The Book Shopper

Milestone or Millstone

2023 was the year that the Book Shopper blog marked its 500th posting.  And in case you missed the celebration; there was no celebration. Admittedly I thought about renting some space and inviting notables who have made tangential cameo appearances throughout the years (Filmmaker James Benning, rapper Killer Mike and author Thomas Chatterton Williams, Book artist Brian Dettmer, essayist David Shields, photographer Emily Berl) and throwing a party on behalf of the blog. I might have called it “Not the Decatur Book Festival Festival.” For now, this remains a fantasy.

The blog premiered on November of 2008 when I reviewed a showing of “Paperback Dreams”, a documentary on the demise of two bookstores in the San Francisco area followed by a panel from the local book selling scene. Ironically, I have been a book seller myself for three years with my book popup Destination: Books. No brick-and-mortar store for me, which was one of the memorable takeaways (financial ruin) from “Paperback Dreams” along what a soulless gorilla Amazon was and still is as a bookseller.

Yet, the blog plods on. In the early years  I used to “report” on happenings around the city, but that became tiresome as writer events often become almost cliché.  Moreover, the response was underwhelming considering the work I put into it.

However, looking back on the postings about the notables was a fun trip down memory lane and I did learn some things worth sharing. For example, when the poet Billy Collins reminded his readers should not confuse the narrator of his poems with the poet himself.  However when my longtime partner Denise and I ran into Collins outside the chapel at Agnes Scott College before showtime, he seemed charming and whimsical like his poems. Another worthy author event featured the historian Rick Atkinson who wrote The Liberation Trilogy. In the Decatur Library Auditorium Atkinson graciously fielded World War II questions from the audience like it was a game show. 

 Though I continue to march with a one-foot-after-the-other attitude, I have lightened my load by adopting a more wistful format, which I share on a monthly basis. Receiving occasional feedback from you fabled few readers who haven’t unsubscribed me, is always encouraging. But the main motivation of continuing the blog is that it gives me an excuse to generate ideas, to write, knowing I have some hassle-free place to publish it.  A few posts have generated other writing ideas and larger essays on other platforms. One of the most notable was The MARTA BOOK CLUB where I listed the books, I witnessed people reading while riding the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit System for 12 years. It spawned my 2016, Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire, (see video trailer) book.

Well, it’s back to work as I compile my Best Books Read List for 2023. Time to get started on that next 100 to make it to the 600th posting, which I will I expect will drop sometime in 2030. Book your party reservations now.

Clockwise from upper left: James Benning's re-creation of the Unabomber's Library, Brian Dettmer's art work, Shields best known book, Williams and Killer Mike at the Decatur Library, Emily Beryl's photo of Liz Goldwyn at an LA bookstore.

 

 

 

Book Launched

It seems rather fitting that this Veterans Day weekend also marks the launch of my new book, A Father’s Letters: Connecting Past to Present which is finally on the shelves (at least virtually). It follows my writing pattern of publishing a book once every seven years: The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009), Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire (2016). At first glance, no three books could be more different from each other.

I began A Father’s Letters after I was blessedly packaged out to retirement from Turner Broadcasting in 2019. The first draft was awful. And on the advice of brave friends who saw the first iteration, I blew it up. However, some of the remnants had a half-life—especially my father’s correspondence which I had kept with me over the decades. This included approximately 600 letters chronicling two distinct periods of his life—as a combat infantryman in World War II Europe and 30 years later as accountant tethered to a desk job at a small Midwestern canning company. (The picture above is my father Glenn R. Browne Jr. as a 19-year-old infantryman near Kaiserlauten, Germany in 1945.)

I am a slow writer and I spent most of 2022 writing a new book, with assistance from some of those same brave friends. It was a great improvement but only five chapters and 63 pages in length.

Not only did I retrace my father’s combat action, but I also examined the letters he wrote me from 1976 when I graduated from college to his premature death from leukemia in 1985.  Certain themes emerged—such as how do we define ourselves in retirement. However, what surprised me was discovering how this correspondence shaped my life then and now. Part of the self-discovery was the process itself, which I write about.   

Fortunately, this was not a catharsis of trauma that so many books of this type can often be, but the writing of it felt more like a Field of Dreams movie moment of “Hey Dad, do you want to have a catch?” And since I grew up in east central Illinois it has that Midwestern influence as well.

