The Roseledge Books Blog

Hello all from Fairview’s excellent Acute Rehab Center where I am figuring out — with great help — how to stand and walk again. And I will do it, even if a ruptured appendix has tried its best to lay me low. Who knew people of an age had errant appendices?

I’m a bit behind on my reading, but I’ve been thinking about it.   Apparently distressed innards require my full attention for healing. And I lost my taste for coffee, but that is returning — within limits. I am fussier now after fourteen days of ice chips and sips of water for a troubled tum.

Sea breezes and vistas, maybe an interruption or two: read on.

Reading joy is coming back too, thank heavens. Gabriel Allon, Daniel Silva’s art restorer / Mossad agent, is a great companion right now. His conversations, reflections on art, and huge sense of places in and over time, especially the middle East and Europe, and (in The Fallen Angel) the Vatican, are just the right amount of thought provoking. And snotty Vatican novels are always a favorite. Another time I healed with Bernd Heinrich’s The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology which was captivating both for the detail of what I learned about eastern Europe during WWI and WWII and the details about a field of study and higher education, both lifelong interests. Both books did their job of helping healing, but the latter required closer reading — or maybe the print was smaller. I know it was longer, and I was sorry to finish.

Both are great transition books on a healing-book spectrum that includes getting through tough times with the distraction of page-turners, recovering with the companionship of conversation,
And rejoining the land of the living with wholly engaging books of unexpected insights.

Water, rock islands, wildflowers and sun: a good read just gets better.

David Baldacci’s latest The Forgotten was my reliable page-turner, but this one read too much like a Jack Reacher wannabee exploit for me. And waiting for my return home and living well as I get ready to live gloriously in Maine is my latest favorite read that somehow enlarges what I know: poet Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of her annual lectures to Bennington students, filled with insights from and leading to poetry.  “Some people wonder and some people know. Scientists know; I wonder,” she says, and I don’t want to miss a word.

But her essays require my full attention, and right now the priority is strengthening muscles that help me stand and move my feet. Very spooky moment when third day after surgery, I found that I could do neither without the help of three others. Good news is that with time and work and inspired direction, what is lost returns.

I’ll see you all in Maine come Memorial Day and after Charlie repairs the chipmunk frolic with the pcv water pipe, better than ever at the end of this, but twelve days of ice chips and a few sips of water with no weight loss? Please.

The annual longing-for-the-sea has settled in which usually means the Pebble Beach golf tournament has just come and gone. Until summer and for others who are lonesome for Roseledge, check the winter picture in the current St. George Newsletter. Wow! Beautiful, yes, and taken before the recent major snowfalls, but note the absence of tracks, human or otherwise. Few people are about apparently. I hope this means the chipmunks are gone, too, and not living it up in my spa recliner. If I were more able-bodied, I might try a whole year at Roseledge; until then, I have Craig Leischer’s adventure of a year in the Maine woods to enjoy.

Nothing beats that first look, just before the driveway turn starts the summer.

Also to enjoy is Jane Mount’s and Thessaly La Force’s The Ideal Bookshelf, my latest favorite idea book. About one hundred “leading cultural figures” noted, and in some cases explained, why a dozen or so books mattered enough to be on their single shelf. Artist Mount painted the shelf of books, spines out for browser ease, and Editor LaForce contained essays, no small task when the content is one‘s personal take on books that matter. What an excellent idea is this whole book. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell listed the books about crime that he had nearby when writing about crime and you don‘t have to be a librarian (though maybe it helps) to enjoy a look at an author‘s influences. Jen Bekman’s shelf reflected her career change from the Internet which she understood to owning an art gallery which she did not. I love both what Maira Kalman says and how she “says” it. Her shelf choices are mostly about the “how”; for the “what”, you’ll have to  check her books, which, fortunately, Roseledge Books usually has some of on its shelves, e.g. Principles of Uncertainty and The Pursuit of Happiness.

Tim's gone; the Inn's sold; adirondack chairs top the sign. What else is new?

