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Reading Notes

This detailed book on the role of the Comanches in American History works on several levels. First, I read a lot of history and lately books about writing history (Barbara Tuchman's  Practicing History and Marc Bloch's The Craft of History*) so I have been primed to appreciate how the author of Empire Moon S.C. Gwynne managed to weave the details of his scholarly research into a riveting saga.

Secondly, you cannot underestimate the blood, slaughter and greed that is an integral part of our nation's history. ( Oh, Texas, you have such a checkered past.)  Because the Comanches were so fierce, brutal and had created their own tactics for fighting on the wide expanses of the Plains in 1830s, they drastically curtailed Mexico's efforts to expand north of the Rio Grande river. 

And finally, as harsh and "uncivilized" as the Comanches were, their culture was partially dictated by their Plains environment (the Buffalo).  Moreover Gwynne draws a parallel that they were no more brutal than the white Scotch-Irish settler's ancestors— if you compared cultural timeline of the Celtics of the 5th century BC who fought against the civilized Greeks and Romans. (Herodotus described them as "fierce warriors who fought with seemingly disregard for their own lives." ) Like the Celts, the Comanches were superb horseman and did terrible things to their enemies and captives.

When reading about the decline of  Comanche nation in the 1880s,  you couldn't help but feel some sadness because their demise was similar to what eventually happened to other indigenous cultures. Gwynne uses the life of their last great chief Quanah as a way to describe the Comanche's final integration. 

* Notes on the Tuchman and Bloch book are buried in some reading notes,  elsewhere in the blog here.

Book Art V.9 Exhibit

Unlike last year when Book Art V.8 was limited to virtual showings because of the pandemic, this year's Book Art V.9 is open for public viewing by reservation. Book Art is part of the Decatur Book Festival, which is limited in scope this year with the the main event being held on Saturday, October 2, 2021. For all the details on the exhibit including interviews with the artists visit the Decatur Arts Alliance page, which is a sponsor along with the Georgia Center for the Book.

I went to Book Art last month and below are just a few of the pieces that caught my eye, but to do the exhibit justice it's better to see in person rather than rely on my Canva skills.

 

 

 

 

Speculating on the Future

In the ten+ years that I have writing the blog, this may be the first posting ever featuring the work of a science fiction writer, so I am confessing to a lot of ignorance about a genre that is also referred to as speculative fiction. However, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) has crossover appeal, because its plot directly addresses the problem of “Can somebody give us hope for averting the oncoming climate catastrophe?” Talk about moving out of your comfort zone.

Set in the near future after a brutal heat wave has killed ten million people in a matter of weeks, an international organization affiliated with the Paris accord known as the Ministry for the Future, is partially empowered to advocate for future generations. A team of international experts, led by the novel’s protagonist Mary Murphy begins to untie the Gordian knot. This includes addressing income inequality, eliminating fossil fuels, (which includes sequestration of carbon), developing technologies to slow the melting of the polar ice caps and getting the global financial powers-that-be on board. 

Robinson intersperses small chapters in the main story explaining how these different technologies and strategies would need to work. 

There is even a secret militant arm of this movement, that—let’s put it this way—make the Monkey Wrench gang from the Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel look like lightweights. There is a moral dilemma of whether EVERYTHING should be done to speed the process along. Toward the end of the novel Robinson offers a glimpse of what that changed world would be like.

What makes the book “worthy” of breaking through blog’s speculative fiction myopia is not only has Robinson encapsulated what it will take to save civilization and the planet, but he has folded it into a solid work of fiction. Decent characters, interesting settings (Zurich, India, Antarctica) and an old-fashioned plot driven by the ever-present sword of Damocles question of “will the planet survive?”

Links of Interest

A review entitled "Catastrophe and Utopia" by Eric Morales-Franceschini was what put this book on my radar. Thank you, Eric and Tropics of Meta who published it.

Rolling Stone magazine also reviewed the book and includes an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.

