If you're going to watch the Field of Dreams baseball game between two National League bottom feeders tonight (8/11), here's a couple of postings from The Book Shopper archive that you can look at when things get a little slow. To celebrate the game, I'm having corn-on-cob for dinner tonight.
From May 2009, "Field of Dream Fanatic" is a review of an appearance by an author who wrote a book about Moonlight Graham and other trivia surrounding the movie.
The second offering "Book Burning Iowans in Field of Dreams" comes from the fine essayist Wilfred Sheed who loved baseball, but in his essay, he was less than kind to Iowans. This May 2013 posting also has a link to a third essayabout the Jungian overtones of the movie.
You should time to read all of these. I would bet on it.
I recently watched two motion pictures about bookstores: The Bookshop (2017) about a war widow Florence Greer (played by Emily Mortimer) who opens a small bookstore at a seaside village in England in the 1950s and the documentary Hello, Bookstore (2022) featuring owner Matthew Tannenbaum who fights to keep his Lenox, Massachusetts business afloat during the pandemic.
Both films romanticize bookstore owners, but there is no love interest to drive the plot (like bookish movies such as Notting Hill or You’ve Got Mail), but Greer and Tannenbaum love books and the written word. Their passion is infectious with many of the townspeople appreciating their expertise. But still, as everyone knows the bookselling business is hard and the financial rewards are almost nonexistent (like blogging).
Further complicating matters for Greer is a wealthy dowager (Patricia Clarkson) who wants the landmark house where Greer has her shop repurposed for an arts center (though there is water in the basement —not so good for books?) Greer becomes friends with an elderly, passionate book reader (Bill Nighy) and upon his recommendation, Greer purchases 250 copies of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. This seems like a big order of literary porn for a small fishing village, but publishers back then probably had more generous return policies.
Hello, Bookstore
The pandemic poleaxed Tannenbaum’s business especially since he thrived on connecting books to readers as they browsed with violin and classical guitar music gently dominating the soundtrack. You could also get a glass a wine at the adjacent Lit Bar, as long as you don’t use a book as a coaster, but COVID-19 changed all that.
What makes the movie interesting is that the director A. B. Zax started making the film before the pandemic when business was normal. Thus, the story takes a dramatic turn when Tannenbaum is forced to take orders by phone or from his doorstep. He will not allow his customers to come inside and browse. The film juxtaposes the pandemic days with the non-pandemic days. These are tough times for Tannenbaum and his business, but fortunately in Lenox there aren’t any snooty dowagers making his life extra miserable.
Enter the Blog Time Machine
Both films are enjoyable, but I wish I could have watched them in a room of bibliophiles wearing Too-many-books-and-not-enough-time T-shirts. That used to happen. Check out this blog’s very first (very raw looking) postingon November 29, 2008 when I reviewed the 2008 documentary Paperback Dreams about the trials and tribulations of two independent bookstores in the San Francisco area. About 70 people gathered at the then Push-Push Theatre in Decatur to watch the movie followed by a spirited discussion afterwards.
Our book group has just finished reading Ron Chernow’s voluminous biography Grant (2017), which illuminated a period of American history that we knew little about. Chernow uses the life of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1888) to give us perspectives on the Mexican War, the coming storm between the North and the South, the Civil War, and the continued strife and violence against blacks who were denied their full rights for decades after the war.
Heretofore, Grant was perhaps best known for two things: the Union General who defeated Robert E. Lee ending the Civil War only because he had superior numbers and resources and secondly, as the two-term 18th President of the United States whose administration was embroiled in corruption and scandal.
Chernow dispels both of these harsh judgements. Although in the early part of his life “Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn,” his life changed as dramatically as if it were a fairytale. An 1843 graduate of West Point Grant served in the Mexican War but left the military in 1854 under duress. As an unsuccessful businessman mostly because he was susceptible to being duped, he was barely able to support his family. Suffering from alcoholic binges did not make things any easier. When the Civil War broke out in 1860, he was a shopkeeper in Galena, Illinois. Eight years later he was a war hero and President of the United States.
