Ink Day

Audio version, along with some extra thoughts

I grew up with three ideas about medieval monks floating in my head. (Only three because we were Baptist, in the southern US, and I’d never seen a monk in real life.) 1. They wore robes. 2. They chanted. 3. They copied manuscripts, which had preserved knowledge that might have otherwise been lost. How appealing! Robes were easy to wear, I loved to sing, and copying manuscripts was something I did all the time. 

Even, or especially, during my turbulent high school years I spent many hours writing sections of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This was by far my favorite book. I filled several college-ruled spiral notebooks with Tolkien’s words. I wrote on every other line, in as small and as neat a cursive as my native clumsiness and blue ballpoint pen permitted. I didn’t do this copying for writerly reasons, but because it calmed me. And as an expression of my love for the books, and because I liked the look of the pages I’d made. Many writers have copied out the manuscripts of admired works as a writing exercise. I did some of that post college, during my “pretentious, moi?” phase (I called myself a Poet, good God). I typed all 154 Shakespeare sonnets and taped the pages on my apartment walls. When I moved I had to pay for the room to be repainted, which stopped me from pulling that kind of a stunt again. Also, dear Reader: this did not make me a Poet.

During my Tolkien-copying days I daydreamed mostly about finding my way to Middle Earth and marrying Legolas. But sometimes I fantasized about living as a monk, if I could somehow avoid all the praying. I pictured myself working in the scriptorium every day, my quill pen scratching at the parchment, humming chants as I wrote.  

It never occurred to me to include nuns in this fantasy. What about the nuns, I wondered today. Belatedly, I’ll admit, but nobody told adolescent me that nuns were composers, philosophers, scientists, writers. I’d learned that over the years. I discovered that there were, of course, many nuns who were scribes. For example sister Irmingart, a member of the Order of Canons Regular of Prémontré. This order had been founded in France in the year 1120 by Norbert of Xanten and quickly expanded. By the end of the twelfth century, there were numerous Premonstratensian communities in Europe. Irmingart’s was located near Munich. 

We know her name because she included it on a collection of homilies about the Epistles and Gospels: “This book, which sister Irmingart wrote with the permission of Prior Henry, belongs to the monastery of Saint Dionysius, Schæftlarn.” Few scribes of that era, male or female, autographed their works. Remaining anonymous showed humility. Also, of course, often the words were not the copyist’s. It’s a shame that the copyists have been mostly anonymous. Not all the manuscripts have much literary value, although they could. What’s more likely to make such a manuscript interesting today is the copyist’s work. The colorful capitals and the  marginalia, comments and drawings and doodles can turn a bog-standard homily into art. Marginalia can be straightforward and related to the text, or fanciful, extravagant, even outrageous. I’m still a bit haunted at the moment by the marginalia of another medieval woman scribe, Jeanne de Montbastion. She was not a nun. In a bottom corner of the poem “The Romance of the Rose” (a notably misogynist work) Jeanne includes a picture of a nun beside a tree covered with phalluses, which she is plucking and placing in a basket. 

Anyhow. Scribes have come to mind because it’s Ink Day. I’m down to just a couple of drops of Diamine Writer’s Blood in my final pen. Being relatively new to the use of fountain pens with cartridges and inks, I find changing them a bit stressful. It’s worth the trouble, since when I write with a fountain pen I feel connected with my thoughts more solidly than I do typing or writing longhand with other kinds of pens. Still, I wait until all of them have run dry and do the refills all in one go. The easy part is picking colors. The ink names are often as pretty as the colors. Yama-budo, Blue Velvet, Inferno Orange, sui-gyoku. The hard part is cleaning the pens and getting ink into them. A messy task, though—and I wish the ink looked as pretty on my fingertips as it does on paper. 

I complain, but compared to the copyists of medieval times I have it easy. Scribes like Irmingart needed to make and then frequently adjust their quill pens. Most pens began as goose feathers, and the scribes used knives to trim the plume and angle and shape the shaft so that the ink could flow smoothly onto the parchment. They had to prepare the parchment to take the ink, and also they had to make the ink, crushing and mixing things like oak galls and minerals to make a liquid that wouldn’t be too gloppy or too thin. If they made a mistake, there were no erasers. They had to scrape errors off of the parchment with pen knives.   

I’ve seen a few of the manuscripts created in this manner, always behind glass at a museum. They are amazing, gorgeous things. I wish there had been more Irmingarts—and more Prior Henrys, who were cool with the artists identifying themselves. A name adds interest and provides a point of connection. The robes, singing, and scriptorium would still apply. I should’a pictured myself as a nun…

Concentrate!

Audio version, with some extra thoughts!

On Sunday evening I planned out my week. So organized! Most of the time I don’t get around to the planning thing until Monday morning. Or sometimes Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday at the absolute latest. Appointments: students, rehearsals, grocery shopping, to do lists and all the et ceteras. The third Wednesday of the month was upcoming, which meant book club. Hooray! I gave myself a little pat on the back for being 90% of the way through this month’s selection, Liliana’s Invincible Summer. The club is managed by an organized and talented librarian who gives us laminated, oversized bookmarks with six months’ worth of books listed, so I peeked at the June selection.

Which turned out to be Liliana’s Invincible Summer. 

For the month of May I was supposed to have been reading The Once and Future Witches, a fantasy novel that was 517 pages long. Book club was in three days. 