 

From the Books-as-Art-as-Books Archives

The recent article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Jerushia Graham’s exhibit at the Callanwolde Gallery reminded me of the often overlooked Books-as-Art-as-Books section of the blog. Graham has appeared a couple of times in this section dating back to May of 2012 (oh yes, we have been at this blogging for over a long time) when she was a curator for the Art Institute of Atlanta-Decatur Wallbound exhibit, which was a precursor to the Decatur Book Festival’s Book Art Series.

If you scroll through the 32 entries that make up the Books-as-Art-as-Books section, you should come away with the sense that we have a somewhat loose interpretation of what that exactly means.  Enjoy the gallery.

Franzen Revisited

Even though writer Jonathan Franzen and I go back a long way (i.e. the days when I attended his keynote address at the 2010 Decatur Book Festival ), it's been a while since I read of him at length*. I recently wrote a review of his book of essays The End of the End of the Earth (2018) for Destination: Books, my bookselling alter ego.

Destination: Books specializes in books about sustainability/gardening, travel and a few books about book culture. Franzen's book lives at the intersection of all three of these neighborhoods. (Our popup book stall will be at the Carter Center Freedom Farmer's market on Saturday morning, July 31, 2021. )

Franzen remains unrepentantly misanthropic as ever but in the trade paperback copy of End of the Earth, he added a new epilogue to address any doubts on what he thinks about the fragile hopes surrounding the future of the environment. He writes:

"If you care about the planet, and the people and the animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that the catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated and enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope."

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* What brought Franzen back into my reading queue was George Packer's recent article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. In the excellent article, "How America Fractured into Four Parts," Packer pulls a quote from Freedom (2010), which is the book Franzen was promoting at the Decatur Book Festival. 

condescension was self-incriminating. 

Deserted Highway

 A recent summer trip to catch up with family and friends led me to Joshua Tree, California and its National Park. With its triple digit temperatures and reclusive landscape, Joshua Tree is a quiet venue in the offseason. One cannot plan many outdoor activities, but the Airbnb where we were staying was well-stocked with books about desert life including the photo- essay book Abandoned California: The Mojave Desert (2020) by Andy Willinger.

As fortune would have it, I was "close" enough to make an overnight trip to visit some longtime friends Tom and Peg who live in Phoenix about 300 miles away. Willinger's book included pictures of Joshua Tree and other remote places that I would be driving through along the north and east boundary of the national park. Inspired by Willinger's vibe of "capturing "the majesty of forsaken buildings, vehicles and artifacts of the Mohave's once vibrant past," I motored along secluded two lane highways (SR 62 & SR 177) from Joshua Tree to Desert Center, stopping a couple of times in the midday heat in an attempt to imitate the book's photos. 

My road-trip soundtrack included U2's critically acclaimed album, The Joshua Tree and there was reference to the recording at the Visitor's Center. Unfortunately, I could not find any of the older residents who may have had a beer with Bono or Edge when they visited the town in 1986 to make the famous album cover. (Eventually the band was actually photographed at the Death Valley Monument.)

The older guy who looks like a retired insurance salesman with the Fender guitar is actually English singer Eric Burdon of the Animals and War fame.

 

Rereading in Solitude

Since the pandemic began I noticed a change in my reading habits. I have been revisiting many books that I have read before – ten titles to be exact. This contrasts with the period of 2017-2019, when I reread only a single book: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I did try to reread Catch-22 in preparation of the Hulu six-episode adaption of the Heller book, but found it unbearable.

Was this just a comfort-in-the-familiar thing, a dearth of books to choose from (doubtful), or was there something else in play?

Rereading The Plague (1948) in the Spring of 2020 made sense, but I should have paid closer attention to the timeline of the bubonic plague in Albert Camus’ Oran. Like many, I thought COVID-19 would recede in the fall,  but in The Plague the epidemic lasted over a year. In January, I reread Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) which examined how the young nation coped with the 600,000 deaths in the Civil War. This provided some context to what we are currently experiencing with the fatalities in the United States from the coronavirus. I did some "processing" in the essay “The Current Republic of Suffering.” 

