ROSELEDGE BOOKS ACTION

It’s time for the high summer book sales report from Roseledge Books! So begins the fun.

Maine books first,  and first of the first is the one with almost less than one degree of separation.

Preston, Douglas. Dinosaurs in the Attic
Most closely connected to Tenants Harbor, this book about the Museum of Natural History includes its first director, Albert Bickmore, who lived two doors down Sea Street from RB.

Maine books, especially coastal Maine, are always big.
Woodard, Colin. Lobster Coast of Maine
Greenlaw, Linda. Seaworthy
Sterba, Jim. Frankie’s Place

Three copies sold make Frankie’s Place the first RB bestseller of the summer.
Siddons, Ann Rivers. Colony
Dawson, Luthera. Saltwater Farm
Murray, Eva. Well Out to Sea
(Matinicus)
Caldwell, Bill. Islands of Maine

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Look at minds working. See Roseledge Books in action. Love the potential.

Heinrich, Bernd. The Snoring Bird: my Family’s Journey through a Century of Biology

Family memoir, evolving science, a lot of trees, half infused with Maine, former bestseller.  Yum.

Plants of Acadia National Park A stunner! New and much appreciated by wildflower list-builders.

Maine books “of the woods” also sell.
Tristam Coffin, Robert P. Kennebec
Roberts, Kenneth. Arundel
Doiron, Paul. The Poacher’s Son
Thoreau, Henry David . Maine Woods

Sullivan, J. Courtney. Maine
The title shouts Maine, the cover girl tanning on sand, wearing little, and living in a beach house less so. Rocks and cottages and maybe sweats are more typically coastal. So Ms. Courtney knows family relationships, but does she understand Maine? A RBR has vowed to let me know.

Books more or less about sailing next time.

Way too much fog yesterday and today. Too few sailboats in the harbor to make this a likely day of big sales to sailors walking by. And it’s Saturday, rental-cottage-turnover day, so RBR’s among this group bought their withdrawal reads yesterday and newbies still have the joy of discovering RB. It’s goodbye and hello all over again.

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MORE RB’S SOMETIMES-ASKED-QUESTIONS

“I’m going to retire and travel around the world.”
(Pause.)
“I’m going to stay longer in several places.”
(More pause.)
The attending bookseller hears, “What books should I read?”

Never at a loss to answer unasked questions, Roseledge Books suggests the following beginning list of books by people with purpose who have travelled to many places.

#1 choice, no question:
Maira Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness
reports with words and drawings a yearlong investigation of democracy and how it works. She uses monthly visits to very different places to make her different, but finally inclusive, points. She and the book, which I read as a blog in the NYT, are charming.(I also love her unusual memoir, Principles of Uncertainty.)

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Re: hand-knits, low-tide striped sweaters have wider bands of kelp-colored yarn.

Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read reports his 30-year quest “to see in person all 600 extant copies of the first and second editions of [Copernicus’] De revolutionibus, including those owned and annotated by Galileo and Kepler.  Part biography of a book, part scientific exploration, and part bibliographic detective story,” I enjoyed them all. In a similar vein, a friend of a friend is trying to see all the Vermeer’s in the world.

Timothy Egan’s The Good Rain reports his “travels through Washington, Oregon, and southern Vancouver, following the route taken by an earlier traveler, Theodore Winthrop, 150 years ago.” He looks at now, compares it with then, and comments. I love that his trek is replicable if you are energetic and physically flexible and that he works from an earlier report, much as do Tim Severin and William Dalrymple (see below).

Tim Severin’s Spice Islands Voyage reports his return to the Indonesian Archipelago that Alfred Russell Wallace explored 140 years ago as he wrote about and thereby, with Darwin, shared the discovery of evolution.

William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, replicates in reverse the late 6th C. travels of John Moschos and Sophronius as they visit and report on the monasteries from Egypt to Mt. Athos in Greece and notes, unexpectedly (as I recall), the twilight of eastern Christianity. In my post-1991 quest to learn about the Near and Mideast, Dalrymple’s was a most useful survey. Paul Theroux’s Pillars of Hercules and Eric Newby’s On the Shores of the Mediterranean cover similar territory but with different purpose.