General Grant
Unlike Lee who was tactician in battle, Grant was a strategist who led the Union to early victories at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, (Shiloh not so much) and then went on to capture Vicksburg in 1863—a campaign rated by military historians “a masterpiece, the preeminent campaign waged by any general during the war.” His army suffered horrible losses against Lee in Virginia in the summer of 1864, where he was called "Grant the Butcher" by northern critics. Eventually he cornered Lee in an untenable defensive position that ultimately led to the end of the war. Chernow writes:
“Grant was the strategic genius produced by the Civil War. He set clear goals, communicated them forcefully, and instilled them in his men. While Lee stuck to Virginia, Grant grasped the war in its totality, masterminding the movements of all Union armies (including Sherman’s). It was Grant who best apprehended the strategic interactions of the eastern and western theatre.”
President Grant
Unfortunately, the corruption and scandal of Grant’s presidency overshadowed his relentless efforts to give newly freed blacks not only the right to vote, but the ability to do so without risking their lives. Chernow does not gloss over the scandals, but he establishes that it wasn’t Grant who was corrupt himself. But Grant had major flaw in trusting the wrong people who took advantage of him throughout his life (unlike his alcoholism which he controlled through total abstinence).
An abolitionist before the war (more so than Abraham Lincoln) Grant was a fervent believer that blacks should be able to vote without intimidation, hold office and during his first term he enacted laws to strengthen the rights to vote. He used Federal troops to disembowel the nascent Ku Klux Klan “unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American History” writes Chernow, and he created the Department of Justice to indict and convict over a thousand Klansman. (A reincarnation of the Klan was formed in the 1920s.) In other words, there was only a short period of reprieve before the white Southerners and Democrat power structure formed new militant groups. This coupled with Northern “Reconstruction fatigue” led the evaporation of voting rights for blacks. (During Lincoln and Grant's tenure it was the Republicans who were the champions of Reconstruction and securing the rights of blacks. The Democrats where the party of the white Southerners who had no intention to succumbing to new order proposed by Lincoln.)
Chernow maintains that it would be another 96 years after Grant (1968) that another fair election would be held in many parts of the South. “Slavery had been abolished,” writes Chernow, “but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.”
Post Presidency
After serving two terms in office Grant made a two-year world tour, but upon his return stateside failed to win the Republican party's nomination in 1880. At the end of his life, he was swindled in a Ponzi scheme that left him penniless. Moreover, he soon he was in declining in health from throat cancer. Fortunately, an important writer and publisher of the time—Mark Twain—understood that he could restore Grant’s wealth by publishing the general’s memoirs. While in intense pain, Grant finished his two volume Personal Memoirs just a month before his death and it eventually sold 300,000 copies which provided Grant's devoted wife Julia with generous royalties.
More About the Book Group
In the spirit of transparency. our book group—consists of just two people (easy to schedule get togethers and everyone reads the book!) and it began in the summer of 2020 as a way for two college chums and new retirees to "support" each other to read challenging books and avoid inflicting our "intellectual" chatter on loved ones. Our first book was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and have just finished Chernow. We keep notes, ramblings, observations, (sometimes irreverent like a comparison between Ulysses S. Grant and Donald Trump) on our discussion board available here (but you must scroll down).
I was in Boston earlier this month visiting my older daughter Cynthia, which included weeding her book collection. This labor of love took plenty of time, but I did manage to visit my favorite Boston area bookstore – the MIT Press Bookstore.
Considering the past postings in 2010, 2016 and 2017, this has not been my first visit. We have a history.
But this time was markedly different as I entered their new store, which has returned to Kendall Square after a year shutdown during the pandemic. This time I was a professional book shopper representing the interests of my Atlanta-based book pop-up Destination: Books, which has entered its second full year bookselling. (Destination: Books will be at the Freedom Farmer’s Market at the Carter Centeron Saturday morning, May 28th, with books on gardening, sustainability, food culture, and anything else eclectic that interests us).
At MIT Press Bookstore, I know I will always serendipitously find new books. My browsing was a great excuse to try out some new publishers like the Kew Publishing (UK) or AdventureKeen(Birmingham AL), but the oddest book that came back with me wasn’t a book – it was an issue of the LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecturepublished by the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
Reimagining Central Park
The theme of Issue #10 was based on the fictional premise that in 2018 Central Park in New York was completely destroyed by eco-terrorists. A call went out for designers to reimagine New York’s Central Park to submit their proposals. The issue contains the winning entries, the honorable mentions and a few Salon des Refusés, described by the editors as “entries that caught the jury’s attention and imagination that did not make the final cut.”