Gabriel García Márquez

While visiting family and vacationing in Puerto Rico, I brought a yellowed, trade paperback of  Gabriel García Márquez’s classic One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In the picture above, I am reading the book to one of the many stray cats who lounge near the Governor's Mansion in old San Juan.

Obviously there are limits to the number of books you can take on trip so you better make sure your selection is a good one. Except for being impressed with García Márquez’s  magical realism, I didn’t remember many details from my first reading over 30 years ago.  I recalled there was a character who ate soil when she was upset, a lot of characters with close to the same name, and the long, rain which almost wiped out the village of Macondo, Columbia where the book is set.

A new reading revealed much more with several themes that resonate today. 

For example, one pivotal plot point in the novel is when the banana plantation owners (representing capitalism) surround the protesting laborers including women and children and machine gun them down. The dead bodies are loaded into boxcars and hauled to the coast where they are dumped into the sea without a trace. José Arcadio Segundo manages to survive and escape back to Macondo, where he tries to keep the memory of those slain alive. But the rich plantation owners obliterate all evidence of the massacre and deny it ever happened (like the Capitol insurrection). As if the gods are angry, the rains descend for years almost washing Macondo into oblivion, but the Word, through the efforts of  José Arcadio Segundo lives on.

Solitude Defined

Since yellow, trade paperbacks are suitable for making notations, I started marking in the book how the characters lived in different types of solitude:

The solitude of grief: “She lost her mind over him (her dead lover). She could not sleep and she lost her appetite and sank so deep into solitude that even her father became an annoyance.”

The solitude of death: “He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest, without a single moment of betrayal, tormented by memories.”

The solitude of depression: “The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude."

The idea that we have all have a different definition of solitude makes more sense after pandemic enforced isolation. There is a difference between loneliness and being alone. For some it was maddening and unbearable (hence by the rise of alcohol consumption); others admitted they enjoyed hearing the birds when the traffic disappeared for a couple of months. It reminds me of my favorite line in Camus’ The Plague when the character Cottard who early in the novel is prevented from killing himself, admits to finding temporary peace of mind in the chaos. “Well, let’s put it like this, “says Cottard, "I’ve been feeling much more at ease here since the plague settled in.”

The insights gained in reading One Hundred Years of Solitude is not limited to understanding the solitude that envelops many of the characters, but rather in the end, it is the Word that endures as does this powerful, timeless masterpiece. Read on, book shoppers.

The End of Civilization

This week marks the End of Civilization. After having a set of Will and Ariel Durant's 11 Volume, The Story of Civilization on the shelves of my glass bookcase for over 40 years, I sold them online through  Destination:Books. 

The thought process was that even though they are an excellent reference set, I was not going to read them all. ( I only read the first volume Our Oriental Heritage and I am not sure I even finished that. ) When the Pandemic didn't motivate me to crack any of them open, my decision became final.

The set came in my possession in the late 1970s when the handyman of my apartment building approached me about the books that an eclectic tenant, who never talked or made eye contact to anyone, had moved out leaving his possessions to the handyman. (He noticed that I had a lot of books in my place and thought I might be interested.) My roommate and I lived down the hall from the mysterious tenant and we had created a story that this pipe-smoking man who walked  nonstop around downtown Danville, Illinois was none other than the reclusive writer Thomas Pynchon. What better place  for the novelist who had just finished Gravity's Rainbow to avoid publicity than to live in a small, rust belt, Midwestern city. Moreover, derived from his writings Pynchon is presumed to be a big reader of encyclopedias, almanacs, and history books, which further reinforced our fantasy.

The handyman kept the man's television and stereo, but I bought the books for a few dollars and saved them from the incinerator (remember the handyman had access). I provided them a decent home for decades and I now hope the set has gone to a good place and not be repurposed into anonymous  living room décor. 

On the brighter side, this has freed up some considerable space and I restocked my shelves with my collection of Pynchon books. It seemed appropriate. And behold there is space for more of the author's work.