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More granite and floating kelp change stripe widths in hand-knit tidal sweaters.

A Roseledge Books Regular also recommended:
Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation “takes us on a road trip like no other — a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.” (All quotes are from Amazon’s Book Descriptions.)
Other suggestions?

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“I’m hot and bored.”
(Indefinite pause.)
RB ears hear, “What book is perfect?”

Well, today I would suggest Norb Vonnegut’s Top Producer which I am just finishing.  It is my latest effort to learn about finance through fiction, and I like it a lot.

The fog has lifted, but I don’t see you coming up the walk.

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RB’S SOMETIMES-ASKED-QUESTIONS

What do you recommend for a Midwestern, home-schooled 14-year-old?

Except for Charlie who mostly read C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Spiderman comics, I am zip when it comes to kids, especially early teens. I was allowed — and thereby, encouraged — to read whatever I wanted at the Wahpeton (North Dakota) Public Library, so I remember the teen summers of Thomas B. Costain (English history), fat Russian novels, skinny new adult books, e.g. Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country(apartheid, South Africa) Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (atom bomb aftermath), Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner (skinny mysteries), other (not North Dakota) people and places, e.g. Louis Auchincloss’s The Rector of Justin, Cleveland Amory’s The Proper Bostonians, Hetty Green, my first miser though now the books call her a tycoon, and at one point, I scanned a different letter of the alphabet each week.

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Memory's fog makes the best times clear and possibilities ever near.

So based on this hodgepodge of memories, I suggested a look at the following — all of which have women authors and all of which are on RB shelves.

Ellis Peter’s A Morbid Taste for Bones, first in the Brother Cadfael series
Brother Cadfael is a 12thC. (other time, pre-Luther) Welsh (other place) Benedictine (educated, curious) monk (other living arrangement) who is the monastery herbalist (gardening, science, health) in the center of the larger issue of the kingdom and the time.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
(church-going, home schooled, teenagers, facing still relevant mores of other time and place)
Kendall Hailey’s The Day I Became an (teenage) Autodidact
Diane Smith’s Letters From Yellowstone
(young woman shifts field of study, joins research team, draws plants in situ, faces issues of timed and place in late 19th C. western America.)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(classic, still discussed topic of technology and medicine)
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (favorite of RBR who is also a 5th-grade teacher, includes kids addressing still relevant issues)

Other suggestions?

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See the trees, love the trees, find shade beneath the trees, but follow the sign.

Tree notes: Ken Chaya made a map and poster which include every tree in Central Park. I love the idea and the products. During an interview, the artist pointed out a nearby tree, then discussed the kind it was and how many of them were where in the Park. Amazing detail. I wonder how many of the leaves in Leanne Shapton’s The Native Trees of Canada could also find a home branch in Central Park. RB doesn’t have maps or posters, darn, but clearly Roseledge Books needs Justin Martin’s Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. And to balance these books about planned landscapes, RB has John Fowles’ Trees, a lesser known of his works which The NY’er argues “[B]elongs alongside the finest wilderness-rambling narratives,” Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, though an astute reader just bought the last copy, and always several editions of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, surely a paean to the trees and other living parts of Tenants Harbor (okay, Midcoast maybe). But I am getting carried away.

Check the webcam.  Does the harbor look empty to you, too?

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ROSELEDGE BOOKS REGULARS

Nothing beats the fun of Roseledge Books Regulars returning after a couple of summers and choosing to buy the somewhat unusual — okay, strange — books I love and so have on the shelves.

For instance, Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is an auction catalog of the belongings of imaginary people who come alive through a “reading” of pictures of their things. This is like “meeting” a person by looking at the things in his or her house, especially looking closely at the arranged titles in bookshelves, or, even better, on a beside table.  I liked the general idea of Ms. Shapton’s book, but the browser-in-question may have been more taken with some of the items.  Her book reminded me of Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum, a book of book reviews of books that weren’t. And I loved Leanne Shapton’s earlier Native Trees of Canada, an exquisite book of stunning watercolors of leaves, one leaf/page.  She allows spaces for our imagination to fill in.   What fun all of this was.