An Ideal Bookshelf would be a great bathroom book if it were in much-less-heavy paperback, which it is not.  It could also be a great book of the (some day) dead with each page someone’s shelf of books with comment — a great, self-written, obituary. The arrayed books with comments would be fraught with nuance and reflection and a great way to be remembered or newly met. And it would give us all one last chance to control from the grave. My mom would have loved that. (The four, single-spaced pages of instructions that she left instead are a story for another time.)

An almost local news note:
The Smithsonian sold N.C. Wyeth’s 1926 painting, Duel on the Beach, for $1 million. (NYT 12/10/12) But duel on what beach? Could it be somewhere near Eight Bells, his summer home in Port Clyde? Surely this calls for the careful investigation of serious kayakers who could (after a bit of a hike) enter the St. George River at Fort Point, paddle toward Port Clyde, check it out,  buy some Ben-Gay at the General Store, and paddle on.  As it happens, some of the Most Regular of the Roseledge Books Regulars are just such serious kayakers. And don’t let Google fool you. St. George has a Fort Point, the history of which is the stuff of peace-lovers’ dreams, but that’s a story for another time.

An Almost-Roseledge-Books-Regular (a potential RBRegular who has only been once) called from the airport to say she is delayed and reading Sarah Orne Jewett’s story maybe set in Tenans Harbor, Country of the Pointed Firs, and it is perfect. Sounds good to me and suggests RB needs a new category of books to make more pleasant the dreaded airport down time. I would add Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind Body Problem to this list. It saw me, with cat, Worthy, semi-snoozing in cat-carrier inside duffel bag at my side, through a four-hour fog delay at O’Hare.  Roseledge Books should have these and others you suggest as “take with” reads for the always possible iffy weather of return flights. These take-with reads are different from, though maybe overlapping with, “withdrawal reads” which are intended to provoke memories of a time well spent no matter when or where you read them. Suggestions for either group are always welcome.

I want to be there, but I am here -- until summer. And where are you? (Caption is an homage to Henri, see below.)

A chipmunk ate the pcv pipe carrying water to the shower upstairs in Roseledge. Curses. Clearly, plumbing has a down side, especially when you live away some of the time, but I do not intend to give up running water. Charlie is aggrieved that chipmunk-attracting pcv pipe was installed ten years ago, but who knew? Until this summer, we had a fierce chipmunk-handler cat, but an unleashed rottweiler did him in, and though both bad dog and owner are gone, the only remaining neighborhood cat prefers batting at butterflies and the mostly unleashed cute and friendly new dog probably plays with the cat. the butterflies, AND the chipmunks.  Drat. The chipmunks will not rule for long I know, but Wow, Tim dies and the living isn‘t easy.

The new books stayed dry. Whew! Fortunately the sometimes-spewing water couldn’t reach across the room from behind the refrigerator and the collected water never rose above the bottom bookshelf-lip. The uninsulated, single layer architecture of Roseledge helped, too, as the water drained out through the bare floor boards. I just hope no more chipmunks get in or, even worse, decide to occupy my spa recliner, the only cushioned thing in the house. Only the boxes under the stairs got wet and then moldy, but who even remembers what’s in them? Charlie has promised to call Joe who always manages to make things right.

Boxes under the stairs got wet, moldy and tossed, but I am sanguine. (Caption is another homage to Henri.)

I just read and LOVED Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Stories, a memoir of her competitive swimming years with her artist’s eye and work as complement. RB will definitely have it as soon as it out in paperback. I don’t think you have to be a swimmer to enjoy the read, but maybe it helps. Agreeing with one of the book’s blurbers, I have a “talent crush“. I will never again look at the world in just the same way and I love a book that does that. Rory Stewart’s memoir of his walk across Afghanistan, Places In Between, changed my worldview, too. Memoirs seem to be an ever-growing part of my must-read pile which, means they will probably become an ever-larger part of RB’s offerings. Hurry up, summer.

As an antidote to winter blahs, or as a Scandinavian friend put it, to his annual morose Swedish cold, may I introduce you to Henri, the black cat, who won the Walker Art Center’s first ever Internet Cat Video Contest last summer?Surely your days will be merrier for meeting him, as are mine when I think of you all.

Some of you wonder if I choose the books for Roseledge Books which would be okay if, when I say that I do, some of you didn’t have the same look of incredulity that the car rental guy had when, in answer to his question about my occupation, I said I was a college professor. So maybe more explanation is warranted.