 

Upping the Worm Game

As an amateur vermi-composter  – who has been raising worms for his own personal consumption for several years (that doesn’t sound quite right), I have recently been inspired to take my worm works operation to a new level. Heretofore I have been content with a simple, blue plastic tub, drilled with air holes and partially filled with red wiggler worms, selected food scraps, and newspaper. Shown here are the worms enjoying a print advertisement  promoting the Ernest Hemingway PBS documentary. Given the novelist’s fear of death, my worms appreciate the taste of irony, as much as avocado and melon rinds.

My renewed commitment began while I was browsing in the section of R.J. Ruppenthal’s Fresh Food from Small Places (2008), where he gives easy-to-follow instructions on how to build a simple worm operation for the home. Ruppenthal also does a shoutout for Amy Stewart’s The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (2005), which he describes as “not a ‘how-to book’, but a reflection and synthesis of wisdom on the achievements of earthworms and their importance to human civilization.” Intrigued, I obtained a copy and started reading.

The Earth Moved

Stewart begins her book with a chapter on Charles Darwin, who studied worms with the same diligence exhibited during the naturalist’s famous voyage on the Beagle, which eventually led to his providing additional evidence to the theories of evolution.  Just before his death in 1882, Darwin captured this fascination with earthworms and their effects on enriching soil in his The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Actions of Worms.  

Stewart goes on to explain how earthworms including the red wigglers or Eisenia fetida (as I now call them) work their magic on nematodes, coffee grounds, manure, bacteria, and fungi. Along the way I was able to glean tips on doing a better job with my bin full of critters.

Folded in throughout the book are interviews with researchers and “field trips” to places such an experimental sewage treatment plant in Pacifica, California where earthworms are part of the process of turning human waste into usable biosolids for agriculture. Along the way,  Stewart never loses her light-hearted anecdotal style that makes the book such a pleasure.  For example, in this passage she explains why she has not gone into the Big Worm business.

For one thing, I’d run into the same problem selling worm castings that I would if I were to go into the business selling chocolate or tawny port; I’d keep all the inventory for myself. I buy compost by the truckload for my annual mulching of the flower beds. I have to buy it because my worms only produce a few cubic feet of castings each season. If I had enough worms to generate truckloads of castings, my farm would still have only one customer: me.

I will take heed of Stewart's advice to limit my own personal consumption.

Worm Connoisseurs

Providing some additional inspiration and reflection on our natural world is Deborah Warren's short book of poems, Connoisseurs of Worms (2021). In her sixty-five poems Warren seamlessly mixes references to Greek mythology, classical paintings, as well as modern life (one poem is even entitled "PETscan"). She deeps dives into all creatures great and small, ranging from zebras, "Titian-haired" orangutans, to moles and a worm dietary favorite - nematodes. A good example of how she can work these seemingly disparate themes into one poem is demonstrated in "Mosquito in the Heart."

 

Mosquito in the Heart

There's nothing viable on the EKG.

So says the cardiologist.

Wrong. Clearly he missed

some small anomaly:

 

With an incessant and insistent hiss

under my left ribs—a falsetto whine,

whetting its proboscis,

it flits and ricochets around my heart.

 

The doctor's diagnosis?

He'd call it a feint of heart—if he had the wit:

He doesn't. He's just content to be smart,

and here's his opinion: It's anxiety.

It isn't in your heart—it's in your mind.

There's medication; often meditation

helps with tension. And he won't admit

that coronary insects do exist.

 

Just paranoia? I'm not buying it:

He'll give me white lies but—when I insist—

refer me to Cardioentomology.

You don't have to be a vermi-composter to appreciate her wit and small wisdoms. Just someone who can take time out to examine life all around us, including what is beneath our feet. 

 

Traveling by Book

“A travel writer knows that a reader isn’t interested in tourism” – Jorge Carrión

Though I am starting to give serious thought (like the statuesque Dante) about traveling outside the tri-county area, I remain for the time being tethered to home. Undeterred, I recently finished reading two short books that have taken me to places around the country and the globe, but with two different approaches.