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The sun sets, the boat's duties done; the book finds its way to the reader.

Then, I may have talked this interesting RB bookie into Maira Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty, but it wasn’t a hard sell. Her combination of pictures and comments makes me want to travel with her and hope that she talks about what she sees as she looks at it. Her blog in the NYT, And the Pursuit of Happiness, will be issued in paperback this October and RB will have it next summer. I love her worldview. Wise, good-natured, knowing.

Then as RB Regulars who sail sometimes do, these two who, with their RB T-shirts are now both RB Regulars, checked out whatever I had on voyages, in this case round-the world voyages, and found to their liking Lawrence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World (Magellan) and Geoffrey Wolff’s Hard Way Around (Joshua Slocum), and, after a quick check of the North Atlantic table, Arnauldur Indridason’s Operation Napoleon, an Icelandic thriller with roots in a WWII plane crash. Surely it can’t be any more noir than his Erlander novels, but I haven’t read my copy yet.

I love being bookseller to the picky. Roseledge Books Regulars are the best.

Big time thunderstorm at the moment. Mugginess is to be gone tomorrow. Luckily I don’t have to be outdoors today, but for boaters caught walking down Sea Street, Roseledge Books is open and the cottage innards are drip dry.

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THRUMS AND WOWS

The goldfinches did their aerial mating dance this morning. Wow! The sun and breezes and twinkley water did their dance, too. Perfect. Lobster boats are tied up, waiting for prices to rise enough to make going out worth it, so the only early morning thrumming is, as Charlie awakened to find out, the massage option on my spa recliner.

A Roseledge Books newbie walked in and asked if I had any Jose Saramago and YES! Roseledge Books had one. This is very exciting and a definite Wow! Having an author someone wants is good; having a particular title is trickier, especially if it’s not current or on a school list. But RB had Jose Saramago’s Blindness which filled in for his The Cave, which I sold last year to one of RB’s exquisitely picky readers who is part of a book club that reads only Nobel Laureates, and which will now be filled in by his Baltasar and Blimunda. With these two spot-on’s, Saramago could be seeing the end of his run. Maybe RB needs to expand its Nobelist offerings. Equally exciting, the noteworthy RB newbie was an author and RB had his book (also Wow! and maybe Whew!) which was moderately prominently displayed. The too–many adverbs in the last sentence go to show you that I am not the killer in Harry Dolan’s latest, Very Bad Men, which I read and liked very much.

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Classic, relevant rock walls and books define and enhance the within.

More Wow‘s: The world’s best nephew-in-law and a RB regular sent me a note to be sure I knew that in Douglas Preston’s and Lincoln Child’s Fever Dream, Pendergast’s wife was born in Rockland, Maine on Mechanic Street. LOCAL CONNECTION ALERT! I immediately ordered the book. New England note: The East Wind Inn is also on Mechanic Street, but this one is in Tenants Harbor and makes a T bar with Sea Street upon which RB is located. And friend Karen, also a RB regular, sent her book-a-day calendar’s suggestion of Mark Puls’  Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution which, after recently driving down 131 and seeing his replicated home, she now knew was pertinent. I ordered it right away. With David McCullough’s emphasis in 1776, and mentions in Ian Toll’s Six Frigates: Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, Diana Gabaldon’s An Echo in the Bone, 7th in her time-travel Outlander series and William Martin’s thriller, City of Dreams, RB is practically saturated with Henry Knoxiana, a not-entirely-likable man of too many mashed potatoes who once was a bookseller.

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Nothing beats high summer in the harbor except you with a good book.

Sometimes books mirror current events, but sometimes current events seem like the mirrors. Two such recent examples:
David Howard’s Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic follows the “covert travels” of North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights from 1789 until now, much as William Martin follows the travels of old documents in his series of mysteries, e.g. The Lost Constitution. RB has it and has ordered David Howard’s book.