Fist of all, choosing books means knowing that a book exists.  I am helped in this knowing because I have a book ear. When other people hear background noise, I hear and pick out a book reference.

Think Moby Dick, a long time gone, fog and rocks and nothing is for sure.

For instance, from NPR, always on, I unexpectedly heard the words ”Moby Dick“, “Ireland“, and “Ray Bradbury wrote a book about it.” Hello. The NPR story was about legendary director, John Houston, filming Moby Dick in Ireland; but tucked into the telling was the essential tidbit that a young Ray Bradbury wrote both the screenplay AND a book about the whole Irish experience which I looked up and found to be Ray Bradbury’s Green Shadows, White Whale, which one reviewer likened to “the grandest tour of Ireland you’ll ever experience.” A book related to Moby Dick is always good, but this was clearly a bonanza choice for RB, embedded in a story not about books.  Whether nature or nurture, a book ear is not to be explained, just to be tuned in at all times, relished and used wisely.

Backing up a bit, maybe a book ear only works if one’s life is basically a conversation of books, which, lucky me, mine is.

For instance, faithful commenter Mary Ellen picked up on my dad’s reading (true) while watching sheep (not so true) (See “Fact Checking“, posted on 10/17/12) and inferred that he may have been reading ABOUT sheep rather than watching over them and the memories merged into Irish truth. Yes! And then the fun becomes thinking about sheep books he might have liked.

Then love knowing that you can live it all from a comfy seat on shore.

Two favorites come to mind: Marele Day’s Lambs of God, a strange, especially apt choice set in stone ruins off the coast of Scotland. It is also a great snotty Vatican novel, always a favorite category, and a tribute to resourceful women everywhere and anytime. Clearly a dad-book and given the island setting, an RB choice, too. The second favorite is Lorn Rubenstein’s A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands which is only slightly about sheep but much about loving the landscape with sheep and golf. Charlie golfed the Royal Dornoch course and I watched, doted, and nattered away with the groundskeeper, and though this may make the book more personally bewitching, it is still a book set alongside the ocean, therefore a must for Roseledge Books next summer. Okay, book inferences may be VERY subtle, several degrees away from the reported situation, sometimes really speculation, and uncommon, if not rare, but they are so much more fun to dwell upon and virtually endless in their possibilities. Another sheep-book possibility is Susanna Kaysen’s Far Afield, although the cover picture of sheep may be misleading because I don’t recall that sheep were key to the story which s set in the Faroe Islands and sheep live there, but I liked the book a lot. I love this stuff.

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At breakfast the other morning, during which I continued noting the absence of flavor and texture in the Wednesday cream of wheat, even though the too-few cranberries helped but not enough, a group-homey was eye-ing the goodie I had not yet eaten. I said, as I sipped my hot, brewed coffee, “We Irish suffer before our pleasure.” Without missing a beat, he responded, “We Scandinavians don’t have pleasure.” Thanks again, Irish dad.

Richard III (1452-1485) is alive again in the public mind! This is no small feat for someone dead these 500+ years.  The newsworthy note is that Richard III’s bones have probably been found which means that two questions about him will probably re-arise.  Was he a villain or a “goodly,” albeit a medieval, king?  (In a nutshell, did he kill his two nephews who were in line to be king or were we duped by biased sources?) And  was he a hunchback or was his scoliosis magnified?  It’s time for some Tudor-time fact-checking.

Never fear; St. George and his dragon are ever near in his same-named Town.

Let the fact-checking interest begin with Josephine Tey’s  A Daughter of Time, a 1950’s police procedural that, among other themes, questions the contemporary sources used by Shakespeare and in history texts to support the victorious Tudors rather than the defeated Plantagenets.    Roseledge Books will have Tey’s book for those who want a good mystery, then watch with pleasure as readers find themselves caring about good and bad sources and consequent judgements.

