he had to sort all humanity [as he sorted garbage] by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of.  

He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice.

Abdul is a real person, and the image of ice was his. He wanted to have ideals and to believe in justice, despite his experiences with corrupt police and judges and hurried, overworked courts. And Abdul is only one of the real human beings you will meet and come to know in this unforgettable story.

“Would it make a good choice for a book club?” I was asked by the same woman who asked if I have time in my life to read. Definitely. Without a doubt. It is part of our real world of today, presented to us in human terms, in the lives of individuals with real names. Not surprisingly, it received for its Pulitzer-winning author a National Book Award for the year 2012.

Paper, $16

[The flowers in today's post, brought by friends Ed and Don, came from the U-Pick gardens in Omena, between Peshawbestown and Northport.]

Musings on a Book: THE SNOW CHILD

I don’t want to call this a “book review,” but I do want to write something about this lovely first novel, written by a bookseller colleague up in Alaska. We’ve never met. I know her only through her book, and not until I reached the end of the novel did I read “A conversation with Eowyn Ivey” and learn that she is a bookseller. There, when asked to tell a little bit about what energizes her, the author replied:

One of the reasons I left the newspaper business and joined Fireside Books [in Palmer, AK] is because I wanted more time and energy to write. What I didn’t expect is how stimulated I would be by the actual work of bookselling. To be constantly surrounded by all these ideas and stories and art!

The “more time and energy” part comes from being an employee, I guess, rather than the business owner, but I can certainly relate to the stimulation a bookstore atmosphere provides.

The Snow Child is a mysterious book. As readers, we are not sure, early on or even by the last page, whether we are meant to understand it as a fairy tale or realistic fiction, that is, a fantasy or a story with characters who could be real people in situations that life might present us with ourselves, were we to be transported through time and space to an Alaska homestead in 1920. The place feels real enough.

The morning was so cold that when Jack first stepped outside and harnessed the horse, his leather boots stayed stiff and his hands wouldn’t work right. A north wind blew steadily off the river. He’d have liked to stay indoors, but he had already stacked Mabel’s towel-wrapped pies in a crate to take to town. He slapped himself on the arms and stomped his feet to get the blood flowing. It was damned cold, and even long underwear beneath denim seemed a scant cotton sheet about his legs. It wasn’t easy, leaving the comfort of the woodstove to face this alone. The sun threatened to come up on the other side of the river, but its light was weak and silvery, and not much comfort at all.

The author’s inspiration for her novel was a used paperback she ran across by chance at Fireside Books, and what initially captivated her in the book was the role of place in the story. (Shades of Lynn Kimball!)

...Black spruce and dark winters spoke of lonely isolation, and the fresh, sparkling snow brought hope and magic. 

Growing up in Alaska, I’ve at times felt a foreigner in the pages of my country’s literature. All the books I had read and loved, but not one of them told of my home. The characters didn’t live the way we did. ... But the setting of the old Russian fairy [tale] was hauntingly familiar.

The paperback book led her to a fairy tale telling of an elderly childless couple who fashion a child out of snow. The snow maiden comes alive – and from there various versions of the tale spin out differently, but all somehow involve joyful childhood, love, marriage, and death.

In Ivey’s The Snow Child, the homesteading couple at the center of the story are in their fifties and childless, the sole pregnancy of their marriage having ended in a stillbirth. It was the loss of that infant that ignited Mabel’s desire to leave familiar surroundings, family and friends, to make a life in the wilderness that would encompass just the two of them. When Jack meets their nearest Alaskan neighbors, Mabel is initially reluctant to socialize. Making new friends and becoming known again is not why she came to Alaska. But somehow meeting George and Esther begins to thaw something in Mabel, providing an opening for fun and joy. Thus when that winter’s snow comes, she and Jack, at her suggestion, fashion a girl of snow.

In time the snow girl disappears, but so do the scarf and mittens. Human footprints, the size of a child’s feet, lead into the woods. Jack follows the trail but does not immediately share his discovery or his search with Mabel. He is uneasy.

As readers, we hardly believe the girl is real even after she comes to be a regular part of Jack and Mabel’s life. She comes to their cabin again and again, but she never stays, and no one else sees her. No one else believes a child could survive alone in the wilderness. Esther thinks winter’s isolation has made Mabel a little bit crazy. One day Jack and Mabel and the girl, like three children at play, lie in the snow and make snow angels. That will prove the girl’s existence to Esther, Mabel thinks, but by the time Esther gets around to visiting, the angel prints in the snow are no longer discernible.

