Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Until we meet again

2011-12-31T09:33:00.063-05:00

Here comes another New Year's Eve. We usually opt for a quiet evening in, and this time around is no exception. I have no specific resolutions this year, other than the usual wordless hopes that seem to gather around me like friendly ghosts whenever I ponder my general situation and choices in life. This past year I think I've been so good I can hardly stand it. What else could I work on, or improve - physically, spiritually, morally? (Everything?? Again???) That seems like the kind of question, and the kind of pressure, I just don't need right now. I tell myself that I'm already doing what I am able to, and as long as I can, I will continue to do so. In short, I will remain as resolute as I always have been. So that's it then?

Well. Of course there's always something, though, isn't there, some lingering unfulfilled desire that continues to nudge at one until one takes action. I do have one specific wish, I won't call it a resolution, and I hope during the year ahead I will discover in myself the willpower to bring it to fruition: the completion of my memoir about reading, books, and the bookshop. I have a manuscript. It is five years old, flawed, and has no story, no plot to speak of. I need to add to it, rearrange it, and create closure. I know I have it in me to get this done to my own satisfaction, no matter what happens with it after that.

With this in mind, I will be taking a break from blogging for a while. Part of the fresh start that the New Year brings should always involve letting oneself off the hook, I feel, and any writing I do this winter I hope will be with a pen, on paper, with the goal of finishing this manuscript firmly in mind. If I pull this off, you'll be among the first to know. I'll be back, of course, if I have any noteworthy news. I have many other book ideas, also languishing, and am still painting, keeping my diaries, and buying and selling old books. Life goes on and for the umpteenth time I worry that my best ideas will remain merely ideas. Less than helpful, I realize, so I am going to attempt to concentrate on one page at a time and see what happens.

But as I cast around for ways to bring my bookish memoir around the bases to the general vicinity of home plate, naturally I want to postpone any actual writing, by reading instead. I just finished this, and found it very helpful:

The Autobiographer's Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir edited by Jennifer Traig, introduction by Dave Eggers (Holt 2008). It's full of timely advice and heartening encouragement from the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert, Sean Wilsey, Tobias Wolff, Nick Hornby, et al - concrete suggestions on how to get it down, in whatever form best suits your story. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It has almost convinced me that I can finish writing this damn book of mine, the one I want to be the first of many, god willing. If you are considering buying a copy of the above, please get it directly from 826 National, so your purchase will directly benefit this great group of tutoring and writing centers. And then listen to Dave Eggers's TED talk about how these centers came to be. Inspiring is often an overused word, but not by me, and so I use it here.

In conclusion - Happy New Year. Blessings on the year ahead. Let's welcome the slow but certain return of brighter days. Final words for a while, from a note in the fine book A Woman on Paper: Georgia O'Keeffe - The Letters and Memoirs of a Legendary Friendship by Anita Pollitzer (Simon & Schuster 1988), quoting Alfred Stieglitz as he writes to Hart Crane (p.252):

"We are all after Light. So let us seek it together in an unsentimental spirit."

holiday hilarity

2011-12-14T18:54:00.019-05:00

Thanksgiving morning, after eight-plus inches of snow fell the day before, there I was, letting the white stuff spill over into my boot-tops while attempting to find the garden. I was determined to add something fresh and grown on our own acre to the meal, and I knew those chives were just the thing! But where were they?

Right around here somewhere! I just know it! Ryan and I were chuckling uncontrollably... caption: Intrepid Maine Woman Successfully Extends Growing Season on Saltwater Farm.

There they are - it's been such a sunny warm fall around here that until this sudden big snow, they were enjoying another rampant growth spurt.

I picked a few handfuls in a rough-and-ready manner. This particular chive plant was a gift from a plantsman I know and love, and they are the sweetest, most onion-y chives I've ever tasted. They also seed themselves like crazy, so if anyone needs or wants any chives, for god's sake come visit this spring and I will dig you a clump. I used them with some sour cream as a dip for crudités. Along with my parents, my beloved aunt and uncle from Vermont joined us for dinner. Favorite appetizer: devils on horseback (bacon wrapped around prunes, baked in the oven - little bundles of sweet and salty wickedness). Favorite side dish: my aunt brought a traditional dish from her family Thanksgivings past, pears and parsnips, so delicious together.

After their lovely visit, onward to Christmas. This is also my birthday season (my middle name is Noël) and I so look forward to this introspective time of resetting priorities, reading long books, painting large paintings, and quietly celebrating the change of season. Winter is home, to me, and the real turning of my year. This past Sunday, we ventured once again out to the back acre, this time to a grove of balsams in the woods. Boots, coats, gloves, a handsaw, and a short walk through chickadee-laden underbrush, and there was our tree. It just barely fits in the living room. White lights or colored lights? We went with colored again this year, for their cheerfulness. While decorating, Ryan caught me in motion:

We always go outside and see what the lights look like from there. Isn't that one of the joys of this time of year - seeing all that warmth and magic coziness in your very own home, and in the homes of your neighbors? Hodge was wary at first but soon settled into his favorite spot:

From our home to yours, we wish you holidays of quietude, peace, and plenty. With a dash of hilarity now and again for good measure.

Falling in love again

2011-11-30T08:37:00.030-05:00

I think Black Friday should be renamed Book Friday. Maybe some clever marketing person has already done such a thing, I haven't searched to find out. I wasn't planning on doing any shopping last Friday but somehow ended up at a bookshop. Funny how that keeps happening to me, whenever I leave the house. Anyway, Left Bank Books on Main Street in Searsport was having a sale, and I wanted to order a book from them, so I stopped in. And you know, walking in through the door of this really fine little new-book shop that simply radiates bookishness, it's just as good as it ever was. I tumble into book-love all over again. I immediately see new books I feel I must read, I encounter old friends on the shelves too, alongside entire subjects that do not tempt me in the least, yet I still appreciate their solidity and presence and everything they stand for.

The contents of my wallet would not allow me to get everything. The whole store. Which I love. So I ordered the book I needed for a gift, and practiced great restraint by only buying two others. The first:

The Journals of Spalding Gray, edited by Nell Casey (Knopf 2011). I read it over the weekend. Hoo boy. Difficult to say the least, and sad beyond words, but worthwhile. Reminded me of reading the big biography of Bruce Chatwin a few years back - it contains a similar kind of pain - that of seeing a writer and artist you've admired and even loved for years spiral downward to finally meet death. Not an easy death, either, if there ever is such a thing. A very dark book and I'm glad I was able to read it through.

The second purchase, not yet begun but next in the to-be-read pile, a real beauty of a book:

My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, edited by Sarah Greenough (Yale 2011). Nearly 900 pages, a bit oversize, warm pink in color (in contrast to the black and gray of the other), a real book lover's book. And it's only Volume One! A brief look-through is most promising. I see passion and art and travel and fascinating people, and can't wait to start reading. Which I will do as soon as I finish what I am currently reading, a secondhand copy of Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (Farrar Straus Giroux 1979), which I picked up at the Big Chicken Barn this weekend (see, I can't leave the house without buying books, I tell you again). Such a utterly compelling book, peopled with a few hundred painters I've never heard of, ever, alongside the many I have. Whatever happened to the female satellites of famous male artists? Including their spouses and children, who were often also painters? How did women manage to make art at all, much less masterpieces, given the circumstances Greer lays out so thoroughly? A book I can't believe I've never read until now, and one I can't believe my art teachers in school never pushed my way, or even mentioned. Where are the great female painters in history, and why are the great ones we do know about often considered "minor" characters in the canon? Read this book and weep.

See what I do when painting doesn't come easily and I need a break? I read about painting. It helps. I'll leave you today with one more image, of the bookshop in Searsport. What a truly great place. How lucky am I to live just a few miles down the road.

Living in the past?

2011-11-10T09:03:00.073-05:00

So many books seem to be about remembrance - attempting to capture time gone by, so that something or someone won't be lost to us. I've read several such lately, and have come to treasure a genre I think of as The Unclassifiable Book. It's a memoir, it's a poem, it's an art book. It's prose written by a visual artist and it reads like a vast collage. Worlds are contained in many brief statements, and their cumulative effect may well break your heart. Examples of three such books are sitting before me right now.

The first, My Life by Marc Chagall (Orion 1960):

Written by the painter when he was 35 and living in Moscow in 1921-22. I bought this last weekend at a local used bookshop for $6.00 - always on the lookout for memoirs by artists, I thought this would be interesting, although I am not crazy about Chagall's painting. Well, by now I should remember that whenever I am not crazy about something, it's just because I don't know it well enough yet. The fault is mine, and not of the other by any means. So it was with this book, which I read in one sitting a few evenings ago, and loved after the first page. The memoir resembles his paintings - it contains villages and loved ones and animals and love and death and marriage and art, combined in swirling remembrances. He stages scenes of enchantment and of course nostalgia, because he is looking back with great love at that which no longer exists. He gives us word-images of his earliest memories, his family, his awakening to painting and becoming an artist, his education and discovery of the world beyond his village, his travels from Russia to Paris and back. A beautiful autobiography written like a dream, in perfect keeping with his style of painting - part symbolism, part realism, part surrealism - all his own.

Then the second, The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman (Penguin 2007).

I may have mentioned this book here before. Bought a softcover copy at a library sale for $2.00 many months ago and also read in one sitting. Then re-read. Then wanted to give copies to everyone I love best (who reads or not). Another memoir, also about life and death, and full of tender caring for people, places, and objects, and dealing simultaneously with all The Big Questions. Each page is illustrated with one painting or photograph and one hand-lettered sentence or two, or just a fragment of a sentence, all again with a cumulative effect that builds and builds like a huge bittersweet chocolate layer cake. I love books that are truly funny and deeply serious at the very same time and this is a prime example. I recently found a hardcover first edition to keep for myself, so I can give away the softcover. If you like this passage, you will love this book (p.11):

"My brain is exploding. Trying to make sense out of nonsense, trying to tell you everything (everything?) and all the while time is fleeing. And the air around me vibrates with so many images. Which is great because most of them are British."

And lastly, I Remember by Joe Brainard (Granary 2001):

Now, I know I've mentioned this book before, though just in passing. In my own defense, I've re-read it many times. Paul Auster's blurb from the back cover of this reprint ends with "...one of the few totally original books I have ever read." And it is. Made up of a series of statements - hundreds of them - all beginning with the phrase "I remember" this memoir reads like an epic prose poem written by a shy gay man who takes careful note of every detail of his life. There is no chronology, again, it is everything all at once. Memory after memory from the explicit to the banal and back again. It contains the beautiful and the ugly, religion and pop culture, and evidence of both a rich interior life and an often-difficult exterior life. You may begin by thinking This is pure Americana kitsch, and enjoying it as such, but will soon abandon that limited opinion for the simpler and ultimately more satisfying This is art and it all matters. Good news for Brainard devotees: he will soon be included in The Library of America series. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard is due out in early 2012, book saints be praised.

All three of these books bring the past to life, bring all the details to the present day and make them news once again (Ezra Pound's "Literature is news that stays news." leaps to mind). So very specific and yet so relevant to all humanity. They leave me thinking that human beings have such wildly original lives, and so many stories to tell in unusual ways (and not merely to be unusual, but rather because that is their authentic form, the only way they could have been told), and I find myself wishing that we all had it in us to create our own versions of these unique books! I don't know about you, but I want to go begin my own, immediately!

Late bloomers

2011-10-26T15:18:00.024-04:00

Time for the first hard frost of the year. The forecast for tonight is below freezing, the same for the next few days. I'm taking it in stride, and in fact I've come around (again) to the whole growing older thing. Not like I have a choice, but, you know. I think the change of seasons always hits particularly hard around here. One's mortality becomes mighty evident. They don't call it fall for nothing! So bare-bones and gaunt! Friends, after last week's malaise I pulled myself together, read some good books, listened to The Smiths and New Order, and am feeling much better.

It also helps that the garden is still sending forth blooms. This fall has been golden and warm, and so many plants are experiencing a renaissance of second growth. The sweet peas:

Feverfew is growing and blooming a second time too, and going to seed like mad:

As are the herbs, the thyme and oregano are both covered in tiny fragrant flowers:

And the chives. Second go-around for them, when there's almost nothing else left in the garden:

Even the forsythia on the sunny south corner of the house has a branch in full bloom:

Even more - the heart's ease (johnny-jump-ups) have their faces turned to the sun:

And by the kitchen steps, lavender and nasturtiums and mint and lemon balm are still going:

The nasturtiums in particular, they are truly volcanic! The color is stunning to me, they glow brighter than the cadmium colors on my palette:

With all this beauty in plain sight it's hard to regret the passage of time, or remain dour for long. In fact, it helps me remember that I was a late bloomer myself. I had a great time, and a terrible time, was cool and uncool, and have at least ten thousand very unusual memories. Wouldn't change a thing. Youth...? Coming of age in the eighties...? Long gone, but I Never Can Say Goodbye.

I love my life, but...

2011-10-14T16:53:00.049-04:00

...sometimes I want to go back in time. Getting older is so weird. It was a rewind the clock kind of day. I spent a few hours in town running errands. By town, I mean the town I lived in for fifteen years, the town where I had my bookshop. By errands, I mean I actually had a long list and I ticked things off as I went along. And then I returned to the coastal village I now live in feeling unutterably depressed about the general state of affairs in this land. In town, what I saw: rush, rush, rush, hurry, hurry, hurry, hideous retail space after hideous retail space after hideous retail space, all selling a whole bunch of ugly. For lunch I bought an organic sandwich at the health food store and sat and ate it in the parking lot next to the big empty Borders. Ugly, ugly, ugly. The mall sprawl: big boxes and power lines run amok and everything paved over and some shabby trees valiantly struggling for survival in little median strips of dirt. The local radio station has a retro show on during the noon hour and all this club music circa 1990 was playing while I ate my sandwich. Making me miss being twenty and going out dancing every week. Making me miss being cool, which I suspect I once was, for about a week. Sad, sad, sad. I feel like such an anachronism!

The evidence to support such a feeling: I was waiting for the photo store to print photos for me (item #1) and I had an hour to pass so I walked around the mall in search of something, anything, that would register anywhere on The Scale of Coolness, and found nothing. Except perhaps some Vans sneakers (item #2) I liked. But my lord, the shops these days. Dark and shuttered Hollister and Abercrombie and Fitch, with thumping pop music and heavy perfume and naked surfer dude photos and flimsy seventy dollar cotton shirts. I'm either way too old to go into those places or I don't think I'm nearly old enough (item #3). Then the Gap: teeny tiny women's clothes that look to me like unpretty chiffon rags (item #4). And fifty dollar hoodies. And acrylic sweaters for much more than that. Acrylic! Nothing with any real style. Is it me? I remember having to travel to Boston or New York to find unusual shoes, so perhaps I'm still too fussy. Are there still good shoes, somewhere...? And record stores, and bookshops, and places to find cool clothing, and retro dance clubs for old people...? Wait, I think I'm stuck in a Nick Hornby novel. Funny what one old song on the radio can summon forth (item #5). See, a total anachronism.

At home here in the village, I know I can't go back in time, and I'm left with the distinct sense that someone who yearns to still be cool from time to time had best hang that hat up for good and move on. Or, be cool on the inside. Listen to vinyl records, read real books, make one-of-a-kind objects with your hands, wear logo-free cotton clothing scrounged from the local Goodwill. And if we are lucky enough to have shops of any kind nearby with any level of authentic coolness, for god's sake help support them by buying their stuff.

(footnote: Ryan says, as I tell him about my day of uncoolness, "You shouldn't have looked at the mall." Oh. Right.)

Seen along the way

2011-09-24T12:25:00.031-04:00

When I'm out painting I inevitably get caught up in what's happening around me. The edge of the ocean is a hotbed of natural activity, even if when I first arrive it looks deserted, as if absolutely nothing is happening or will ever happen, it can seem so timeless. But if I sit still and watch long enough, something amazing always occurs right in front of me. A good lesson in paying close attention, no matter where you find yourself. I've seen terns, gulls, eagles, osprey, deer, porcupines, voles, mink, a family of sea otters once, snakes, fish, shellfish, many seals, insects of course, and sea ducks of all kinds. Most of the time I just notice and admire them and then they've moved on. But once in a great while I get lucky with the camera.

I love sea ducks. So intrepid. I've been taking lots of pictures of them lately. First photo:

I was very content to sit and watch and listen. And then, some dumb luck, a second later:

Dive, dive! The herring must be in. Seeing a wild creature in motion like that is amazing to me. And look at the surface of the water. That's in motion too, and I've been slowly figuring out how to paint it. So many colors, and different angles of light and shadow. Learning from the masters helps. Painter Stapleton Kearns just wrote a great blog post about that very thing. Reading his cogent advice always reminds me that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we approach a blank canvas. Most helpful. Also, I visited another painter I admire, Tom Curry, in his studio a few days ago. He has spent years looking closely at the coastal landscape near his home here in Maine and painting it from life in all weather conditions, times of day, and seasons. His series of water surfaces is amazing. I love his work and seeing a lot of it in person while being able to talk with him was terrific. He recently had an exhibit at the Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth, Maine, and his gallery talk there is available on video (to watch, hit the pale little video link just to the right of his name). A contemporary master, and hey, he's funny, too!

One more note - only a few weeks remain in which to see the Edward Hopper exhibit at Bowdoin College. I've been twice and plan to go once more. Talk about learning from a master. If you possibly can, go, GO! It's free admission, so no excuses!

good news and ARTnews

2011-09-19T17:14:00.020-04:00

Well, there goes summer, nearly over before you know it. For the past month I've been chopping firewood and dealing with the garden and reading a little and painting a lot. And selling books and selling paintings. My book booth at the antiques mall has been very busy of late, I'm happy to say. And the time I've put into framing paintings and hauling them around to various venues has been well spent. I've sold a lot of paintings this summer. (Thank you, people who bought paintings.) Maybe 25, but I haven't counted lately. Of course, that's all business, the busy stuff, the pull and haul. This is where I really live:

Out on the rocky edges of the great state of Maine! Attempting to paint water in motion after looking and looking and looking some more. One of the pitfalls of living and painting where I do is the danger of the cliché. Rocks, surf. Islands. Lighthouses. Sunsets. There they are, for all to see and some to attempt to paint. All I can say in my own defense is that I am painting what my heart says to paint. Rocks, surf. Light on the water. Lighthouses, not so much. The above painting is from Marshall Point in Port Clyde. There is in fact a very sweet little lighthouse just to the right of this scene. It's okay, but the rocks around it are tremendous. People wander by and wonder why I'm not painting the lighthouse. The rocks, the rocks! I say.

After all the bustle of summer I'm looking forward to the change of season. I crave quietude and another long winter reading project and much uninterrupted time in the studio. Evenings in front of the woodstove with Ryan and Hodge. Hot cider and popcorn. Flannel. Meanwhile, here is something I never thought I'd be able to say in my life. A bit of good news, icing on the cake of this wonderful year. When I was an undergraduate art student, almost 25 years ago, I'd sit in the library and read ARTnews magazine - fast forward to now, and there is my name on one of its pages. Poet and art critic Carl Little wrote a short review of the Portland Museum of Art biennial, and it was published in the September issue of ARTnews:

My name (spelled correctly!) appears in his review, along with the name of my painting from the exhibit. A tiny brass band played in my heart when I read it. I hate to toot my own horn (to extend the metaphor), but in this case, why not. Once in a lifetime kind of thing.

Now that my fifteen minutes of fame have come and gone, I'm heading out to paint more rocks and surf. I'll return to more frequent blog posts sometime in the near future. Some wonderful books have come my way lately, I must say. I hope the same for you.

Maine icons

2011-08-07T16:04:00.032-04:00

Well, in less than twenty-four hours I've experienced two of the most iconic living things that people often associate with Maine. First, blueberries, which are ripe for the picking now and are blatantly offering themselves up all over the place, and second, moose, who are shier and prefer to be left to their own devices whenever possible. The blueberries Ryan and I raked yesterday afternoon a few miles from our house, at the organic pick-your-own Staples Homestead. I used to rake blueberries when I was a kid, so I felt right at home carrying a big white bucket and metal rake while heading out into the fragrant fields. We raked enough to fill half of the freezer for the winter, then also picked berries off the highbush blueberry plant we have here at home. Pie is in my immediate future:

The moose were a bit closer to home too. Hodge the Cat woke us up early this morning to let us know something unusual was transpiring in the backyard. He was transfixed at the window and we were too. The photos are a bit blurry since I was taking pictures through windowglass, but you get the idea. Look at this brown beauty:

She was huge yet completely elegant and even delicate in her motions. And she had company:

They were very tender with each other. So companionable. Mother and calf perhaps. We watched them amble around the lawn for several minutes, then head off to graze in the field next door, then finally return, walk right by the vegetable garden without stopping to eat a thing, and head off into the woods behind the house. Amazing. I've only ever seen moose two or three times in memory, and certainly never this close or for this long. Shortly after six a.m. on a Sunday morning and my eyes were very wide open indeed.

Regarding another Maine icon, the island: I had a wonderful time on Islesboro. Sold several paintings at the exhibit I was in, had time to paint several more, swam in the ocean during those hundred-degree days we all experienced, ate lobster and a mess of clams, played a lot of Scrabble, and even read a few books. Also, due to a serendipitous series of events, I talked with a charming book blogger, Thomas. He recounts the details of our meeting here. I've been reading his blog for two years or so and quietly enjoying his fine writing about literature, art, and home life. And he now has kind things to say about my paintings, so naturally I shall adore him henceforth. All in all, a perfect island sojourn.

Except for one thing. I missed the legendary Islesboro friends-of-the-library sale by a week. But, I have been fortunate in my book finds since then. The legion hall up the road from us had a giant yard sale this weekend. The basement of the legion hall was full of books. The books were priced at one dollar a bag. I bought five bags, feeling terribly guilty and deeply exultant at the same time. Less than ten cents a book, my my.

O the amazing bounty of summer in Maine! Let me remember, when deep winter returns!

Nothing but good news

2011-07-19T10:33:00.013-04:00

This exquisitely summery weather has finally driven my cold away and I am preparing to go island-hopping once again. Penobscot Bay here in Maine is one of my very favorite places in all the world and I seem to have spent much of the last few years painting its islands and edges from various locations all around the bay. Last month I was out in the middle of it, looking at views such as this - a painting from my trip, the view toward Sloop Island and Isle au Haut:

And this coming week will find me along one side of the bay, participating in a group art exhibit at the Islesboro Historical Society. I hope to have some painting time on the island as well as several days of gallery-sitting with some of the other painters in the show (we are planning many games of Scrabble, needless to say). I have paintings in several locations around Maine right now, and am happy to report they are actually selling, imagine such a thing.

At the moment I am packing and looking askance at the ever-growing pile of stuff I must somehow fit into our car tomorrow morning. My, it's a lot. Paintings, packing materials, luggage, food, art supplies, easels, tools, a few books even. I idly wonder if packing the car will require a greater grasp of physics than that which I currently possess... tomorrow will tell. Be back in a week or so - wishing everyone some wonderful summer days involving lots of beach reading.

A midsummer lull

2011-07-16T18:06:00.015-04:00

One of the most beautiful weeks of summer and here I am indoors, recovering from a cold. I couldn't do much of anything this past week except blow my nose and read - a strange combination of misery and happiness. My attention span was that of a gnat so I chose comforting books with lots of pictures. Specifically, old-favorite art books, because I seem to be languishing in one of those mercifully brief periods during which my own paintings appear difficult and pitiful. I looked at books about some of my heroes, to remind myself what can happen when you stick to your chosen profession for your entire life. If you're any good, and much more importantly, if you have the will and means to paint all your life, you could become your own version of Fairfield Porter, or Rockwell Kent, or Edward Hopper. (At least this is what I tell myself, to lift my spirits.) Speaking of Hopper, an exhibit of Hopper's work in Maine has just opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and I am wild to go see it. In Robert Henri's classic book The Art Spirit he could almost be speaking of his student Hopper when he says (p.86):

"Is it not fine to see the development of oneself? The finding of one's own tastes. The final selection of a most favorite theme; the concentration of all one's forces on that theme; its development; the constant effort to find its clearest expression in the chosen medium; an effort of expression which commenced with the beginning of the idea, and follows its progress step by step, becoming a technique born of the theme itself and special to it. The continuation through years, new elements entering as life goes on, each step differing, yet all the same. A simple theme on which a life is strung."