I knew that the group wouldn’t fault me if I showed up without having finished the book. Or even if I hadn’t started. Just a few months back, there had been only two of us (of eight, that particular session) who’d managed to get all the way to the end—561 pages—of The Satanic Verses. The nachos and chicken wings and parmesan fries would flow nonetheless, and we’d talk also about our personal lives and other books and current events and streaming adaptations of books. 

However. I had extra time at the moment due to sternal precautions—don’t want to impede the breastbone’s healing process—and a light schedule. After the fog caused by trauma and anesthesia, I’d been trying to read more. Actually been reading more—a little. What better way to see if my concentration had truly improved? 517 pages: challenge accepted! 

I frequently write about reading in this blog. I read more than average, but it’s still less than I used to. Once upon a time I indulged in “reading vacations”—days devoted to books, one after another. I’d pour coffee and crack a novel and lose all sense of time passing. I’d come up for air around lunchtime, eat a sandwich, and then read past sunset. That was then. These days, like practically everyone I know, it takes effort for me to read for more than a half hour. I can do it, but it’s work. I blame technology and the pace of modern life, but have the suspicion that I’ve just lost the knack for this skill. That worries me. 

Upon researching tips to improve focus, the recommendations tend to fall into three categories. The first involve ways to improve the physical plant. Get enough sleep, exercise, eat a diet rich in fish, berries, walnuts, and leafy greens. The second category regards skills drills: working puzzles and playing games, practicing mindfulness and meditation, reducing multitasking, writing stuff down so the brain doesn’t keep trying to remind you of it, and listening actively to others. The final category is environmental. Putting away devices, using background music or white noise, straightening the workspace, planning breaks, and setting a timer. 

I’m a sucker for a timer. The Pomodoro method, which calls for a timer set for 25 minutes, followed by a five-minute break, is similar to what I do when I’m teaching music lessons, with the timer set for whatever’s the lesson duration. This helps me focused on the lesson, rather than Time as she prowls around the room or curls atop the piano. Until she jumps on my lap, whistling her alarm, she’s out of my mind. 

I decided to go for broke with the book—half hour segments would be too short—in an enjoyable environment, viz., two hours on the patio. The day was warm, and we’d recently set out the furniture and put up a big blue umbrella for shade. I set the alarm. No need to spend the entire time laser-focused on the task, as the joyless  productivity bros recommend. The background noise was taken care of: breeze and birdcall. For breaks there was the middle distance, which helped rest my eyes. Or the chipmunk that ran right by my foot, and the people talking as they passed on the sidewalk. Also Neighbor Nancy’s dog, Skye, who popped by with a slimy tennis ball that she wanted to be thrown. 

Little distraction after little distraction, but it was easy to get back to the book. Two hours felt like twenty minutes, by which point I was a fair way in, and still energized enough for a shorter session in the evening. 

My takeaway from the experience, if I can presume to add to the attention-span conversation, is that it’s been helpful for me to investigate when my concentration has been most satisfying and  easiest. Probably this will generate a different recipe for others. Maybe it’s the rituals around study, that handful of M&Ms, or the sensations of underlining a key point in the text, or the feel of the body working through eight-counts. For me, attention involves letting go of Time, and a strategy for getting hold of her again when I need to. 

To be fair, this book was an easy, fast read. (But when you’re building up a skill, it’s helpful to start with something that’s doable.) To be truthful, it wasn’t so absorbing that I feel that I missed much by skimming a few of the more predictable bits. (Although I wish I’d had the time to read the whole thing a little slower.) To pat my own back, by book club night, I’d finished it and was ready and able to contribute something meaningful to the meeting. (And enjoy the friendship and some snacks.) 

Marplot

Here’s the audio version!

I’m reading Rachel Maddow’s terrific and terrifying book Prequel. (Strongly recommend: 11/10.) It’s about the Hitler-admiring domestic fascists who hoped to take over the US in the 1930s and 40s, and who numbered at least in the hundreds of thousands nationwide in various noxious permutations. They formed organizations with innocuous-sounding names featuring the buzzwords that remain popular today (American, Patriotic, Christian) and published racist and anti-semitic screeds. Also they stockpiled weapons and made bombs. To achieve their American dream, they planned to evict from the territorial United States (or just kill outright) every human who wasn’t white and Christian. Maddow, a fine writer who clearly loves words, at one point notes that among these would-be rulers were a fair number of marplots.

I had to know what this word meant. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines marplot as “one who frustrates or ruins a plan or undertaking by meddling.” The earliest known use is by Susanna Centlivre in 1709, in her play The Busie Body. 

Centlivre was born Susanna Freeman in 1669, nine years into the English Restoration. This was a heady, turbulent time. The eleven-year Interregnum, with its puritanical prohibitions of holiday celebrations, gambling, and theater, was over. Huzzah! The fun spigot opened wide. Theater was back, Baby, and now even women were allowed to act in plays, think of it! Writers were busy-busy-busy penning new dramas, along with new words and catch phrases to go inside them. One way to make a new word that was quite fashionable was to prefix an existing word with “mar.”

The Restoration mar was based on the verb meaning obstructing or defacing, from the Old English “mierran” (as opposed to mar meaning sea, which is derived from Latin). Attached to a word, mar transforms it into “one who spoils [that word].” Sometimes Restoration writers used mar to build a character name, as John Dryden did with Sir Martin Mar-All in 1667. Susanna Centlivre’s Mr. Marplot fits snugly into this practice. In the Busie Body Dramatis Personae, she describes him as “A sort of a silly Fellow, Cowardly…[who] generally spoils all he undertakes, yet without Design.”