Most of 2023 was spent getting it proofread professionally, designed professionally and finally printed through Ingram Spark and distributed through Ingram with my Muted Horn publishing imprint. The book contains photographs, a truncated map of my East Central Illinois homeland, cartoons (and I had to get permissions) and this cover art which is part of a permanent exhibit at the High Museum in Atlanta. Like Down & Outbound, I wanted the content to determine the physical form of the book.

Limited Availability

By working with Ingram Spark, the book is available online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble or you can purchase it through Ingram’s book direct sales. (Link to the book here.) I have a few “advance copies” here in my study and they will be available at my book popup Destination Books, which makes a monthly appearance at the Carter Center Freedom Farmers Market (Saturday morning, November 18). I expect that after Thanksgiving I will have more copies readily available for purchase directly though my personal website.

It seemed only appropriate that you blog readers should be among the first ones to know. Thanks for your support.

 

Grave Significance

Last month, my longtime partner Denise and I traveled to the Basque region of Spain and Belgium for a couple of weeks. Everyone knows about traveling in Spain (pintxos, wine, beaches), but Belgium is a lesser-known destination unless you are big fan of Colin Farrell movies (In Bruges).  Not only did I want to see my older daughter who flew over from Berlin, but Denise planned the trip so I could visit one of my bucket list items, the World War I battlefield at Ypres, Belgium. What initially intrigued me about Ypres is The Last Post ceremony. Held daily since 1928, it commemorates the 500,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers that died in the four major battles fought there between 1914 and 1918, The bodies of 100,000 of those fallen were never recovered. In a brief ceremony held at 8 p.m. three buglers play a haunting homage in front of the Menin Memorial Gate in Ypres. The Menin Gate is undergoing a major renovation, so I attended a considerably scaled down version to the one shown here on YouTube. 

The tour I took began with a forty-minute bus ride from Bruges to Ypres (pronounced E-pra,) beginning at 9 in the morning and extending through the Last Post. The tour visits monuments to the British forces, including the Australians, the Canadians, and New Zealanders and some stops where the battlefield has been preserved. Live ordinance is still being unearthed on a regular basis and has to be disposed properly. 

In preparation for my trip, I began reading British historian John Keegan's The First World War (1999), but it is a dense book explaining in detail not only the trench warfare on the Western Front, but he goes into the often-forgotten campaigns of the Eastern Front too where the Russians lost 1.7 million men, and the Hapsburg Empire (Austria) lost another million. Keegan explains why four years of wholesale slaughter was even possible. I did not finish the book until I returned home. Thus, I didn't fully comprehend the significance of the cemeteries until I read this passage in the book's final pages:

"The British chose an entirely different and absolutely standard method of honoring the fallen. Each body was given a separate grave, recording name, age, rank, regiment and place of death; if unidentifiable, the headstone bore the words, composed by Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved father, "A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God." The names of those who had been lost altogether were inscribed on architectural monuments...It was also decided that the cemeteries, large and small, should each be walled and planted as a classic English country garden, with mown grass between the headstones and roses and herbaceous plants at their feet...Over six hundred cemeteries were eventually constructed and given into the care of the Imperial War Graves Commission which, working under a law of the French government deeding the ground as sèpultures perpètuelles, (perpetual military graves) recruited a body of over a thousand gardeners to care for them in perpetuity. All survive, still reverently tended by the Commission's gardeners, much visited by the British, sometimes by the great-grandchildren of those buried within, as poignant remembrance cards testify, but also by the curious of many nationalities. None fail to be moved by their extraordinary beauty. Eighty years of mowing and pruning have achieved the original intention of creating 'the appearance of a small park or garden,' while the passage of time itself has conferred an ageless maturity. In spring, when the flowers blossom, the cemeteries are places of renewal and almost of hope, in autumn, when the leaves fall, of reflection and remembrance."

Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendale (near Ypres). Contains 12,000 soldiers killed and commemorates 35,000 whose bodies were note found

 

In Ypres, every day is Veterans/Memorial Day.

Conspiracies Explained

The Gravity’s Rainbow Support Group (GRSG), is a two-member book club/duo made up a college friend of 50 years and yours truly. Founded during the first months of the Pandemic, the GRSG’s first book was Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

In the three years we have read over 30 books together ranging from classics like Tristram Shandy and The Odyssey to historical tomes such as Barbara Tuchman’s Stillwell and the American Experience in China (1971). We recently finished Colin Dickey’s Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (2023).