One of Hopper's great themes, quoted somewhere in one of the books I have about him and his work, was the subject of sunlight on the side of a house. How beautifully simple, yet how complex in both execution and meaning, and how many variations he found to paint over the course of his life. Most heartening, and just what I needed to hear during this minor midsummer slough of despond. (Atchoo.)

In search of luminosity

2011-07-06T17:55:00.021-04:00

Last week I returned from a Maine island sojurn. Every year at this time I head out to sea, to rent a little cabin at the edge of the woods on a small family island in Penobscot Bay. No electricity, no phone, no running water, no problem! This year, instead of staying for a week as I usually do, I was there for twelve days. I painted like mad, created many landscapes full of sun and fog, and the one truly sopping rainy day when I couldn't be outside, I set up indoors and tinkered with all the paintings that needed a bit more work. The days were long and luminous and I could hardly bear to go indoors at all. I'd run in and make a sandwich and run back out. When I did go in, here is what I saw - oil lamps, an old white dresser, the stack of books I brought with me, including the usual suspects (Sarah Orne Jewett, Raymond Carver, Mary Oliver):

Turn and look the other way and there are some of my paintings leaning up on chairs to dry, and the woodstove, which is a godsend on the few particularly damp and chilly evenings:

When I wasn't painting, or writing in my journal, I could be found (if there was anyone to find me, which there wasn't) sitting at the very end of one of the rocky overlooks, gazing out at miles of sea, islands, mainland, and sunset. Sunsets here often last three or four hours, this time of year. At six o'clock they consider beginning, and the water looks like this:

How to paint that, I wonder. An hour or two later the sun tips itself over the mountains, and the seals on those ledges out there in the middle of the water talk the whole thing over (I listen in):

Well after nine the sunsets still linger, a cadmium red deep in the clouds off over the mainland. Unphotographable, by me at least. Dark finally, I head back to the cabin, then the stars come out and I walk out yet again to see them, and their earthbound counterparts, the fireflies, hovering over the island meadows.

I come home with my finished paintings and look at them back in the studio, and if I'm lucky and have observed closely and paid attention as well as I'm able, my paintings will have glimmers of all this available luminosity. This year, it was tough. Many of them clunk in shadow instead of singing with light. But even then, it's worth it, this island time. I still get to be in the light myself, even if I can't pack it up and bring it home with me. I wouldn't have it any other way. As Raymond Carver says in Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (p.81, from the poem Tomorrow):

"My bowl is empty. But it's my bowl, you see,
and I love it."

A man of gifts

2011-06-12T18:45:00.019-04:00

There's never an easy way to relay news such as this, so for those who haven't already heard, I'll just say straight out that yesterday my father wrote from New York City to tell me he'd read an obituary for Patrick Leigh Fermor. Leigh Fermor was 96 when he died. He had a long and wonderful life. But is any life ever long enough? Especially a life such as his?

Here is the Guardian piece. And the article in The New York Times.

It's a cold rainy evening here in Maine and I'm feeling sad and drizzly and nostalgic for a time and a place I never experienced: the wide open and golden world he described so beautifully in this now-classic memoir of travel literature:

I believe I have three copies of this book in the house at this moment. A hardcover first edition, a Penguin softcover reprint, and the New York Review Books softcover reprint. Located in bookcases both upstairs and down, alongside its sequel (also in hardcover and softcover, in the British and U.S. editions), next to many of Leigh Fermor's other books. Travel, history, literature, memoir, none of those simple classifications encompass the richness his books contain. I've loved him for a long time now. I remember recommending him to a customer of mine at the bookshop, years ago. This sweet fellow would come to Maine once a year, come by the shop and find a few things, and depart, to be unheard from until his next annual trip. So one year we talked about travel books and I told him to read Leigh Fermor. And the next year he came back to the bookshop, and the first thing he said was "That writer you told me about is good. I mean really GOOD." We stood there smiling at each other in complete agreement.

My heart aches for those who do not read. To miss the gifts that authors such as this have given us...!

Books by and for women?

2011-06-03T15:18:00.053-04:00

That V.S. Naipaul is a piece of work. I'm sorry, but precisely how bloated must one's ego be, to dismiss Jane Austen, and later his own (female) editor, and, oh yeah, women who write, as beneath him, as so much "feminine tosh"? Oh, I see. That bloated. I have never read any of this nobel laureate's work, myself. I wonder if I would enjoy it if I did. In the spirit of speculation, I'll just say that I never have been one to separate the person from the work he or she creates, and leave it at that.

Literary kerfuffle aside, I spent some time this week reading and thinking about books by women. Books written by women for women. Books brought into print probably because the publishers knew that women buy books, and wanted to provide them (us) with books about other women they could identify with. Books that were brought into print because they were simply and undeniably good. This pleasant reverie was not induced by Naipaul. Rather, by a book I came across in my sorting-out project of a few weeks ago. I rediscovered a book I've been hauling around unread for at least a decade, maybe two. (I found many such books, but this one I finally sat down and read.) It was in a box of books from my mother's house. (I am a book repository of sorts, in my family, as you can imagine.) (Sorry for all these distracting parentheses. Back to the story.) This one is a lovely old hardcover from 1940, still in its jacket. It has my grandmother's name written inside, underlined, in her handwriting. I never met her; she died before I was born. But I have inherited some of her books, in the way of things.

The book is Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther (Harcourt 1940) and is a collection of short fictional pieces that originally appeared as articles in The Times, during the escalation of events leading to World War II. The pieces are written in the voice of, and from the point of view of, a middle-aged upper-middle-class housewife, with three children (the oldest at Eton) and an architect-builder husband, a London flat, a small house in Kent for weekends, household staff, a reluctant social life with various other problematic couples, and an introspective streak a mile wide. She's a noticer, our heroine. She loves and values calm normalcy. The little details that make up daily living are brought to life and turned inside out for their stories and associations, romantic and practical, melancholy and tender. This is a gentle book about not much at all, and at the same time, about everything that really matters.

This is not the only book I received from my grandmother. I also have her copy of M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf. And several of the Mrs. Appleyard books by Louise Andrews Kent. Which I love. Love love LOVE, I can't say it enough. All these books come from my grandmother's era. All are housewifely with a charming mixture of comfort and sharpness, all tinged by war, all written with an eye toward domestic detail but simultaneously concerned with the great questions of life. So, important to women on all sorts of levels. And important to men too, of course. Feeding, clothing, housing, caring for, and of course perpetuating, the human race, but equally, savoring the details of daily life, both intellectually and literally. When it comes right down to it, these details, moments, choices in how we live day to day, are all we have.

Back to Jan Struther for a moment. From the wikipedia article about her life: at The Times "...Peter Fleming asked her to write a series of columns for the paper, about 'an ordinary sort of woman who leads an ordinary sort of life - rather like yourself.'" Surely this is why her stories resonate so much. A common and terribly broad generalization for you: Good writers put into words what many of us experience, but few of us have the literary ability to express clearly. One example - how many of us watch the fireworks at a holiday celebration, and feel something wordless and inchoate. Well, here is the way Jan Struther has Mrs. Miniver describe her family's handpicked little fireworks display on Guy Fawkes' Day (p.21):

"...fireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, colour and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had suspense, surprise, and a faint hint of danger; above all, they had the supreme quality of transience, which puts the keenest edge on beauty and makes it touch some spring in the heart which more enduring excellencies cannot reach."

She watches her children and her husband, and knows that all things are ephemeral. She quotes Thomas Nashe to herself. This is what I want to read more of - books such as this. Books initially by women, for women, but really books for everyone regardless of the gender you happen to be born into this time around. Good books! Written by women and by men! That help us understand our experience as human beings! Why, I wonder yet again, do we need to award prizes and induce competition in fine art and proclaim that one form of art is more or less worthy than another? Why bother classifying beyond simply, This is good, this matters to people.

(Final parenthesis, I promise. I could continue this little rant indefinitely, continuing with books from my mother - her copies of Mary Stewart's romantic suspense novels to start with - and my stepfather's copies of Georgette Heyer's novels - and more recently, anything by Laurie Colwin, who I treasure beyond words - her books are domestic, fraught, and entirely loveable. What about Elizabethe Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love? A great memoir my sister said got some bad reviews because, in her words, "It's all about what matters to women." And I must also mention Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Can Naipaul have read this novel? And then found it not worthy? Or lacking in any way? Truly...??)

The perils of bestsellers?

2011-05-29T19:12:00.029-04:00

Yet again I read a bestseller several years after its bestsellerhood has come to a close. Yet again I find much to love within this bestseller, and yet again I encounter an infuriating and unexpectedly violent ending that has me almost almost regretting I read the book at all. Why make us care so much about a fictional character, only to... and right at the very end of the novel, just when things were going so well? This may be why I don't have much patience with contemporary fiction these days. Anyway, all that is to say that a few nights ago I found myself both weepy and angry after staying up way too late to finish reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (Europa 2008).

Setting the needlessly dramatic ending aside - a true bummer of a deus ex machina - I must say the novel has many fine things to recommend it. For one, it employs a central plot device I love - that of the apartment building in which many people live, whose stories gradually unfold around a few preternaturally observant main characters. Also, the writing is intelligent, philosophical, and introspective. I must mention one of the finer bits early on - this, from our aging, unattractive, private, deeply bookish heroine:

"I have read so many books... And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading - and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure." (p.53)

Long live the gift of freedom and adventure in reading! (Conversely, boo-hiss to official discourse and the steady guiding hand!) And - a plea I'm sure will remain unanswered - god save me from experiencing any more shocking events in otherwise decent fiction!

Save it for a rainy day

2011-05-26T09:03:00.013-04:00

What a strange few weeks. Many many consecutive days of rain and fog had me feeling disoriented and a bit waterlogged. I kept doing things like, oh, drilling into my finger with a power drill while framing paintings. Or, say, dropping a just-finished painting face-down in the sand. I couldn't seem to get my bearings. But the sun has finally reemerged and the garden is mostly planted and I have been out painting again after all the weather, so I can't complain. (Can I?)

I did put many of the rainy days to good use. After taking a long look at our so-called guest room, I decided the time had come to clean it out. It was full of all the stuff from the bookshop, all those things I didn't know what to do with that wouldn't seem to go anywhere else in the house. Extra bookcases, chairs, supplies, and around forty cartons of books and paperwork and things from my old studio, which was in the back of the shop. The guest room was basically a giant pile of stuff with walls around it. I am haunted by the thought of being or becoming a hoarder, so I took action and spent a few days unpacking, sorting, giving away, throwing away, pricing books for my book booth at the antiques mall, and rediscovering neat bits of this and that from twenty years of book buying and selling. It felt like an episode of This is Your Life. I found my teenage diaries, correspondence from college, souvenirs from my first bookstore job, broadsides and books I'd made when I was obsessed with letterpress printing, old photos of all my punk friends, artwork from the guy I was engaged to before I met Ryan (we now call those years BR - Before Ry), abandoned projects, and of course everything from my book business - beginning, middle, to now. Also back-issues of magazines - Firsts, OP, Fine Books & Collections, even some of the old AB that I'd saved, plus the first several years of The Believer, and many fabulous old booksellers' catalogues. They are so heavy and they take up so much space, both in my brain and in actuality. But I love them. What to do? What a mess!

In short, over the course of a week I ended up revisiting most everything I've experienced thus far in life. Some of the boxes were like Andy Warhol time capsules. I even found some money - the first dollar I made at the bookshop. The room is not clean yet, but most of the stuff is gone. The boxes, well, they are half gone, but to be honest some are only sorted out and repacked. Some stuff is just so sticky - so hard to get rid of. The magazines are still hovering in limbo but I've dealt with most everything else. It was a weird project, and at first only served to contribute to my general feeling of disorientation. But as the room cleared out the skies cleared too, and so has my head. Today I am humming that Jayhawks song and feeling pretty good.

Art news

2011-05-09T10:12:00.005-04:00

A quick post this morning - I had a great time last Friday night at an opening for a group show. This terrific place will be showing my paintings this summer: Landing Gallery in Rockland. Before the opening got busy my sister took a photo of me and my stuff (four paintings already sold!). Here I am, looking forward to a busy season of exhibiting and, oh yeah, painting:

Am finishing up with Jim Harrison's book of nonfiction Just Before Dark (mentioned a few posts back; temporarily abandoned to read Chatwin and Leigh Fermor), and this bit seems to fit the moment, referring as it does to the peculiar joy of creative work (p. 219):

"To wait all day upon it then, very late, to have a door open for you that you did not think existed: all fears gone, sweetness, nonchalance..."

Dreaming of the open road

2011-05-04T11:33:00.100-04:00

I'm sitting here on this rainy foggy day with the aforementioned books of letters before me. I am lucky to live within easy driving distance of several independent bookstores, and so had them in hand quickly. Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare (Viking 2011) came first, and it took me three days last week to read through. It would have taken me two but I couldn't bear to come to the end, so I hedged for an evening to postpone the inevitable, and read the last thirty pages the next day. Then, In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley (New York Review Books 2010). I began these a day after finishing the Chatwin letters. And how different they are.

A word about the physical differences, first. The NYRB book is bound in full cloth and printed on acid-free paper which feels like Mohawk Superfine. A lovely, heavy, solid, well-designed real book-book. Such a pleasure to hold and read. The Viking book, now, is almost twice as thick yet feels much too light for its size. Bound in paper-covered boards, and printed on pulpy paper which I suspect will yellow quickly. I wish for something more lovely and with greater longevity. But I do like the dust jacket. (Reading this over later, please feel free to consider this paragraph a general metaphor for the authors in question.)

On to content. As a schoolboy, Chatwin writes to his parents and asks for a few books, among them Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and The Open Road: A Little Book for Wayfarers, an anthology of prose and poetry collected and edited by E.V. Lucas: "With a green buckram binding 'and a flight of gilded swallows on the cover', it was Chatwin's most cherished travel book..." (p.24) This sent me to my bookshelves. Here is my own much-loved copy, a reprint from 1926:

I suppose after this I will always equate Chatwin with swallows - migrating long distances, nesting in difficult and borrowed places for short seasons, thin and quick, beautiful both in flight and in repose. Common yet still rara avis. I read his letters with great pleasure and some distress, as he seems to spend his entire life seeking something he can't ever find, and running from he knows not what. I don't know what else to say about the letters themselves - here goes nothing - they are very vivid yet often impersonal and businesslike, they deal with money woes, and writing and publishing, and odd travel logistics. He regularly fires off impossible lists of commands to his wife, from several countries away. His lovers of both sexes are strangely absent, barely even mentioned by himself. He denies his fatal illness, AIDS. The letters are impersonally personal. Thankfully, they do also offer insight into how his books came about. After finishing, I spent some time with another book of his, Far Journeys: Photographs and Notebooks (Viking 1993), and found this quotation from one of his famous little moleskines. It refers to the 'nomad book' he spent his life working on and never brought to completion (p.13):

"This book is written in answer to a need to explain my own restlessness - coupled with a morbid preoccupation with roots. No fixed home till I was five and thereafter battling, desperate attempts on my part to escape - if not physically, then by the invention of mystical paradises. The book should be read with this in mind."

There is his story in a nutshell. His mystical paradises become Patagonia, Noakchoatt, Mount Athos. In his relentless seeking, he comes across as an impetuous, precocious child, and as he ages, a child pretending to be a man. One you love for his intelligence and adventurous spirit, but one who could also infuriate.

Several reviews of this volume gave Elizabeth Chatwin a hard time for some of her editorial comments in the footnotes. After reading the book through, I can't see why. She offers welcome clarification throughout, and despite some dry rejoinders here and there (only a very few, in hundreds of pages), they are factual and expository. She's not the only one, either, his brother Hugh Chatwin frequently clarifies points, and many other friends do so as well. So why pick on her, I wonder? Because she is the one left holding the bag of his legacy? Because he flew so high during his lifetime that the literary powers that be felt he had to be shot down afterwards? I suspect and then speculate but actually know nothing.

To continue on to Patrick Leigh Fermor's book, I must first quote Elizabeth Chatwin in these same footnotes. She mentions Leigh Fermor's travel book (p.446):

"...A Time of Gifts (1977) had come out at the same time as In Patagonia. E.C.: 'Paddy said to me, "It's very good, but he ought to let himself rip." Bruce said to me, almost simultaneously, of Paddy's book, "It's very good, but it's too baroque and overflowing; he should tone it down."'"

There again is the case in a nutshell. If Chatwin was a child pretending to be a man, Leigh Fermor in his letters to Deborah Devonshire is a man pretending, from time to time only, to be a child. He has the same enthusiasm and need for travel, the same love of remote places, as Chatwin. And many of the same friends. And a similarly huge intellect and spirit. But he was a war hero early in life, and never seems to be running from anything. In these letters he matches his tone to hers, pitch perfect, for decades, and the correspondence is completely delightful throughout. In the Editor's Note in the beginning of the book, Charlotte Mosley sums up the situation perfectly (p.xii):

"Much of the charm of the letters lies in their authors' particular outlook on life. Both are acutely observant and clear-sighted about human failings, but their lack of cynicism and gift for looking on the bright side bear out the maxim that the world tends to treat you as you find it. On the whole, the people they meet are good to them, the places they visit enchant them and they succeed splendidly in all they set out to do. This light-heartedness - a trait that attracted many, often less sunny, people towards them - gives their letters an irresistible fizz and sparkle."

I'm no longer a drinker of alcohol, but this is champagne indeed, as one of the back-of-the-book blurbs makes note of, something to be endlessly sipped and enjoyed, which leaves you refreshed. (Compared to Chatwin, more like an rare old scotch that burns as it goes down, and then leaves you hungover?) The letters span the years 1954 to 2007, and long-standing jokes run through them, particularly Deborah Devonshire's famous aversion to books and reading. For example:

DD to PLF: "Bother it all - how I HATE books. The marvellous thing about yours is that they never appear, such a good thing. And if by any chance one does (a) read & (b) like a book it's so awful when it's finished." (p.146)

She repeatedly calls Chatsworth "...this old dump." (such as on p.249) And he refers to it as "Dingley Dell" - "...after the snug Christmas retreat in the Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens." (p.326) He usually spells out every literary reference, one suspects as an in-joke, as he teases her about her supposed lack of common bookish knowledge. Their gentle camaraderie grows as the letters progress in time and encompass world events, royalty and the famous, acquaintances in common, the building of houses and raising of livestock, the publishing of books, and finally the passing away of old friends, husbands, and wives. A few of the final letters caught me with tears in my eyes. I have misjudged Deborah Devonshire, having read no other books of hers (yet). She doesn't exhibit the thorny, sometimes cruel gossip that some of her older sisters do in their letters. Both sides of the correspondence are utterly charming and funny. One fascinating thing is the views the letters present of some of the same people in the Chatwin letters, read back-to-back they work together to bring a certain circle of friends to life again.

I see this review has become overly long. But these authors, themselves friends in life (in fact Chatwin's ashes are buried near Leigh Fermor's home in Greece), and two of my very favorite writers ever, fully warrant such treatment. No better way to spend a rainy day than inside, with such fine books to hand, mulling over the lives of these extraordinary people, dreaming of the open road.

It's relentless...

2011-04-21T10:32:00.019-04:00

...this book-loving thing. Just when I feel caught up, more or less, they keep being published! All the time! Since I don't read the major book reviews much anymore, I don't hear about things I should have found out about about months ago. Still, in that wonderful way books do, what I apparently need to read next somehow manages to pass into my sonar circle while giving off insistent blips. I say all this because there are two recent books I now know of and cannot wait to get my little paws on. First, published last October by the New York Review of Books:

Anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor, anything! Even as I tire of the upper crustiness of the Mitfords, whom, it seems, one can read about endlessly these days if one so chooses, for his side of this correspondence alone I will gladly read hers. Then, if that lovely new publication wasn't enough, how about this, which got fairly poor reviews (after I heard of its existence I sought them out), of which I inevitably think to myself Sour grapes, baby, he had it all and he knew it, he may have been insufferable and opportunistic, but he was also pure gold. Like Patrick Leigh Fermor, give me anything by Bruce Chatwin that I haven't already read and I will abandon all else and set sail immediately. Besides, I cannot wait to read what his wife had to say about him, and vice versa. How vulgar, but how true. Weighing in at a hefty 560 pages long, published in February by Viking:

For the most part I have abandoned the quest for modern first editions, but in the case of a handful of authors I have always kept whatever I have been able to find. These two writers are among that group, and whenever I cull my books, I find myself unable to remove a single book of theirs from my shelves. And now I see I'll have to make room for two more.

Getting out there

2011-04-19T15:27:00.011-04:00

"It is the misfortune of us painters that we cannot let beauty alone. We are not content to see and enjoy it. Something uncontrollable makes us go out and try to do something about it." - painter Edwin B. Child, 1935.

Ryan caught me on camera last week, out trying to do something about it, all this wild beauty of Maine. Rocks, water, trees, islands, light. They never go out of style, in my book. Speaking of books, I'm reading Jim Harrison's essays, collected in Just Before Dark (Houghton Mifflin 1999). What a writer! I mean, he's a WRITER! One you avidly read, and you fervently believe. From his notebooks, a brief bit of advice that could easily apply to painters as well as poets, or anyone, really, engaged in an endeavor worth pursuing:

"Remember: vividness, lucidity, momentum."

Books that Matter for People Who Care

2011-04-14T08:01:00.033-04:00

One of my favorite local bookshops, Left Bank Books, holds a series of winter and spring Sunday afternoon talks on varied themes, given by all sorts of bookish speakers, complete with sherry and cheese and crackers. They call it their Lyceum. Most civilized. This past Sunday it was my great pleasure to go there and meet and listen to publisher David R. Godine, whose recent catalogue celebrates his company's 40 years in the book business. The bookshop is tiny and the crowd easily filled the chairs and aisles. A powerpoint presentation cast large images of fine press books and trade titles high up on the wall, as David spoke about his early years as a letterpress printer, the move to offset printing, and life as a discerning publisher determined to print quality books, books that are simply great and deserve to be in print. He learned to print on a Vandercook Proof Press (me, too!) as a student at Dartmouth, set up his publishing operation with a Kelly 3 Press in a dilapidated old barn in Brookline, Massachusetts, and proceeded to spend several decades producing Books that Matter for People Who Care (his publishing motto, and what a fine one it is). A few notes I took during his talk:

His favorite Godine book, in his top three at least, is Moral Reflections on the Short Life of the Ephemeron by Thomas Boreman, 1970, with hand-colored illustrations of great delicacy, suited to their subject, the mayfly. (Want, WANT.)

His favorite typefaces are in the Bembo/Minion/Garamond family, "because they're elegant," and he also loves the Scotch faces like Miller and Bell, "heavy and gutsy." He doesn't like sans serif types; he doesn't think people are comfortable reading a whole book in sans serif.

An audience member questioned him twice about the future of publishing. He said he gets depressed when he goes into most bookshops, but we're very lucky here in New England to have the number of independent bookshops that we do. He said, "I can make a living in New England. But Mississippi - three bookstores in the whole state - forget it."

On the big chain store: "We've never sold to Borders. Anyone who sold to Borders should have their head examined."

On book-reading devices (such as the Kindle, though he didn't name it specifically), he speculated that in the future such things will not be treasured or even be able to be used. They will be obsolete as pieces of technology, replaced by some other thing. Not so the book, which was perfected in its essentials many centuries ago. (Oh, how I agree! Kindle - it's a piece of plastic, people. Not something alive in your hands, warm, made of wood and paper and cloth and imagination and mind and heart and soul. Fine for best-sellers, perhaps, and genre fiction, textbooks, but anything else...? But I digress.)

Despite saying that the next ten years would be difficult ones for the book trade, which is changing so rapidly it's hard to chart what's happening now, much less predict the future, he ended his talk with a note of optimism, quoting from Kenneth Clark's series Civilisation (and I now see that Clark was quoting Ruskin, in saying "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."). David Godine elaborated thus:

"I really think art is the one thing in this culture that has a chance of survival... if you can make your books art, you'll be all set. Make books as art, make books people read, make books people can afford."

I could go on and on. Do me a favor - browse Godine's wonderful backlist (and their frontlist too). If you're anything like me, you'll recognize many books you already own. I could recommend many of their titles on cookery and gardening, but a good place to start is with the wonderful selection of books about books, and the 40th anniversary poster, hand-silkscreened, showing Godine himself with a composing stick in hand. The sidebar quote tells us that the poster commemorates the time in which:

"The narrow, personal world of trade publishing was still run by opinionated individuals, whose names were often eponymous with their companies, and who more or less published what they liked and did their crying in private..."