By 1709 Centlivre’s career was well established; she was one of the most successful persons on the London theater scene. She had joined a traveling theater company in her mid teens and had worked her way up to the big leagues with a position at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. She had started writing plays and poems as well as performing breeches roles (in which a woman dressed in men’s clothing and played a male character) such as Alexander the Great. By the time she met and married Joseph Centlivre, a cook at Windsor Castle, she had been widowed twice. Busie Body was her ninth play and her biggest hit. The critics didn’t much care for it, but the play outlasted most of its competition and is still occasionally performed today. I watched it on YouTube the other day, in fact.

The play has a typical comedy plot in which two pairs of young lovers want to marry, but their guardians have different matches in mind for them. Elderly, ugly matches. Mr. Marplot wants very much to help his friend (and, probably, crush) Charles to win the hand of Miranda. Marplot is a feckless try-hard, though, so his friends don’t tell him anything important. Therefore he acts based on hopes and half-understandings, and of course chaos ensues. It’s a fun watch.

Maddow’s 1940s marplots, who are horrid as well as feckless, also sincerely intended to help their causes. They believed wholeheartedly that all the general public needed would be a little push in the “right” direction, a Kristallnacht or two, to turn events to the fascists’ favor. Fortunately, the American fascists of the 1940s judged others’ characters as falsely as they judged their own capabilities to carry out their schemes. (Not that they did no harm. They did plenty of harm, but it never quite scaled.)

Note that marplot contains no idea of intent. It’s almost the opposite. The marplots work diligently in support of their causes, but somehow they can’t stay out of their own way. Coincidence plus incompetence equals…what? On the nights when I am a mar-cook and the rice is burnt or crunchy or both, there’s scant consolation in knowing that my intentions were good. On the nights when I lie awake worrying about the fascists of the 2020s, I often fear that there are not enough marplots among them. Today I feel like a mar-blog. A fun word for this process, just what I need, perhaps. I remove the hyphen of my new word. Autocorrect goes into mar-proof mode and makes marblog into marble. Foiled at every turn; is it my fault? or is it my nature? or is it Fate?

Easy

For the expanded audio version, click here!

I’ve always had a weakness for the upper brass. The sound of the trumpets and horns, I mean. Also the people who play these instruments. It takes a special kind of confidence to play high brass well. As someone who’s naturally diffident, I’m drawn to that confidence. We didn’t have very good horns in my high school band, but the first chair trumpet was incredible. He made All-State band, and quarterbacked the football team, and led the National Honor Society. And he did all that without a hint, at least to us mere mortals, of self-doubt or nerves.

In my single days I mostly dated other musicians, many of whom played trombone, baritone horn, or tuba. Low brass players evidently have a weakness for the likes of me. Every once in a while I went out with a trumpeter, but more often I suffered through unrequited upper-brass crushes. One of my earliest crushes, as a freshman in college, was a trumpeter named Charlie. The university was located in the midwest and flush with blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians. With his black hair and brown eyes, Charlie stood out. He also stood out in the trumpet section with a beautiful and distinctive tone, which made his solos sing. I’ve since met several Charlies who play trumpet—each one with a singular sound.

I was happy to find yet another trumpet-playing Charlie, Charlie Schlueter, in one of my nightstand books, Carl A. Vigeland’s In Concert: Onstage and Offstage with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I finished it last night, turning the pages with abandon to find out what happened.

The book chronicles the BSO’s 1986-87 season under conductor Seiji Ozawa. From the outside an orchestra might seem staid and stuffy, but like any workplace, it’s filled with conflict and suspense. The musicians union is negotiating a new contract: will they go on strike? Can Ozawa improve his somewhat distant and rocky relationship with the orchestra? Why is the concertmaster missing so many services? Will the orchestra, chorus, and soloists manage the challenges of Mahler Two? How will the Boston music critics, who tend to give the orchestra so-so reviews, react to the new season? Who will sing the soprano solos when the orchestra records the Mahler? How will Ozawa and Schlueter get along, in the wake of Ozawa’s recent, ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to fire Schlueter?

It’s not unusual for an orchestral conductor to have a hard time getting along with trumpet players. Conductors need to get every body on stage thinking and moving together for a performance. This requires confidence and authority, which can unfortunately sometimes edge into arrogance and authoritarianism. Conductors are trying to make sure everybody’s in tune, playing in the same style, and playing at the right volume inside the group. Trumpets are among the loudest instruments on stage, and therefore much of what they do sticks out. Intonation, style, and volume: if a trumpet is erring on any of these, it’s more obvious than if one of the twelve second violins is having a problem. 

Therefore, conductors very, very often shush and single out the trumpets. It’s not personal, exactly, but being told to be quiet all the time can feel so. Conductors also can be more insidious and insensitive, or just oblivious, towards brass players in general. Relatively few orchestra conductors have a brass background. I remember one conductor—whose day job was as a BSO violinist, as it happened—who would start beating faster whenever he was angry about something, then complain that the trumpets were rushing. In reality the entire orchestra was following the baton, but the trumpets got the blame. At a different concert, while backstage, I eavesdropped on another conductor. He had been critical of the principal trumpet for months. A few minutes before she was set to go on stage, with some tricky solos to play, he “reminisced” with her about the big-time careers of some of her music school classmates, concluding, with a psuedo-innocence, “I wonder what happened to you.”