Then there is the French forensic anthropologist/physician who, among many other things checks the validity of relics much as happens in John Case’s prescient thriller, The Genesis Code. It is one of my favorite snotty Vatican novels and RB has it just waiting for you.

The sailing school kids are flitting about the harbor in their daysailers and kayakers are more frequent. But too few sailboats are moored and almost no unknown walkers are here. I hope this is not the new normal.

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REPLIES

As many of you know, I don’t respond to emails mostly because your comments deserve sharing, but also because typing with one short-fingered hand and weakened abs is not the good time I want to have. So that is my mea culpa and these are my replies.

Marta, Many thanks for Louise Dickinson Rich’s Happy the Land. I suspect the First Edition with it’s original jacket is worth money –yes, I watch Antiques Roadshow–and if it is, I will donate it to the local library in your name. Seems as if I have been forever reading about people who live differently. LDR’s books about “back to the lannd/earth” life in the woods of interior Maine were among my first and still mirror exploits of friends who are off-the-grid in the woods of northern Minnesota or, more recently in Maine, e.g. Linda Tatelbaum’s Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader’s History. Even more recent is Lou Urenek’s Cabin:Two Brothers, A Dream, and Five Acres in Maine, but it is not yet available in paperback which uninsulated RB requires.  The use of “cabin” instead of “cottage” suggests interior Maine and a few comforts, the latter of which RB readers seem to prefer.

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Walk up Sea Street, inhale salt air, and prepare for RB's comforts.

Summers ago, a biology teacher/summer guide in Acadia National Park could not understand why I was sitting on a rock inhaling the ocean when I could be hiking through Minnesota’s BWCA which was his idea of a good time. In Music of Failure, Bill Holm argues that he has an eye for the “horizontal grandeur” of prairies [and coasts, I’d add] and others an eye for the woods. So different strokes: I’ll take big water and big sky; the Acadia guy can wallow in the woods. Living the rough life of homesteading is another whole issue. RB has always had electricity and running water, now it has plumbing and lots of windows, but no insulation or polish. Call it austere, up the scale from primitive, but not yet “living simply.”  Anyhow, many thanks, Marta, for the fun of being remembered, thinking about you, and dreaming-up yet another of life’s spectrums.
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M from NC, RB did have Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake and will soon have it again. There must be something in the Canadian air because I have just had to re-order Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, Jane Urquhart’s Away, the best book I know on emigrating or leaving home, Thomas King’s Medicine River, the best book I know on friendship, and Howard Norman’s The Bird Artist. I also ordered his What is Left the Daughter.
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S,J,M,K,P and D, I know, I know; the blog went black or blank or whatever it did. Charlie forgot to change the year on the credit card he used to pay for the domain name, but all should be good now. Sorry about that, but — good news — I discovered I have six readers., Yes!

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Just like that! Orange pops out from the rock wall and makes a walker smile.

Dana, the 1000 piece puzzle of best seller covers is perfect. I have only one table top with an ever dim bulb, but it is available because we eat outdoors unless rain-chased into comfy chairs with laps and straight chairs as tables. So set it up, I say, and many thanks. (I trust the puzzle pieces match the cover picture.)
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And thinking of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (you know who you are), I should warn you all who are coming that the warm spring has encouraged ticks and, yesterday I heard on Maine public radio, bears. So if you are woods folks or just tree enthusiasts, bring light-colored clothing with long legs and sleeves to spot, then shed, the attracted ticks. No bears near yet, but my best advice is to avoid them.

See some of you soon.

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NEWS FROM TENANTS HARBOR

It is a glorious afternoon. (Check webcam shadows.) Iffy morning makes it all the sweeter. Iffy last two weeks makes it seem like a miracle.