As you would expect, all the entries are gorgeously printed in full color. I could not begin to do these presentations justice and I doubt the publishers would appreciate me trying. Fortunately, you can get a sense of the Iconoclast issue by going there directly.
Currently on exhibit at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is Postcards from Parisby photographer André Kertész (American, born Hungarian 1894 - 1985). Included in the exhibit are a couple of reading-related photographs. One is of Parisian gallery owner Jan Sliwinsky in his study (circa 1926-27) shown here at the right.
Another notable photograph is that of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian's glasses, which we all know are needed for reading. And the pipe too. Can't read without the pipe.
Kertész on Reading
But what really connects Kertész to books is On Reading (2008), a collection of photographs taken between 1915 and 1970. The book was originally published in 1971, but was it restored and reissued in 2008 (and available online at Destination: Books). It is a pictorial paean to reading with photographs of engaged readers on city rooftops, on crowded streets, and browsing at book shops from Paris to New York.
Note: The Kertész exhibit is at the High until May 29th. It looks much better in person than online, though I will warn you that the "postcards" are sometimes the size of postage stamps.
April 6th and 7th is the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh that was fought in 1862. In this 1965 snapshot my older brother Neil and I are standing in front of Ruggles Battery near the Hornet's Nest. Our parents took us boys on a road trip to Shiloh, Lookout Mountain, Chickamauga and Atlanta. Little did I know then I would end up living in Atlanta,
This trip was the beginning of my lifelong interest in history. Last year, I wrote an essay for the Tropics of Meta about Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which established that the two-day battle with almost 25,000 casualties was unlike anything seen before on the North American continent. The premise of the book is that the Civil War changed America's attitudes towards death. The essay draws a comparison between Faust's book and the struggles this country has coming to terms with the nearly one million deaths from COVID-19.
Some may remember political satirist and journalist P.J. O'Rourke who died last month as one of the co-editors of TheNational Lampoon High School Yearbook, or as the author of Parliament of Whores (1991), or his appearances on the NPR radio show Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! But when I think of him, I think of this piece from decades ago, which I kept stashed in my Witty Stuff file.
For a better understanding for what life is like under totalitarianism (and what the Ukrainians are fighting for/against) check out the works of Josef Škvoreckؘý (1924-2012). I just finished reading two of his novellas Emὃke (1963, tr. 1977) and The Bass Saxophone (1967, tr. 1977), which are combined in a single volume with an introductory piece "Red Music." Škvoreckؘý played saxophone with a jazz group Red Music growing up in Czechoslovakia. In 1968, the Soviets removed the Czech reformist government with an invasion of a half-a-million troops, crushing the budding Prague Spring. Škvoreckؘý and his wife emigrated to Canada where he became a professor and started a publishing company that made the works of banned Czech writers available throughout the world and to his fellow countryman.
This is not the first time I have read the prolific Škvoreckؘý. When my partner Denise and I were in the Czech Republic in the fall of 2019 on vacation, I took a copy of his short detective novel The End of Lieutenant Bovurka (1975) with me. After reading it and I picked up a copy The Return of Lieutenant Bovurka (1991) at the English language bookstore Shakespeare near the Franz Kafka Museum. In each book the melancholic detective Bovurka must walk a tightrope of solving crimes and resisting the Communist regime. These books reinforced the sentiment expressed by our middle-aged tour guide over drafts of Pilsner Urquell as he described the suppression in Czechoslovakia under the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Memorial to the Victims of Communism (shown above) in the Lesser Town Area of Prague serves as a reminder who disappeared during the Soviet regime.
Last fall when I went to Germany (the former East German cities of Cottbus and Dresden) to visit my older daughter Cynthia, I took a copy of Škvoreckؘý’s most well-known work the voluminous The Engineer of Human Souls (1977, tr. 1984) The narrator Danny Smiricky (considered Škvoreckؘý’s alter-ego in many of his novels – like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman) has emigrated from Czechoslovakia and is a professor in Toronto. Smiricky mixes his recollections of living under German occupation with ex-pats in Canada wrestling with their guilt in leaving Europe. Because of all the characters and the time switches, the book is a challenging read and I’ll admit I did not finish it. (More my shortcoming than the book’s).
Despite the grim settings of oppression under totalitarian regimes, there is an element of humor/absurdity in his many of writings and in the links below there is a prime example from The Bass Saxophone.