Schlueter had been hired by Ozawa in 1981 and was granted tenure in 1982. Then in 1983 Ozawa attempted to terminate him. In 1984 Schlueter appealed his firing to the musicians’ union and won on procedural terms. In 1986, at the start of Vigeland’s book, Schlueter is still wounded. No matter what is going on inside, he has to play as if he’s on top of the world.

A fair amount of the narrative deals with Charlie’s  struggles to regain confidence in his playing and to stabilize his relationship with Ozawa. Vigeland himself is an amateur trumpet player and is great at describing the difficulties of orchestral trumpet playing in general and the special challenges presented by 86-87 season repertoire, especially the Mahler symphonies, which make major demands of the principal trumpet.

As an instrumentalist rather than conductor, and as a lover of trumpet-playing Charlies, I’m often not on Ozawa’s side in his interactions with Charlie and some of the other orchestra members. At the same time, I don’t know if the orchestra players are being completely fair to Ozawa, either. Is there any such thing as a universally beloved boss? It’s interesting to read how the musicians at the most elite levels manage, or don’t, the stress of their jobs while making the impossible look easy. They feel the pressure and do the same sort of things to blow off steam as the rest of us: smoke, drink, take beta blockers, meditate, play golf, etc. Helpful to know!

The 86-87 season progresses. Charlie performs well, generally. Sometimes spectacularly. Ozawa eventually takes (baby) steps to mend their relationship. The recordings get finished on schedule. The Boston critics don’t come to a consensus, but occasionally mention the trumpets in a good way. 

The book doesn’t know this—as it was published in 1989—but Charlie continues to play principal trumpet in the BSO, retiring after 25 years in the position in 2006. (Ozawa leaves in 2002, after 29 years in the conductor’s seat.) Since his retirement Charlie has stayed busy. He continues to perform and teach and has recently released an album and a memoir. Whatever’s going on inside his head, he’s still doing the Charlie thing, making it look easy.

Nightstand

For the audio version, click here!

Browsing stock photo images of nightstands, I feel envious. So many elegant little tables adorned with some combination of lamp, alarm clock, vase, soothing beverage, and book. The table tops are occupied without being crowded. Occasionally some have as many as two books, in a pile with a clock atop them.

Technically I don’t have a nightstand. The doors and windows of our bedroom are placed in such a way that there’s no room for a single nightstand, let alone two. Instead we have a bed frame that includes under-bed drawers and a headboard with a shelf and a couple of drawers in the middle. It’s not the most comfortable setup for reading in bed, but with the pillows piled, it serves. There’s no space to store a chamber pot—the original purpose of the nightstand, as it turns out—but there’s plenty of room for books, lamps, and clocks, albeit in a rather more crowded configuration than the online images.

My side of the lower shelf has about 15 books, all of them to-be-reads, and a stuffed cat. The top surface serves as my nightstand. I have a combination alarm clock/CD player, a stack of CDs, a little reading lamp, because the built-in lights that came with the bed frame burned out long ago, a couple of artificial plants, and the stack of four books that I’m currently reading. These are my nightstand books. They wander a fair amount.  Sometimes they come outside for coffee under the trees. Sometimes they go riding in the car. Mostly, though, I read them in or near the bed.

A month ago the stack was higher. Overwhelming, even. There were seven books in the pile, which is a relatively reasonable number, but several were chonky volumes of 500 pages or more. On looking at the pile I was starting to feel disappointed with myself, rather than energized. This is unusual for me, because I’ve always enjoyed reading multiple books at a time, with interruptions for the delightful occasions when one book captures me and makes it so that there’s nothing else I can do but finish it. Back in my 20s, when I was single, I also had a headboard with a shelf, on which I stored stacks of paperbacks and a coffeemaker, so that I could make a cup of coffee and start reading without leaving the bed, bopping from book to book with caffeinated abandon.

Still, I don’t argue with agita. I made a plan to deal with the stack and whittled it down to four. Four is the minimum number to make a meal, which is what I see my nightstand books as comprising.  Remember that Francis Bacon quote about ingesting books, with some “to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”? Oftentimes I mush the books together like some diner forking potatoes, peas, and chicken into a single bite. I never would do this in a real meal—I eat one item at a time—but it takes way longer to read even the most breathless and gripping 300-page novel  than it does to eat a serving of vegetables. Even  Brussels sprouts, my least favorite of the tolerable greens.

I start my meals with the most challenging element, which for me is always the vegetables. That’s why the top book in my current stack is…

1.  The vegetable: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Selected Essays. I thought this would be a broccoli book. Broccoli is a vegetable that I actually find somewhat tasty. On the other hand, if it turned out that broccoli was not good for me I would give it up without a regret. This spring and summer I’d become curious about various New England literary figures of the 1800s, especially the Massachusetts writers, and about the transcendentalist movement, of which Emerson was a part. I’d liked a lot of Emerson quotes. I found this collection in Barnes and Noble and felt a bit disappointed that it was so short. I was looking forward to these pieces, but it turns out that for me, this is a Brussels sprouts book. Part of it is the style, which is flowery and ecstatic and puts me off, somehow. Part of it’s the attitude, which is dogmatic and tunnel vision-y. There are fascinating ideas and confounding assertions, so I read it first, write my reactions in the margins, and move on to…

2. The cocktail: The Portable Dorothy Parker. This is a collection of short stories, poems, reviews, and letters, so the pieces are short and self-contained. In a way this is the perfect nightstand book, except that the writing is far from soporific. Back to the plate I go, for…