Okay, newly-found bones alone may be iffy on acts and their motivations, but iffy raises questions which is better than dead silence.  I also know better than anyone that Roseledge Books is closed until summer.  So don’t wait; go now to your off-season bookstore and get  Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time in time to “test read” it before giving it to someone, preferably one of the huge and exploding number of ninnies who don’t know a good source from a bad.  The book is short, interesting, pertinent, fraught with unacknowledged questions about sources, especially bias, and generally wonderful.  Then, after the holiday, maybe the even minimally curious will rush the library to find out more, always a goal of Roseledge Books, especially, in the winter when the time to think is upon us.

Come summer, come back to RB and follow-up the interest in sources with Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, the best compilation of information pitfalls that I know currently in print e.g. selective perception, questionable expertise, truthiness, declining objectivity, questionable choosing.  You can read it and weep for the ways you were fooled in this election season of ongoing information follies.

Sort the good and useful from piles of clutter and the world smiles.

My dad’s grandfather emigrated from Ireland, settled in way-north North Dakota and promptly built the Coghlan Castle.  (I am not making this up.)  Dad told of sitting in the turret window reading books while watching the sheep.  When I told this story to the farmer who now owns the Castle (my dad’s brother-in-law’s grand-nephew), he said, “Your dad must have been really tall, then, because I’m six-feet-tall and I can barely see out the window (My dad was 5’6″.) and there were no sheep.”  I checked the 1885 Agricultural Census, and there were no sheep.  But my dad was a big reader his whole life, bad eyes and all.  From this I learn about Irish truth: there is always something true or real in the story; you just have to figure out what it is.  Is this a variation of truthiness?  (I miss you, dad.)

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Life in the group home (senior residence for the picky) is good, but cream of wheat three times a week for the breakfast hot cereal?  Really?  Before I left for Maine last May, it was only two days a week which was borderline tolerable for those of us willing to substitute cheerios for oatmeal on occasion.  How many people of reasonable taste can swallow wallpaper paste and think your body is saying “thank you” three times a week?   But life is good when the oatmeal/cream of wheat war is the only complaint and the good coffee is perked and waiting at 7 a.m., right next to the patio when reasonable weather calls.

Tim Watts died Wednesday morning and the tenor of Tenants Harbor changed in a heartbeat. He is a great big reason I know and love Tenants Harbor, and for that I will be forever grateful.

Spring of ‘79, I was searching for Mohegan-on-the-mainland (I could no longer walk the rocky paths with confidence.) when, while reading Down East Magazine, I spotted in the East Wind Inn’s three-line ad, “Country of the Pointed Firs.” Worth a try, I thought, and wrote to Innkeeper Tim asking for the particulars, e.g. walking surfaces and distances to water, rocks, boats, general store, post office, library, restaurant, public landing, trails, etc. Thanks to his detailed, precise, sometimes terse response, Charlie and I came that August, settled into the EWI for two weeks and fell in love with Tenants Harbor. We came back each summer.

Who can look at the East Wind Inn and not see Tim on the steps? Not I.

Then, April of ‘82, after surgery at Mayo to stop the crippling, I called Tim and said, “Guess what? I have a new nine-month job.” (Pause) “What is the question?” he asked. “Can I come and volunteer mornings at the East Wind for room and board?” “Sure,” he said, (or “Shoo-ah” to my Midwestern ears.) So thanks to Tim, I began my treasured summers in Maine, and, because I was there, knew to bid on long unoccupied, but ever-tended Roseledge, which would be available once they found Bess McClusky’s heirs. (That’s another story.) I bid and won that lottery in summer ‘83.   Tim surprised me with electricity in the cottage for which I berated him, as it just made fall’s leave-taking harder.  He just harrumphed.

The earlier Gledhill, unlovely then, perfect for the summer staff.

June of ’84, I arrived ready to move into Roseledge, but before that happened, local son Tim took me to the doors of my neighbors to introduce me. First I met Harry who said, “You’re in my lady’s house” (another story) and I said, “I know and I will do my best to take care of it.” Harry harrumphed with a half smile and turned away. Tim and I went to meet the Andersons up the hill who said “I’m Bill” and “I’m Mrs. Anderson” and I responded with my name and plans to live next to them in the summer. They nodded and that was that. Some time later that day, Harry and Bill, both deaf as posts, met on the road in front of Roseledge and began shouting, “And then she said to me…” “And then she said…,” and each one repeated exactly what I had said, so I figured that was fine. The Andersons sold their house a couple of years later, but Harry was my good neighbor for nearly twenty years, and I miss him still. Introductions matter.  Thank you, Tim.