A rogue poplar is poking through the porch lattice in exactly the right spot to provide shade during the excessively sunny hours of 10:30 to 2:30 each day, after which the aging and asymmetrical other rogue poplar that you see in the webcam does its shade-tree duty.  This is very good news because I refuse to install a mechanical umbrella. Roseledge is a cottage, after all, and I already have a toaster-oven. Thank you, Mother Nature.

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See the poplar! Be the poplar! Left of the lawn chair waiting for you.

Tenants Harbor links to my latest reads are promising. Daniel Silva’s Portrait of a Spy includes Minneapolis, my winter place, as a potential terrorist base. An unfortunate reference, but a definite link through me. William Martin’s City of Dreams mentions Henry Knox who, after the Revolutionary War and with his position but no money, married hugely landed Lucy Fluker (or is it Flucker?) and lived just down the road in Montpelier at the corner of Highways 131 and 1, a definite 10-mile link. William Martin also mentions J[ames] Monroe Hewlett whose murals are on the walls of the Bank of New York; now I have to check with RB reader Hewlett to see how many “degrees” it takes to make the link.  If this doesn’t work, Momroe Hewlett traveled to Paris in 1931 with N. C. Wyeth who already owned Eight Bells in Port Clyde, just down the road from TH. And Andrew Wyeth’s current exhibit at the Farnsworth is of his Port Clyde watercolors from the 1930’s, so that’s a Wyeth/Wyeth (Wyeth-squared?) link. I’m going to assume six degrees are still a standard, even though an earlier blog noted that 4.17 (I think) is the new “usual.” I love this stuff.

Today was “stepping the mast day” day at the East Wind Inn wharf. I love knowing that “stepping” is the verb to use. Bring on the many masts of high summer. The 4th is nearly upon us.

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The tide goes out, dark clouds surround, while you watch from the porch of the Inn.

The East Wind Inn is for sale. (The Chandlery, part of the East Wind, is the building sticking out at the bottom right of the webcam image.) Surely it is the most perfect 300’ of frontage ever enjoyed by porch sitters who look out on harbor comings and goings, ever changing tides and tidal flats, and, for early risers, spectacular sunrises over the open end of the harbor. It would make a great Alumni Center! Just think about networking on the porch, lifelong learning Chatauqua-like sessions, workshops, or “independent study” of whatever strikes one’s fancy. And Roseledge Books, of course, will be ever ready to do it’s part.

This is what happens when friends from away and with ties to the same college get together, then try to figure out how to share the glory and be here longer and more often.

First customers have come. Whew! Old friends new to Maine and RB, old friends not new to Maine or RB but away for a while, and old friends passing through again this year after a Roads Scholar week in Campobello. No surprise then that Frankie’s Place by Jim Sterba was a perfect withdrawal read for a Midwesterner who had just enjoyed hiking in Acadia or that Arundel by Kenneth Roberts was right for someone who wanted some history and a related trail-of-sites to hike afterwards, or that Seaworthy by Linda Greenlaw will bring someone already grounded up-to-date.

Business is slow. I have the newly fixed and enhanced ROSELEDGE BOOKS sign rehung on the tree at the corner of Sea and Mechanic Streets, so you can’t be lost.  Where are you?

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GREAT NEWS! UNION RAGS WON, WEBCAM TELLS TRUE, AND…

UNION RAGS WON!
Surely no community can claim ties to a greater horse than Phyllis Wyeth’s Union Rags, horse extraordinaire that won the Belmont Stakes last weekend. Roseledge Books, your community bookstore and never one to miss out on a good thing, has ordered one copy of its first significant book of the summer, Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet. There are too few new, paperback copies of the classic out there, so I hope a RBR decides to buy, then use this one to write an equally long-lived charmer about Union Rags. Remember Elizabeth Taylor in the movie? It’s time to cast anew. (I am not the only person to so consider.)  “How about Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand?” a RB visitor suggested. Of course, I said, and ordered it, too.

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I have no picture of a horse, of course, so maybe a crab instead? (Can you find the crab attached to a rock somewhere on Barter's Point Road?)