3. The pasta: Jody Rosen’s Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle. Dave, who is an avid cyclist, found this book when we visited Beacon Hill Books and Cafe this summer. (Terrific, terrific place; if you’re passing through Boston you should check it out.) Once he’d finished it, he passed it along to me. I love this kind of nonfiction deep dive and am finding out all kinds of cool stuff, including that in the late 1800s bicycling was so popular and so controversial that there were newspaper articles that blamed this habit for breaking up families and corrupting general morals! Now there’s just one thing left on the plate…

4. The protein: George Solti’s Memoirs. Solti was one of the great conductors of the twentieth century. He headed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when I lived in in that city, so I got to see him work in person. What that man could do with an orchestra simply by raising an eyebrow! Solti’s narrative voice is as vivid and engaging as his conducting. I’m about a third of the way through and finding the account of his experiences in Hungary, Germany, and Switzerland in the years around World War II to be compelling, and terrifying.

At first I enjoyed watching the stack dwindle. It gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I started with a quick read, a collection of James S. A. Correy stories set in the Expanse universe. I finally finished a history of opera that had been in the pile, about 75% done, for a couple of years. I sped through a collection of interviews with famous singers. Eventually it started to feel a bit like the time I went on the Atkins diet and cut out the carbs, when I lost weight (temporarily) but also kind of hated my life, especially when passing a bakery.

My original thought was to get the nightstand books down to one—no, down to zero, and then make a new pile. But at the moment I am, as often happens, rebounding to the other extreme. My stack is too small. I need a nightstand that’s a nightly feast…a party…a buffet! So now I’m on the hunt for appetizers and desserts.

What would you suggest? What’s on your nightstand?

Words and weeds

How a word sneaks into my head…

Poem 1519

The Dandelion’s pallid tube

Astonishes the Grass, 

And Winter Instantly Becomes 

An infinite Alas – 

—

The tube uplifts a signal Bud

And then a shouting Flower,-

The Proclamation of the Suns 

That sepulture is o’er. 

Sepulture, I think. Hmm. It’s close to a familiar word…sepulchre, that’s it. A tomb. A church word, in my experience. This is fitting, because Emily’s poem—as I’ve read her poems 1 through 1518 before today, in my mind we’re on a first-name basis—is in a hymn rhythm. Common meter, in fact, which is iambic tetrameter (four feet) alternating with iambic trimeter (three feet). Isaac Watts, the “Father of English Hymnody,” often used this metrical structure in his works. After annoying his relatives by speaking mostly in rhyme, he eventually wrote the lyrics for around 750 hymns. Emily’s family attended First Church in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Watts’ hymns were a regular part of services.

These are the same rhythms that I belt out on Sunday mornings while processing to the choir stalls. Procession is a rather grand name for it; it’s more of a jerky shuffle produced by trying to sing the right line in the hymnal without bumping into anyone or tripping on the steps to the chancel. Still, there are candles and crosses and robes and music, so procession it is.

On my two feet, in common time, I circumambulate the bedroom. Not quite sure about the meaning of sepulture, I don’t want to stop walking to google. Emily often uses words in a way that suggests that her English is not my native language. I figure that I get the gist: spring’s coming and there’s nothing that winter can do about it. Or maybe it’s about the way that weeds can take over a patch of grass before you realize it. Dandelions weren’t considered weeds in Emily’s day, though, undercutting that interpretation. Plus I love the sight of them.

I can only walk with my Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems for a few minutes at a time, maybe 15, maximum. It’s a big paperback with a purple cover and more than 700 smooth white pages. A Christmas present. Nine months later it’s lost its new-book smell. It weighs a couple of pounds, but that’s not the problem; it’s the awkwardness. I’m in the 600s, page-wise, and the book, off balance, keeps trying to close itself. I have to actively hold it open, which gets annoying after a bit.

I return Emily to the shelf, pick up Poems of Robert Browning, Oxford Edition, and resume my steps. Mr. Browning’s book is smaller and lighter. It’s a hardback, bound in brown leather. The front cover has R. Browning, embossed in gold, and coffee cup speckles that look rather similar to a photograph of Browning on the frontispiece. (Check it out at the top of this post: can you see it?) The pages are yellowing, no surprise for a collection that was published in 1919. The poems are presented in two columns per page, single-spaced, in 8-point font. I have to hold this book very close to my face to make sense of the itty-bitty words.

Mr. Browning doesn’t use the hymn rhythms as much as Emily does, although he’s fond of couplets with a long first line and a short second one. I’m not far into the collection (so he’s still Mr. Browning, not Bob). It’s very different from Emily’s, with lots of stories and drama. Some of them I quite enjoy. Today’s selection is “A Grammarian’s Funeral.” As someone with grammar problems, to put it mildly, I’m eager to find out about this guy and what he might have had coming to him. The first lines are promising:  

Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 

Singing together. 

A thrill runs through me as I wonder if this may be a mystery story. Did the grammarian correct one too many subject-verb disagreements? Then, ten lines later: 

Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; 

Seek we sepulture

On a tall mountain, citied to the top, 

Crowded with culture!

Sepulture, again! I’m pulled out of the book entirely at the wonder of reading this word twice in ten minutes.