Is Faina real, or have Jack and Mabel imagined her? We read on, expecting to receive a clear answer in time. As the girl comes to seem more and more real, however, the author somehow continues to keep us in a state of uncertainty, suspended between belief and doubt.

I love books, fiction or nonfiction, with women characters surviving in nature and pitting themselves against wilderness. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River; L. E. Kimball’s Seasonal Roads; Down the Wild River North, by Constance Helmericks, and so on. In the early chapters of The Snow Child, while the girl (real or imaginary) was a creature of the wilderness, the role of Mabel, the homesteading wife, was pretty much restricted to housework. Then Jack meets with an accident while plowing, and while he is laid up their neighbors come to help Mabel with the spring planting. From then on, throughout and following Jack’s recovery, Mabel takes her part in the hard work of the farm.

...She had never understood how Jack could fall asleep in a chair without washing up, talking to her about his day, or even removing his filthy boots. Now she knew. Yet for all the sore muscles and monotony, the days of working in the fields filled her with a kind of pride she had never known.

They became true partners in the farm. As for the snow child, she grows up into a young woman, but what are we to make of her?

I don’t want to give any hints about Faina’s evolving role in the homestead and neighborhood world of this bit of wilderness Alaska, because you should not be deprived of discovering her world as I did, page by page. In the end, one thing you will know for sure is that you have been transported, carried on story’s wings to another world. Do you need more certainty than that?

And how delightful that the author is a bookseller! For me, that is icing on the cake!

More and More and More

Repeating Itself (Another Summer of Wildflowers and Cherries)

Certain aspects of life capture my attention year after year, so much so that I know my blog posts and letters to friends become filled with repetitions. Same words, same photos: first spring wildflowers (again), succession of summer blooms and fruits (again), fall color (again), winter storms and snow (again). Do I repeat myself? So does Nature, and that is my excuse. Snow, thaw, spring beauties, cherry blossoms, daylilies, cherries, loosestrife, black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, fall color, frost, and back to snow. Rain, shine. Sunrise, sunset. But for me the seasons never grow old. Each one is new and exciting when it comes around again.

And that's good, because the details of particular days are not always too exciting. For instance, this morning:

5 a.m. Up to read on the front porch, finishing Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child (more about this another time).

6:30 a.m. Started another load of wash, folded yesterday's dry laundry.

6:40 a.m. Walk up the lane with Sarah; come back to water garden and start coffee.

7:15 a.m. Hang another load of laundry on line.

7:45 a.m. Leave for Traverse City errand, stopping in Lake Leelanau to get a croissant for the road.

Etc., etc., etc. You see what I mean.

More Authors Visit Northport

What is exciting is having authors visit Dog Ears Books, and from mid-July to this past weekend, I’ve had writers visiting Northport from Grosse Point, Newberry, and Suttons Bay, Michigan. Both Kelly Fordon (see next-to-last post) and Lynn Kimball have new collections of linked stories published by Wayne State Press. Here is Lynn’s from this past Friday with her book, Seasonal Roads:

It was interesting to hear Lynn explain that she likes to present her characters through the places they inhabit, rather than with lengthy descriptions of their personal looks. She read three selections, focusing in turn on the three main characters in her collection of linked U.P. stories, and it made perfect sense.

Even when authors are making repeat appearances, it's usually because they are presenting readers with a new book. That was true of Lynn Kimball and also of Lynne Rae Perkins, who came up from Suttons Bay with spice cookies in the shape of dog biscuits to go along with her reading from her delightful new illustrated children's book, Frank and Lucky Get Schooled. The story and pictures, however, rightfully held first place in the audience's attention.

Lynne Rae was asked if pictures or story come first with her books, and her answer (I hope I'm reporting this correctly) was that sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other, but usually she's working back and forth between the words and the images. However she does it, it certainly works, all agreed.

Each visiting July author maintained gracious good humor and infectious enthusiasm despite heat and humidity, as did audience members who came to celebrate Michigan writing and art and enjoy behind-the-scenes glimpses into the creative process. As always (another repeating theme) I was struck by the generosity of writers. My authors! That's how I think of them that way and am so grateful to them for their work, as well as for sharing time with us. Similar in having talent and a strong work ethic, each author works differently, and that is fascinating, too.

More Memories: “Was it really that long ago?!”