Roseledge and neighbors, with rocks at low tide, in front of the East Wind Inn

I will miss Tim. He was the crabbiest person I know (“Then you get to be the nice one,” he would say.), but he was always there with a just-right solution to whatever needed doing. He is my definition of a Mainer and, though I know he will haunt the harbor forever, I will miss his presence. Tenants Harbor just changed indelibly. Real estate shifts don’t bother me; I figure that’s a generational thing. But Tim’s going? Well, maybe that’s a generational thing, too, but he died way too young and deserved his dotage as a generous crabby person turned generous curmudgeon.

Colleen

Should Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs (CPF) be updated?

CPF is classic. Harry's house is classic, too, but updated.

No.  A classic (with meaning for many over time) should stay as is for whoever finds it next.  Sequels by others are often dreadful, e.g.  Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Alexandra Ripley’s sequel, Scarlett, but a new Foreword or Introduction or translation can be useful, and a series by the same author can extend the pleasure e.g. William Trollope’s Barchester novels or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.   Sometimes, though, something really good is best just remembered.

Roseledge Books did not sell a single copy of CPF last summer, even though some of its action MAY be tied to Tenants Harbor and fewer degrees of separation between book and place usually sells books.  No sales probably reflects that too few newbies came by and returnees have pondered the TH ties and moved on, but to what?  That’s another good question.

For those who want more of CPF’s pace and place, several other good follow-up reads come to mind.  Ruth Moore’s Spoonhandle is an almost-classic that also captures pace and place AND adds summer money to the Maine mix.  Her dialog is better, too.  Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine is another, but if you read it and think nothing happens, you are probably not going to enjoy Maine.  Jim Sterba’s Frankie’s Place, written by someone from away and still alive who married into the rusticators of Mt Desert, may be my favorite and a RB bestseller two of the past three summers.   The world may not need an updated CPF, but a Jim Sterba-like effort set in our Midcoast area would be good.

Local history resides in decisions about building stone walls.

For those who want more Tenants Harbor ties, there is the currently unavailable (but ever lurking at the library), History of St. George by Albert Smalley which needs to be reprinted (and retyped or reentered for digitizing), preferably by a stranger.  The last person who volunteered to reproduce it wanted to change what Albert Smalley had to say about her family which would then make it HER history which is not necessarily bad, just different.  Anecdotal histories, like Smalley’s are often quirky, filled with vigor, humor, real people, impolitic reflections, and often telling tidbits.  Richard Meryman’s Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life is another good example and pertinent because so much of it takes place in or near St. George.  The more studied local histories can be too much data, e.g. cemetery lists, census counts, meeting minutes, but historian and summer resident Samuel Eliot Morison’s Story of Mount Desert is a good crossover example and probably more telling for someone seeking acquaintance.

As always, I am getting carried away, but it is fun to think about these things and you are not here to keep me in check.  Back to my current read, in this case Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which tracks the lost and found history of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things.  I love it.  The book is like good conversation with underlining and marginal notes, always subject to change after further thought.   John Adams read books this way, too, as we all try to figure out how the world works.

And then its time to go.

Come back next year, the harbor calls. I will, I say, without delay. Sigh.

What I learned these final days:

Three-year old multi-grain baking mix, white whole wheat flour, and dark brown sugar do not lose their punch when mixed with fresh buttermilk, eggs and the last of the blueberries to make excellent pancakes.  And the lumps in last year’s opened, but refrigerated, maple syrup are not poisonous.  Note to next year’s early partyers:  I finished the generic cheerios.

School starts and summer stops.  No more sailboats, no more Sea Street walkers with boat bags, no more RB Regulars to cajole.  Summer people, and I am one, head for winter climes.  Mine is Minnesota.  Not exactly tropical, but I am a North Dakotan (“Exotic,” one RB visitor declared) and therefore ready.

The leaf-peepers of fall (affectionately known as peeps) are several weeks away and, Mother Nature willing, the leaves will have started to change colors by then.  Still lush and green now, though.  No red sumac and few blue asters in the ditches, as Charlie and I head to Logan.