I lay Mr. Browning down–carefully, as he’s rather frail–and google. The rest of the poem will have to wait for another day. Sepulture means either the placement of something in a grave, with synonyms including burial, interment, entombment; or the burial chamber itself, with synonyms including crypt, tomb, and sepulchre. Its origin is the Latin word sepultura, which made its way into Old French and then Middle English.

I want to find some extra significance when a new word hits my brain. Especially such a weighted word. In actuality this isn’t surprising, especially when reading two poets writing in the same language during the same century. Unlike some of the words that work their way into my brain, I can’t figure out how to use sepulture in a real-life sentence. But I do spend a few interesting moments contemplating tombs and burials, rebirths and resurrections, and how words live on, in that nonliving way of words, after their authors.

Book Drop

Link to the audio version, with some extra thoughts

An abundance of summer sun and rain has led to the spectacular growth of the bushes in our yard. Things were starting to look a little too much like the hedge around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, so I’ve been pruning to clear a path to our front door.

I’m pruning more than our hedges this month; I’m also decluttering the closets and reorganizing my book and sheet music collections. This is slow work and not as much sheer fun as shaping a hedge—there is something so concrete and satisfying about the chop and then the fall of the clippings—but it does have its pluses. I’m reminded of books that I want to read, or reread, as well as music pieces that will be fun to get under my fingers, and now I know where to find them without searching for an hour. In the closets, I’m making more room as well as unearthing various items that make me wonder what I was thinking when I acquired them. No, that’s wrong: I know what I was thinking: that I was going to be a certain kind of person. Someone who needs an evening gown, or plaid Bermuda shorts, or platform sneakers. Some of the detritus is amusing enough to save, but most of it is going to donations bins.

Yesterday the bookcases in the sun porch were up for inspection. I came upon Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s mammoth postmodernist novel. Wallace’s writing is discursive, with lots of footnotes and meandering, which I’ve enjoyed in his essays. Infinite Jest was published in 1996, which is the year I started an MFA program in fiction at Emerson College. Most of the critics loved the book, and there was a lot of buzz about Wallace among my fellow grad students. The sight of it took me back to a version of myself who was determined to become the kind of person who writes serious books. Also the kind of person who naturally preferred to read serious books, rather than comic novels, detective stories, and space opera. That person bought Infinite Jest, the paperback version, in 1998.

As it turned out, 1998 wasn’t the best year for me to start reading a novel that clocks in at 1,079 pages. I was a new mother, we’d just bought a house, I was finishing my thesis, I had a job, and I was playing in an orchestra. Yada yada, all the things. I made it through the first 25 pages and then relegated Infinite Jest to a basement bookcase. When we moved to our present house, almost 16 years ago, Infinite Jest came along. Its new home was on the ground floor, although it had to share a shelf with mystery and science fiction paperbacks and a how-to book on personal essay writing that I plan to get around to someday. The sun porch is a great location, one of my favorite places to ruminate and read. There are lots of windows, and when the bushes are in full bloom the room feels almost like it’s in a forest. Somehow, though, I kept bypassing Wallace’s masterpiece for something by Rex Stout or John Scalzi or P.G. Wodehouse.

Maybe it was the extra light from the trimming that made me look harder at Infinite Jest. I pulled the book off the shelf. My right wrist twinged a bit, a sign that I might have overdone it with the garden shears. I opened to a random page and read, trying to absorb its serious thoughts. My eyelids kept drooping. I sighed and stuck the novel in the donations pile. I won’t be the kind of person who finishes Infinite Jest. Perhaps that’s a disappointing discovery, but at least the book has a chance to find someone who’ll read it through. And I’ll have an extra six inches of shelf space.

Fig leaves

This is a tale of five Thomases and a Harriet. The first two Thomases, who flourished in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and between them collected enough unexpurgated tracts to furnish an extensive library, bequeathed this collection to our third Thomas, Thomas the Father. Having accomplished this, they disappear from our story.

Thomas the Father was a banker who read Shakespeare regularly to his wife and children. Studies show that reading to children has many benefits. It supports cognitive and emotional development, improves problem solving skills, builds vocabulary, and (sometimes) inspires a lifelong love of reading and writing. Father Thomas seems to have understood this. Was it these entertaining evenings that turned most of the family in a writerly direction? His wife produced a tome about the Book of Revelations. His son John wrote religious pamphlets. His daughter Jane was a poet and essayist. Daughter Henrietta, nicknamed Harriet, authored poems, essays, and even a novel. And his youngest son, our fourth Thomas, wrote travel books. Thomas and Harriet even collaborated on a project, producing the famous—or infamous—The Family Shakespeare.

Thomas the Son grew up, studied medicine, wrote current events books, played chess well enough to have a move named after him, and advocated for prison reform. When he eventually read Shakespeare on his own, he discovered that Thomas the Father had left out some “inappropriate” passages and changed the wording in others. Thomas the Son was grateful, in retrospect. The Father was reading, after all, in a room full of the feebleminded and impressionable (i.e., women and children). Exposing one’s family to great works of literature was a wonderful concept, but Thomas the Son worried that not every father would have his dad’s discernment and ability to apply fig leaves where needed. That was okay. He had a plan, and a sister.

Harriet was a young woman acutely conscious of propriety. An acquaintance, the Earl of Minto, reported that when Harriet attended the opera she covered her eyes during the dancing bits because it was “so indelicate that she could not bear to look.” Harriet seems to have been the person who did most of the expurgating and paraphrasing in the first edition of The Family Shakespeare, which came out in 1807 and included 20 of Shakespeare’s plays. She cut out the sexy and blasphemous bits, eliminated some ladies of negotiable virtue, and altered some plot elements.