The words burst from me as I read an item in this week’s Leelanau Enterprise. Under the heading “35 YEARS AGO” I read about boxer Thomas Hearns training at Sugar Loaf Resort. The “Motor City Cobra” (I liked that nickname much better than “Hit Man” Hearns) was in training at Sugar Loaf from August 14 to August 28, and David and I were in the audience one day as part of a group brought together by Leelanau poet and friend Jim Harrison. We had all been up late the night before, dining and drinking together, and the space where the training was set up was not air conditioned that August of 1981. The idea, we were told, was to simulate the conditions Hearns would meet when he fought Sugar Ray Leonard in Las Vegas. Impressed as I was with the fighter and his entourage, including wife and children, it’s chiefly my own misery that stands out in my memory of that day. Worst hangover of my life – a sad confession.

Here is the Las Vegas fight from September of the same year:

Summer Again -- But Don’t Say “Hot”

A local friend of mine chides anyone who dares to complain of “hot” weather here in northern Michigan. The most he will allow is that sometimes the temperatures are “warm,” but we should remember winter’s cold and be grateful for warm, he maintains. That has been the challenge of the past week: remembering winter cold to be grateful for summer warmth. How did you do with the heat wave?

I felt cooler when I heard of other parts of the U.S. that were 20 degrees warmer than here in Leelanau County – and without a lake breeze, too – and the realization that summer has passed the halfway mark reminded me of my mother’s words, “Don’t wish your life away!” These warm days too are beautiful days. And they are flying by, faster every year....

How We Live (Hint: We Are Not Minimalists)

Friday farm market haul

“Weekend”? It begins with the farm market on Friday morning, but otherwise Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, in the summer, are much like other days of the week. We come to Northport, David to his studio and gallery, I to my bookstore, and we live our public lives, surrounded by art and books. The way we live at home is not entirely different, since there too we are surrounded by art and books. Our home life is just a little quieter and calmer than days in the bustling summer village.

Minimalism is not our style, but we cannot be called hoarders, either (We recycle on a weekly basis), and I like to think – this gloss actually occurred to me as I began composing the sentence – that we live according to Aristotle’s golden mean. Be that as it may, we are happy to live as we do. Original art and attractive prints and other objets d'art vie for wall space with fully loaded bookcases.

Tables are a different matter.

“We just can’t be trusted with horizontal surfaces,” David once remarked. Certainly, we cannot be trusted to keep those surfaces empty. I survey the house and find stacks of books on every table.

Is this so bad? Books are not dirty dishes, after all. Clutter is not squalor. (You may quote me, you with similar tendencies.) And to my eye, a house with no books in sight looks like a house where no one lives. (Our house certainly looks lived in.)

About four days ago I began reading (finding it on a table on the front porch) Letters From Russia, by the Marquis de Custine, Astolphe Louis Léonor, a Frenchman born in 1790, who wrote his impressions of a trip he made to Russia in 1839. One aspect of this book that fascinates me is how many criticisms the author made of the country under the czars that sound identical to those later made later under the Soviets: an unwieldy, overgrown petty bureaucracy seemingly designed to harass rather than help petitioners; constant rewriting of history with each shift in political power; governmental discouragement of travel, either into (by foreigners) or out of (by citizens) or within (by anyone) the country; the nonexistence of detailed maps (which goes along with keeping each Russian in his place and keeping foreigners from straying far from carefully policed urban centers); almost complete lack of concern for individual life at every level of society; and constant preoccupation with what should not be said.

Seventy-seven pages into Letters From Russia, however, fascinating as it was, I was distracted by Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo, when a neighbor brought two bags of books to the bookstore, each book with her little one-phrase summary. Inside Boo’s book, Bobbie’s note read: “This book ought to be required reading!” Curious, I opened to the first page and then could not stop. I keep reminding myself the book is not a novel. These are real people. This is the way they live. That children survive and grow to adulthood in such conditions is astonishing.

So then I could not stop reading that book - except when, after avidly turning pages all evening at home, the next morning I left it on one of the porch tables. And so, next day at the bookstore, during a quiet lull, I picked up The Silver Star, by Jeannette Walls, author of the bestselling memoir The Glass Castle. The Silver Star. It is no criticism to say that this novel clearly owes much inspiration to the author’s actual life. A writer’s experience, after all, is her raw material. The Silver Star could easily be one of those adult-YA crossover books, too, because I’m sure teens would find the story as captivating as adults.

So, nineteenth-century Russians, poverty-stricken garbage pickers in an Indian slum, and the fatherless daughter of an unstable mother were some of my companions over the summer weekend. Not my only companions, of course, and reading isn’t all I did, either, but it is a big part of the way we live. After a busy day in Northport and a leisurely supper on the porch, David and I enjoy settling down with our books, our sweet, patient little dog girl at our feet. We never lack for beautiful objects to regard, books to peruse, or conversation about our rich life, filled with art, literature, friends, and good, fresh food.

Beet greens to steam