Dickey begins his book about the Freemasons in England and France and their influence in the American colonies. Both Ben Franklin and George Washington were supporters of Masonry. Dickey writes that “Rather than a shadowy organization pulling strings behind the scenes, the Freemasons of the eighteenth century were a prominent, public group who sought to display their power and clout in the open streets.”   (Masonic buildings still dot some town and city landscapes like this one in my home town of Decatur, Georgia.)

The book gains momentum as the Civil War approaches.

Dickey points out how the abolitionists of the North used conspiracy theories to taint the Southerners and likewise how the Southerners used conspiracy theories to strike fear and defend being slave owners. Many Northerners complained that free slave labor gave the Southerners an "unfair" economic advantage. This feeling was especially true in agrarian Midwest.

One of the more ridiculous arguments was made by the future 10th President of the United States John Tyler who argued that the abolitionists "were not ‘friends’ to enslaved Americans but instead their 'enemies' since their agitations drove enslavers to crack down on those in bondage." This sounds as idiotic as the current Florida governor Ron DeSantis redefining slavery as on the job training.

Dickey's breakdown of the different eras of the Ku Klux Klan include the marketing strategy of merchandising of robes and hoods in the 1920s. This along with KKK's membership model which was basically a pyramid scheme is nothing short of eye opening. 

Towards the end of the book, Dickey gives us examples of how conspiracies and the belief that secret societies and cabals control our society, but he relates them to the current political landscape of Donald Trump, QAnon, January 6th rioters, militias, and replacement theorists. He explains why they endure:

"The morass of global politics is difficult to understand and unpredictable even to experts but conspiracy theories off a straightforward explanation that cuts through all that. They suture all available facts together and do the work of organizing the chaos of history into an explainable, overarching theory."

Coincidently those of at GRSG know only too well that one of major themes in Pynchon’s novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is that paranoia conveniently provides some kind of framework to explain our world. 

The Next Step

The CRSG thought this book was a worthwhile read for all its American history alone, but the author does seem have a point of view (not necessarily an agenda). It’s not a gospel, but it can be the familiar first step, to an education. "DO THE RESEARCH," as they say.

Solzhenitsyn Humor

In the previous posting about Milan Kundera*, I made a waggish comment placing Kundera on the humor spectrum next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) the Russian dissident and Nobel Prize winner. Solzhenitsyn was the author of August 1914 (1971), The Gulag Archipelago (1973-78), Cancer Ward (1968) and many other works.

The reasoning behind that joke was that it reminded me of the work of another writer Ian Frazier who is also mentioned briefly in that same posting. Frazier has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1974 and author of gobs of other books. (Many of which I have read and enjoyed, see The Book Shopper, pages 80-82 ).

But one of my favorite pieces of his is "Kimberly Solzhenitsyn's Diary" which comes from one of early collections Dating Your Mom, a copy which I rescued in true book shopper fashion from a discount dolly at the Hoopeston (IL) Public Library. 

Enjoy.

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Example of Kundera humor: "Fiction that avoids or denies feces, Milan Kundera has written, is kitsch". - Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review (7/23/23)

 

Kundera: A Final Review

My first thought when reading The New York Times obituary on the Czech ex-pat novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023) is that if you live and write for decades, not every reader or critic is going to admire your work. (In the obit, he is described as brilliant, witty, with "his poetically prizefighterish* looks, a misogynist, and a traitor to his country, etc.) Of course, if you have read enough of him, I think his rebuttal to these judgments would be an impolite version of "I don't care what you think, idiot."

That's why I never expected a thank you for including him in The Book Shopper's pantheon of notable writers in the chapter, "What Every Good (Used) Bookstore Should Have." In this chapter I included a rundown of contemporary writers I would use to measure the quality of any secondhand book shop I visited. The list in alphabetical order includes: Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, T.C. Boyle, Bruce Duffy, Ian Frazier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jim Harrison, Oscar Hijuelos, Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Milan Kundera, Alice McDermott, and E. Annie Proulx.  

In the The Book Shopper (pages 98-101) I gave a rundown of some of his works including a slap-on-the-wrist for recommending an Unbearable Lightness of Being, which after rereading years later I described as "overwrought." The movie version was even worse. As a humorist, I placed Kundera on the funny spectrum next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 

No wonder he never expressed any appreciation for making my list.