This is the kind of publisher to support, and Left Bank Books is the kind of bookshop to treasure. How lucky am I, to live just a few miles down the road.

No fooling

2011-04-01T10:58:00.031-04:00

Wow, a blizzard is raging here in Maine this morning. Just yesterday I was beginning to become accustomed to the sight of bare ground once again. We had snow lingering only on the shady side of the street and the crocuses were all in bloom. I don't know if this will do them in or not, I suppose tomorrow will tell. Apologies for the lack of writing lately - as spring lurches along here I have been less inclined to spend time in front of small glowing screens of any kind. I've been out painting a handful of times, also out surveying the bare garden and drawing maps in my head of where new vegetable beds could go. And out walking, out book-hunting, all in all simply OUT. With some impatience and much great joy. What a long winter it was, to be sure.

Noteworthy from the past few weeks, in no particular order (though first is best):

Celebrated 19 years with Ryan. His anniversary gift to me: The Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by Bruce Redford, complete five-volume set, fine in fine dust jackets (Princeton University Press 1994; the Hyde Edition; lovely presswork from Stinehour). He knows what I like! Read on!

Chuckled over The Future of Books at McSweeney's. Laughing aside, they also provide some welcome information about what's happening to reading and literacy and publishing, in their series Good News from the World of Books.

Delivered one of my paintings to the Portland Museum of Art for their upcoming biennial, which opens next week. Commenced fretting about what to wear to the opening. It's been a while since I've had to wear something other than what I usually schlep around in. You know, clothes with tiny flecks of paint on them - fraying comfortable clothes - old bookshop clothes.

Contemplated Maria Shriver's interview with poet Mary Oliver in the O Magazine online edition. Going to see and hear Mary Oliver read from her work several years ago remains a literary highlight in my life. Actually, forget literary, the experience remains a highlight, full stop. The reading took place a year after her life companion had died and it was obvious that the loss was raw and painful. Good to read this interview and see what's happened in her life since then.

I'll leave it at that for now - the power is flickering and I keep getting disconnected. As the storm rages on, I'm going to go curl up and connect with a book instead.

All roads lead to Samuel Johnson

2011-03-16T09:48:00.041-04:00

I think Samuel Johnson would have been shocked that historians and literary scholars frequently refer to his era as the Age of Johnson. He was a deeply humble man, for all his great intellectual weight. His influence certainly lives on. Regarding which, I thought I was finished with my winter Johnson-Boswell reading project, but then I picked up some books at a library sale, and bought another stack at the local Goodwill.

From the library sale I brought home a book that looked good - Lapham Rising by Roger Rosenblatt - his first novel, set in the Hamptons, the tale of a man who has had it with society, particularly in the emblematic form of his billionaire neighbor and the gargantuan house he is having built. Our hero lives in a dilapidated seaside home next door, and exists in a mild state of crazy, talking to his dog, who talks back to him. He is a novelist who isn't writing. One of his novels is about a man who lives in an antiquarian bookshop. This is mentioned in passing, and I do wish Rosenblatt had chosen to elaborate, other than to have the main character say that this was a metaphorical theme, representing "...a mind that wanted to live in the past." (p.108) (That would be a novel I'd like to read.) But, back to Samuel Johnson. Our hero has given away all the books in his home, from a generous library accumulated by three generations of his family. Given them a few bags at a time to the local library. Except for the one book he feels is truly worthy: a slim volume, containing Johnson's long poem The Vanity of Human Wishes:

"...a single humble yet confident, self-aware yet not self-involved, brief yet eternally expansive book. This one I could not bring myself to toss. It made no unseemly noise. It did not plead for its life. It did not preen or strut. It was, in fact, the English language's supreme argument against noise, against pleading, preening, and strutting." (p.54)

Rosenblatt introduces Johnson much earlier in the novel, though. We first meet him on page 10: "Wealth heaped upon wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, /The dangers gather as the treasures rise: Dr. Johnson wrote that, and Dr. Johnson was always right." Dr. Johnson is always right is in fact one of the novel's leitmotifs. Which I didn't know until I began to read it, and was a lovely surprise. One small note - the ending of the book left me unsatisfied and a bit confused - I expected to turn over one more page and read the real ending - but overall, very good. A satirical send-up of certain members of the Hamptons summer set and their wealth, and one man's last stand against the hubris of it all.

Then, at Goodwill I found a coffee table book, The Mountains of Rasselas by Thomas Pakenham (Seven Dials reprint 1999). Originally published in 1959, and now reprinted with new material and color photographs by the author, this travelogue chronicles Pakenham's search for the truth behind Johnson's novel Rasselas, in the mountain ranges of Ethiopia. I've just started reading and must say I'm enjoying it thus far - a very young British academic sets off on an Indiana Jones-style adventure. His narrative lured me in from the very beginning:

"In May 1955 I had been dining in a Venetian Gothic house overlooking the Thames at Oxford. We had begun to talk of amusing places where we might spend the summer holidays after Schools. Abyssinia cropped up frequently in the conversation. The place had exciting associations for us all - was this not the land of Prester John and the Queen of Sheba, the birthplace of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief and Scoop? After Tibet, Abyssinia sounded the most exotic place for a holiday." (p.8)

A Byzantine scholar suggests he not merely ramble aimlessly, but instead mount a search for a mountain near Gondar called Wachni, a place never seen by Europeans, and the inspiration for Johnson's short novel Rasselas. Abyssinian kings would isolate their sons there, so they wouldn't get into trouble (or make trouble), until such time as an heir was needed to reign. In Johnson's novel, a prince and princess escape from their imprisonment in order to experience the world as it really is and discover if happiness in life is possible. (Short answer, according to Johnson: No.) Johnson wrote his novel after reading the travel accounts of two of his contemporaries. I read Rasselas a few months ago and loved both its spirit of inquiry and its moral conclusions. Now I'm 25 pages into Pakenham's account, and it promises greatness.

Johnson lives! I wonder where he'll turn up next?

Makeover season?

2011-03-10T17:00:00.024-05:00

For a while now I've been thinking of giving the old blog a new look. And I have to say I've decided against it, other than making a few changes to the text here and there. So many blogs I read lately have so much going on in their margins - tons of pictures, lists of followers, blog rolls with links aplenty, clouds of words - jittery bits of information that seem to light up my latent OCD like so many flickering fluorescent bulbs. Which I find difficult to read by, by the way. So no, I will not upgrade this ancient template. I will keep it spare and simple and hope that plain old words, and a picture once in a while, will satisfy - who? Well, myself, and a few readers from time to time. I do not need to feel any more socially networked (what a term, I am certain William Strunk would shudder) than I currently am. Meanwhile, I just got a haircut and am assiduously practicing yoga and getting around a bit after being housebound for much of this long winter. Generally feeling good and dusting myself off in anticipation of spring. I guess I was the one who needed a makeover.

My Italian travels

2011-03-07T09:52:00.035-05:00

As winter turns to spring here, with heavy rain today steadily shrinking the massive snowbanks, I continue to travel in my books. Italy looms large and I become determined to go there someday soon, to eat and paint and gaze at art.

Two very different views of Italy are presented in the memoirs I recently read, Naples '44 by Norman Lewis (reprinted by Da Capo in 2005) and A Traveller in Italy by H.V. Morton (Dodd Mead 1969). Both are first-person accounts presented chronologically, both descriptive and well-written, both unforgettable, both written by justly famous travel writers, and in both the Italian landscape figures heavily. They are both books of place, but there the similarities end. Naples '44 is a wartime diary, a short book to devour in a day, full of famine, violence, treachery, corruption, and the deeply unbeautiful, a view of one city and its immediate surroundings seen from the point of view of a young British intelligence officer caught in the bureaucracy of occupation. The war is an ugly living reality. A Traveller in Italy takes place over two decades later and is a long ramble around northern Italy, from Lake Como to Venice and down to Florence, a thick book which will take a week or two to read at least, easy to put down and pick up again, full of refined observation, dense history, connoisseurship, and intimate description. The war is a memory and becomes one more link in the long chain of violent events and shifts in power in this fought-over region.

Naples '44 captures a moment. A Traveller in Italy speaks of centuries. Both are highly compelling. I read Norman Lewis with fascinated horror, almost in a state of panic, he shows so clearly what we are capable of under extreme duress. After that, I calmed right down and read H.V. Morton as if strolling hand in hand with the most civilized man I'd ever met. He reminds me that horror passes and what endures is culture, art, the landscape, and generations of people simply living their lives. Generations who might choose not to repeat the corruptions of the past. They probably will, but they might not, and in the meantime, much good happens.

I didn't find Lewis to be quotable. At least, I didn't make any notes while I read, the way I usually do. His whole book was too immediate and blunt. And disheartening, it must be said. Of course, I took several pages of notes from Morton. Here he is on Pliny the Younger's villa, built in 1570 on the edge of Lake Como:

"The charm of Pliny's villa continued to haunt me and it will always do so. I know what my books would look like there, and where I would put my desk. It was one of those places, and they are few, where I knew I could be happy and content until the end of my days." (p.126)

Morton tells us Shelley tried to rent the villa in 1818. (Read his book if knowing little details such as this pleases you - it's full of them - it's what the entire book consists of, really.) In my to-be-read pile are a few more books about Italy. Italian Hours by Henry James is there. I've also started to read selections from Vasari's Lives of the Artists and am in the middle of the wartime diaries of Bernard Berenson, who chose to stay near Florence for the duration. But that's a story for another time. To end today, a bit of fine advice from A Traveller in Italy, something we can all take to heart (p.179):

"...trouble has a way of straightening itself out if you continue to collect books and to read them."

Spring in my heart

2011-02-28T10:55:00.010-05:00

Another storm rages here in Maine today. I look out the windows over the whitescape that is the garden, hidden beneath three feet of snow and rising, and wonder when this winter will end. I suspect in April, but May seems a distinct possibility. I know there are crocuses and daffodils sleeping under there. And herbs and perennials and wildflowers and lilacs and green grass. It's amazing when you really think about it. Brave and mysterious are the ways of nature.

Over the weekend I got out my gardening journal and wrote the first entry of the year, after ordering seeds, and onion and shallot sets, and making rough maps of what to plant where in the vegetable garden this time around. After writing a page, I took a look through at the last few years and remembered: that which is dormant will return. The ferns on the shady north side of the house always awaken early:

Then the grass begins to green up again and johnny-jump-ups appear and turn their faces up to the sun. I've always loved their other name - heart's ease - it's poetry:

As the summer comes on, clumps of lupine bloom in front of the snow fence by the driveway. Their peppery scent is a joy. My journal measures about 9" x 12" so this is a full-page illustration - usually I write a lot and fit in small drawings around the edges, but in this case I wanted to get the whole thing - nibbled top, foliage, seed pods, and all:

In a small bed by the kitchen door - mint, lemon balm, tarragon, and lavender all winter over, and then I plant sweet peas to climb up on the porch railing and Alaska mix nasturtiums, from seed. They are well underway by midsummer and flower right up until frost comes in the early fall:

That's it for today. I've been keeping this journal for three years now, and will fill it up this year if I remember to add to it as the seasons turn. Pictures I didn't show this time: forget-me-nots, bleeding hearts, blueberries, a maple syrup tap, my old galvanized watering can, wild strawberries, chive blossoms, tulips, peaches, apples, onions, seed potatoes, gardening gloves.

Outside the storm rages on. Inside it's spring in my heart.

The bad old days

2011-02-26T08:18:00.005-05:00

Whenever I wax nostalgic for my bookshop - which happens now and then - I stumble across something like this and am reminded of the seedy side of shopkeeping. I remain nostalgic (O how I loved my shop!), but I do not miss, not in the slightest, the folks described in the article, and I had them all. Except the sleeper, I don't recall anyone ever falling asleep. I could add a few more types - the man who always smelled strongly of pot and patchouli, the woman who manifested what I came to regard as a talking disorder and would rant interminably about the oddest subjects, the wealthy couple who always talked me down on my prices and left me feeling like I'd been had. At least I can say that they all bought books, repeatedly, bless them. The wonderful things about the shop far outweighed the bad, but the bad sure do stick in my memory, like pesky little burrs. It's good to be free.

(Hat tip to Joyce for the link.)

Journey to the interior

2011-02-25T09:09:00.017-05:00

Day six of a standard run-of-the-mill cold. Being ill is such an interesting time. It allows one to practice acceptance and surrender - since there are no other options - and, as long as one can concentrate sufficiently, it also allows one to read for great uninterrupted swaths of time. Guilt-free. Not that I ever suffer from that much guilt while reading, but after days and days of almost nothing but, even I feel like I should be up and doing.

Early in the week, I lost myself in Edwardian uppercrusty British novels (The Ladies of Lyndon by Margaret Kennedy and A Room with a View by E.M. Forster). And my penchant for travel narratives continued to ramble along (A Traveller in Italy by H.V. Morton and James Herriot's Yorkshire) side by side with a yearning for the completely frivolous (How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson). And if all that wasn't enough, between cups of tea and boxes of tissues, I added in a few books by a spiritual teacher of non-duality who truly blows my mind (Emptiness Dancing and Falling into Grace by Adyashanti). All that is to say, even though my physical self was suffering, my interior was deeply happy. Like Thoreau in Concord, I have traveled much.

Now my head is clearing, literally and figuratively, and I am experiencing sparks of interest in the outside world again. To wit, I've got a seed catalogue in front of me, from the incomparable Fedco, and although snow is falling steadily and the garden remains under a bolster of white, I am thinking about what to plant this year. And later today I'll be sorting out paintings for some shows, and figuring out what to frame. This summer will be a busy season for me, and may be a watershed of sorts. I'll have paintings for sale all over the place, and should discover if this second career of mine will be a viable one. Not that that would stop me from painting, because it won't. I mean, bookselling is and isn't, and just look at me. Why anything should be so hopeless and so hopeful at the very same time, I'm sure I don't know. Enough rambling - back to work!

Where are the Good Books?

2011-02-16T10:54:00.039-05:00

One of the books I bought during my recent foray into local bookshops was Alain de Botton's little collection of observations written while spending a week as the writer-in-residence at Heathrow's massive Terminal 5, A Week at the Airport (Vintage 2010). He could write about the workings of a food distribution plant and I'd read his words willingly (oh wait, I did, his last book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, contains just such an essay), so this was a must-have for me. All of his books speak about the contemporary human condition in such a friendly, gentle, intelligent, accepting, yet despairing manner. Which is to say, his books speak to me in just the way I most like to be spoken to as a reader - as if I were actually thinking about and concerned with the major issues of the human condition - which I am. A friend of mine used to call books such as these the Good Books. You know, you go into a bookshop and want to ask, Where is the Good Book section? Usually the staff picks - but I digress. This most recent book of de Botton's can be read in one sitting, at just over 100 pages, and many of those pages are full of color photographs. So the text is thin, but it's still a thoughtful look at a crossroads we sit at, a literal and a metaphorical one. The back cover sums it up: the airport is "...a showcase for many of the major crosscurrents of the modern world - from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our global interconnectedness to our romanticizing of the exotic."

The book consists of small sections that reflect a traditional mythic journey - essentially departure and return - and begins with a note about the fact that he has been hired to write this, in other words he has a patron for this work. He justifies this in part by thinking "...of impatient ancient Greek statesmen who had once spent their war spoils building temples to Athena and ruthless Renaissance noblemen who had blithely commissioned delicate frescoes in honor of spring." (p.11) The reader may draw his or her own conclusions about whether or not the resulting book honors the strength and beauty of the airport or points to any darker underlying messages not entirely compatible with frescoes about spring. Though I think it does both, in that generous and inclusive way that de Botton has with words.

He visits and describes many of the airport personnel at work, and I must mention part of his conversation with the manager at the WH Smith airport bookshop (p.59):

"I explained - with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport- that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange."

Again, those are the kinds of books I too most want, the kind I consistently seek out, and those that somehow seem to find me even when I'm not seeking them. Books such as Alain de Botton's. Needless to say, the WH Smith had none of his books in stock. But, as long as he continues to write them, I will continue to find them, and to read them.

Book shopping in my own shelves

2011-02-12T10:24:00.034-05:00

And elsewhere. I must really have cabin fever. In the past few weeks I've bought books at four local bookshops (used and new), attended two library sales, and hunted for books at two different Goodwill stores. I also spent some time last week tending my own book booth, at the antiques mall in downtown Bangor. If I don't stop in for a few weeks the shelves get fantastically messy - one person puts some books back roughly, someone else leaves books out in a stack after browsing, the next person sees the mess and thinks it's fine to add to it. This worries me. In my shop I used to straighten the shelves every morning when I opened. It was immaculate. I was a neat freak then and I remain so. But now I live 45 minutes away from my inventory, and I share a car with my husband, who works in the opposite direction these days, so I don't tend my books as often as I'd like. I'm happy to be able to say that last year was a very good year for selling, and this year is off to a great start, so I have to live with the fact that a messy display of books doesn't necessarily mean lost sales. But, sales aside, books deserve respect, don't they? (Rhetorical question. Unless anyone feels like answering.)

Of the bookshops I visited, two are gloriously messy and two are extremely tidy. And the Goodwill shelves are... Goodwill shelves. Terrible stuff in no order whatsoever but a gem every now and then, so worth scanning quickly. The library sales were a pleasure - I came away with several big bags of books for not much cash on the barrelhead. And now my to-be-read pile looms large. I think my Johnson-Boswell project is winding down, as these other books begin to elbow their way into my reading life. I despair of finding the Johnson Dictionary, and I may just leave that quest in the hands of serendipity, and move on. After finishing the Life, I spent some time ransacking my own bookcases and I swear I kept finding books I'd forgotten I owned, books about or by Johnson and Boswell and their friends. I could have stayed home and gone shopping in my shelves, when it comes down to it. I have enough here in the house to be able to read, uninterrupted, for years and years.

Some of the Johnsoniana I found at home: two volumes of The Rambler by Samuel Johnson (Earle, Philadelphia 1812, lovely little leatherbound editions of his essays); Aspects of Doctor Johnson by E.S. Roscoe (Cambridge 1928); An Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Other Essays by S.C. Roberts (Johnson 1930); Young Boswell by Chauncey B. Tinker (Atlantic Monthly 1922); Anecdotes of The Literary Club by C.A. Miller (Exposition 1948); and several books with extensive reference to Johnson and Boswell as part of social scene of that time, such as Austin Dobson's Eighteenth Century Vignettes (three volumes, Chatto & Windus 1906). Many many others, too. One of the best is the Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, edited by William Roberts (Harper 1839), which is comprised almost completely of selections from her letters to and from her sisters. These letters are droll and altogether wonderful and give us marvelous first-person accounts of literary life in London. She adored Johnson and writes of him repeatedly. I am well into volume one. I could go on and on. I mean, I haven't even mentioned Horace Walpole. Or Fanny Burney.

So, the long and short of it is, despite all the new acquisitions, I've been carefully reading my own antiquarian books, and enjoying them mightily, I must say. I suspect I will unearth even more as the winter winds down (when, Lord, when...) and I begin the task of sorting out the cartons and cartons of books and miscellaneous stuff still remaining from the closure of my bookshop. All those cartons, in a heap in our spare room. I'm determined to get through them. I hope the pleasure of rediscovery will alleviate the distress of the job.

Hannah More gets the final word today (Volume I p.113):

"What frost - what snow! By-the-by, if this same snow were of human invention, I should be apt to say I did not like it."

Travel dreams in winter

2011-02-08T09:40:00.035-05:00

The urge to travel always hits me hard this time of year. I've got a restless streak a mile wide, as happy as I am in Maine, and being housebound by snowstorms and empty pockets has me feeling even more so than usual. After beginning the winter with accounts of the travels of Johnson and Boswell around Scotland, naturally I am daydreaming about seeing that place someday. This corner of it in particular looks quite nice:

I wonder if they have a bookseller's ticket I could add to my collection? It sure would be a pretty one, judging from that darling tiny sign.

In the fullness of things during my reading, I wondered what ever happened to Boswell's family estate in Ayrshire: Auchinleck, the lovely eighteenth-century Adam-esque house his father constructed near the ruins of the old castle they called home way back when. Well, it turns out one can rent Auchinleck. From the Landmark Trust. For a country house party, retreat, or what-have-you. (For many thousands of pounds per week, it goes without saying.) The Landmark Trust website is a fine rabbit hole to fall down, if one has an hour or two to spare, during which to fruitlessly dream about travel and imagine staying in The Library or at Casa Guidi.

Besides noodling around on the internet, the only traveling I'm doing right now is via my books. As usual. I just read A Garden in Lucca: Finding Paradise in Tuscany by Paul Gervais (Hyperion 2000) and Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr (Scribner 2008). Doerr's memoir about his writing fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and his wife and infant twins and this year abroad together, was very good. He really knows how to write a beautiful descriptive sentence, and does so again and again throughout this book. Lots of unusual similes and metaphors and I liked the entire narrative. But Paul Gervais's meandering, humorous gardening memoir I loved, and it had me wishing I could lead another life. Specifically, his. (If I wasn't so happy with the one I have already, of course.) Tuscany, gardens, food, wine, the struggles of life, and some sweet victories too. The story of a late bloomer who finds his place and truly blooms. Visit his blog for a taste. The two books encapsulated the difference between city and country for me, and since I have come to believe that in life, nature always wins, I prefer the country. Even Doerr, after side-trips to towns in Umbria, wishes he was in the country, in the midst of his own book about one of the world's great cities. But no matter, both books are fine ways to escape for a time.

Italy, Scotland. I guess I'll go ahead and add Australia while I'm at it, since around here we are absolutely hooked on watching MasterChef Australia online - the episodes are endless - season two is over eighty episodes and I can't seem to get enough. Keeping warm by the woodstove watching people on the other side of the world chop ginger and shallots and shell prawns, why is it so fascinating? Well, it is, from where I sit. Back to the present moment, today, here and now, not elsewhere, Maine: fresh snow overnight, and I'm headed outside with the snow shovel and some seeds for the chickadees that visit the row of cedars by our driveway. They seem quite cheerful, despite the long snowy winter. I hope the same for you, wherever in the world you may be.

The art of making bad choices

2011-01-28T12:47:00.044-05:00

All the books I read lately seem to consist of morality tales. Characters real and imagined, living with the consequences of their actions.

First, An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin's new novel (Grand Central 2010). I wanted to love it, I really did - I love Steve Martin - I mean, who wouldn't want to be him - novelist, movie star, in a bluegrass band - but the main character of this book was so despicable, with her complete lack of any kind of moral compass, the terrible choices she made, how she treated others. I read it with a bad taste in my mouth. Fortunately, the novel is also a primer on the contemporary art world and how it functions, which is interesting in its own right, considering Martin is an active participant in this world as a collector of art. So, an exposé, in fictional form, worth reading but watch out for that story line, it takes some nasty turns. Very unpretty. See how the mighty become mighty, and see how they fall.

Second, Anthony Bourdain's new collection of essays, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (Ecco 2010). Real-life tales about his further adventures in food. Kinda like Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy on heroin. Or, no longer on heroin, since Bourdain cleaned up his act twenty years ago. But the vocabulary remains. Despite all the bracingly rampant vulgarity, he, however, certainly does have a moral compass intact and functioning, and writes so well about his experiences with food, celebrity, money, the Food Network, famous chefs, his own disasters and successes, I really loved it. Very worth reading, this naming-names tell-all. See the mighty, from the court jester's point of view.

Third (not really third, because I've read many other books recently, but let's say third for the sake of some kind of continuity here), of course there's Boswell's Life of Johnson. Which I finished last weekend, finally. It's one long morality tale from beginning to end, told by a profligate of the highest order. Because, let's face it, James Boswell made some spectacularly poor choices in life, particularly those involving prostitutes and alcohol. He tells us himself that he was drawn to Samuel Johnson because of Johnson's reputation, his intellect, and above all, his example of piety and conduct of life. To say Johnson was religious would be putting it mildly. Today we might find it strange that a renowned scholar and Truly Great Brain would prostrate himself before his religion to the extent that Johnson did. Not so, in the eighteenth century. Johnson composed prayers, practiced good works, went to church, supported many people more indigent than himself, was, in short, a moral man who feared death and judgment and did not want to be found lacking in the eyes of his God. And yet, was not pedantic or proselytizing about it. Just tried to be good, within himself (and failed often, in his own eyes).