American Places

It does not really matter whether or not you have visited the points of interest in William Zinsser’s  American Places: A Writer’s Pilgrimage to Sixteen of This Country’s Most Visited and Cherished Sites (1992, 2007). Zinsser makes it work either way. It has been decades since I visited Mark Twain’s hometown and Zinsser’s descriptions reminded me that Hannibal wasn’t much more than Tom Sawyer’s House, Becky Thatcher’s House and a roadside view of Jackson Island on the mighty Mississippi.  And yes, Zinsser's overall impression of The Alamo was the same as mine: The Alamo is a lot tinier than you would ever expect. (The reason? We grew up seeing it on big movie screens.)

And if you are concerned that it's been nearly 30 years since its original publication, don't worry. American Places isn’t a tour guidebook anyway. He examines the fundamentals of why places in our nation’s history continually resonate with us. 

Two things that keep the book fresh is that Zinsser interviews National Park Rangers and gift shop employees alike and purposely avoids talking to tourists and official representatives. This allows him to get the insights of those who are there every day and provide a fair amount of background history on the site itself (e.g. Mount Vernon had fallen into serious disrepair just before The Civil War and later during the war both armies agreed not to battle there, treating it as a demilitarized zone).

Also, this not just a compilation of independent pieces published elsewhere, Zinsser builds on the narrative of his trip and circles back on previous stops to draw comparisons between the sites.

As the author of the mega bestseller On Writing Well (1976), Zinsser has set high expectations for tight, evocative prose and he does not disappoint. And as a bonus, there are many passages that have a subtle humor to them. For example,  in this excerpt from the Alamo chapter Zinsser watches the tourists buying  gift items and lists the items alphabetically: ashtrays, belts, bookmarks, books, buckles, bumper stickers…tote bags, toy guns, and yo-yos. “I was impressed that one small martial shrine could lend its imagery to such a multitude of domestic uses,” he writes. “The items all appeared to be of a certain quality above kitsch, and I walked around the display counters and racks taking notes. As I was finishing, a very tall security guard accosted me and told me to ‘step outside.’ I followed him out the door, my heartbeat racing ( I am about to be arrested at the Alamo!)…”

Unamerican Places

In sharp contrast in style and content, Jose Carriόn’s Against Amazon and Other Essays (2019) acts a guide to book shops and book people in London, Korea, Argentina, Tokyo, Mexico City, Capri and his home country of Spain. Carriόn made this blog’s Best Books Read in 2018 with his 2017 effort —Bookshops: A Reader’s History. (His Certificate of Merit is still waiting to be picked up at the blog offices, sigh.)

His anti-Amazon title essay includes a seven-part manifesto why we should not mindlessly bow to the will of the corporate giant when we buy our books. 

Carrión also interviews The History of Reading ’s Alberto Manguel who now is the director of the National Library of Argentina. Manguel tells the story of every booklover’s nightmare— how he was forced to dismantle his 40,000 book library and move it from France to Montreal.

As Carrión takes you to various book shops and booksellers throughout the globe he reminds readers the value of physicality of the best bookshops inhabited by booksellers who can tell you what is on the shelves without checking their computer. In contrast to Zinsser who is diligent in connecting the dots, Carriόn will refer to many favorite titles and bookshops, many of which  you have not heard of, much less visited. But do not be discouraged, just ride his passion.

Besides being “travel books not for tourists” another of commonality of these two books is the author Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinian-born Borges, known for his writings about labyrinthic book places, figures in one of Zinsser’s American Places—Hannibal, Missouri the boyhood home of Mark Twain.

According to Zinsser, in 1982, the aging, blind Borges accepted an invitation to give a lecture at Washington University in St. Louis on the condition that he could visit firsthand the “the source of the author’s strength.”  Zinsser tells the story of the museum curator that accompanied Borges:

“I took him down Front Street and led him across the cinders where some cobblestones go down to the Mississippi. He squatted to where he could reach the river, and he leaned over and let the water run through his hands. Then he said, ‘Now my journey is complete.’”

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Here's our American family at Tom Sawyer's house. From the left is my brother Neil, my sister Kay,  our Dad, (wearing his "vacation tie" ) and your narrator. Mom is taking the photo. No Borges photobombing.

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