Related Links
A lengthy tribute to Škvoreckؘýfrom Paul Wilson in the Guardian who translated The Engineer of Human Souls to English. (Its title refers to Stalin's description of writers),
A Škvoreckؘý passage from the introduction to The Bass Saxophone listing the Nazis 10 Rules to Combat Jazz. Note: The best way to buy this out-of-print book is through Alibris. Make sure you get the copy that includes the Introductory "Red Music". The easiest way to get the correct copy is type the ISBN number 0-671-55681-9 in the search bar at Alibris Books.
This month I have read two travel books, neither of which you would find on the shelf next to your Fodors, Lonely Planets, or Anthony Bourdains. Both books are not your normal travel fanfare.
Norman Lock’s A Boy in His Winter: An American Novel (2014) is an imaginative revisiting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Part One (July 2, 1835 to August 29, 2005), the narrator Huck Finn travels down the Mississippi River with his companion the slave Jim, but the two are stuck in a time warp where they don’t age even though the voyage itself lasts for decades. Off the river, time has marched on, as Huck and Jim witness a Civil War battle at Vicksburg, and later meet a veteran of the Great War. Tom Sawyer makes a few cameo appearances along the way but unlike Huck or Jim, Tom grows older.
While Huck and Jim are traveling companions, they are not close friends because of the chasm of race. Jim knows that a black man in the South lives in peril and it is something that the youthful Huck in his ignorance doesn’t understand. In one instance, Huck asks:
“ 'Jim, do you believe in free will?'
'Is there a more ridiculous question to ask a slave?' he said, laughing.
And for a moment I hated him."
In the second part (August, 29, 2005 to September 11, 2005) Huck arrives at the mouth of the river south of New Orleans the same day as hurricane Katrina. His raft is gone (and so is Jim) and he joins a three-man crew of a charter boat who are running drugs from New Orleans up the Atlantic coast during the post-Katrina chaos. Lock is able to capture how a thirteen-year-old boy views the 21st century, who is both innocent yet worldly enough to survive. In Part 3 (September 12, 2005 to March 15, 2077) Huck, since he is no longer tied to the river, is beginning to age and the old Huck reflects more on his young life. Hence the title A Boy in His Winter.
It's an unusual premise, and I am usually skeptical of derivative works (like sequels, prequels), but Lock who has reimagined several other American classics in his The American Novel series (all with Bellevue Literary Press) writes well taking on a time-traveling Huckleberry Finn adventure.
Remembering Turkey
The other book is Michael Pereira’s Mountains and a Shore: A Journey Through Southern Turkey. Originally published in 1966, Paul Dry Books republished the book in 2015. In this thin travelogue, Pereira combines the history of the country with his solo travels along the southern Mediterranean coastline and Taurus Mountains. Because Pereira speaks Turkish and insists on traveling the way that the locals do: by foot, by donkey if necessary, and the most common mode of transportation— the bus. He writes:
“…the role played by buses is of immense importance, and I came away with nothing but admiration for them and their drivers. For they have to contend with the trains, bridges washed away or simply non-existent, and, by no means the least, other Turkish drivers.
To help them overcome these hazards they very reasonably enlist the help of the Almighty, and in the space above the windscreen is always written some brief prayer or exhortation. Some of these are pious rather than comforting, such as: ‘May God protect you!’ and others, to my mind, needlessly eschatological: ‘Forget not thy God!’… The most popular of all, however, is the single word ‘Maşallah’, which used in much the same way as a Spaniard uses the sign of the cross to avert danger.”
You feel every bump in the road as he travels the mountainous swerving roads often overlooking the Mediterranean. Pereira’s purposely traveled to an area of a country that he believed would be much more developed in the upcoming decades.
His descriptions of the kebabs, and the centuries-old churches and muezzins’ calls to prayers from the minarets reminded me of my trip to Turkey with my partner Denise in 201o. Books like Pereira’s expand what I normally think of as a travel book. Sometimes you read a travel book with a purpose to plan an upcoming trip or to be a companion while traveling, but Mountains and A Shore, provided a respite from our daily routine by reliving memories of our trip to this fascinating country. (I cannot forget our visit to the Hagia Sophia and the pickle shop in Istanbul.)
It is just as Dave Mason wrote in the Forward to Pereira’s book: “All travel is time travel.”
Both books are available at the Destination: Books Book Shopper portal. When you purchase an independently book through site, we earn an affiliate commission.