Johnson on proper conduct of life:

"If (said he), I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman..." (Life Vol II p.124)

"Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life." (ibid p.140)

"Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness." (ibid p.417)

"Make an impartial estimate of your revenue, and whatever it is, live on less. Resolve never to be poor. Frugality is not only the basis of quiet, but of beneficence." (ibid p.456)

"The world passes away, and we are passing with it; but there is, doubtless, another world, which will endure forever. Let us all fit ourselves for it." (ibid p.504)

"...life is very short and very uncertain; let us spend it as well as we can..." (ibid p.616)

"To have attempted much is always laudable, even when the enterprize is above the strength that undertakes it..." (from Johnson's Preface to the Dictionary)

Would that Boswell had taken more of this advice. Not to proselytize myself, but would that we all could.

Keeping warm

2011-01-23T11:49:00.032-05:00

Lots of snow here and more on the way in two days, and until then, below-zero temperatures. This is always the time of year when I wonder what, exactly, I'm doing here. As I shovel through a three-foot drift on my way to the compost pile. The heap of snow beside the end of our driveway is as tall as I am - we don't know where we're going to throw the next batch, when it arrives.

All this deep January weather has me contemplating warmth. Seeking it, maintaining it, cherishing it, all different kinds of warmth. Chores take on new meaning. Washing the dishes is a pleasure, the water is so warm. So is taking warm laundry out of the dryer. And vacuuming the house keeps me warm. So does shoveling snow, and lugging in wood, and baking cookies. Hot tea, too, cup after cup. In fact, anything around the stove works well. Ryan's been baking a lot of bread. I've been making soup. I invented this great soup the other day, and it's very warming: parsnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, curry powder, chili flakes, stock, salt, pepper. Good with dumplings, will cure what ails you, and warm you through and through.

I also keep away the cold by forgetting about it, by becoming so engrossed in a book, or in the making of a painting that I lose track of everything else. Easy to do, when the book is wonderful (I finished Boswell's Life of Johnson over the weekend). Easy to do, when one of the reasons I love to paint is that the state it puts me in is one of suspension of all else, all externals fade away for a time. In reading, in painting, experiencing this state only makes me want to return to it. It's not merely passing time, wishing it away, waiting for the winter to be done. I never wish time away, it's too precious.

Final thought today: keep on the sunny side, after all, it's the warm side.

Wish list

2011-01-18T10:27:00.004-05:00

A very short post after yesterday's overly long one. Wish list: this lovely edition of Johnson's Dictionary and this set of contemporary periodicals. Yum, yum!

The measure of a man

2011-01-17T10:19:00.076-05:00

Samuel Johnson was known for his vigor as an author and as a man - he was tall and large and often slovenly, his writing was erudite and prolific, his conversation second to none. He had a wide acquaintance, and surely one great measure of a man's worth is how he appears in the eyes of others. Now we know that Boswell was attempting to capture on paper the genius of his beloved great friend, so he was wildly prejudiced in his favor, but Boswell himself states over and over again throughout his writings that this portrait is created from both light and shade, to show the whole person, and is not merely a panegyric, as biographies had largely been up until this particular one.

Johnson is described by his acquaintances thusly:

"...so great a mind as his cannot be moved by inferior objects: an elephant does not run and skip like lesser animals." (Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides p.230)

"He appears to me like a great mill, into which a subject is thrown to be ground. It requires, indeed, fertile minds to furnish materials for this mill." (ibid p.338)

"When you see him first, you are struck with aweful reverence; - then you admire him; - and then you love him cordially." (ibid p.343)

"Pliability of address I conceive to be inconsistent with that majestick power of mind which he possesses, and which produces such noble effects. A lofty oak will not bend like a supple willow." (ibid p.353)

"This man is just a hogshead of sense." (ibid p.390)

"...he was a dungeon of wit..." (p.391)

"...URSA MAJOR." (ibid p.420)

"...slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk." (Boswell's Life of Johnson Volume I p.265)

"A robust genius, born to grapple with whole libraries." (ibid Volume II p.5)

"He's a tremendous companion." (ibid p.106)

"I compared him at this time to a warm West-Indian climate, where you have a bright sun, quick vegetation, luxuriant foliage, luscious fruits; but where the same heat sometimes produces thunder, lightning, earthquakes, in a terrible degree." (ibid p.226)

Another measure of such a man could be gleaned from how he describes others. Johnson is not quite as generous with them as they are of him, perhaps. At least in his public conversation, which by accounts was combative and overbearing to the point of compulsion. For example, he would often take the contrary position in a discussion, just to argue a point well, even if he didn't actually believe what he was arguing for and might later contradict himself. He appeared to delight in this form of winning, what we call one-upmanship today. But, as Boswell notes well into his Life, after numerous examples of such, his friends encouraged him in this, just to hear him argue and speak, and "He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it." (Life Volume I p.391)

Some examples of Johnson's thoughts about his contemporaries:

Burke: He "...has a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet." (Journal of a Tour p.341)

Lady Eglintoune: "Her figure was majestick, her manners high-bred, her reading extensive, and her conversation elegant." (ibid p.414)

Chesterfield: "This man... I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords." (Boswell's Life of Johnson Volume I p.177)

Churchill: "Sir, I called the fellow a blockhead at first, and I will call him a blockhead still. However, I will acknowledge that I have a better opinion of him now, than I once had; for he has shewn more fertility than I expected. To be sure, he is a tree that cannot produce good fruit: he bears only crabs. But, Sir, a tree that produces a great many crabs is better than a tree which produces only a few." (ibid p.208) (Ouch!)

Anonymous: "He is, indeed, continually attempting wit, but he fails. And I have no more pleasure in hearing a man attempting wit and failing, than in seeing a man trying to leap over a ditch and tumbling into it. (ibid p.302)

Baretti: "There are strong powers in his mind. He has not, indeed, many hooks; but with what hooks he has, he grapples very forcibly." (ibid p.373)

Burton: "Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, he said, was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. (ibid p.415)

Gray: "BOSWELL - '... but surely he was not dull in his poetry.' JOHNSON. Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT.'" (ibid p.569) (Ouch, OUCH!)

Cibber: "It is wonderful that a man, who for forty years had lived with the great and the witty, should have acquired so ill the talents of conversation: and he had but half to furnish; for one half of what he said was oaths." (ibid p.578)

Goldsmith: "Goldsmith, Sir, will give us a very fine book upon the subject; but if he can distinguish a cow from a horse, that, I believe may be the extent of his knowledge of natural history." (ibid Volume II p.60)

Boswell: "I can tell you that I have heard you mentioned as a man whom everybody likes. I think that life has little more to give." (ibid p.274)

So much of this was said publicly, at times when Johnson apparently could not bear to be bested in conversation. One of the great surprises for me as a common reader, in making my way through this series of related books, is the difference between Johnson's bombast in public and his private persona. Much of the Life is long descriptions of table-talk, but Boswell also quotes at length from Johnson's personal letters and his private memorandum booklets, his pocket journals (later published as Prayers and Meditations - I do not yet possess a copy), to illustrate this very difference and round out his portrait, as it were. In his private writings, and many of his essays I have yet to mention, we encounter Johnson as a deeply religious man concerned with morality, eternity, charity, humility, fidelity to his duty and his friends, and his opinion of his own perceived failings as a human being. I find this most endearing. Boswell tells us repeatedly that this is also how Johnson truly was - his superego stilled - when not in company. I still haven't finished the Life. Two hundred pages to go. I am postponing the ending as long as I can, and reading in other Boswell/Johnson books, to keep these men and their times alive for a while longer.

Books: How do I love thee?

2011-01-11T09:26:00.015-05:00

Let me count the ways. This Johnson-Boswell self-imposed reading program of mine is well underway and I want to take a brief moment to mention the tactile qualities of the experience. I began with an old Oxford edition of both of their accounts of their Hebrides journey. In the second half of this particular volume, the pages were uncut. I had to take the sharpest letter opener I possess and carefully slice them open before I could read what lay within. Delicate surgery, lovingly performed. I continued with Boswell's Life of Johnson, and since I do have three different editions on hand to choose from (ahem...), I looked them over to decide which to read. I ended up choosing the smallest, almost a pocket edition, if such a long book could ever be such a thing - Oxford 1904, with paper so thin it is almost onion skin, two volumes printed in one, bound in dark blue oxford cloth. The thin paper means I read and read and read and put the bookmark back in and it looks as if I've made no headway whatsoever. But - the main reason I chose this edition - after two hours or more of reading my hands and arms are not cramped up from grasping a larger and much heavier edition (such as the fat hardcover Everyman). Also, the typeface and font size is pleasant and clear. And the headers on each page note the date (the book unfolds chronologically, year by year) and the page's main topic. These topics are often delightful: Remedies for Melancholy; Johnson's Defense of Tea; Boswell Talks Stuff; The Lawfulness of Dueling; Goldsmith in Witty Contests; Virtue and Vice Mingled; Books in a Lady's Closet; Effects of Wine on Conversation; etc. They read through like an eccentric flip-book.

Progress report: I've read around 800 pages of the Life thus far. I also took a break to read Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763 (McGraw-Hill 1950), a lovely large hardcover with great paper and type and generous margins and a preface by Christopher Morley, what more could one ask for! Then I read Johnson's fictional morality tale, Rasselas, in a nice little hardcover reprint from the 1960s. Now I've returned to the Life, to pick up where I left off. I don't usually read in this roundabout manner, but I'm finding that each additional text I get my hands on only enriches the experience of reading the Life, as the people and their achievements (and foibles) begin to live and breathe. Thus, reading Boswell's version of meeting Johnson for the first time, in the Life, then reading his account of that entire year in his own London Journal, gives me the backstory, as it were, firsthand.

I am still searching for an affordable facsimile reprint of Johnson's Dictionary. And I begin to despair. I have the abridged version that Levenger printed a while back, and it is very nice indeed, but who wants to say, "A few years ago I read Johnson's Dictionary. Um, the abridged version..." Speaking of the tactile pleasures of reading, this edition is quite impressive. But the cost, the cost! I may have to resort to interlibrary loan.

I know all this verbiage only mentions what I'm reading, not what I think about what I'm reading. Well, regarding all the books we love so dearly, those old books that come to life under our careful hands, how many times can we keep saying we love them? Are there new ways to say such things? I begin to despair of that, too.

Good news for the resolute?

2010-12-31T15:19:00.044-05:00

New Year's Eve finds me once again considering that thorny old business of resolutions. In the Life of Johnson (p.409), Boswell quotes Samuel Johnson's Prayers and Meditations (p.101) concerning the efficacy of the making of resolutions. I'm afraid Johnson didn't hold much stock in the idea:

"Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.... They...whom frequent failures have made desperate, cease to form resolutions; and they who are become cunning, do not tell them.... He who may live as he will, seldom lives long in the observation of his own rules."

After taking a break from the Life to read Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763 this week (McGraw-Hill 1950), and finding that, like Pepys, Boswell carried around a little notebook in which he jotted reminders to himself to be good and moral, amidst the events of the day, and then observing Boswell's own riotously scandalous behavior almost immediately afterward, I tend to agree with Johnson. Don't make resolutions. They won't change your life; in fact, they may only serve to convince you of your own imbecility. Instead, be good, and do some gentle sinning too, year-round. Read more racy books. Eat more pie. Be a human being. Whoever makes the rules around here, if there is such a one, will surely assist us in sorting it all out at some point.

But this all sounds so pedantic - ugh! All I really wanted to say was Be good, have fun, and have a Happy New Year!

Thoughts ephemeral

2010-12-27T10:08:00.006-05:00

As the blizzard rages this morning, I will make quick mention of a lovely new site about those charming bits of ephemera we love to collect: Bookseller Labels. The fine folks at Bay Leaf Used & Rare Books in Michigan are the responsible parties. I particularly like their reviews on the books and resources page.

December 25, 1753

2010-12-24T09:24:00.011-05:00

A very Happy Christmas and Boxing Day, to everyone this weekend. Cold and sunny here, and I am home listening to public radio and preparing to make gingerbread to bring to our family lunch tomorrow. I'm also browsing in a facsimile reprint of the 1750s periodical The Adventurer (Garland 1978), to which Samuel Johnson contributed many essays, only signing them "T" - I discovered this while reading Boswell's Life of Johnson, Boswell saying, "...Johnson's energy of thought and and richness of language, are still more decisive marks than any signature." (p.167)

The Adventurer dated Tuesday, December 25, 1753 contains a sermon of sorts on the pursuit of happiness and its relation, or rather lack thereof, to possession of things. Its argument is persuasive, particularly viewed from a twenty-first century month known for its consumption and excess. The last page of this particular issue, signed with Johnson's "T":

The last two sentences read:

"There are few things which can much conduce to HAPPINESS, and, therefore, few things to be ardently desired. He that looks upon the business and bustle of the world, with the philosophy with which Socrates surveyed the fair at Athens, will turn away at last with his exclamation, 'How many things are here which I do not want!'" (p.294)

From spurning unnecessary possessions, to the fabulous accumulation of them: I also send along a Christmas greeting from the premier collectors of Johnson and Boswell. My copy of Donald and Mary Hyde's two-volume set Four Oaks Library and Four Oaks Farm (self-published in 1967) is a loving chronicle of their superlative book collection, formed over twenty-five years, and the beautiful home in which it was housed. My copy of this slipcased set has the following card laid in:

Would Johnson have approved? Boswell saw Johnson's own library, full of dusty unkempt books, with manuscripts and letters all over the floor, willy-nilly. So who can say. But, we approve. The Hydes collected for their own pleasure, and also for the sake of future scholarship and research, and their collection now resides at the Houghton Library at Harvard. The Hydes said, about their collection, that scholarship was their primary concern, but: "Emotionally, what the library means to us is a record of friendships..." (Four Oaks Library p. xxi); we know Johnson and Boswell would have approved of that.

News flash: the great books are... great

2010-12-22T12:43:00.010-05:00

I don't know why I'm so shocked whenever I discover that a great book, A Famous Work of Literature, is actually readable. Compulsively readable, even. In fact, justly famous! Not difficult to understand, or hard to navigate, or impenetrably intellectual! Just plain old good reading and a lot of it! Boswell's Life of Johnson is proving to be just such a book, full of witty, intelligent, easily flowing prose that reminds me of Jane Austen's, albeit a bit more robustly presented. 225 pages in and I am happy to say that I am eagerly anticipating the next 1100 (give or take) with great pleasure. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to Great Britain and Ireland (1981) sits at my elbow, as a steadying anchor to windward. In the entry about London, I find a photograph of the house Samuel Johnson lived in from 1749 to 1759, the prime Dictionary years. The house still stands today. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Off to read and watch the snow flurries out of the corner of my eye.

Notwithstanding their defects

2010-12-21T09:13:00.024-05:00

After looking long and hard at my very own bookshelves, I finally decided what this year's winter reading project shall be. Proust will have to wait - upon reflection I concluded that after consuming the Diary of Pepys last winter, I truly crave a substantial follow-up banquet (and French pastry will not do, if I may extend the metaphor, without any insult intended). I had my eye on a group of books that have accumulated around me like a windrow and remain unread. Until now. So I think I will take up residence in the eighteenth century for a time, in the bookish presence of two literary lions who have been lounging around my library for quite some time.

To dip a toe in, as it were, I begin with an attractive old Oxford hardcover. Which caught me right away, hook, line, and sinker. R.W. Chapman, in his introduction to Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Oxford 1924), describes his work on this seminal edition during the summer of 1918 in Macedonia. It reads in part:

"...here, in the long hot afternoons, when 'courage was useless, and enterprise impracticable', a temporary gunner, in a khaki shirt and shorts, might have been found collating the three editions of the Tour to the Hebrides, or re-reading A Journey to the Western Islands in the hope of finding a corruption in the text. Ever and again, tiring of collation and emendation, of tepid tea and endless cigarettes, I would go outside to look at the stricken landscape - the parched yellow hills and ravines, the brown coils of the big snaky river at my feet, the mountains in the blue distance; until the scorching wind, which always blew down that valley, sent me back to the Hebrides. These particulars are doubtless irrelevant; but I like to think that the scene would have pleased James Boswell." (pp. vii-viii)

Chapman, in the finest tradition of the soldier-scholar, endures a terrible situation and wills his mind to turn to the solaces of literature, in the face of current events that defy understanding. This fine book is the result and I honor him for it.

In the illustrations which precede page 1, we see the title page of Samuel Johnson's copy of A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (London 1703), with a long inscription written by James Boswell regarding the author, one M. Martin, Gent. The last sentence of Boswell's inscription reads, "I cannot but have a kindness for him, notwithstanding his defects." I feel just the same way about Boswell himself, and about the hero of Boswell's tale and life, Samuel Johnson. This is why I decided to spend some time in their congenial company.

I wasn't sure who to start with, but I realized that as the elder man and as Boswell's hero, Samuel Johnson it had to be. So, I've just completed the volume mentioned above, the two-for-one special Oxford edition, which begins with Johnson's account and continues with Boswell's diary of the same journey. Now I find myself well into Boswell's masterpiece The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Oxford 1904). I hope to find a facsimile copy of Johnson's Dictionary of 1755; the copy I possess is only a contemporary abridged reprint. I have much other miscellaneous Johnsoniana and Boswelliana. Book reports to follow, over the next weeks (and possibly months). Until then, since I never stray far from painting these days, here is Gilbert Stuart's oil sketch of Samuel Johnson, which the Houghton Library at Harvard tells us was possibly made from life but also certainly copied from Joshua Reynolds's earlier portrait of his good friend. I love this unfinished painterly sketch because it shows Johnson's avidity for reading, and highlights Gilbert Stuart's robust-yet-delicate style:

In Johnson's own words, over the winter I hope to be "...entertained with all the elegance of lettered hospitality." (Johnson's Journey &c. p.5) May I also entertain you in turn.

N.C Wyeth's self-portrait

2010-12-07T10:15:00.030-05:00

In November almost the only reading I did was a total immersion into the massive collection The Wyeths: The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, edited by Betsy James Wyeth (Gambit 1971). At over eight hundred pages, it contains hundreds of letters in chronological order from the time he left home as a teenager, to study painting with Howard Pyle, to just before his death. The collection is everything I had hoped for, namely, a fully-realized self-portrait. Just what I wanted to know, after revisiting some of his transcendent paintings at the local Wyeth repository again this fall. Not only are the letters a near-complete record of his painterly education and deep concerns in art and life, but in them N.C. also repeatedly acknowledges his personal heroes:

"I have nourished a thought or have experienced a sensation. I want to convey it to you. I must do it by hook or by crook. Stevenson did it with enchanting rhythm, perfect euphony, gliding sentences; Whitman fired great chaotic chunks! great gobs of thought - fairly hurled his ideas in heavy masses, so that your brain reels with the power of his meanings. And along comes Thoreau, the master of them all..." (p.486)

He idolizes Thoreau. Calls Robert Frost's book North of Boston "...my greatest discovery since Thoreau, in the realm of wonderful expression." (p.538) And discovers via Emily Dickinson something he hadn't quite believed before, that a woman is capable of creating fine art based on her own experience:

"Creative work of such magnificent stature is infinitely more than a means, or vehicle, of temporary escape, but rather becomes luminous radiation which makes a course to steer by. It has been a growing revelation to me to gradually awaken to the dynamic power of this frail girl's art.... This woman's creation is pure gold. (p.823)

Anyone who has pigeonholed N.C. Wyeth as an illustrator, albeit one of the most famous of the twentieth century, should read these letters to see how much he struggled with that path in life. He desperately wanted to be a painter of things of his own choosing, particularly of the transcendent nature of the American scene. And instead, he was bound to Scribner's for decades, and fit his own work in around the edges. It's heartbreaking, and I must quote his own description of Thoreau's Familiar Letters, so closely does this passage describe how I feel about his own letters:

"The letters are full of genuine pathos, not because they are pathetic, but because they are so tender, and so sincere." (p.339)

N.C. Wyeth's are that and much more. Unselfconscious, passionate, full of romantic fervor for the divine in nature and for the making of art. I don't know if I've ever read a more complete first-person record of one artist's internal life, charted over an entire lifetime. (Van Gogh's Letters, perhaps?) Riveting. I could only put it down long enough to take notes, and then, just barely. The end is particularly poignant. As World War II rages, N.C. Wyeth rails against it and prays for more time to do what he considers his real work. But we, the readers, know what lies ahead for him, on the train tracks near his home at Chadds Ford. We know he has run out of time. What a masterful self-portrait. In truth, larger than life.

A love letter to Maine

2010-12-03T16:19:00.034-05:00

This fall I've been attempting to write a new version of my artist statement. The artist statement is a short piece of expository writing usually found alongside the bio and résumé or c.v., and is supposed to state succinctly why the artist does what she or he does. Or what the artist does and why. Or something like that. Sounds easy, right? Weeell. Try it and see.

At last I have my final version. It's only three sentences long and it took me three weeks to write. However, in the meantime I ended up with all kinds of stuff about why I love Maine so much and I thought I'd post some of that here. Because when I talk about why I love to paint, it almost always comes back to the love I have for this great state. I don't mean to say that all kinds of places aren't wonderful, because they are, but for me Maine is where it's at and I'm so grateful to be from here and to still live here. So, here goes, not my artist statement, but some of the flotsam and jetsam behind it:

I'm painting love letters to Maine, love letters full of all the stuff they are usually full of - adoration, distress, description, openness, difficulty. I revel in the particulars of the beloved - all the fine things - while tenderly accepting the faults that make up character and history.

Maine is an old heirloom apple tree. The fruit may be scarred but is still as sweet as ever. Get it while you can, the tree may not bear much longer.

Maine is the best! It's rugged, homely, elegant, strong, radiant, proud, orderly, foggy, beautiful, dark, natural, eternal, changeable, humbling, sublime!

Maine takes your identity away, who you thought you were, and gives you back something better, something more yourself.

Maine contains so many apparent dualities: hard, soft; overbuilt, barren; peace, mayhem; summer, winter; foggy, clear; city, country; purity, deviltry; shacks, mansions. Yet Maine still manages to be one place and one state of mind.

Maine has an impersonal beauty that pulls me outside of my self. Maine has radiance and spaciousness, integrity, a sense of eternal concerns, a fortitude that knows how to weather anything that arises. Once you participate in Maine's radiance, you can't not participate in it.

Maine is real, raw, where I live, what I think of as beautiful. Maine is vivid and alive. Maine is hard-earned.

Maine teaches bleak acceptance of what is, and joy in what is, simultaneously.

Maine is ancient, but never gets old.

Maine is the old-time band I dance to, the movie I most want to watch, the radio station that plays the best music, the art museum that's always open and shows my favorite paintings, the library full of books that mean the most, a photo album of beloved friends and family, the channel with all the good shows, a warm woodstove on a cold evening, the most comfortable old clothes, the satisfying food at the church supper. It is all these things; it is itself. Maine is home.

Dear me. Reading this over, I see that Mainers can be terribly place-proud and I am no exception (there is Maine, and then there is not-Maine). But I mean no disrespect and sincerely hope your own special place is all these things to you and much more, dear reader.

Here's a recent painting I made of a Maine island hillside on a blustery fall afternoon. Maine is:

Giving thanks and practicing active gratitude

2010-11-26T13:07:00.018-05:00

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone but gratitude lingers alongside the delicious leftovers. Ryan and I hosted a big family meal at our house for the first time in recorded history, and I am relieved to say that all went off without a hitch. Nothing burned, everyone ate well, plates were full of old favorites as well as the results of some recipes I'd bravely tried for the very first time. Between turkey and pie we took turns talking about what we were thankful for in our lives, from soup to nuts and small to large. Life transitions navigated, disasters averted, successes applauded.

We set the table with a hodgepodge of family heirlooms and antiques shop finds. The vintage set of china I put on layaway during a low point in life, a particularly dreary time when I yearned for something fine. My grandmother's spoons, my great-grandmother's battered table knives, my other grandmother's footed silver dish. The table linens my sister gave us for a wedding present. The big table from the kitchen in my childhood home. I walked around outside in the morning and gathered up a bouquet of gratitude - a few late wild rose hips, some dry everlasting, the still-green sage from the herb bed - for a prickly fall centerpiece for the table.