Fred’s dog and two regular walkers who know where the blackberries are polished off this year’s crop of reachable berries in the brambles across the road.  Fred’s dog occasionally fed a two-snack-a-day urge.  The Produce Lady had no blackberries at all this year.  No walkers-by thought the rose hips were cherry tomatoes this year, so no profound puckers.

“Contract Pending” is still affixed to the East Wind Inn’s For Sale notice.  Changes are in the air, just not too many, I hope.

Morning coffee on the porch smells really good and tastes even better when the sun angles into Fall.

Roseledge, books, trees, tides and rocks; think good thoughts, read 'til Spring, then get ready.

So how do i ready the shelves of good books for whatever your wants of next summer?

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, for sure.  Soon out in paper, this telling of how a classic book was not lost to the ages is a must in a lifelong quest to figure out how information moves and why.  What books get noticed by whom, where, when and why?  Do publishers reflect or provoke learning or both?  Does self-publishing make a difference?

Then Donna Leon.  RB has been remiss in not having an adequate sampling of her mysteries set in Venice, and a friend who says that order doesn’t matter has a “tested” stack just waiting.

Maira Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness will soon be out in paperback. This will be a re-read as it was available on-line as a NY Times blog, but her take on (in this case) democracy through pictures and words is just a joy.  And don’t we all need some of that, especially in this election year.  Her illustrations in Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual make the second edition a double delight, but it is not available in paperback — yet.  I have my fingers crossed.

These possibilities continue Roseledge Books’ attention to how the world works and how we live well and learn lots within it.  And so do the following good suggestions from Roseledge Books Faithfuls:

Amy Vanderhoof’s The Spice Necklace: My Adventures in Caribbean Cooking, Eating and Island Life (think harbor-bound sailors who have tried Moby Dick one too many times) ,

Harry Gratwick’s Stories from the Maine Coast: Skippers, Ships and Storms (think of “the wrecks” at low tide in front of RB), and

Stuart Woods’ Dark Harbor (think Isleboro)

Switch the hours to "Closed," add the adirondacks, and plan to come next year.

Smell the salt, hear the gulls, taste the wild blueberries.  Think pace and place and very good times.  And if a read to remember comes to mind, let me know what it is.

It’s a perfect day, I shouted.

“Today is worth a howl,” neighbor Fred said, and he howled down Sea Street on his way to get a paper at the General Store.

“My daughter wants to stop by and get her Christmas book gifts. When do you leave?” neighbor Jan asked in passing.

Next Wednesday and lots of good memoirs are waiting to be visited on your daughter’s friends, I answered.

Clearly this was a morning born to be spent on the porch.

Gift lists are always fun. Matching a good read (what booksellers know) with a good friend (what book givers know) is the best kind of remembrance-read. This summer’s most sold memoirs are Maria Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty with which so far two buyers and two browsers have found ties, e.g. the same torn sofa, Pina Bausch; Nigel Barley’s Innocent Anthropologist which apparently appeals to intense graduate students who need a shot of joy; and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for locavore-wannabees in search of  inspiration — or maybe just a good guide.

I loved reading about the exhibit featuring interactions of animals and humans that curator Carla Drummond built from the very varied holdings of the Morgan Library. Okay, it’s a stretch, but I remembered my long ago librarian days in a tiny, newly tax-supported library outside Chicago with mostly donated books, making “themed” book displays which sometimes provoked great comments. (Looking through my “Good and Evil” book display, a local priest noted that Morris L. West’s The Devil’s Advocate did not belong, as it was about sanctity, a very different concept.) And now, RB  bookseller days building personalized gift-book lists are not so different. Each has an idea, options, and likeliest best choice.

No more ropes and buoys on a dock nearby; summer is winding down.