THE WEBCAM IS ON, which is good, but it won’t show the rock, which is okay, too. The dreadful truth is that the very dreary webcam tells it like it is in front of Roseledge and it is and has been cloudy. In the glass half-full spirit of a knitter, may I note how nifty would a sweater be if its yarn(s) were the many shades of gray through green with a splash of yellow which, if subtracted from the green, is the rare blue sighting. The dyeing of the yarn to allow such a spectrum would be daunting, but I am not a dyer. This minute the sun is out and, after a showery day tomorrow, the sun should be among us through the weekend. A diminution of the very cool sea breeze would be welcome, too. (Remember: click on webcam, last listed page on the right.) No book suggestion here; just check out the scene, then come, be one with the harbor, and  build the webcam frames into an action-packed — or not — story.

THE NATIVE STRAWBERRIES ARE IN!
Yes, the Produce Lady has native strawberries. And just in time, I say, especially as I try to will the last of last year’s Cheerio’s to have just a little bit of taste. The strawberries are about ten days early, witness to the warmth of this year’s Spring. I don’t know what this means for the short raspberry season, the shorter blackberry time, and the much anticipated blueberry extravaganza. Cookbook alert; Marjorie Standish’s two oldies are most reasonable, but berry-filled soup or chowder recipes may be iffy.

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Low summer or late summer, sea and sky abound for those still around.

So low summer is here and I have placed first book orders. Be ready to decide what to read and what I missed. Most exciting may be this season’s first “signature books.”

#1 is Enid Bagnold’s classic horse story, National Velvet, as already noted.  And Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabisuit, too.

# 2 is Jenn McKinlay’s Due or Die, a librarian’s take on murder, mayhem, library services, and romance in a small, coastal New England town, salutes Tenants Harbor’s new library which is 1.6 million dollars close to being a reality. Nothing brings a group of library users to blows more quickly than deciding what a library should be, have, and do. (Think of the NYPL renovation fracas currently unfolding.) What fun to be part of the fights that growth — or change — usually provoke.

#3 is Jamie Wyeth’s Farm Work, a handsome, PAPERBACK, catalog of his mostly animal drawings with an engaging faux-memoir (adapted from interview responses) interspersed, celebrates the community life he lives and records for all of us. If his current show, Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan, issues a catalog in paperback for $25.00 or less, I will have that, too, because Monhegan is nearerby, and it would be great fun to roam the island looking at today and yesterday and thinking about how things change and how they stay the same.

Here come the strawberries. I would share. Where are you?

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HELLO FROM WONDERLAND

We and the mosquitoes arrived at Roseledge at Sunday dusk, none the worse for wear but VERY HAPPY to be here. Monitor heater kicked on, Internet connection did not, and we drank glass after glass of water to end the dry travel day. Beautiful Memorial Day dawned with Taps, the always perfect parade and a wreath thrown into the harbor. Fewer walkers and parked cars on Sea Street, which I hope is not an ominous sign of fewer visitors again this summer. And we gave my sister a proper seaside sendoff so she can haunt forever the wonders of Marshall Point.

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This place of land and sea and possibility is ours forever.

Charlie has been here and gone, but he leaves in his wake a commode with pillow on the front porch, an operating webcam, new paintings of buoys and boats, modestly repositioned bookshelves and Roseledge Books t-shirt display, enough co-op purchases of peanut butter and chicken wine to last at least until the first friends stop by with a car, and a summer’s worth of 2 part Jet and 1 part French Roast coffee from Rock City Roasters. So Roseledge is perfectly outfitted, as always.

I am currently finishing (from last summer) Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn about Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot’s giving birth to our national parks and forests. I love Timothy Egan, in part because I learn from someone who lives, loves and knows whereof he writes. I also loved his books The Good Rain and Lasso the Wind, both also about the west and its resources. I saved Julia Spencer-Fleming’s One was a Soldier for a Roseledge read (without distractions), and am so glad I did. The book’s attention to returning veterans deserves thoughtful consideration, even as Reverend Clare and Chief Russ continue their enjoyable dance. And for a book that combines the glorious wilds of the North with a disquisition on many ways of loving, I recommend William Kent Kreuger’s Thunder Bay which I finished last night as the electricity was off and the rare sun faded.