Still, I have a soft spot for him. I read a lot of his books and I still carry two quotes of his forever in my head, which originated with him and that counts. They both come from the book The Art of the Novel and the chapter entitled "Sixty-Three Words":

One the terms is the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (U.S.S.R.), which he describes as "four words, four lies. " **

The second term is that we live on the Planet of Inexperience. 

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their own age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.

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* The description of "prizefighterish good looks" from a character in Philip Roth's The Human Stain who sees Kundera at a book event.  

** Kundera acknowledges that "four words, four lies" originated from the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis.

Dublin Book Crawl

First of all, everything you heard about Ireland is true except the weather. The people are friendly; there is a rich literary tradition; and Irish music is in every pub.  Also take note, when they talk about “having a pint,” remember they are not referring to ice cream.

The weather in May-June is supposed to be cloudy and drizzly with temperatures in the mid-60s, but we enjoyed unusually sunny, dry weather with temps in the low 70s, which is unheard of. I hear Spain got all the lousy weather.

Generalities aside, here’s a rundown of my bookish adventures.

Trinity College and the Book of Kells

Book of Kells Exhibit

Fortunately, you can schedule your tour of the Book of Kells ahead of time, so waiting in line was manageable. But before you actually see the 9th century Book of Gospels (the size of a ancient metropolitan phone book in a glass case, no tourist pictures allowed), there is an introductory exhibit and audio tour that gives you a rundown of the different elements of the book and how it was created.

From the exhibit you go directly into the Old Library's Long Reading Room (shown at the top of the posting)  which houses ancient volumes of Irish works that are currently being removed individually and cleaned meticulously with a mini-mini vacuum. Judging from the videos that explain the process, these preservationists would never survive as automobile detailers.

I did purchase a Book of Kells ball cap with monogramed letter M. I used it daily during the entire trip to keep the blazing Irish sun out of my eyes.

 

National Library of Ireland

The National Library of Ireland is within walking distance of Trinity College and it currently is hosting the W.B. Yeats exhibit mentioned in my previous post. They have a sitting area, where various narrators recite a Yeats's poem while the poem scrolls on a screen accompanied with images. No Liam Neesem voiceover ☹, but I did learn how to pronounce “Lapis Lazuli”.

In the lobby of the library, they have a Lego version of the building. Admittedly, as my grandchildren can verify, I don’t have the patience to do intricate Lego re-creations, but I do appreciate the effort it took to construct this one.

 

Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde

I did not know that both writers were Dubliners. Swift was born in Dublin and moved to London as child, but later returned to be the dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral from 1713 to 1745, where he was laid to rest. Oscar Wilde's boyhood home is adjacent to Merrion Square where there is a statue of the poet, playwright and renown wit.  Nearby is a pedestal displaying his more well-known quotes.

Books Shopping

There are a lot of bookshops in Dublin and all over Ireland, but as we walked the streets (all these places were within walking distance of each other), I was in pursuit of a copy of J.P. Dunleavy’s 1965 novel The Beastly Beatitudes Bathlazar B. Set at Trinity College, I read the novel decades ago and I remember the irreverent voice of the narrator and the peccadillos of his perverted divinity student sidekick Beefy. 

We did go to The Gutter Bookshop (so called because of the Wilde quote “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars")”and The Winding Stair Bookshop overlooking the Ha' Penny Bridge. At the latter, I bought another Dunleavy classic The Ginger Man (1955).

Unfortunately, I left my vacation copy of TransAtlantic (2023) by Colum McCann in the hotel room (no substitute for a housekeeping tip, I know), so the rest of trip I obsessed on finding a replacement copy, which I finally did in Kinsale at Prim’s Book Shop. This is an unusual shop because when you go through the back door you are butted up against a drippy, underground seawall.

Denise at the Winding Stair

Many thanks to blog readers who sent me their tips and suggestions and a special book shopper thanks to my partner Denise who planned the trip and made sure to include this literary crawl.

Ha' Penny Bridge

Prepping for Ireland

In anticipation of a trip to Ireland next month, I have been trying to familiarize myself with the Emerald Isle, which admittedly is a near foolhardy task given the magnitude of the rich Irish literary traditions.