In the late afternoon as everyone drove off into the dusk, I picked over the turkey in the kitchen and thought a lot about gratitude. I would say at this point in life that my spiritual/religious practice is what I have come to regard as active gratitude. Being aware of and grateful for what is. Being actively thankful. This can be practiced anywhere, at any time, is remarkably calming in the face of what comes, and helps me with those thorny issues of forgiveness, letting go, and acceptance, which seem to show up like obnoxious drunk uncles (not that I have any of those...) during the holidays. Thanksgiving just feels like a natural time to speak your gratitude aloud, with as many of the people you are grateful for as will fit around your table. It was good to do just that yesterday, and I hope the same for you.

that November feeling

2010-11-01T12:04:00.012-04:00

November. One of those times of year, at least in New England, that serves to remind us of all the things we still haven't done in life, things that we really really really want to do. Illustrate a cookbook. Rewrite that memoir about books and reading. Start a new series of paintings. Find some decent curtains for the bedroom, because frankly the ones that are up there now have got to go. Save the world. November reminds us of stuff like this, even as she drains us of ambition, with waning bleak light and thin cold wind. Ambition to even move. Now, I myself am the kind of person who, if I haven't accomplished something tangible by the end of a day or a week, can get a little... down on myself, let's say. The work ethic I am dubious heir to means I can be unkind to myself and others if I feel I haven't produced in some way. And bullies of any sort appall me, in my own self and elsewhere. So what to do? Nothing. Sit with it, that November feeling. Consider it a great time to deprogram oneself, to allow oneself to simply be.

I'll let you know how all that goes. Because of course I could just need lots of extra Vitamin D. And a few more Democrats in office. Poetry might help, too.

One of my favorite hopeful thoughts about this time of year, the first line from the poem A Man in Blue, by James Schuyler:

"Under the French horns of a November afternoon..."

Bad Books

2010-10-27T11:19:00.003-04:00

That's Bad Books, the indie rock band. Their music page on facebook is offering a chance to win a nifty limited edition bundle along with the new record. Very nicely packaged in a hollowed-out old book with their trademark critter on the cover. (Don't just like it, love it.)

Next on the list?

2010-10-22T18:43:00.009-04:00

Cooler weather has arrived and with it my thoughts turn to winter days spent with books in the rocking chair by the woodstove. Of late my reading has been haphazard - although really, when has it been otherwise - and I find myself craving one of my annual attempts at a more sustained reading project. Multi-volume or multi-part, engrossing, new-to-me but a classic to everyone else, something looming on my life list like a rare bird spotted once in a lifetime. In recent years: Montaigne, Pepys, the Iliad and Odyssey. Winter brings out an aptitude for sustained concentration in me and I don't want to let this go to waste, good yankee that I am. So this year? Certain names loom large, both on my bookshelves and in my imagination. Such as Proust. Last time I attempted Proust, I made it through most of volume two. I actually loved the dreamy prose but couldn't stick with it somehow and want to try again. What about Anthony Powell's massive series A Dance to the Music of Time? Which I own in hardcover and paperback and have never cracked open. Or some of the Giant Famous Russian Novels I've never read? They're supposed to be really good, I hear (War and Peace, etc). Or maybe Dante's Divine Comedy? How about an extended foray into the writers of ancient Greece and Rome? Or the entire oeuvre of some author I've always meant to read but never have (Woolf - besides Orlando, Faulkner)? Good choices to have to make. I'm enjoying mulling it over. Suggestions welcome.

I visited two libraries this week, in different nearby towns, because each one contained something I dearly wanted to find out about. Something which was not available on the internet. How often can you say that any more. Did my heart good, call me old-fashioned.

State of the art

2010-10-14T14:53:00.007-04:00

I dreamed this week that I had great big blisters on the sides of my fingers from painting too much. I don't think it's possible to form calluses from holding paint brushes, but you never know. I've been outside painting painting painting during this glorious stretch of fall weather here in Maine and now I'm feeling tired and looking forward to some quiet studio time as the cold really settles in. Some recent good news on the art front: I've had a painting accepted into a juried show at the Portland Museum of Art. Feeling really good about that, but not letting it distract me (much) as I keep working on the new stuff at hand. Good news is always welcome. Particularly since I recently realized that this past season I had work in twice as many places as last year, but sold half as many paintings as last year. If I hear the phrase "In this economy..." one more time... Luckily the book biz continues to provide me with some income. "In this economy" (Doh!) people seem to be buying used books more than ever.

Solvitur ambulando

2010-10-10T08:53:00.003-04:00

Huge time sink. I do love it, but man oh man. All this stuff - blogs, youtube, facebook, twitter, tumblr. I can't keep up so I'm not even going to try. I'm going to go take a walk instead.

An eccentric's delight

2010-09-30T11:23:00.007-04:00

A few more notes of interest from Patience Gray's unclassifiable book (though it does have recipes, so, a cookbook, sort of, but not really), Honey from a Weed:

"Artists have something in common with shepherds in that their means of livelihood is not apparent - they work for long periods with no prospect of gain, and others regard this as disreputable." (p.18)

"Failure as a source of discovery is an encouraging thought." (p.36)

Those words might be cause for despair, and yet they have the opposite effect on me.

Lastly, my very favorite:

"Eccentricity: living according to priorities established by one's own experience." (p.111).

I want to give this book to several people I know. But I want to keep it for myself. What to do.

A change of pace

2010-09-27T12:59:00.012-04:00

Every time I consider writing here lately, I turn away and do something more literal instead. Go off and paint or draw outside. Make soup. Lug wood. Write in my journal with a fountain pen. Move stacks of books around in the book room. Move stacks of paintings around in the painting room. Invite a friend over. Toss toy mice around with the cat. Real life is particularly sweet at this moment and I think, yes, I will continue to post here from time to time, but after nearly five years I find myself winding down and so will keep posts shorter and simpler than in the past. In fact, much more like what I began doing in the first place, before I apparently tried to write my life story. There are so many good book blogs now, discussing so many great books old and new (and don't get me started on the art blogs), we could do nothing but read and try to keep caught up, all day long. And miss what's happening away from the small glowing screen.

So in the spirit of my more streamlined posts of the future, as I imagine them, a new favorite quote from what I thought was a cookery book when I began reading it, but what turned out to be about everything, as all good books are, Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades, and Apulia by Patience Gray (Harper 1987):

"...I was reading the landscape and its flora with as much attention as one gives to an absorbing book." (p.189)

That speaks to me as a painter, walker, gardener, reader, and I could go on and on - this book has wonderful sections on foraging, antiquarian booksellers, fishermen, anarchy, sculpture, and oh, glorious food - but perhaps it's enough just to mention these things, and move on.

Fall is not in the air

2010-09-01T08:43:00.014-04:00

What a strange year. Month after month of glorious weather, starting early this spring. Around here the blueberries flowered weeks early and the bees weren't ready to pollinate them all, so the blueberry harvest was down 25 to 30%. Blackberries are weeks early. Apples as well. The ocean is warm and this is very confusing to the local lobsters. 96 degrees yesterday and the maple tree that always drops its leaves first is doing just that, despite the heat wave. So strange to see the breeze taking the orange leaves away even though the air is sweltering. What I call flat cat weather (poor Hodge). Too hot to read, my hands stick to the books. Too hot to paint, I can't be outside trying to concentrate. Too hot to write in my journal or sketch, because the ink smears if I touch it by accident, which always happens. Too hot to garden, though when the late afternoon shadows finally reached the vegetable beds I managed to dig some potatoes and pull up the onions so they could start curing. Too hot to cook, so I've been eating strange and delicious sandwiches with whatever's cool and handy. Avocado, tomato, cucumber, and cheese is a current favorite.

August sped by too quickly, as it always does. I painted outside quite a bit early in the month, prepared and hung a show at a cafe in the southern part of the state, bought books at a few small library sales, had several groups of people come over to purchase paintings, spent some time with my family, and read a great big stack of books to boot. Sad to say that some of the titles on my bedside table are still there since the last time we talked about the contents of that stack (the venerable Bede, for example, languishes), but I did construct and demolish several other stacks in the course of my meandering summer reading. A few highlights:

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - Helen Simonson (Random House 2010). Yes, I know it's hard to believe that I actually read a novel, a best-selling novel, while it is still a best-seller. Not five or ten years from now. Of course I only read it because I found a copy at a library book sale for two dollars. But still. I needed an intelligent romantic novel and this really fit the bill. I loved the major, his unsuitable romance, and his quiet observations as seen from "...a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground." (p.175)

My Life in France - Julia Child (Knopf 2006). A lovely memoir by one of the all-time great lovers of life. I read this after my sister told me she'd read it twice. Lip-smacking and full of pleasure.

Old Herbaceous: A Novel of the Garden - Reginald Arkell (Modern Library reprint). A quiet short novel about an English head gardener and the Lady he comes to work for. The Secret Garden for grown-ups. In tone it also reminded me of Akenfield and The Remains of the Day, showing a country way of living now gone, a servant and a master and the delicate life-long relationship between them. I remember crying at the end of The Remains of the Day, and I cried at the end of Old Herbaceous, too, for different yet oddly similar reasons. Read it in one sitting. Highly recommended.

Speaking of tales of English country life, I finally read my first Barbara Pym book - her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle. I've been successfully skirting around Barbara Pym for a few decades now (her and Anita Brookner both, after reading Hotel du Lac twenty years ago), but a reprint of this fell into my lap recently, and it was so attractive and looked so like a Miss Read novel with more teeth to it, that I tried it. I also tried the first of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels, Queen Lucia, having come across a pleasingly fat hardcover anthology of the whole series. Finished the Pym, liked it, but didn't love it. Couldn't finish the Benson, I'm sad to say, because I know people can be fanatical about this series and its characters. His satire seemed mean somehow, in a subtle way that left a bitter taste in my mouth. So often I seem to want the authors of books to love the characters they create - a failing of mine that keeps me from reading all kinds of great things, I suppose. Perhaps these characters mellow through the various books, but I don't know if I will ever find out.

I guess that's enough for now, though I've got many more books to mention. Soon. Too hot to blog.

A brief musical interlude

2010-08-26T11:33:00.006-04:00

After listening to Nick Lowe at the very end of A Prairie Home Companion's summer reading show in July, I had to hear an acoustic version of When I Write the Book again. Then I came across a new song of his, I Read A Lot. (Get out your hankies.) He's on tour in the USA this fall, with one date in New England, hmm. That would be worth traveling for. If I could visit some bookshops along the way.

Summer vacation

2010-07-30T15:32:00.004-04:00

Well, as you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging of late. And I've recently decided to take the rest of the summer off. I thought I'd better post a note to that effect, though, in case anyone has been checking in and wondering. Let's get away from our computers and enjoy the rest of the summer, as short as it is. Fall is already in the air, today. I'm looking forward to wearing jeans and sweaters again. And lugging wood. And drinking cup after cup of hot tea to help keep warm. But not just yet! During the recent run of splendid hot weather I've been out painting nearly every day, in much-loved and often-revisited locations, then coming home in the evenings and reading art books for consolation, when my paintings fall short of the beauty of the landscape itself. Which happens every damn time. Luckily, this only makes me want to go out and try again, the next day. I don't get discouraged easily.

Besides art books, I've been doing some desultory summer reading. But believe it or not, most evenings I'm too tired from being out all day, which often involves hiking somewhere with canvases and my heavy pack basket of paint and supplies. This means that the pile of books on my bedside table has only grown higher. In fact, I moved most of it over to the top of the dresser, because I was afraid the weight of the pile would tip the table, which is small and old and a bit rickety. When September approaches, I promise a return to regular posting. Until then, happy summer, dear readers.

Journals and diaries, some personal, some not so much?

2010-07-13T11:24:00.025-04:00

I know I've written on this theme before, but I'm still mulling over the differences between journals and diaries. Besides semantics. My latest unprofessional hypothesis: I suppose diaries are the most personal documents of all, written with no one else in mind, written (among other reasons) to unload some of the baggage we carry around with us like so many steamer trunks full of all of our past possessions and experiences - those trunks sure gets heavy sometimes - while journals perhaps are best kept on particular themes or for more specific reasons than merely the unloading of the cumbersome luggage. My diaries are extremely private. My journals however, well, here I am writing one in public. The one that has become my book journal, and now my art journal, for the most part.

So, I keep a personal handwritten diary and a typed book blog. And I know I've mentioned once or twice that I also keep a handwritten garden journal. Almost three years have passed since we bought our house and inherited the gardens and plantings here, and each season we've modestly added to both. I was so excited to get my hands back in the dirt after far too many years of city living without so much as a pocket handkerchief's worth of lawn to tend. So the joy I felt and still feel had to find some kind of an outlet. I've always been this way. Something wonderful happens (or something terrible) and I want to chronicle it and explain to myself how I feel about it. Get it down, somehow. The garden journal took me by surprise - I started out merely wanting to make a few notes about what is planted where, that first spring we were here and were still discovering what was emerging from the ground. Make a few maps of the perennials, note where the bulbs were, that kind of thing. Then I started sketching a few things in, with the same fountain pen I write the text with, then I colored in the sketches with colored pencils. No underdrawing, just a rough sketch and some color and text. I realized quickly that this activity felt very similar to using coloring books when I was little, which I loved. But now I'm creating my own and I must say it's an extremely satisfying activity.

The garden journal has evolved into a chronicle of the seasons here. Maple syrup time, when the berries ripen, when to dig up potatoes, reminders not to be sad when the lilacs are over because something else equally beautiful is happening immediately after they go by. All this activity means when there's something great going on in the garden, I can often be found sitting outside sketching it into the journal. Ryan caught me between rain showers this weekend - one more heavy downpour and the delphiniums were going to break like matchsticks, despite my cobbled-together staking job. I was out there to see what I could see, before it was too late:

Then I looked up and saw Ryan, who brings a goofy smile to my face, no matter what the weather:

The sketching is done, and I'm trying to match the delicate colors of the blue-purple flower petals, which is impossible, but still, I made a valiant attempt. Which is all I ever hope for:

The finished page has more text and color and is a good approximation of what I think I saw:

All this chronicling. Do diarists ever know why they do it, really? Some days I'm not sure and I worry it's all a bit too obsessive. It keeps me busy, I know that, all this writing and drawing. And of course my paintings are also a diary of sorts. Pretty much everything I have to say about everything appears somehow in each one. It's a mystery to me, but it keeps happening. And as long as it does, probably longer, I think I'll be out there looking and trying to get it down somehow, in whatever form I can.

Bookmen's holiday

2010-07-08T16:01:00.013-04:00

Three book bloggers in one room, in rural Maine - what are the chances? Apparently good, when two of them (Ian and Malcolm) kindly go out of their way to track down a reclusive third (yours truly) at her home. A fourth should have traveled here with them but circumstances dictated otherwise, and his presence was deeply missed. Yet, what a rare afternoon we managed to have, talking and looking over books, some fine and not-so-fine, some scarce and medium rare, and some quite common yet somehow loved best of all. It was wonderful to express bookish enthusiasms in person, aloud. Usually they reside among the quieter kinds of happiness, the internal ones, unspoken. Sometimes written, but not that often. And certainly not always among people who completely understand. Because they have it as bad as I do, if not worse, that book-love we suffer from so willingly.

Do you believe that two of the three of us also collect booksellers' tickets? I wonder about the fourth, I've never asked him. (Consider that a leading question, my dear, if you happen to read this.) Even higher odds. I ask you.

Ian has a few photos on his blog, of our visit and the rest of their day. Looking at these, I knew I wasn't the only stop on their bookmen's tour of the downeast coast, but it certainly seems as if I should have politely requested that they stop here first. And then not so politely demanded that they bring me along! Perhaps next time.

Thank you, bookmen. I will treasure the memory of the two of you here. Would that it could have been three of you. Let's make sure it's not the only time such a thing ever happens.

Books on bedside tables

2010-07-01T09:56:00.011-04:00

My working vacation last week was a joy. I painted my heart out and brought it home on canvas. During my last evening on the island I sat in a hammock chair on the big porch of one of the old island houses, atop a cliff facing the sea, and watched the full moon rise over the neighboring islands. No one else was on the island except the caretaker, staying in the house on the opposite side of the island from me. I felt like a ghost. A happy ghost haunting a beautiful place, well satisfied with the week's work, collecting a reward in golden moonlight.

During the week I did some reading in the evenings, by kerosene lantern light. Poetry books by Raymond Carver and Mary Oliver were on the beside table. Charles Hawthorne, too, Hawthorne on Painting. Those are books I've mentioned before, as the ones I take on most trips. They are thin and light and say pretty much everything that needs to be said. Or at least everything I most need to hear.

The morning after the full moon, I packed up and came home - nothing lasts forever, which is as it should be - and here I am again, business as usual, facing the pile of unread and half-read books waiting for me. On the bedside table at the moment:

A biography of Margaret Wise Brown, Awakened by the Moon, by Leonard S. Marcus (Quill 1999)

A History of the English Church and People, Bede (Penguin reprint)

Early Boston Booksellers 1642-1711, George Emery Littlefield (a 1969 Burt Franklin reprint of the 1900 Club of Odd Volumes first edition)

The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth by Roy Andries de Groot (Ecco reprint)

The Bakers' Big Book by Mary and Margaret Baker (Dodd, Mead 1941)

A New York Times book of Sunday crossword puzzles

A nearly-full moleskine journal

That about sums up what I'm most interested in: books, authors, words, food, painting, religion, poetry, stories. Not necessarily in that order.

In The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, de Groot explores the history and cuisine of a remote valley in the French Alps, La Grande Chartreuse. He tells us that the derivation of this place name word is "...a few huts which the Romans defined as catursiani. The word meant 'a little house where one is alone in an isolated and wild place.' The word has remained. It became chartreuse. The Roman settlement is today the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse." (p.9) My copy of this book is secondhand, naturellement, and the person who owned it before I did underlined this passage. Coming as I just have from being alone in a little house in an isolated and wild place, I read this while beaming with pleasure and sympathy. In the introduction de Groot talks of his "deepest sense of relief" upon being able to spend time in this remote and natural landscape (p.viii), and again I smiled with recognition.

Next on the horizon: summer. Painting outside and upstairs, delivering paintings to exhibits, weeding the garden, attempting to sell books, buying at friends-of-the-library book sales, saving pennies ahead for the winter fuel bills. Life seems very full, for such a quiet place. In immediate news, I have a show opening in Blue Hill tomorrow evening, July 2, 5-7 p.m., at Handworks Gallery. Twelve recent paintings. I am just at the stage today, the day before, of worrying if anyone will attend and if I will sell any paintings. (You know, the usual.) Although the latter is not much of a worry, thanks to a dear old friend on the west coast who already called the gallery and purchased two paintings, bless her.

The books on the bedside table help keep these worries at bay, also. They always have. What's on your bedside table, I wonder?

Bon voyage

2010-06-17T12:34:00.010-04:00

I know I shouldn't keep apologizing for not posting very often, but I want to anyway. Besides, I'm merely writing to say that I won't be back here for another week at least. In explanation, I offer a picture of the leading candidate for the best outhouse in the world (see the archive, July 2007, for a few more photos of this charming and well-situated structure):It resides near the harbor I'll soon be seeing in person, not just in photographs, because I'm about to set off on my annual week-long painting trip to Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay. Home of the finest outhouses on the east coast, surely. Just look at this one! Which reminds me, I must remember to pack toilet paper. And extra flashlight batteries. Usually I can do without making lists, but this is the one time I dearly need them, for fidgety details such as these. Important details - sunscreen, bathing suit, sweaters, band-aids. All my art supplies, and enough canvases to keep me painting throughout the week. If I bring too many I'll stress out about having to fill them all by week's end (horror vacui), and if I don't bring enough I'll run out and wish I had a few more for the last day (happened last year). As with so many things in life, it's a fine line.

Last year I read Constable's letters before and during this same trip. This year I've been reading Philip C. Beam's book Winslow Homer at Prout's Neck (Little, Brown 1966) - a classic about this master painter and his Maine experience - and attempting to keep in mind a few pieces of it, for the week ahead. First, from a letter of Homer's:

"'The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The Sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.'" (p.126)

Second, some advice he gave to a young painter friend:

"'...when you paint, try to put down exactly what you see. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway.'" (p.208)

The former is a timely reminder to keep gratitude at the center of everything, and is spoken like a true lover of nature besides. The latter is as concise and helpful a bit of art instruction as I've ever read. Painting is learning to see, and learning how to translate what you see by way of your materials, while simultaneously getting out of your own way. Your style is what you can't help but have, if you paint long enough - the "whatever else." And how I love Winslow Homer's style. He is one of a handful of painters who says in paint what I most want to hear. Wordlessly. For a book person, that's saying a lot. I'll remember what he says this week while I'm wedged in the rocks balancing a canvas on one knee and attempting to get out of my own way.

Until next time.

Renovation complete, more or less

2010-05-27T19:09:00.016-04:00

I know I said I'd return to regular blogging soon. It appears that soon is not yet, however. The summery weather has me painting outside again, and working in the garden (which is almost all in, finally), but not so much sitting in front of the computer. For anyone who is still with me, here is a short post with a few photos. I thought about posting some "before" pictures, but they are far too dreary. Instead, the finished third floor in all its clean splendour. The new dormer window in our formerly dark and dusty attic:

The view is out over the treetops, away down the hill, overlooking the northern edge of Penobscot Bay, or rather, to be precise, the place where the Penobscot River officially becomes the ocean. We see fog coming in, often. Which is good. If it were sunny and clear every day, instead of painting up here I might just spend all my time standing at the window and staring out at the horizon.

My hero Ken the Carpenter built great storage closets under the eaves - this one is for my art supplies. Everything painting-to-be goes in here - canvas, stretcher bars, wooden panels, gesso, extra paint, and my outdoor painting kit. The closets have black forged drop latches on them, and strap hinges:

Walk to the other end of the room and turn and look back and this is what you see - the picture window into the back yard and lots of open space. I know art studios traditionally have north-facing windows, but hey, this is Maine, and I for one am not going to put a skylight or dormer on the north side of this house, for ice to work its way into for several months of the year. The big window faces due east, the dormer south, another window faces west out over the street. That's a lot of light, any time of day. Besides, north light is dark light, if that makes any sense. I want light light.

We (I) painted the chimneys white so they blend in somewhat. Still no light fixtures (note bare bulb hanging from ceiling) and the door at the bottom of the stairwell won't close because the bannister pushed it out of its square slightly. But hey, that's about it, and who's complaining! Not me, this is the best workspace I've ever had. Over the years I've painted in cramped stairwell corners, dark hallways, crowded studios with other artists and all their messy stuff, kitchens. I loved the little studio room I had in the back of the bookshop, but it was only about eight by ten feet. So I painted these teensy paintings. This new room is thirty feet long - I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again - thirty feet long!

Now I need to get busy. The rest of the house is settling down - many books are in motion as we rearrange the book room and guest room - and I'm hoping to sell a lot of both books and paintings this summer, to build up our demolished savings account once again before snow flies and I worry about the winter heating bills. Here's to a good season...

Local forecast: bookish with a chance of showers

2010-05-19T20:01:00.027-04:00

I spent this dark rainy day ensconced in the book room at home, regarding my subfusc accumulations with a jaundiced eye. Not to overly anthropomorphise, but they responded in kind. Having moved the books several times over the past few years, I find myself wanting to significantly lighten the load, so I've been culling again. The books seem to know, and cringe away from me deeper into the shelves.

They can't hide, though. I looked at every book on every shelf. Now, when we moved into this house, I haphazardly organized the books as I unpacked them, and haven't rearranged since. Which means today, sorting, I found Evelyn Waugh shelved in three different places, and W. Somerset Maugham in two, and Christopher Morley all over. I also found myself wondering if I will ever read anything by Anthony Powell (shelved in two places). Do I need A Dance to the Music of Time in both hardcover and softcover? Do I need books about Anthony Powell if I've never read Anthony Powell himself? Does my well-being require ten books by H.H. the Dalai Lama, or will five suffice? Am I required to keep books other people have given me, books I did not choose and will certainly never read? Books inscribed to me? Do I need to own a book just because I've already owned it for twenty years? If I will never have a complete collection of the McSweeney's oeuvre, why should I retain some decidedly odd novels just because they carry that imprint? I used to love the novels of Douglas Coupland, do I still? Is Lorrie Moore just too depressing to have around, brilliant as her books are, even if they are first editions? Why, exactly, do I have all these books about the British Empire, and why do I love them so? I did a lot of standing around and staring into space while thinking thoughts such as these. It made for a long day.