This first edition was published under Thomas the Son’s name—adding the family name, which was Bowdler. There may have been practical reasons for Thomas to claim responsibility. After all, a male author was more consistent with the editorial position that Shakespeare was too bawdy and too brainy for a woman to manage.

Later editions of The Family Shakespeare expanded to include all 36 of the known Shakesperian plays. Ads for The Family Shakespeare proclaimed that “nothing is added to the original Text: but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family.” I have to note that the ad’s claims are deceptive. The Bowdlers didn’t just “omit” words; they changed words (for example, substituting “Heavens” for  exclamations such as “God” or “Jesu”) and also did things like turning Ophelia’s suicide into an accidental drowning. Still, in comparison to other authors who revised Shakespeare, the Bowdlers left much more of the plays intact.

Now that there was a “safe” Shakespeare, more households were willing to invest in these texts. Families and schoolmasters of the 1800s bought them in droves. Some critics loathed the emendations, but others supported the Bowdlers’ editions. Unexpurgated versions of the plays were still readily available, they pointed out, and more children learning Shakespeare was good for society.

Bowdlerizing became a verb. Based on his successes with Shakespeare, Bowdler went on to sanitize the Old Testament and at the time of his death in 1825 was working on a cleaned up version of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This book was completed and published by our fifth and final Thomas, Thomas the Son’s nephew Thomas Bowdler the Younger.

I explored the Bowdlers because of the current kerfuffle about Roald Dahl. Admittedly I haven’t read much of Dahl and am not emotionally attached to his work. Reading the book Matilda made me uncomfortable at points. Dahl makes some of his most objectionable characters fat, loud, and/or ethnic. So do a fair number of other authors. Is that reason enough to publish new, fig-leaf editions?

Dahl’s publishers evidently think so. The intent is to make the stories more palatable to children and to the people who read books to children. It’s a financial calculation at heart, the desire to sell more books. I don’t know what I feel about it. I suppose it’s better than the alternative promoted by so many these days, taking the text out of circulation entirely.

I think about what the Thomases and Harriet might suggest. Should we take all books (for every book offends somebody) off all the shelves? Make libraries and let the readers decide? Censor as we share the stories? Reword the stories inside the books?

Ultimately I feel that Thomas number three’s strategy, keeping the books intact and redacting on the run, so to speak, may be the best real-world compromise. He managed to communicate the love of stories, and ideas, and words, and books, while leaving the books intact, to be explored, warts and all, when the readers were ready.

27th on the 27th

The cancellation notice for the paint-and-sip had gone straight to Dave’s junk mail folder. We stood outside the locked door, peering wistfully at the easels with blank canvases and pondering Plan B.

If you get married on January 27, celebrations often need to be adjusted on the fly due to weather or economics. It was economics that had done us dirty this time. For want of more customers the three pm session had been canceled. I wondered if it was a sign that this paint-bar, like many others, would soon be closing. That would make me sad. Dave and I have a kind of nostalgia for paint-and-sip places even though we only went to them three times in the olden (pre pandemic) days.

 Fortunately the afternoon was almost springlike. It was a  good day to walk around Legacy Place. The paint-and-sip was tucked away in a corner near the mall’s parking garage. We don’t visit here often, so there are always some new-to-us shops.

The Whole Foods, the bowling alley and movie theater complex, the Paper Source, the Paper Store, the Cafe Nero, the J.P. Licks ice cream store, were all in their expected places. So were most of the fancy retailers, exercise studios, and restaurants. A bakery for dogs: that was new. The Soul Cycle place was gone. And there was a Barnes & Noble where the Amazon bookstore had been.

You’d think a bookstore would be logical in a “lifestyle” mall such as Legacy Place, which is designed to induce customers to linger. Sadly, the bookstores here have proved fragile. The first victim was Borders, an anchor tenant that opened in a big, two-story space in 2010, when Legacy Place was just a year old. Borders closed 13 months later. Then came the Amazon bookstore in 2017—in a much smaller space than the Borders—which closed about a year back.

The new management at B&N has been closing and opening stores at a madcap pace of late. The Legacy B&N reflected the current trend: compact and stocked per local customers’ preference. It was, in fact, the smallest B&N I’d ever seen.

Local preferences must have included being able to find books without hunting down a store employee. This was the first B&N I’d been in for years where non-book merchandise wasn’t cluttering up the place and where my favorite authors were easy to find. The shelves were properly alphabetized, the genres and sections were clearly labeled. It was like taking a time machine back to 2005!

The Legacy B&N had gotten rid of the Amazon bookstore’s coffee bar and electronics sections. It was tiny, but packed with books. So I bought three of them. Dave got a new crossword puzzle collection.

Then we went to the Legal C Bar for some seafood. The water seated us at an enormous corner booth. There weren’t many people in the restaurant. I hoped that was just mid-afternoon doldrums, rather than Legal being on its last legs, but you never know. We lingered until we agreed that we’d managed enough of an anniversary event to go back to the house. Our twenty-seventh anniversary, sorted.

The next day I started the first of new books.

I have lots of physical books in my house already, some of them adolescents, others centenarians with their pages going brown and crumbly. Most of the time now I’m reading on my tablet. I forget how lovely a brand new book is. That scent of words, the smooth, strong paper, the sharp edges of the pages, the crisp  snap when I riffle them with my thumb. Gorgeous.