Now, as promised, RB summer book sales about sailing included the following:

McKinlay, Jenn. Due or Die (well, the library is in a coastal New England village and includes boat rides)
Wolff, Geoffrey. Hard Way Around (Joshua Slocum biography)
Bergreen, Lawrence. Over the Edge of the World (Magellan‘s round-the-world trip)
Mowat, Farley. Bay of Spirits
Mowat, Claire. Outport People
O’Hanlon, Redmund. Trawler
Horwitz, Tony. Voyage Long and Strange
Norman, Howard. The Bird Artist
Carson, Rachel. Under the Sea Wind (evokes “special mystery and beauty of shore and open sea“)
Greenlaw, Linda. Seaworthy
Marryat, Frederick. The Phantom Ship
Alexander, Caroline. The Bounty: True Story of Mutiny on Bounty
Henderson, Bruce. Fatal North: Adventure and Survival Aboard the USS Polaris

How I mostly know it’s fall:  The sun comes up later and angles differently through the maple trees up the hill.  The moored sailboats are even fewer.  The school bus picks up the several kids who live on or near Barter’s Point Road. The Monitor heater comes on each night, I’ve worn a sweater the last two days, and my family was here to enjoy the German-American-Seafood Cooking at the Happy Clam, the  (some nights) biker bar next to the bakery behind Roseledge.  Yum.  And the berries are done.  But the sumac is still green or no longer in the ditches, the blue asters are few and the maples I see have no red leaves.  And two nights from now, I will be in Minneapolis, where today it was 90 degrees above.  I’ll leave my sweaters here.

What is wrong with these people?

Jonah Lehrer, riding high, invents a quote from Bob Dylan and expects it to pass. Why? Especially when Bob Dylan’s relatively few words, often cryptic and/or mumbled, are so much considered. Jonah Lehrer hasn’t said. Maybe he searched and couldn’t find the quote and, based on other Dylan quotes, he was sure it, or words to its effect existed and he needed the quote to make his point. Okay, so document your search, list pertinent other Dylan quotes, or change your point, but don’t cheat. It clearly indicates insufficient search skills (said the librarian) or terminal dumbness.

There is nothing as real as a memory confirmed, day after day.

Remember Joe McGinniss in The Last Brother, his biography of Ted Kennedy? He invented speeches but, as I recall (all the search I‘m willing to do), argued that by the time he finished writing the book, he knew the speakers well enough to know what they would have said.

And Edmund Morris in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan invented a narrator/author because (as I recall he argued in an op/ed piece reprinted in, maybe, the Star Tribune, but which I can‘t verify without access to licensed databases which I do not have) he needed it, as, regarding former President Reagan, either there was a there there and he couldn’t find it or there was no there there. But as a scholar and generous man, he added that probably it was there and he could not find it. I may be letter-wrong on his words, but I think the spirit is right.

Then Jonah Lehrer reused his own words without change. Good grief! Telling the same story twice is surely a definition of getting old. Thinking the same story is better the second time is a big-time dotage alert.

Fareed Zakaria’s plagiarism is especially hard to understand because he copied from a recent essay by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker which was bound to have been read by many of his readers. So why not cite it and add why he admired it? He also gave two commencement addresses which were much alike. What is wrong with these guys?

Varied rocks together make great stone walls; always worth a walker's search.

Search tactics are always worth citing, if only to lend credibility to one’s conclusions. I love books that depend upon the search to exist, especially if the reader is let in on the process. This summer’s best example, so far, is Charles Cumming’s Trinity Six, a novel in which he wonders if, in addition to the Cambridge Five, there was a sixth spy. The author plans the search as follows:

“Paul, I’m not an investigative journalist. I’m an archive man.”
“What’s the difference? You interview people, don’t you? You can follow a trail from A to B. You know how to use a telephone, the Internet, a public library? How hard can it be? ( p.39)
“…Historians specialize in the dead….[Sam Gaddis] was a specialist in reconstruction. He knew how to piece together the fragments of a stranger’s existence, to work through an archive, to pan the stream of history to reveal a nugget of priceless information.” ( p.56)

Already after eighty pages of Nicholas Kilmer’s A Paradise for Fools, the library reference exchanges are worth the book. A late summer search favorite may be emerging.

The Produce Lady is, yet again, my hero. She did whatever it took to get blueberries when everyone else was out. Spooky sky today; wiggly cloud ends hanging down look ominous to a Midwesterner, but the sun is out now, so porch event is still on. A week from tomorrow is back to Minnesota. Always hard.