However, I also took action, and pulled twelve cartons' worth of books out of there, while using the criteria that what remains must be what I dearly love. The culls are headed to my book booth at the antiques mall in Bangor. Where they will no doubt reside indefinitely. So I really do still own them, even if they aren't here at home with me. A comforting thought, in many ways. It seems to be so much more difficult to deaccession books than it is to acquire them...

On the bright side (where I usually live, on non-rainy days), I rediscovered many wonderful things to read, and read soon. Also, what remains has room to breathe, and entire subjects have room to expand once again, should I be lucky enough to find additions. I've purposely avoided any book sales and shops recently, vowing to clear out before bringing more in. Mission accomplished.

Watching paint dry

2010-05-14T15:39:00.010-04:00

Apologies for the hiatus. I've been working with the builder to finish the attic renovation, and I've been painting walls and ceilings for a week and a half, and am finally finished. He primed it, I painted it. A big job. I still have many window mullions, should I decide they need to be painted, instead of treated in some other fashion. But I can't face them just yet. I've been too tired to blog, and too tired to do much of anything else, either. The garden remains unplanted, to my chagrin. I haven't been at the easel at all, or read anything of note lately, or done much of anything except attempt to keep the house in order while this project wraps up. Of course it went on three weeks longer and cost twice as much as we'd hoped, but the result is worth it. The space is better than I'd ever dreamed it could be. Light-filled and old-fashioned and beautiful. I'll post some photos soon. Right now (or rather just before writing this post and resuming immediately after finishing writing this post) I'm moving in and setting up my studio. This involves two flights of stairs and four hundred paintings (give or take), many portfolios of drawings and watercolors, picture frames, three easels, a few tables and chairs, and several big baskets of art supplies. I'm taking an afternoon break, in the midst of all that, so here I am.

To catch up a bit, a few blog posts I mulled over but never wrote, during the last few weeks:

High points of home renovation (seeing the room primed for the first time, transformed from a big dark cobwebby space into a sunny light-box)

Low points of home renovation (dropping the shop-vac down the stairs, after vacuuming)

Visits with gallerists (two gallery owners/curators have been here recently to choose paintings for summer exhibits, details to follow)

Is there anything nicer than a room with absolutely nothing in it? (yesterday I almost wished I didn't have to move anything in there at all, except my yoga mat)

Rediscovering the library (moving all the stored paintings away from in front of the bookcases in the book room means I am meeting many old friends again)

Rediscovering the living room (moving all the recent paintings and easels and art supplies out of the living room means, well, we have a living room again)

Marathon roadside checkpoints (Ryan is running the Sugarloaf marathon in western Maine this Sunday - I'll be meeting him at points along the way, in the car, with extra shoes, clothes, calories, loud music, and anything else he might need to help him on his way to the finish line)

And finally, on a more serious note, one unwritten post has been particularly on my mind:

If you have your health, you have everything (a close family member will have an operation on Monday to remove a spot of lung cancer, which has me praying for him, and deeply appreciating the blessings of good health)

That's what's happening around here. I hope to return to regular writing again soon. Thanks for your patience, those who might still be reading.

Books as comfort food

2010-04-27T13:16:00.030-04:00

When under stress, I return to the sure safety of old favorites. Grilled cheese sandwiches, blueberry muffins. Peanut butter cookies, with pressed fork patterns on the tops. Really good scrambled eggs. And this morning, Laurie Colwin's book of essays, Home Cooking (Knopf 1988). Yesterday, a short story collection from Sarah Orne Jewett. Last week, a few Georgette Heyer novels. Before that, a visit with Louise Andrews Kent and her Mrs. Appleyard. All re-reads five times over, of the loved and the known - they never fail to bring a measure of relief, and a righting of a temporarily wavering compass.

Sarah Orne Jewett, in particular. Her prose is steeped with all things Maine, yet she still manages to take me away completely. And not just into a far past. As I've said before, not much happens in her stories, at least on the surface. They contain only a few characters, perhaps an incident or two on which all things turn, much quiet country description, but also a fresh immediacy and a precise noticing of human emotion that never seems to change, despite the passing of a century or two. One of the best stories in this particular collection (The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, Anchor 1989, the softcover with the perfect detail of a Fairfield Porter painting on the cover) is Martha's Lady, which opens thusly:

"One day, many years ago, the old Judge Pyne house wore an unwonted look of gayety and youthfulness. The high-fenced green garden was bright with June flowers. Under the elms in the large shady front yard you might see some chairs placed near together, as they often used to be when the family were all at home and life was going on gayly with eager talk and pleasure-making; when the elder judge, the grandfather, used to quote that great author, Dr. Johnson, and say to his girls, 'Be brisk, be splendid, and be public.'" (p.244)

How could you not want to read on, after that? I defy anyone to read this story and not cry at the end, from sadness and joy in equal amounts together. Anyone with a tender heart, that is (which must be all of us, secretly, mustn't it?). Her stories are perfect aides to contemplation of one's good fortune in modern life, no matter what is happening. I always come away from her words feeling like a righted ship. I could say the same for any of my comforts, in their own ways.

I would love to hear what others consider their favorite comfort foods, either of the readable or the merely edible varieties... what do you turn to and re-turn to? I know, here I am talking about food again, but it can't be helped. The house still carries the scent of those peanut butter cookies I made a few hours ago.

Order versus chaos

2010-04-23T18:49:00.017-04:00

Symmetry, proportion, order = what I yearn for when chaos reigns. Week four of renovations and I had to get out of the house, so midweek I spent a sunny morning in Castine, sketching around town while Ryan was working. I say sketching, but really I just wandered slowly about looking at architectural details and savoring their classical harmonies. Castine, like many other coastal Maine enclaves, is currently dusting off and preparing for the return of its summer inhabitants. This means old houses are crawling with local landscapers, painters, roofers, you name it. Lawns are being mowed for the first time. Tulips are dutifully opening. Clapboards are being scraped. Chimneys are receiving new mortar. Many yards contain nary a dead leaf.

All that maintenance, and yet some houses there seem to exist in a state of perpetual perfection. A few in particular I can't imagine paint daring to flake off a single piece of trim, ever, despite the wind that can howl up into the harbor. Ancient they are, with lovely details. Ryan says he's heard of a photography book about the doorways of Castine, but I can't find mention of it. So here are a few snapshots of my own favorite front doors in town.

This one is quite small and has dear old handforged bootscrapers set into the granite steps:

Next, I am a fan of fanlights. And wisteria, or whatever clinging vine is climbing the trellis:

One red door in a town of the whitest white houses - how brave! It goes with its holly hedge:

I love the twelve-over-twelve windows on this stern beauty, and the rounded fanlight panes:

Lastly, I sat across the street from this elegant place for an hour, watercolor paper on my lap, pan of pigment on the ground beside me. I loved the shadows and the warm yellow clapboards. The shutters are that very dark green that appears black in shadow, and not quite so black in full sun. My painting fell flat, but I might try again, in oils. Perhaps if the inhabitants take the storm door away for the summer. Or when the flowers are in bloom.

After a surfeit of architecture I sat on the beach and stared out to sea (one of my special talents - years of practice, I've had), and made a few slightly more successful watercolors of the view down the bay. Then came home much refreshed and ready to face the FINAL WEEK of building. Now here I sit, surrounded by paint chips, thinking how ironic it is that a painter can't decide what colors to paint her studio. I must choose, this weekend. All those clean shades of white in Castine have me thinking. And yet, so many places there are vacant in winter. I think I need something warmer, but something that won't distract from or fight with whatever I happen to have on the easel. I am leaning toward cream. Hodge the Cat approves.

Divine landscapes

2010-04-18T09:30:00.027-04:00

A spring garden with nothing planted in it yet is a beautiful sight. New England folklore says plant your peas on Patriots' Day if you want to harvest them on the Fourth of July. I'll get busy with that. Tomorrow. Because I have declared today a rest day. Ryan is of course out running a road race, but I am here writing and eating oatmeal with raspberries and I don't plan on doing much else today. I might take a walk.

And read. I've been slowly savoring a challenging and beautiful book sent to me by a reader from overseas (thank you, dear R), written by one of my current literary loves, Ronald Blythe. The book is Divine Landscapes: A Pilgrimage Through Britain's Sacred Places (Viking 1986), and in it Blythe travels through scenes of religious literary history, tracking William Langland, John Bunyan, George Herbert, and others, while describing the effects of physical terrain on their writings and spiritual lives. The chapter on Bunyan and The Pilgrim's Progress is particularly fine; entitled How to Make a Pilgrimage Without Leaving Home, it says of Bunyan's hero Christian:

"...his life has remained an astonishing lesson on how an ordinary person can intensify the home scene. Don't get bogged down in it.... Get up and go to the visible heights of love." (p.121)

This book is full of such fine writing. I didn't want the chapter about George Herbert to end. It made me wish that Blythe had written an entire biography of him. Blythe quotes from Herbert's book Outlandish Proverbs, after writing the finest definition of a proverb I've come across:

"...a proverb had its resonance. It was a statement of plain truth which hung around in one's hearing, setting up an intricate kind of thoughtfulness." (p.150)

One of Herbert's proverbs reads: "Building is sweet impoverishing." Oh my, yes. The local proverb about planting peas pales by comparison to some of Herbert's. Many of his are still common parlance today, "Living well is the best revenge," et al.

Speaking of building (and impoverishing), Sunday is also our builder's day of rest. The house is blissfully quiet. It's still too early to plant, even if just by one day. But I've been out admiring my handiwork in the gardens. Here is our little vegetable garden, ready to receive seeds and seedlings. The chives in the foreground are huge, and the forsythia is in full bloom:

Backing up a bit, this is the herb garden I finished yesterday. Once that lumber was gone and the stone set into place, it looked like it had always been there:

A close-up of the herb garden - each bed is about five by seven feet. In it we have more chives, sage, thyme, a tiny tarragon, and some anise hyssop just beginning to show green. I'm going to fill the center with basil and lemon basil, and have flowers over in the right bed, as yet undetermined, maybe nasturtiums with creeping thyme around the edges:

I love the gardens at this early stage of spring, they remind me of carpet pages from medieval illuminated manuscripts, so square and clean and plain against the wildly greening grass. I'll end with this today, from the Blythe book (p.152), a bit of George Herbert's perfect verse about his own beloved gardens:

Nothing we see, but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure;
The whole is, either our cupboard of food,
or cabinet of pleasure.

What to do when there's nothing to do

2010-04-16T08:20:00.013-04:00

What a week. I am not yet at the end of my rope, but there it is, in plain sight. Attic renovations continue, and the house is too noisy and messy to get much done as far as my usual round of contemplative activities goes. That, and our car is in the shop, after stranding us for the very first time ever at these nice people's yard sale. There were many cartons of books at the sale, which is why we stopped - I even ran into one of my favorite antiquarian booksellers there, he stopped too, for the same reason - but the books were uniformly terrible. We called Triple A. And waited. They never arrived. A handy fellow overheard us talking and helped get the car started so we could limp home. We finally got it to the garage yesterday. All that is to say that I am housebound for now, and anxious about what the mechanic will be telling me later today about the state of our vehicle. Ryan is carpooling to work with a friend. It's too cold to paint outside. I'm too tired to go running. I'm stranded in rural Maine. Really the only thing left to do is garden.

It's actually too cold to garden, too, but not to prepare to garden. So this week I've cleaned out the vegetable beds and ripped deeply-buried grass roots out from under the stone that surrounds them. Another week or two and I can start planting. And my big spring project is well underway: expanding the little herb bed into something larger and more attractive. When we moved here it had pressure-treated lumber around it, which was never good-looking in the first place, and has not aged well in the last two years. Yesterday I removed all that ugly stuff, weeded out around it, uprooted a lot of sod to double the size of the bed, and dug a small trench around the edges. Then Ryan and I went for a walk in the woods behind the house, where loads of beautiful old fieldstone reside. Decades ago this house had an ell and a giant barn, both of which had fieldstone foundations. This stone is now scattered around the edges of our acre. We found more than enough to make a stone wall around the herb bed. I can't lift most of them, but I can pry them along, and roll them into place.

It's satisfying work. And what more fitting thing to do right now, than roll stones around like Sisyphus.

I've got the neat freak blues

2010-04-13T09:55:00.015-04:00

We are two weeks in to this attic renovation at home and the house is a freaking shambles. Which means my obsessive-compulsive tendencies toward neatness are stretched pretty tight right now. But light gleams at the end of the tunnel, as the third floor takes shape. We have insulation, walls, subfloor, lights, outlets, and heat. Flooring, trim, another window, and paint are still to come. Perhaps another week and it will be finished. First, I think I will sleep for a week. (Why am I this tired, even though I'm not the one doing all the work?) And next, dust everything off and move in.

A painter I admire once said that painting is not a spectator sport and I quite agree, so it will be very fine to have this private place to work, hidden at the top of the house. The finished room will be thirty feet long, by about twelve feet wide, with a good high ceiling. Big storage closets built in under the eaves, a picture window for light, a dormer window for the view, a little place for a desk and chair, but mostly just open space, so I can set up my easel and table, and actually get far enough away from my paintings, as I make them. It's not an art myth, painters do really work on their paintings for a while, then walk far away from them and take a look, then go in close again to get back to work. This one does, anyway. And for years I've never had the space (except when I'm painting outside) to really back up far enough to get that good long look. Soon I'll have thirty feet. In just another week or so.

I'm trying to decide if I want to take any books up there at all. On the whole, I think not. Because once you let a few in the door, others inevitably follow. This I know.

The best of intentions

2010-04-11T09:04:00.007-04:00

Remember when I mentioned that I was planning on culling my books? I mean, the book room here is so full that my mother is gently reminding me that the sills under the north side of the house may not support all that weight forever. Well, I thought about starting yesterday. Really buckling down. But instead Ryan and I got out of the house and somehow I came home with a grocery bag full of... books. I don't know how it happened. I am doomed, DOOMED!

Ruined by reading?

2010-04-09T09:03:00.027-04:00

Right before I read Susan Hill's book, I read another book about books I've seen knocking around for years, but somehow never got around to until now: Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Beacon 1997). Reading these two books in such close proximity made me aware of their similarities - both written by intelligent, opinionated, literate women, both steeped in all things books, both looking deep into their reading pasts while also taking place in the present day. They made me want to write my own. I enjoyed both, though the only thing I didn't like about Schwartz's book was its title. Is it supposed to be ironic? Because she wasn't ruined by reading. In fact reading was her lifeline. Although I realize that yesterday I did refer to book-love as an affliction. To which Schwartz says:

""...reading is not a disabling affliction. I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?" (p.15)

Hmm. Later on she worries that she often can't remember what she's read, which made me smile with recognition, and she ponders the real reason behind reading, something intangible and far beyond simply gathering and retaining information:

"...in reading, the body is still. Indeed what reading teaches, first and foremost, is how to sit still for long periods and confront time head-on. The dynamism is all inside, an exalted, spiritual exercise so utterly engaging that we forget time and mortality along with all of life's lesser woes, and simply bask in the everlasting present. So I see, finally, why it hardly matters whether I remember the contents of the book. Mere information is nothing compared to this silent flurry." (pp.115-116)

I don't know if I've ever read a better description of the interior state reading induces, the ephemeral state that I, for one, am addicted to. So, reading. Affliction or saving grace? Both?

Acquired tastes

2010-04-08T09:09:00.060-04:00

Books about books have been casting out lures to me for much of my life, lures I have not resisted, or even wanted to resist. Reading them comforts me. Other booklovers are out there, suffering from this same affliction. And as I accumulate more books and discover they need to be tended to, dealt with, decided upon, lived with, cared for, and I don't know what-all, and on top of all that, dusted regularly, and, oh yeah, read, I realize that it truly is an affliction. I am coming to know the weight of books. Their spiritual and physical heft. This presents a conundrum, because as I grow older, I want to be lighter. So, while I love my books, I want to live with less of them. Fewer, and better. Stuff of all kinds is shifting around our house during this construction project, and I feel a big book sort coming on to help lighten the load. A cull. How dreadful.

In her latest book, Howard's End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home (Profile 2009), author Susan Hill faces her own houseful of books and realizes she hasn't read many of the ones she wishes to read, and re-read. So, she sets herself a year of no new book purchases, in order to read what she already has. I can't imagine being that stringent with myself, but I can certainly sympathize, so the book makes for interesting reading. I picked up a secondhand copy at the recommendation of a reader I trust, having read no other books by Hill except a lovely collection of her gardening essays. But once I saw the dust jacket, I knew I was doomed. Just look at it. Books about books are bad enough, but when they also have pictures of books on their covers I know I am doubly doomed. Must Own.

The book contains a series of short essays about her bookish loves and hates, ranged over her year of self-imposed restraint. She has me with her immediately, as a reader, because she begins with The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. I am on her side. Then she loses me an instant later by saying that in the other Sayers books "...the Wimsey-Harriet Vane love story is embarrassing..." (p.15). I myself am happily romantic, gullible, and naive, so I do not find this love story embarrassing, in fact just the opposite. This little episode, early on, serves as a barometer for the rest of Hill's book. I was with her, so often - she loves Patrick Leigh Fermor, and some of Bruce Chatwin - and then she lost me completely and utterly - she cannot read Jane Austen, doesn't see the point, and name-calls James Lees-Milne, even though she loves his early diaries. But she had me again, with terrific chapter titles such as Never Got Around to It, Don't Like the Look of It, Couldn't Get Beyond Page Ten and Other Poor Excuses, which begins:

"There is no reason why most of the books I own but have never actually read should be more or less in one place. They just are. Maybe they quietly gravitated into the sitting room one by one, to sob and huddle together for warmth." (p.63)

So good. But she lost me again completely, by writing such things as "Bookplates are for posers..." (p.124) and "Antiquarian booksellers, whose trade is in books but who rarely seem to read them..." (p.126) Ouch! Then I came back to her way of thinking: "Books should pay rent." (p.200) The whole book was like this, a back-and-forth describing her highly personal reading selection and strong opinions about books and book people. Her own, often divergent from the tastes of others (mine, say, or yours), which is as it should be. She describes her house, full of her books, after all.

Reading this was like consuming a dish with one ascerbic ingredient, added for piquancy. Balsamic vinegar? Capers? Strong taste, with bite, and often delicious. If you enjoy that kind of thing, as I do.

Full steam ahead!

2010-04-03T10:49:00.014-04:00

Release the hounds! What a crazy-busy week, everything seems to be happening at once, after what was, on the exterior at least, a long quiet winter of a whole lot of nothing. The big news around here is that we found a carpenter who has started work on our attic renovation. We decided to move ahead and try to get it done, spend that tax refund, live for today, since this great builder is available now. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it. The sweet sound of a nail gun and radial arm saw is echoing from the third floor, as we speak. Music to my ears. It feels so good to invest in this place, and in myself as a painter. And yet, spending money makes me a bit twitchy, to be honest, so I haven't been sleeping well. But more importantly, I have been painting well and have a few exhibits planned for this summer. All good.

Between paintings I inhaled the Warhol Diaries. The editor, Pat Hackett, took down the diary entries every weekday, over the phone from Andy, for years. Some were on tape. She says in the introduction that the diary was originally 20,000 pages. She edited it down to over 800 - didn't want it to sound too much like a laundry list of names and places. So, if Andy went to five parties in one night, she narrowed it down to one or two, etc. 20,000 pages! I want the laundry list! All the parties! Unedited! More, more!

Reading this huge book again and loving it so much made me realize, more than ever, that I really must face the fact that I have an odd sense of literary discernment. Which is to say, I may have no sense of literary discernment. Because whatever book I happen to be reading at a given time becomes my new favorite book. And of course I love to talk about how wonderful it is. And then someone may actually go out and buy a copy of said book, and attempt to read it, and find it to be not one's cup of tea in the least. I mean, I love Warhol and his weird diaries, but then, as a teenager, I was up here in rural Maine absolutely glued to Michael Musto's great New York nightlife articles in Details magazine. That to me was really the news. So, Warhol spent time with some of the same people I read about back then in Details. (Long before it became a men's style magazine, I should say.) Old home week! He even mentions Michael Musto, which made me smile. So, all that is to say caveat emptor. In case anyone takes anything I say here seriously. Onward...

What not to talk about

2010-03-26T09:51:00.013-04:00

I was looking at some of my old posts recently, and realized I've just got to resist the urge to talk about the weather. Boring stuff! Who cares! Note to self: do not talk about the weather, or food, or life complaints. Unless book-related. Or art-related. (For example, I like to paint food. And read about it.) Everyone eats, everyone experiences the weather, everyone has troubles. We all know this. We don't need to talk about it all the time. In fact, it can be a relief not to.

So instead of mentioning the snow on the ground this morning - oop - I will say instead that I would be writing a lovely review of this great new book-about-books sitting on top of the to-be-read pile on my bedside table, except I haven't read it yet. It looks amazing. But I can't pick it up and start reading it because I can't seem to put down The Andy Warhol Diaries (Warner 1989). I can't seem to finish them, either - what a massive book - 800+ pages of densely-packed social gossip that gets better and better the longer I read. I found my copy again in the boxes I sorted out earlier in the week. I read this book when it was published, but haven't since then, and what I don't remember the first time around was the déjà vu I'm experiencing as I go along. The events he mentions happening are things I remember happening. I'm up to 1983 in the book, when I was a teenager. He was in his 50s by then, and was an active participant in a particular social arena, one involving bucketloads of money and power. And, like a Forrest Gump-type observer, he saw a lot of important world events unfold before him. All that is interspersed with candid gossip about movies and tv and artists and celebrities and society folk. And sex and drugs and rock and roll. Which makes interesting reading, but what really gets me and keeps me turning pages into the night is all the other stuff, the personal things. He's alone and weeping on Easter, and again on Christmas. He's working on Thanksgiving. His skin is always broken out. He goes to church a lot. He's suffering from unrequited love. He's afraid his art is no good any more. He's worried about his health. He's worried about his reputation. He gets a death threat. I mean, I can't put it down - I'm not going to get anything else done until I finish this book!

I know I mentioned this vis-à-vis the Samuel Pepys Diary, but it bears repeating. I think the oddest thing about reading diaries, or any memoir in which we know the ending, is the sense that the writer does not know what we, the readers, know. Hindsight again. For me today, it's 1983 in this particular diary, page 481, and Andy Warhol doesn't know he will only live another four years. I remember the week he died - my freshman year of college. I worked in a dining hall and took home an empty industrial-size can of Campbell's Soup to keep my paintbrushes in. An arty friend of mine walked around clutching a copy of his Interview magazine. I think I still have my copy of the memorial issue, I can picture the cover photo of him. It's so strange to read a contemporary diary such as this, containing all the cultural references I understand, yet at the same time dishing the dirt (exquisitely) about a world I never knew. Very different than reading Pepys. Yet compelling to me for exactly the same reasons. I don't know where I'm going with this. I feel like I'm repeating myself, so I'll stop there.

This wasn't even what I intended to write about today. What I really wanted to mention (not the weather, not what I'm about to have for lunch, not my worries) was this website I've been reading lately, Five Books, "The best five books on everything," a subsidiary of The Browser news magazine. I really like their manatee logo. I love manatees. The interviews and articles are good, too.

Spring makeover?

2010-03-24T11:19:00.008-04:00

Forget spring cleaning, I need a makeover more than the house does. In winter, things kind of get let go somehow. I wear the same wool sweaters in rotation, and by the time the weather is warm enough to stop wearing them (not quite yet), I want to burn them in the woodstove. Same goes for the long-sleeved t-shirts I wear under the sweaters, mostly old road race t-shirts of Ryan's. And the sagging turtlenecks. And then there's my hair. Without my knowledge it seems to have evolved into a style called stay-out-of-my-face-while-I-paint. Which involves bobby pins. My closet also needs a thorough overhaul. Glancing at it, I immediately consider taking half of its contents to the local consignment shop. Somewhere in the past I vaguely remember wearing pretty dresses and skirts and flip-flops and linen shirts and sunhats and bright colors. When was that? Oh, right, summer. What else - my yoga practice has been languishing of late, and I've been walking but not running (need new running shoes, have been putting off buying them), so the five pounds I gained over the holidays is still with me, lurking in the usual places.