The physicality of reading the book helped me ignore various plot holes, unearned character development, and some lazy writing. If it had been loaded on my tablet, odds were that I’d have abandoned the thing halfway through.

I kept reading that first book to the last page, though, for better or for worse. It didn’t feel like time wasted. I like new things and also enduring things. Paint-bars and marriages and bookstores and such.

Fever Dream

I celebrated my birthday last week in New York City, my second visit ever to the metrop. “Autumn in New York,/Why does it seem so inviting?” goes the song, which was written by Vernon Duke in 1933. My answer to that question: I’ve spent so much time in this city in my imagination that being in the actual place feels like a fever dream where fact and fiction, past and present, get all mixed up together. In books, I’ve eavesdropped on Dorothy Parker cracking jokes with Robert Benchley and the gang at the Algonquin Round Table. Peered through the secret window into Nero Wolfe’s office to see who was sitting in the red chair. Imbibed bathtub gin with the Fitzgeralds. Explored the eateries of Greenwich Village with Calvin Trillin. Waited for the evil editor to get her comeuppance in countless chick lit novels.

“Autumn in New York/Is often mingled with pain.” Second verse, sadder than the first. Up to the day before our visit, weather forecasters were predicting a week of sun and mild temperatures. We packed accordingly, researched walking tours of Manhattan, made a list of attractions, such as the Empire State Building, to visit, and generally planned to be out and about as much as possible. Then we exited Penn Station to a downpour.

In my 20s, while living in Chicago, I started reading a lot of Lost Generation writers. The Lost Generation was comprised of people who came to adulthood around the time of World War I, who’d had their expectations and ideals disrupted by that cataclysm. Broken, or at least dented, they wrote on. Many were based in New York, and they depicted the city in a way that made it feel equally gritty and glamorous. I was living in a big city and slowly recovering from a small but volcanic cataclysm. These books helped me dodge the lava and learn—especially from the writings of Dorothy Parker—how to be a city girl.

What to do in New York in the rain? First up: visit an iconic bookstore featured on various TV shows and movies. Dave and I acquired $10 tourist umbrellas from CVS and set out for The Strand Bookstore. This would be a walk of about 35 blocks, but of course New York blocks are very short. We entered and I was immediately gobsmacked. The place was a cathedral to the written word! Long stacks, twice my height or more, every shelf packed. Ladders everywhere. So many colors and bindings…There were also lots of tchotchkes, with perhaps more socks, bookmarks, totes, and postcards than strictly necessary, but books were first, front and center.

The Strand was originally one of around three dozen bookstores in an area of town called Book Row. The other stores are gone—out of business or elsewhere. Reportedly the Strand has a total of around 2.5 million books spread among several locations and a warehouse. We browsed for a long time. I made my way up and down ladders, feeling a bit lightheaded, albeit without falling off and into the arms of a handsome stranger even once. It was on a low shelf in a corner that I found and bought a new-to-me Calvin Trillin book, Remembering Denny. Calvin Trillin, who may still live in Greenwich Village, not far away. Who wrote a piece about this store, “Three Strand-Hounds” for The New Yorker.

Two days later it was still raining. We’d been to museums and jazz clubs, so culture-culture-culture. I’d felt a little disappointed that the trad jazz trio in the Flatiron Room hadn’t included “Autumn in New York” in their set. Now we were in a Times Square diner discussing whether the Empire State Building would be worth a try. (Conclusion: no. We got thrown out of the ESB the next morning, very politely, but that’s a story for another time…)

It was getting harder by the minute to stay happy despite the weather. Dave’s $10 umbrella had lost a structural spoke in the winds coming off the East River and had been laid rather forcefully to rest in a trash bin on 36^th Street. My baseball cap was so soaked that after a night’s drying in the hotel room it was still damp. Down the block was the M&M Store, but we weren’t in the mood for candy of any color. Instead we headed to another bookstore, a secondhand place called BOOKOFF.

This shop was less magnificent than The Strand, but still quite browsable. There was a loft full of books, a basement packed with manga, and a main floor with DVDs and other media. There was also an enormous unclassified pile of hardbacks along the side of the staircase to the loft. That’s where I happened on The English Wife, a mystery set in Gilded Age New York by Lauren Willig, who’s a writer based in NYC. Maybe our umbrellas had crossed paths at some point this week.

“It’s autumn in New York/It’s good to live it again.” Verse three, a conclusion of sorts. The rain had petered off a bit while we were in the bookstore. We were hungry again after another walk of many blocks. We rambled through the Theater District in search of pizza. “Hey!” said Dave. “There’s the Algonquin.” He was right. Dorothy Parker and the rest! I wanted to time-travel back to 1922. 

Sadly in 2022 there was no pizza on the Algonquin menu and the burgers cost upwards of $25. I snapped a picture instead. We ate eventually at John’s Pizzeria, which is a couple of doors down from Sardi’s, a restaurant mentioned by many New York writers and featuring caricatures of some of them, including Mrs. Parker. John’s has its variation on the Sardi’s theme, a mural featuring various celebrities and notables. The bit of it next to our booth showed Andy Warhol, John and Yoko, Marilyn Monroe, and various others. No Dorothy that I could see. The pizzeria’s only been in operation since the 1990s, too late for her to have visited, but the building originally housed the Gospel Tabernacle Church, a missionary training college…and a bookstore. I wondered if Dorothy ever dodged into it on a rainy autumn day.