I am a little sheepish to admit in a book blog that I have spent many winter evenings lately watching television or more specifically, watching movies on television. Denise and I haven’t been to the cinema in over two years (sigh). To fill that void, we have been streaming motion pictures that are receiving critical attention. Most of you have probably heard of or watched The Power of the Dog, Passing, and Being the Ricardos. While watching these offerings I was reminded of passages from related books. Some of these books I read a while ago, which is a credit to the strange selective power of reading and memory.
Larry McMurtry and Jane Campion
Based on a 1967 Tom Savage novel of the same name, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is the story of two ranching brothers in 1920s Montana. One is a more refined brother (Jesse Plemons) who marries a widow (Kirsten Dunst) and brings her and her sensitive son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to live with them on the ranch that he shares with his rawhide tough, a man’s-man brother played by Benedict Cumberbatch. (He's right up there with Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall.) But underneath the grit, the chaps, and the smell of horses, Cumberbatch hides his homosexuality which adds to the tension between him and the widow’s son.
I reminded of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 movie about a rodeo cowboy (Jake Gyllenhaal) and ranch hand (Heath Ledger) who fall in love with tragic, sorrowful results. (Anne Hathaway plays Gyllenhaal’s wife; Michelle Williams is Ledger’s) The story behind the movie is best told in Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (2007), which includes Annie Proulx’s original 1997 short story that appeared in The New Yorker. It includes the screenplay and essays by Proulx and the screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry.
For those wishing to go back further, read McMurtry’s piece “Eros in Archer County” found In a Narrow Grave Essays on Texas (1968). He is no stranger to writing candidly about the range of the sexual mores of the post-World War II Old West. (With the exception of Lonesome Dove, McMurtry is a better essayist than novelist.)
Passing and George Schuyler
Passing, based on the 1929 Nella Larsen novel, is set in 1920s New York, when Irene (Tessa Thompson) meets an old girlfriend Clare (Ruth Negga) who passes as white. Irene has misgivings about rekindling their friendship. When Clare asks Irene if she can join her at the Negro League Charity Dance, she explains to Irene that she has a longing. “I so much want to be around Negroes again. Talk with them. Hear them laugh.”
Coincidently this same sentiment appears in George Schuyler’s 1931 novel Black No Morewhich I read just last year. (Isabell Wilkerson recommended the book in an interview.) In Schuyler’s biting satire Black people are able to get an operation that allows people to bleach their skin white—and is advertised as a new way to "solve the American race problem." However, the strategy is flawed as Max the main character who had undergone the Black-No-More operation begins to have remorse for his decision:
"He (Max) was not finding life as a white man the rosy existence he had anticipated. He was forced to conclude that it was pretty dull and that he was bored. As a boy he had been taught to look up to white folks as just a little less than gods’ now he found them little different from the Negroes, except that they were uniformly less courteous and less interesting.
Often when the desire for the happy-go-lucky, jovial good fellowship of the Negros came upon him strongly, he would go down to Auburn Avenue (in Atlanta) and stroll around the vicinity, looking at the dark folk and listening to their conversation and banter."
The Larsen and Schuyler books were published just two years apart.
Lucy, Desi and Oscar Hijuelos
While watching the dynamics between Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, in Being the Ricardos, a passage from Oscar Hijuelos’ 1989 novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love came immediately to mind. Like the movie, there are some behind the scenes description of the I Love Lucy show in Hijuelos book and impressions. Mambo Kings centers on two brother, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who emigrate from Cuba to New York City in 1949. Both are musicians and their band The Mambo Kings achieve a moderate amount of success during the golden era of mambo. They even land a guest spot on I Love Lucy.
In one scene Desi Arnaz confides to the Castillo brothers his frustration with Lucy:
If you knew what I have to go through every day with this woman. These American women are enough to drive you nuts! My mother told me a million times: Ricky, never marry an American woman unless you are looking for one big headache. And she was right, I should’ve married that girl back in Cuba! Now there was a quiet girl who never bothered me, who knew where her bread was buttered. She wasn’t crazy! She always left me alone, you know what I mean, compañeros?
Whether it be a movie, a novel, or a television program Desi and Lucy’s marriage was complicated.
BTW, they did make a movie based on the Mambo Kings starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas. Judging from the clip below it looks like a strong candidate for our next movie night or as a soundtrack for a house party.