That about covers it. Ugh. The short list for April - haircut by someone other than myself, new running shoes, get back to the yoga mat, find something pretty to wear. Replace the bedroom curtains, paint the bathroom. I feel better already! On the bright side, I did roll up my sleeves and sort through about thirty boxes of stuff a few days ago - old shop things, books (many many books) - and found a lot to discard, donate, consolidate, and price and take away to my book booth at the antiques mall. And of course read. It was like taking a trip to a fabulous bookshop and coming home with stacks and stacks of great books to read. Without leaving the house - a neat trick. I suspect that when I rearrange the book room I will experience a similar epiphany. I'm actually about to start reading a book about a woman who swears off new book acquisitions for a year, just so she can read the books she already has at home and has always meant to read or re-read. I should have written this book! Details and full report to follow.

Another Friday night

2010-03-19T21:17:00.010-04:00

And here I sit picking price stickers off the heap of books I bought at Goodwill today. The stickers are the kind that come apart as soon as you pull up one little corner. So you have to pick off ten little sticker bits instead of one big sticker. Almost all the books at this particular Goodwill are 99 cents each, and if I ruled the world they would not have stickers on them at all, there would simply be a sign stating that all the books are 99 cents each, thereby saving sticker-picking customers all kinds of irritation. Not to mention the time it takes to put price stickers on them all in the first place. Like I said, if I ruled the world. Unfortunately I don't, so here I sit pick pick pick.

The books are worth it, though: Don Marquis, Edward O. Wilson, Bashō, Julian Barnes, Marilynne Robinson, a history of avant-garde art, a coffee table book about diner cars, et al. And I do love sprucing up books for new ownership, or for inclusion in my own collection. De-stickered, dusted and wiped down, renewed - welcome home, books. You will be loved.

Around the farm

2010-03-18T09:07:00.022-04:00

I'm still recovering from reading the William Targ book - such verve and urbanity has me feeling like a country mouse - oh, wait, I am a country mouse! And I love it! But that doesn't mean I don't like peeking into worlds other than my own. For example, while googling around to see what Targ was up to during the twenty-five years he lived after publishing his memoir, I found this great page of candid photographs by Bill Yoscary, who took the pictures at Gotham Book Mart events. There are several in there of Roslyn and Bill Targ and lots of schmoozing authors and artists and book people, such as Joe Brainard, Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, Lawrence Durrell, Andy Warhol and some Superstars, and Frances Steloff. Sure would like to hear what they were all talking about.

Thankfully I can divine some of the talk from the books these people left in their wakes. I've been slowly unpacking the remaining boxes of my shop stuff, and came across a perennial favorite of mine, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Harcourt 1977). I bought this book at the Museum of Modern Art gift shop when I saw the Warhol retrospective there in 1989, when I thought I was a city mouse and, as an art student, when Warhol was my hero. Reading through it, you know, it is still a great little memoir, the artist in his own words. Same vintage as the Targ memoir, same gossipy smart city-insider flavor. Books books books, I can't get enough of them!

I have been putting them aside from time to time, though, and as this blog has been image-free for too long (and in the spirit of this oddly-early spring) here are a few pictures I took two days ago around "the farm," as we affectionately call our slightly-less-than-an-acre of land. The crocuses by the stone wall are now fully open and very cheerful:

When I removed dead leaves from the herb bed, I found the thyme sending out greenery:

And even the chives are getting into the act - I'll be able to clip some soon, for an omelette. I ate one and it was very tender and fresh and sweetly oniony, the taste of pure green:

The little round bed on the side of the lawn has another thyme shrub getting green, and some daffodil shoots are coming up, too, at the back of it:

And finally, since we Mainers always try to stay one step ahead of the weather, here's the backyard woodpile, all ready for next winter. When we bought wood last year we bought twice as much as we needed, so this pile has an extra year to get really good and dry. Around here, this says security, more than anything:

In the Warhol book, he says, "I'm a city boy. In the big cities they've set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don't have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick." (p.154) I love going away, but whenever I am away, I can't wait to get back home, back to the coast of Maine, back to the farm.

To recommend or not to recommend...

2010-03-16T09:40:00.015-04:00

...that is the question. This last week I've been reading, among other things, Indecent Pleasures: The life and colorful times of WILLIAM TARG (Macmillan 1975). Bookman Extraordinaire. Finished it yesterday. What to say about a book which frequently touches upon, rather too intimately, topics such as proctology and porn, while simultaneously providing some of the most fascinating reminiscences ever written about the book business. Targ did it all, from teenage office boy at Macmillan Chicago to bookshop owner to letterpress printer and fine press publisher to editor at World to editor in chief at Putnam to bon vivant husband of glam literary agent Roslyn Targ. He lived to be 92, and what a life it was!

His rambling memoir gossips about his dealings with everyone you can name in the book world circa 1930 through the 70s. I mean everyone: publishers, authors, editors, agents, typographers, booksellers, reviewers, salespeople, collectors. Many familiar to me - I loved the small sections on Ben Abramson, Bruce Rogers, Christopher Morley, Bennett Cerf, Lawrence Clark Powell, Frances Steloff, Edward Gorey. Also blockbusters such as Mario Puzo (Targ ushered The Godfather into print). And so many completely unfamiliar to me - but no longer, thanks to Targ.

While at World, he published the classic biography Rosenbach, and Pi (the lovely Bruce Rogers miscellany), and the facsimile reprint of the Kelmscott Chaucer. For those three things alone, I love him forever. But also for descriptions such as this, from his memoir:

"A bleak and cold Saturday morning in February 1973 in Paris. Sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Montalembert, I was awaiting the arrival of the Most Important Living Writer in the World. (My characterization.) The prospect was dizzying, almost beyond my endurance." (p.113)

He was waiting to meet Samuel Beckett.

Another bit of fine writing, describing a visit to Oxford University Press:

"In comparatively freezing temperatures I saw men at work, printing the Bible. The famous Oxford India paper was floating out of the press' rollers, and holding one of the sheets in both my arms I marvelled at the beautiful wet, black ink impressed like a lover's kiss on the snowy paper, so featherlight." (p.398)

Talk about book-love! Passages like those kept me reading through the sprawl and rant of his wildly opinionated soundings-off on all topics imaginable: feminism, race, politics, food, religion, cosmology, carnality. And books course through it all like an inundating river. It sounds like he read just about as much as is humanly possible for one person to read in a lifetime. Early on he says:

"I've never really regretted being a high school dropout. The rigors and regimentation of school interfered with my indiscriminate reading..." (p.24)

When we quiet introverts read about someone like this - one of the great striders through life - rife with such worldly and lushly hedonistic experiences - it is not without a pang of envy. So naturally, in the spirit of encouragement, he provides us with the perfect bit of advice on that very subject:

"Envy leads to nothing. What matters is to make a decision, decide what you want, then try your damnedest to let it happen." (p.329)

Much of this memoir is in fact advice, some of the bookish kind - how to acquire manuscripts, how to be an editor, how to deal with authors you are editing, how to navigate the book world - some not, but all fascinating, albeit with more than a touch of bombast. He closes the book with a few more pieces of general advice, to those seeking to live fully. One I repeat here:

"Try not to miss anything worth experiencing." (p.412, italics his)

The other, on the last page (p.413), is even better, but contains the classic cuss word I can't bring myself to repeat here. (Targ would not approve of that, but as I've said before, this is a family show.) Like the rest of the book, it's worth reading. So go find a copy yourself. I'd recommend it.

A week of firsts

2010-03-14T12:20:00.009-04:00

This past week was so beautiful here in Maine - sunny skies, warm weather, general luminosity - and it gradually became the week of spring firsts for us. The first picnic lunch at the harbor, first walk around the state park loop road (the snow finally melted), first open crocus, first library book sale when it wasn't too cold to wait outside beforehand (not that a little cold weather would have stopped us, but still), first new entry written in the garden journal, first long walks with no hat and mittens, first time in bare feet (very briefly!), first raking out of the remainder of last year's dead-leaf windrows. All-around satisfying stuff.

At the library sale I picked up a few books by William James, and so this week also found me reading his words for the first time. One book, a nice little hardcover with the irresistible title On Vital Reserves (Henry Holt, a reprint from 1922), contains the essay The Gospel of Relaxation. He says that "...the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear." (pp.45-46) To paraphrase, use your will to regulate your actions, which shall in turn regulate your emotions. Couldn't we all use a courage-fit, from time to time?

He goes on to recommend that over-busy and stressed-out and generally worried Americans need to "Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good." (p.70) Even if I don't agree with all of it, a lovely little screed about letting go - letting go of one's worries and cares and preoccupations with outcome. On the last page of the essay, he worries that someone hearing these words "...may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will..." (p.78), which made me smile, hitting as close to home as that does.

Well, worries aside for the moment, and strenuous relaxation at the fore, I'm glad to say that this week helped refill my own vital reserves. I wish the same for you, dear reader - I can't say happy spring yet, but soon - all the signs are right in front of us. Bon courage!

The book room

2010-03-08T18:08:00.011-05:00

I have the spring cleaning heebie-jeebies today. I started with the overrun bookcase in the dining room (gardening, cookery, field guides), where I found books I forgot I owned. Overall I didn't get far and am in fact feeling quite grumpy over the state of our house. Our beautiful, well-proportioned old house, which, when we moved in over two years ago, we had set up just about how we wanted it. Then I closed the bookshop and brought everything home. And we started a renovation project last year (the attic), which displaced stuff and generally made a mess. A year later, the attic remains unfinished until I accrue such funds as will be necessary to finish it off - it still needs walls and floors, and lights, and a heating duct.

Fast-forward to now. The stuff from the bookshop is winnowed down to the things I just don't know what to do with. Boxes of stuff - credit card machines, old shop receipts, files, gew-gaws. And extra bookcases and furniture. And the contents of my old art studio, which was in the back room of the bookshop. All this stuff is taking up space upstairs in our spare room, and more importantly, in the book room, where, to my great discontent, sit rafts of paintings with dust covers over them and boxes and stacks of everything you can imagine, piled in front of the bookcases. Which means I cannot even get to many of my own books. This in no way pleases me. To think that the things I love best in my own home, the things I truly value, what I spend almost all my time working on somehow - books and paintings - are more or less a freaking shambles. So distressing to my generally tidy spring-cleaning self.

Well, the good news is that this is a temporary state of affairs. (Even if temporary means two years.) We've almost made it through winter and "the heating season" as it's known in these parts, and I am slowly but surely accruing funds earmarked for the completion of the attic renovation. This summer should see it through. Then I can tuck away, in newly-constructed storage under the eaves, the ghosts of my bookshop, and, in built-in painting racks, keep the unsold artwork. THEN, I will reconstruct what I originally dreamed of when we bought this great old place - a book room, lined with shelves, filled with all of my dear friends, with nothing else in the room except for a comfortable reading chair, a place to rest my feet, a decent lamp, and a small stand to have reading glasses handy (I'm going to need them soon), and perhaps a coaster for a teacup. Maybe - maybe - a soft place for the cat to sit. He can't have my chair. Well, at least not all the time. Days like today, when the book room is still a distant dream, I look around longingly for that reading chair. This might be it, if I ever could ever aspire to such a thing. The matching ottoman, too, of course. Since we're dreaming.

My life is an open book

2010-03-01T10:16:00.012-05:00

Before beginning to read the Pepys Diary, I was, I vaguely recall, busy swooning over Lord Peter Wimsey. So coming full circle, I recently returned to reading Dorothy L. Sayers, and found myself wondering yet again how I can love someone who isn't even real. I mean, he's a fictional character, a flawed ideal, so very upper-crusty and bookish. Oh, wait, perhaps that explains it. I came across these words of Wimsey's, in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club:

"'Books... are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with 'em, and then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.'"

I read that and thought, Oh, how lovely and how true - I have a house full of earlier stages of development, as well as stages yet to be evolved into - and made a note of the passage, and said to myself I must put that on my blog. Then with a sad pang I realized that I already have (see archive, May, 2006). Great, I'm repeating myself. Which is a worry of mine, now that I seem to have written in depth about every possible item of interest issuing forth from Planet Sarah. If anyone would like to know anything, for god's sake please ask. News here is thin on the ground. I may have to start turning to fiction myself.

But back to Sayers. Wimsey is a rare book collector and I must mention two stories in her collection Lord Peter (Harper 1972), because their plots hinge upon rare books: The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention features a Nuremberg Chronicle as a plot device, and The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head features an antiquarian bookseller named Mr. Ffolliott (ooh, three double consonants in one name!). The former also contains a great description of a fine library ruined by wilful neglect (p.118). And the latter has Wimsey blithely explaining to his young nephew "...that book-collecting could be a perfectly manly pursuit. Girls, he said, practically never took it up, because it meant so much learning about dates and type-faces and other technicalities which called for a masculine brain." (p.170)

This from one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford - how she must have enjoyed writing this bit of satire. One of the great pleasures in her writing is how her characters develop from the sketchiest of caricatures in her early novels to full-fledged studies in her later ones. I could wish for more Lord Peter stories, but who am I to begrudge her abandonment of pot-boilers so she could translate The Divine Comedy instead. Rock on, sister.

Homebodies, rejoice

2010-02-22T13:48:00.008-05:00

Just when I'm yearning to travel, hardscrabble old life brings me a book to ease the necessities of staying home. On a local book-hunt recently I picked this up for a few dollars:

Vivian Swift's illustrated memoir When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler's Journal of Staying Put (Bloomsbury 2008). I have a small collection of published sketchbooks - memoirs with watercolors or drawings by the authors - always thinking Someday I will make one, too, so after flipping through this one in the book section at Goodwill I added it to my stack. I thought I'd like it. I didn't think I'd love it, which is what in fact happened when I read it. I started to read it, thinking the illustrations and hand-lettering were fey and charming, in a good way, then I paid attention to what she was saying and how she was saying it - funny, spot-on, melancholy enough for a melancholic like me. With hundreds of small watercolors and snippets of text, she creates minutely-observed personal portraits of the four seasons at home in her coastal Connecticut village, alongside her remembered years of world travel.

She also creates (or recognizes, really) her own private kingdoms within the village, and chronicles them with love and fine detail. One such is her micronation of Pawsylvania (if you are not a cat-lover, you may want to steer clear), in which reside "Their Highnesses the MOST SERENE AND USUALLY NAPPING Lords of Pawsylvnia Woody the Robinson and Louie I with the First Lady & Prime Minister of Civility and Decorum (me)..." (p.126) And her Acre of Earth: "My Museum of Letters is the biggest building on my Acre of Earth. I also have a Warehouse of Grudges and an Institute of All the Shades of Blue." (p.143)

As I was reading this book, filled as it is with cat-love and travel daydreams and homebody-fodder, I felt quite gleeful, and sang an invented little song to my own cat (when it's just you and the cat, most days, you end up inventing and singing little songs fairly often, I find). Here it is:

Books for fun
Books for fun
How I love you
Books for fun

(You may make up your own tune.)

But back to the book and its author - as with many other authors I dearly love, she points directly at what we must read next, as soon as we finish with her book:

"Xavier de Maistre invented a new mode of travel in 1790 while under a 42-day house arrest for duelling: ROOM TRAVEL. He wrote an 80-page book, Voyage Around My Room, treating his furniture as major tourist attractions. ROOM TRAVEL is perfect for those without the wealth or courage to voyage around the world." (p.33)

Naturally I googled this Vivian Swift, upon completion of her book. Naturally she blogs.

Enchanted elsewheres

2010-02-19T13:00:00.009-05:00

Okay, so enough with the magical thinking already. It seems I wished spring here too strongly - snow has been in the forecast for days now, but we received less than a trace. The ground is thawing in the garden. The temperatures have been unseasonably warm. People in the neighborhood are already talking about tapping maple trees. I see some mud out the window. It's all very unsettling. But listen to me - I fuss when it's too cold, and I fuss when it's not exactly warm, but not cold either.

I guess I'm just fussy in general because I've been housebound lately, what with Ryan working at his regular job, then also doing some freelancing in the evenings this week. Lots of time on my hands. I took the opportunity to stretch a big batch of canvases and wooden panels of various sizes. When I prime them, I add black acrylic paint to the white gesso, so it turns a nice warm gray. Now the gray canvases and panels are ranged around all the edges of two rooms as they dry, and I feel like I'm in the center of some kind of weird miniature Stonehenge. Which makes me think of places other than this.

The mail this week brought news from faraway lands. How wonderful it is to receive real mail from real people, about real things. A lovely little package came from Greece, including a travel guide I immediately sat right down and looked through, and a postcard arrived from Italy, wishing I was there. Me, too. Greece and Italy. This is usually the time of year I want to watch Shirley Valentine and Enchanted April in one night. Two of the best women-who-occasionally-pine-for-life-elsewhere films I know. Best watched alone, during a quiet late-winter evening, in middle age, while building cloud-castles overlooking the Mediterranean. This week, I meet that criteria. I have never seen the Mediterranean. I want to. I mean, I love Maine, but mid-February is not its finest hour. Did I mention the mud?

Wishful thinking

2010-02-15T16:26:00.009-05:00

I know I can't wish spring here any faster, but I practiced some magical thinking anyway while ordering some garden seeds this afternoon, and seed potatoes, and onion sets. And in my post-Pepys reading free-for-all I've included an even-tempered gardening book: Some Ancient Gentlemen: Being an Examination of Certain People, Plants, and Gardens by Tyler Whittle (Taplinger 1966), which I bought recently at a used bookshop nearby because it looked rather odd.

Exhibit one, an old gift inscription scrawled inside the front cover. It reads, in part: "This is an ideal bedside book - gentle, soothing, yet moderately informative." Who am I to ignore such a pointed directive (even if it was written to someone named Rosalind in 1971)? This sounds like exactly the book I need at this precise moment of my life.

Exhibit two, the blurbs on the back of the jacket. The first, from a woman at the New York Botanical Garden, assures us that the book "...will appeal to sophisticated amateur gardeners who enjoy good reading of high literary quality." Well! And a second, from a fellow at the London Times, who says that the book is "...unlike most books on gardening: informative, amusing, scholarly, and unorthodox, with the wit and very definite tastes and prejudices of the author punctuating every page." Well, well!

Exhibit three, the author's short biography, inside the back flap of the dust jacket. The author's fame apparently rests in part on "...receiving the accolade from Arthur Calder-Marshall for 'prose as well smoked as Bacon's.'" I do not know Arthur Calder-Marshall from a turnip in the ground, but I do tend to over-trust those British gentlemen hereditarily lucky enough to sport hyphens in their names. And besides, what a great simile.

I rest my case. I'm a third of the way through the book, and thus far it is living up to its initial promise of oddness. I quite like it.

But back to spring for a moment. Besides ordering seeds, I also took a long walk outside today when the sun was warmest, and the nearly-bare ground on the roadside was actually beginning to thaw and smell like something other than cold and frost. Even though snow is in the forecast for tomorrow, today I think I almost wished it away.

One last visit with Samuel Pepys

2010-02-13T14:09:00.047-05:00

I still have Volume X of the complete Diary on my bedside table. Volume X is the Companion: an alphabetical listing with definitions, often long, of people, places, ideas, themes, and general what-have-you mentioned in the Diary itself. It makes fascinating reading, being an extensive fleshing-out of things the footnotes often just touched upon. What was a sack-possett? Who were the Houblons? Where was Fish Street? And why should we care? Well, it does what a good Companion ought to do - it makes us care, by turning its side-lights on the minutiae of the times.

I've had at least one of these green hardcover volumes on my bedside table for months now, and I am loath to finally return the last one to the hall bookcase to reunite with its set. But I must, other books are pushing it aside. Now that my time with Pepys has drawn to a close, I do want, as I said earlier, to note a few things that stayed with me regarding his life as a booklover. He mentions books, his booksellers, his library, the viewing and reading of many plays, and his frank opinions of particular books throughout the Diary, and often I found myself wishing he had written more on those topics alone. Permit me a few highlights.

Pepys as a literary critic:

"(Cicero) ...pleased me exceedingly; and more I discern therein then ever I thought was to be found in him. But I perceive it was my ignorance, and that he is as good a writer as ever I read in my life." (Volume III p.107)

"(A Midsummer Night's Dream) ...the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life." (Volume III p.208)

"...reading Duchess of Malfy, the play, which is pretty good - ..." (Volume VII p.358)

"...Hydrostatickes, which is a most excellent book as ever I read; and I will take much pains to understand him through if I can, the doctrine being very useful." (Volume VIII p.258; Robert Boyle's book Hydrostatical Paradoxes 1666)

"(Hydrostatickes again) ...which the more I read and understand, the more I admire as a most excellent piece of philosophy." (Volume VIII p.351; okay, now I am curious)

"...The Merry Wifes of Windsor, which did not please me at all - in no part of it..." (Volume VIII p.386)

"...The Feign Innocence or Sir Martin Marr-all....the most entire piece of Mirth, a complete Farce from one end to the other, that certainly was ever writ. I never laughed so in all my life; I laughed till my head (ached) all the evening and night with my laughing, and at the very good wit therein, not fooling." (Volume VIII p.387; Dryden's adaptation of Molière's L'Etourdi)

"...Hydrostatickes, which are of infinite delight." (Volume VIII p.400; okay, very curious)

"...reading a little of L'escolle des Filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world." (Volume IX p.58-59; Paris 1655; a bawdy book, and what a lovely justification for reading it, and he did in fact burn the book the very next day, so it "might not be among my books to my shame...")

"...and so to my bookseller's and there looked for Montaigne's essays, which I heard by my Lord Arlington and Lord Blany so much commended... (Volume IX p.120-121; I do so wish he had recorded his opinion of it)

"...there kissed bookseller's wife and bought Legend..." (Volume IX p.161; the book was Legends Aurea, a collection of lives of the saints, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1527, PL 2040; oh, the irony)

"...The Silent Woman; the best comedy, I think, that was ever wrote;..." (Volume IX p.310)

"...The Duchesse of Malfy, a sorry play;..." (Volume IX p.375; a revised opinion, apparently)

The Companion tells us that Pepys recorded having read around 125 books during the Diary period. By the time the Diary closes, he owned at least 500 books. At the end of his life, 3000. Over and over, he notes that books are one of his great delights. This is what most endeared me to him, I must say.

Pepys as a booklover:

"...my books new-bound...and much pleased I am now with my study, it being methinks a beautiful sight." (Volume VI p. 33)

"...much pleased today with thoughts of gilding the backs of all my books alike in my new presses." (Volume VII p.266; a press is a cupboard, i.e. bookcase)

"The truth is, I have bought a great many books lately, to a great value; but I think to (buy) no more till Christmas next, and these that I have will so fill my two presses, that I must be forced to give away some to make room for them, it being my design to have no more at any time for my proper library then to fill them." (Volume IX p.18; he's writing this in January, and I'm thinking, Umm, good luck with that)

"...all the morning setting my books in order in my presses for the fallowing year, their number being much encreased since the last, so as I am fain to lay by several books to make room for better, being resolved to keep no more then just my presses will contain." (Volume IX p.48; yes, the time-honored tradition of upgrading the books in one's library)

Of course he did what we all do - he gave up that vastly sensible plan, and instead broke down and got more bookcases. By 1693 Pepys had seven bookcases, by 1698 eight, and eventually twelve (Volume X p.35). Which now reside with their books, as I have mentioned before, at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The books are numbered and shelved from smallest to largest. Pepys wrote later in life that his personal library was "...calculated for the Self-Entertainment onely of a solitary, unconfined enquirer into Books." (Volume X p.34) What a perfect self-contained statement of purpose. One of my favorite pieces of his writing, anywhere.

And, while I'm at it, one of the most poignant passages in the entire Diary, in my view:

"...I to bed, my eyes being very bad - and I know not how in the world to abstain from reading." (Volume IX p.124)

Indeed.

This is going on far too long. I must sum up, somehow. Let me return for a moment to my discovery of not absolutely loving Samuel Pepys as a person, despite his rampant bibliophilia (which is usually more than enough to tip the scales in someone's favor, around here). My definitive AHA moment regarding this issue came while reading the entry about Health, in the Companion, which I quote here at length:

"Clearly the diary is not the work of an introspective (AHA); when Pepys writes about his thoughts, feelings and dreams he writes objectively, at no greater length than he writes about the world outside himself. And equally clearly, the diary is the work of a man who had to an unusual degree the capacity to live happily and effectively. He was disciplined and well-organized, yet at the same time never lost his zest and flexibility. He loved order and neatness (it was the basis of his success in all sorts of ways - as a diarist, a civil servant and a collector) yet he never allowed this love to become an obsession." (Volume X p.176)

As an introverted introspective diarist myself, who seems, some days, to write of nothing but thoughts and feelings, perhaps it was only natural for me to recognize in Pepys the extrovert that certain something that I myself do not possess. From the first, I wanted to identify with him, badly, as I did with Montaigne, or as I do with any great writer I admire. I also knew how much certain writers I admire loved Pepys in their turn. I can see why. For he was certainly one of the great striders through life - working in the public arena, garnering fame and fortune, known and valued during his lifetime, advising Kings, and finally becoming famous for something he never even intended to become famous for. That was my AHA moment. And this is far too much analysis. I should scrap all that and just be able to say this instead: I loved some things about Pepys, wildly, and other things, I didn't care for at all, in fact I cringed and almost hated him.

