Well, Br-r-r. It is very cold.
The flu has come and gone which means the ten days of no interest in coffee or reading and all-over miserableness are a thing of the past. And now it’s cold. But when the body finally said ENOUGH, you all were there for me with books to re-energize the good humours: William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, Mainer Clara Peakes’ The Yarn Whisperer: My Unexpected Life in Knitting, and Jenifer LeClair’s Maine Windjammer series. So far I have ordered Peakes and LeClair’s first in her series, Rigged for Murder, and I am loving Cronon’s discussion of sources and their caveats (okay, it’s only Chapter 1) which for me justifies the rest of the book and provokes the librarian’s snotty task of figuring out what records he overlooked. (Thanks to RB Lifesavers: Dazzle, Andrew, Karen, and M from NC. I miss you all.)
Windjammers, knitting, and changing landscape all come together in Maine.
Then a wonderful surprise from Ellen Zachos’ Backyard Foraging: the dreaded Japanese snotweed (okay, Japanese knotweed) is edible! Eat enough of the young stems and maybe, finally, the undigupable roots will be defeated. I offer the effulgent growth of my Maine backyard for the pilot effort to turn little snotweeds into the new broccoli or the newer kale.
Roseledge Book’ favorite New Year’s Resolution: Read a bit before you tweet and regret. With NYT’s Frank Bruni, think coolheadedness, maybe even open-mindedness, definitely deliberation. Slacken the pace. Force] a pause. This is not only Minnesota Nice talking; it’s your updated mother thinking, “Count to 10 before you say something you’ll regret.”
Remember the earlier post (Your Personal Bookseller 2, 11/29/13) and good idea (she said modestly) of giving a copy of Leanne Shapton’s faux auction catalog of a faux couple’s treasures and using it as a model album of memories to help people who are reluctantly downsizing? (See Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry.) Well, how about making the memory album even better by including a bit about the part each treasure played in building a lifetime together? The Smithsonian offers just such an example in Richard Kurin’s The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects. Think of the fun you could have hearing (and taping or otherwise recording?) the stories. Oral history alert.! This could be a business apart from or attached to a more general clearing out and finding other places for the too many things we all collect.
I would have an adirondack chair among my momentos of Maine.
I love Sara Willis, the mind and ear behind “In Tune,” Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN)’s evening music hour. Maybe having no summer television explains why this radio program is so enjoyable (like Terry Gross’s interviews), but how Sarah Willis puts a good program together so often and so well remains a mystery. Then NPR aired a great segment on the making of Dan Kim ‘s annual musical compilation, called Pop Danthology, and I learned new things and appreciated Sarah Willis even more.
Why include this here? Let me count the ways. I love the Maine experience. I love the why’s and how’s of compilations, anthologies, and all kinds of lists. (RB is still waiting for Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists to be issued in paperback.) And, as I realized after a friend told me to read a book about seagulls to get over the dreadful Johnathan Livingston Seagull craze and it worked, learning more about something always makes it better. So here’s to Roseledge Books ongoing effort to understand. (I am a master of the contrived segue.)
More when coffee, the morning paper, and a good mull converge.