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Lupine is early, forsythia's gone. Sunshine come back to us, please.

To sum:

We’re here, we’re here, we’re here,
on the porch emitting cheer.

No time to fret, we’re ready to let
the summer’s good times begin.

Hello from Wonderland.

(For those who have forgotten what Wonderland looks like, or not, the webcam is up and looking. See last of pages on right.)

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ODDS AND ENDS, OR MAYBE JUST ODDS

Time to pack for Maine and clear the desk of clippings. The following weathered the several-month resting test for continued interest.

CONNECTIONS

Degrees of separation have dropped from 6 (remember Kevin Bacon?)to 4.74 which may — or may not — affect the number of steps to connect Tenants Harbor and the recent Kentucky Derby.  (The inference is  subtle.)  The real long shot was the mention/connection of Enid Bagnold who wrote National Velvet, a paperback copy of which RB will have later in the summer if it is currently published and being distributed. But clearly TH is in, of, and connected to a larger world of friends, neighbors, visitors, readers, et al.

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Horses, and books, buoys and boats, all with special ties to the Harbor.

PLAGIARISM (curses!) updates

1. Bob Dylan was not sufficiently forthright in discussing who or what influenced his painting. Shoot. I expected more, especially when he was asked about it.

2. Quentin Rowan or Q. R. Markham in Assassins of Secrets seems to be more a pastiche-r than a plagiarizer, but without crediting sources for the parts, it’s still a big ick. (See New Yorker, Feb 13 and 20, 2012)  RB will have the book when or if it’s in paperback so readers can see how many abused sources they can spot.

3. Reviewer David Leavitt notes that Olaf Olafsson, in Restoration, “[minimizes] the obvious debt he owes [Iris] Origio….”  So RB will have Iris Orgio’s War in Val d’Orcia: an Italian War Diary, 1943-1944 for sure, then  you all can be ready to compare Ms. Origio’s book with Mr. Olafsson’s book when it is issued in paperback, probably next summer.

But, interestingly, reviewer Leavitt goes on to say,  “By far the most troubling — and interesting — problem [Olaf Olafsson’s] Restoration addresses is the relationship between a work of art and the source material on which it draws…. Full disclosure: In 1993, I was sued by the poet Stephen Spender after I wrote a novel, “While England Sleeps,” based on an episode from his memoir “World Within World.” If I learned anything from that unhappy experience, it was that it’s essential for writers to acknowledge their sources fully and without hedging.”

4. LATEST ANTI-PLAGIARISM HEROES: Simon Dumenco (with a Council) and Maria Popova and Kelli Anderson (with a code of conduct) argue for the need to credit sources when aggregating content or developing it anew.  Also, Ms. Popovsa and Ms. Anderson have designed two symbols to put before the aggregated sources:
VIA which indicates big influence or a link of direct discovery;
HAT TIP which indicates a subtler significance or a link of indirect discovery, story lead or inspiration.

Here’s to A SUMMER OF FRONT PORCH TOASTS for these heroes, Simon Dumenco, Maria Popova, and Kelli Anderson, who know that good ideas come from thinkers who stood on the shoulders of giants who should be recognized.

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The euonymus is gone, but Roseledge Books lives and is soon open.

I no more than get my new pacemaker installed, then re-installed (yes) and made checkable from afar, than someone is murdered on the television show NCIS when an Internet hacker figures out (from afar) how to make the poor guy’s pacemaker speed up until he dies.   I called Charlie to tell him to get busy and figure out how to make my pacemaker hacker-averse.  He sighed.  Now I read that my St. Jude Medical pacemaker may have wires that go amok. I called Charlie again. He thinks I should learn to talk Cyborg.  Good news outcomes:  I have more energy and I won’t nod off inapproprriately at Roseledge.  Now it’s time for me — and you — to be in Maine keeping tabs on the harbor.

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