With the help of our private book group (the GRSG) I was able to read at least one of the books of the Irish canon – James Joyce’s Dubliners, his collection of short stories that was published in 1914. This was my first experience with Joyce and with this help of the James Joyce's Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations (1993) edited by John Wyse Jackson & Bernard McGinley (shown above), I was able to get a sense of the complexity of Joyce’s work and definitely an indoctrination into life in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century.

Joyce wrote the book after he had left Dublin in 1905 and our notes about the book include a review of the 1987 John Huston movie based on the final story of the collection The Dead. It was Huston’s last film and it stars his daughter Anjelica Huston.

Some in our group prefer Joyce’s Portrait of Artist a Young Man or Ulysses (no one favors Finnegan’s Wake), but I will have to take their word for it.

Literary Tours

Other preparation included Zoom tours of the W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) exhibits that are done through the National Library of Ireland.  Admittedly, I knew very little about these two Nobel Prize winning Irish poets, but one important takeaway is how the poetry of each man captured the political upheaval in Ireland at the time. Yeats' poem Easter, 1916, commemorating the uprising led by Irish nationalists for independence of Ireland and Heaney during the more recent violence in Northern Ireland.

I know this preparation sounds paltry, (watching The Banshees of Inisherin and three seasons of Derry Girls doesn’t count) but usually after these kind of trips with my longtime partner Denise, the education continues long past after we return stateside. I am taking Colum McCann’s Transatlantic with me.  A tour of the Book of Kells is planned but there are many bookshops in Dublin as well and I intend to perform my book shopping duties.

A Liam Neeson Coincidence

While researching for this piece I stumbled on to a clip of Neeson reading Yeats' Easter, 1916.

The versatile Neeson also appears in Season 3 trailer for Derry Girls

 

Berlin Book Shopping Revisited

This month I returned to Berlin to see my older daughter Cynthia, which always includes some book shopping. Last time we visited the Another Country Book in the Kreuzberg district (during my 2019 European book shopping tour) and this time it was the Hopscotch in the Tiergarten district of Berlin. Both have plenty of English language offerings.

It took a little hunting to find Hopscotch which lies inside a large courtyard with no street signage.  Inside is a small shop, but it is crammed full of all kinds of books and smaller publications.  It would have been an ideal outlet for my earlier works, The Book Shopper and the quirkier Down and Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire, but alas, I had no copies with me. 

We spent nearly an hour there. Cynthia replaced her copy of Walter Benjamin's voluminous The Arcades Project and she recommended Saidya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), which I purchased and started reading while I was in Germany.

(For the record, my "in country" books for the trip were:  Philip Kerr's' The Pale Criminal (1990) the second novel of his Berlin noir trilogy set on the eve of Kristallnacht 1938 and W.G. Sebald's Vertigo also published in 1990.) 

 

 

The Force Is Always With You

What do binder clips, ballpoint pens, tape measures, can openers and large bridges (like the Navajo Bridge in northern Arizona) have in common? They are all part of the invisible world of forces that impact our daily lives, and they are discussed in Henry Petroski's Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop (2022).

Force examines a host of scientific, physical, and mathematical topics without burying us in technical jargon. Petrosky mixes anecdotes about his life extending back to his childhood playing with the Tricky Dog dog magnet (Chapter 2 - Magnetism) or in Chapter 13 when he reminisces about watching a clerk in a bakery slice a loaf of bread and then flawlessly place it inside a plastic bag (pg. 164). He writes:

"The clearance between the contents and container appeared to be as tight as a piston in a cylinder. She left the bag open, lest the fresh bread be crushed in the course of closing it. She did not have to be so careful with a loaf of rye bread because its crust gave it both stiffness and strength to resist. Watching the whole seamless process and imagining the forces involved was to me the greatest thing since sliced bread itself."

Reading Force will change how one looks at some of the simplest objects like the binder clip and ballpoint pen (Chapter 12 - Stretching and Squeezing), the can opener (Chapter 6, - Lever, Lever, Cantilever), and the tape measure (Chapter 14 - Deployable Structures). You will even feel a little better about yourself when you learn that your fingerprints wear thinner and lose some of their tactile qualities, which explains why I drop more objects (like pens, clips, and tape measures) than I used to. 

This doesn't mean that Petrosky doesn't tackle bigger engineering feats like bridges, arches and domes, and obelisks. As he describes the reasons behind famous bridge collapses you may be thankful that bridge repair is part of the Federal infrastructure plan.