But, as I return the last volume to its bookcase tonight, I choose to end here on a positive note. One of Pepys's most endearing qualities was certainly his tidy nature. Even after death: a codicil to his will instructed his nephew and heir to make certain book purchases to complete his library. Beautiful. Full stop.

The End.

A quiet day with no plans of any kind

2010-02-12T08:03:00.011-05:00

Finest kind of day, in my book. For I've had a busy two weeks - what with the painting exhibit, a house guest and visits with my family, a few short trips hither and yon - and this blog has suffered accordingly. I haven't even written in my journal for a week. So, the news in a nutshell: I'm working on some big paintings, to my great happiness; I've been floundering around in completely unfocused pleasure reading since completing Pepys's Diary; I pried myself out of my shell and attended my own exhibit opening, which was a moderate success and a lot of fun to boot; I visited Stone Soup in Camden and bought some books I really love; I found a good wool sweater and more books I love at the Rockland Goodwill; I've been out walking a lot because there is almost no snow here in Maine and the temps have been in the 30s; I made a truly dreadful pea soup, which should have been delicious but was somehow emphatically not (hello, compost pile); I am craving spring in the worst way. What else. Oh, the accountant is checking our taxes - between books and paintings, it seems I made money last year. Imagine that. I think that about covers it.

My upcoming painting exhibit

2010-02-02T11:44:00.004-05:00

I am still planning on writing about Pepys and his books at length, and I am still thinking about finishing his Diary, and I am also browsing in some peripheral books about restoration London (just happened to have a few handy). But, today, I have other news - I wanted to let people know that around thirty of my recent oil paintings are appearing in a solo exhibit at the University of Maine at Machias Art Galleries. The exhibit, entitled Margins of Safety, opens on February 10th and runs through March 26, 2010. Here are the details:

University of Maine at Machias
Art Galleries
Powers Hall
116 O'Brien Avenue
Machias, Maine 04654

Gallery hours are weekdays from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m., or by appointment, call 207-255-1279.

The opening reception is February 10th from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Powers Hall is the first building on your left as you enter the campus from Route One.

Margins of Safety explores the edges of long-familiar landscapes. A margin can be an edge and the area near it, and in a book (of course!), the space around a narrative; a margin of safety the amount allowed beyond what is needed, past a break-even point. Most of these paintings depict my home landscapes of Washington County and areas around Penobscot Bay. Here are a few of the paintings from the show.

The first of an approaching storm front over Thrumbcap, Islesboro:

Then Bald Porcupine Island, off Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Island:

And finally, from Cape Rosier, looking southwest:

So, if you find yourself in Machias, Maine in the near future (and why wouldn't you), I hope you will stop in and take a look. By the way, the University also has a wonderful book arts program, complete with a letterpress print shop (Vandercooks! Type! Furniture!), papermaking facility, and book arts gallery. I toured it yesterday after I delivered my paintings, and I must say the whole thing makes me want to sign up for classes again. The gallery has a few items on display that made my book-radar hum with contentment - most particularly a broadside poem by Raymond Carver (signed by Raymond Carver) on stunning handmade paper. Worth a visit, Machias is, I tell you truly.

Two months, a million words

2010-01-30T17:28:00.035-05:00

Actually - 1,250,000 words, give or take. I finished reading the Diary of Samuel Pepys last night. Let me say that again, it feels really good - I finished reading the Diary of Samuel Pepys last night.

I burned through the second half of Volume IX because it's wildly riveting, justly famous as it is for its chronicle of the major crisis in Pepys's marriage, caused by his dalliance with his wife's hired girl companion. One fine day his wife walks in on them. Weeks of recrimination follow, which Pepys knows he well deserves, and he works to change his ways (with a few notable exceptions, of course, when he is fairly certain he won't be caught). He has other troubles, too - he believes he's going blind from overwork (much of it done by candlelight). He consults medical men and takes various courses of physic, but eventually stops writing the Diary because he feels he can no longer write it out himself, privately, because his eyes are in such pain. He can in fact no longer read and write for any length of time - his clerks take dictation, and his wife and servants read aloud to him. Oh, and besides those things (as if they weren't enough), he's also been asked by the King's brother, the Duke of York (the future King James II), to write a long letter recommending a complete restructuring of his own administrative offices of the Navy. Pepys does this, essentially sandbagging his scurrilous colleagues while thinking he is taking himself down with them at the same time. He writes repeatedly that he is perfectly content with this, feeling it is absolutely the right thing to do to have a clear conscience, which was apparently much more important to him in this matter than remaining employed. What a hell of a year.

He ends the Diary after asking for a few months of leave, to see if his eyes will heal away from all work, and he makes plans to travel the continent for a few months with his wife. What he doesn't know at this point is that his wife has less than a year to live. She will contract a fever on their return trip and die a few days after coming home to England.

All this drama is quite shocking and immediate on the page in stark black and white. People's lives are so fraught! With everything! All the time! A few weeks ago I took a Pepys-break to read An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms (Larson 1988), and when I finished the Diary yesterday I had to return to the Joseph Campbell book and search up a passage that was stuck in my mind. Campbell says:

"There's a wonderful paper by Schopenhauer, called 'An Apparent Intention of the Fate of the Individual,' in which he points out that when you are at a certain age... and look back over your life, it seems to be almost as orderly as a composed novel. And just as in Dickens' novels, little accidental meetings and so forth turn out to be main features in the plot, so in your life. And what seem to have been mistakes at the time, turn out to be directive crises. And then he asks: 'Who wrote this novel?'" (p.24)

Directive crises indeed. Pepys's life seems like it was nothing but (plague, fire, war, loss, infidelity, infirmity). And yet. What a lot of joy he got out of it, what delight in music and books and theatre and loving, and in orderly hard work, and in pride at his rising station in life and his general good fortune. The thing that surprised me most about finishing the Diary was how greatly I didn't want this particular story to end. I wanted to keep on reading - about his trip to Europe, his wife's death, how he felt about it, and what he did next. Instead, the narrative just... stops. And I walked around all day today thinking about someone who's been dead for over three hundred years, and the grand autobiographical novel of his life.

I'll end with that thought, for now. I think I must make some observations about his life-long book-love, and I don't want to merely tack them on here, all willy-nilly. So, more on Pepys at a later date. But first, may I say it one more time? Humor me, please. I finished reading the Diary of Samuel Pepys last night.

Easy reading?

2010-01-28T07:16:00.008-05:00

A milestone of sorts, reached last night - I began to read Volume IX of the Diary of Samuel Pepys. The last volume of the Diary. I am just now beginning to wonder what in the world I will read next, when his prose is no longer breaking over me in great waves every evening. Volume VIII was tough to swim through, to extend the metaphor a bit - six hundred pages, much of it closely-written court gossip and parliamentary problems concerning the dismal conduct of the Navy officials during the late war with the Dutch (which was by all accounts a total freaking shambles, excluding, of course, the behaviour of our relatively honest diarist, who did the best he could under the circumstances). Some paragraphs (most paragraphs) were demanding, with his run-on sentences covering multiple complex topics, rife with seventeenth-century usage and vocabulary, and I had to literally stop and re-read some paragraphs (most paragraphs) as I went along. This stretched out the six hundred pages somewhat.

I suspect that whatever I read next is going to seem ridiculously simple and easy to navigate, by comparison. I'm not used to this level of intellectual rigor. Which reminds me of finishing Montaigne's Essays - I felt just the same way, and had to let some time pass before I could pick up another book. But first, Volume IX, another six hundred pages. Full Pepys report soon, as I mull over what being immersed in this man's life has meant to me.

Pleased To Meet You

2010-01-25T11:59:00.021-05:00

Long before I had my own bookshop, I became enamored of someone else's: a tough little cookie of a lady on the road to Castine, Maine had a small shop in the ell between her house and barn. The books were relatively few but of high quality, and reflected a knowledge of books and book-people that I had seldom encountered at that time in my life. Which is to say, she liked the kinds of books that I liked, and stocked them, so I naturally thought she had fabulous taste. Over a few years I visited and always bought, and when she aged to the point where she no longer kept her shop open, I counted myself lucky to receive a note from her now and then, saying that she had a few books I might like to look at, if I would like to come by on a given day. Then the notes stopped coming, and it appeared that her house was sold. I lost track of her. Now friends tell me she lived elsewhere in Castine for a few years, and then finally moved to a nursing home, and then, a few days ago, I read her obituary in the local paper.

So, a few memories today of one of my very favorite book people ever, Barbara Falk. I spent some time this weekend looking through my bookshelves at the books she sold me. As most dealers do, she had a distinctive manner of pricing her books, and her books were of a certain quality, so most were easy to spot. And I found a lot. Including ten signed Christopher Morley books (and I suspect there are more). Barbara was a bookseller on Long Island before moving to Maine, and I remember her telling me that when she was a young woman she attended a book talk he gave, I think in the 1940s in Roslyn, his home. At this time, I was heavily into Morley-hunting, and she was delighted to hear that someone still cared about him and his books. I was also reading in the letters of Horace Walpole, and wanted books by the indefatigable Walpole collector Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis. When I asked Barbara, she exclaimed "Oh, Lefty Lewis!" and subsequently showed me most of the series edited by Lewis and printed by the Yale University Press, entitled "Miscellaneous Antiquities, or, A Collection of Curious Papers...," items of interest to people who care about eighteenth century antiquarian gossip and fine press printing (us). The books she sold me in this series were from her own collection, in the house. What she didn't sell me, and which I still think about late at night, was her complete run of the bibliophile periodical The Colophon - she had Lefty Lewis's personal set. She said she'd let me know what she decided to do with them, when the time came. *Sigh.*

She also sold me many charming little bibelots - fine press books, printing trade items, some Bruce Rogers titles, a few fine bindings (always attached to books I still would have wanted otherwise). Sometimes I think she only sold me the things she knew I would want to keep in my personal collection, and never resell. She herself had had them for so long, you see, in her personal collection. She was the bibliophile who first told me to read Dukedom Large Enough, by David A. Randall (but she wouldn't sell me her own copy of that).

I know I can't have visited her shop more than ten times, and if I look back through all of my book receipts I could count up those visits and it wouldn't seem like much, but I must say that she had a profound effect on me - it was a case of just the right kind of enthusiasm at just the right time. A real bookwoman - I knew she was who I wanted to be when I was her age, god willing.

One more item she sold me was the Maine novel Small Potatoes by painter/writer/architect Emily Muir, who lived on nearby Deer Isle. Barbara did sell me her personal copy of this book, a very nice first edition in dust jacket, inscribed by Emily to her. Now it's an association copy that means a lot to me:

One thing I could not find, in my bookshelf scavenger hunt, was a book with a small note inside the front cover - Barbara often wrote in soft pencil anything of note about the book in question - a limited edition, signed, how many copies, etc. - and in this particular one she drew an arrow to an old number written in blue grease pencil on the front pastedown. This number, she noted, was from Leary's, in Philadelphia. She had loved Leary's, and she was the kind of person who didn't want that little bit of bookish information to be forgotten. She knew what that mark was. And now I know. And when I find that book again - someday there it will be, in my hand - I will get a pencil and make a note that Barbara Falk, Bookseller, wrote this.

It seems like a long time ago. Barbara must have been about 80 when I met her. I found her to be a sparky, enthusiastic, ascerbic, canny, witty, delightful person. Now I'm settled just across Penobscot Bay from where Barbara had her shop. She ended her long life in the nursing home immediately next door to my childhood home. I think I still want to be like her, when I'm 94... I will end this elegy with the phrase I began it with, a book I bought from her and still own, the title of a novel by Christopher Morley. Barbara, I was so Pleased To Meet You; Doubleday, Page & Company, Garden City, New York 1927; hardcover first edition in near fine condition, in a very good dust jacket with a bit of edgewear; $25; discount to the trade.

The seven habits of highly ineffective people

2010-01-17T12:31:00.007-05:00

I really try to keep the complaining to a minimum, here. I find complaining unattractive. I also find snarkiness unattractive. None of that ever gets anyone anywhere. And yet today here I am feeling snarky, unattractive, and full of complaints. A painting I'm working on, which was full of promise, has turned out to be something other than full of promise. I attended a funeral yesterday and now am feeling very bitter about the fact that we all will lose everything we love - all of us, all of everything. I'm cold and it's only January, and it's going to snow tomorrow for the first day in ages, when I actually had a tiny bit of fun planned, which will probably now be cancelled. I have paintings and books piled high all over the house and since I have nowhere to put them they are driving me bats. I can't bear what's happened in Haiti. Arg. A day of Dark Thoughts, about issues large and small. I wonder what the *other* seven dwarves were called - Snarky, Twitchy, Fussy...

OKAY. Time to bake some cookies, hug the cat, bundle up and go for a walk, look at the ocean. Continue reading Volume VIII of the Diary of Pepys (which finally arrived). Think about the next painting. Hope for long lives with the ones we love.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Lost in the stacks

2010-01-14T17:07:00.007-05:00

A very short post today, since the last was overly long.

One of the art blogs I keep a weather eye on is Sharon Butler's Two Coats of Paint. She recently posted a few images by painter Xiaoze Xie. I'd like to see these in person. Reviwer Kenneth Baker writes, "We might take the claustrophobic atmosphere of Xie's pictures as elegiac, a silent lament for the passing of the non e-book." Or we might not. (That phrase, "the non e-book" - ugh and double ugh.) The review continues, though, "Or we might see him forming an equation between paintings and books as treasuries of silent meaning." (Full review here.) Now that's more like it.

My last entry was blog post number five hundred. Still here. Thanks for reading.

Anatomy of a painting

2010-01-08T19:29:00.003-05:00

Today's posts should be read in numerical order. I realized after I posted them all that the last comes first. Etc. Etc. Sigh. So please scroll down. Thanks.

Anatomy of a painting 7

2010-01-08T18:27:00.018-05:00

The next morning (that is, this morning) we were up before sunrise, some difficult family issues keeping us both from sleeping very well. So once we were awake, there was no going back. But, this morning I was happy to be up early, waiting for the sun to rise, so I could get back to work on the painting. I really couldn't wait.

After being away from it for a while, the first look is important - I immediately see what needs to happen next. Variations in the clouds, some of the whites softened, the ocean finished, and those odd little tiny areas that need a bit more attention before the whole thing feels balanced and right. The clouds de-anthropomorphized just a bit. At this point I am no longer referring to any visual aids. I haven't for some time. It's now all about what the painting itself needs. Because the painting is not, after all, the scene itself. It's an object I've constructed, showing something about how I feel about a place, and I can make any changes I wish, to enhance that feeling. A liberating thing.

I removed a few small marks in the water that kept catching my attention, not in a good way. And I took a big brush and softened things up a bit around the edges. And made some other very minor adjustments. I had lunch and came back again to look one more time. And changed one more tiny thing. Then, done.

All told, it took about six hours yesterday and three today, not counting the time getting situated and arranging my palette and actually doing every other little thing I suddenly had to do before I just picked up a brush and just started already, for god's sake.

I'm happy with this one. It feels the way I felt when I was there. I took a break - went to the post office to mail a book (an Amazon sale), checked the mailbox again (no book). Then, since my paint was all out anyway, and I had a lot on my palette still - don't want to waste it - I started the next one. I only got in the underdrawing and a few basic colors before dark, so it's still pretty rough. But it has some life to it. Tomorrow will be good, no matter what the day brings.

Anatomy of a painting 6

2010-01-08T18:20:00.012-05:00

But before I quit for the day, I get paint all over the rest of the canvas. A base gray into the clouds, kind of a purply-gray, and also into the water. A bit of the gray gesso shows through and I like it, another warm gray to add to the depth of the clouds. But then I start to worry that the clouds are anthropomorphic something-or-others. Not what I want.

I'm making this painting indoors, from a series of photographs I took in September when I was there. So some things in this painting are fixed and static, and I know how I want them to appear (and I remember very well how I felt when I was there in person, and I want that feeling in the painting). But, I can still go outside and look at the clouds, any time. So I did that before it got dark. Real clouds are a lot softer then these painted ones. More varied, more infinite. It's tough, this painting thing...

Then I had tea and blueberry muffins with Suzanne, along with some good conversation. Books did come up, from time to time.

When Ryan came home from work I said, "Close your eyes..." and I showed him the work-in-progress.

Anatomy of a painting 5

2010-01-08T18:17:00.008-05:00

I've got some of the darker blues in there now. The sky (behind the clouds) is finished. And I'm getting worried that I won't finish the painting today because the sunlight ends so early this time of year, and my friend Suzanne is coming over for tea right around dusk.

I prefer sunlight to paint by. I have clip-lights with full-spectrum bulbs, but it just isn't the same.

Once these outside thoughts start to stick in my mind, I need to wrap it up for the day, and go do something else for a while. Like check the mailbox. Again.

Anatomy of a painting 4

2010-01-08T18:06:00.010-05:00

Right about now I realize a few things. The primary one being - why does this painting have almost NO COLOR in it? Where is that brilliant blue day I loved? And how can I get it on my canvas NOW? So I start in, and all of a sudden it seems as if there is some real air around the island, and something watery happening in the ocean.

I also realize that I've been working and concentrating for a long time and I really need a snack and a bathroom. Quickly. But the painting comes first, so I get some color in there and then stop for a bit to get my bearings and regroup.

Did I say the painting is five feet high? About 60" x 20". That's big, for me.

I'm trying not to look at it too much, until I get some more paint on there. All that gray still showing is still bare gesso.

And I'm thinking that I'd better do something pretty damn quick to make myself fall in love with this painting. So I can sustain the momentum to finish it. I always do this - one major lesson I've learned as a painter is that you can't be afraid of making something ugly - just block it out and lay it in, then work on color and light and, if you want, beauty.

Anatomy of a painting 3

2010-01-08T17:58:00.006-05:00

I've worked out the details of the rocks and trees, and seaweed, and then I start thinking (not that I'm thinking, mind you, but rather making intuitive decisions without really thinking) about light and space and atmosphere, so I start laying in light - in the sky and on the water.

I like working all over, all at once, with a largeish brush. I think it was the painter Robert Henri who told his students to stick to the large masses for as long as possible, before you went in to do any detail work. I try to remember that - my instinct is to start with a large brush but then I find myself going smaller and smaller the nearer the painting gets to completion.

At the very end, I try to go back with a bigger brush and get rid of some of those fussy details I liked so much.

This is when I start feeling very happy, because I'm right in the middle of the painting and it feels great. There's just nothing like making something with your own hands, out of sticks of wood and canvas and paint. This is also when the image in my head, of the painting I wanted to make, starts to conflict a bit with the painting I am, in fact, actually making.

Anatomy of a painting 2

2010-01-08T17:53:00.007-05:00

The next thing I always do after the initial sketch is to lay in all the darks. Get some form in there, and mass. In this case, spruce trees and the rocks on the island, and this strange reflection which is the major reason I wanted to make this painting in the first place. So I get it in there immediately, and build the rest of the painting around it.

I love this early stage of a painting - I can see it coming to life under my hands, and I'm completely out of my mind, in a good way, concentrating and forgetting everything that doesn't have to do with this specific task.

It's a lot like meditation.

By the way, please excuse the variations in light in these photos - the sunlight was moving around the room as I worked all day.

Anatomy of a painting 1

2010-01-08T17:35:00.009-05:00

I am trying not to watch the mailbox for Volume VIII of the Diary. Really, it should be here any day now. Right? Arg...

So, since I'm not reading Pepys, I returned to painting after a bit of a break over the holidays. Yesterday and today I made my first painting of 2010, and I thought I'd celebrate by doing something a bit different here. I photographed the painting while I was working on it, so here is a work-in-progress for you.

For the past few years I've been rather obsessed with certain islands off the coast of Maine, most of them located in Penobscot Bay. The subject of this new painting is a small island called Thrumbcap, which you can see from my friend's dock on Islesboro. I've painted it many times, in many different ways, and this painting is one I've had on my mind since fall. So I'm glad I finally decided to get on with it.

I knew I wanted to make a large (for me) painting, with the island slightly off-center and reflected in the ocean, with a big sky overhead. This is how I saw it in September when I was last there in person.

Step one: an undersketch in burnt sienna on the gray gesso I always use as a painting ground on my canvases and panels. I stretched this canvas back in December, the last time I prepared a big batch of them.

An age of uncertainty

2010-01-05T13:06:00.019-05:00

I continue to read in Pepys's Diary, with occasional forays into other autobiographical writing, for leavening purposes. Volumes VI and VII proved fearsome and heartbreaking, the former because of its chronicle of the Great Plague (in 1665 roughly a quarter of everyone in London died - these mostly poor people, since the Court and anyone who had money enough fled for the country) and the latter with Pepys's eyewitness account of the Great Fire (in early September of 1666 fire broke out in a bakery, and over the next four days destroyed much of the city). During the plague year, Pepys made his will and then made hay while the sun shone, both by making money as quickly as he could and also by increasing the frequency of his various amorous associations. The following year, the English were at war with the Dutch and Pepys's office was suffering from a plague of a different nature - a desperate lack of funds with which to victual the Navy - and he had to defend himself and his colleagues before the King and various angry naval commanders, with account books at hand. Then, at the height of uncertainty about the course of the war, the Great Fire broke out. Pepys evacuated his goods and people safely and then found that Seething Lane, where he lived and worked for the Navy, was spared, because firebreaks were created by blowing up adjacent buildings with gunpowder.

The fire was a shocking spectacle. Pepys's diary entries for the next month tell of his nightmares: "...much terrified in the nights nowadays, with dreams of fire and falling down of houses." (Volume VII p.287) He mentioned these dreams several more times, and he also dreamed of some of his books which went missing in the evacuation and return home. He seemed more sanguine about the plague - being careful in his daily actions but also accepting it, and preparing for it, should it come his way: "...how to put my things and estate in order, in case it should please God to call me away - which God dispose of to his own glory." (Volume VI p.125)

Not surprisingly, the whole Diary has become more and more engrossing the further into it I read. The cast of characters become distinct personalities and we know what to expect from them, in Pepys's opinion, when their names appear in his pages. And we come to know what to expect from Pepys himself. To be honest, one thing I've struggled with in reading this, is whether or not I even like Pepys, as a person. In some ways he is very delightful, honest and hard-working, a good servant to the King and his country, known for his plain dealing, a true book lover, a musician. I read about this, and I come to admire him. Then during an argument he gives his wife a black eye. And later beats an unruly servant until his own arm hurts. And dallies with numerous women not his wife, often several times in one day. And yet. He constantly tries to hold himself accountable to himself (and presumably to God), by writing his code of conduct down and mostly keeping to it. He knows when he has done wrong, by his own moral standards and the standards of the day. Which, granted, were fairly corrupt. He transcribed a colleague's view of life at the Court of Charles II, at this time: "...of all places, if there be hell, it is here - no faith, no truth, no love, nor any agreement between man and wife, nor friends." (Volume VII p.228-229) I've been browsing in the contemporary account of the Court, the Memoirs of the Life of Count de Gramont, and it's one long gossipy back-stabbing rogue's tale. How to be good, in this atmosphere, with these examples before you?

I am not required to like Pepys, I know. And he was not required to be good. I also know that most people are a strange combination of the despicable and the admirable - and they often choose what side to show the world, while hiding the other. Pepys didn't have to write any of these terrible things down. I wonder why he did. Do most diarists do so? Perhaps this is one of the major points of the diary - he presents himself entire.

Not to change the subject, and actually I'm not, but in Ronald Blythe's column this week, he speaks of diaries and their writers, himself among them. And he quotes Reverend James Hervey, who told himself: "Compile a secret history of your heart and conduct." The good, the bad, and the ugly. 350 years ago this week Pepy's began his diary. And by reading it now, all these years later, I am realizing anew how little human nature changes, come plague and fire.

I'll end this overly-long post by saying that I've finally located a decent copy of Volume VIII, and the check is in the mail, as the saying goes. Until such time as it arrives, I am keeping myself busy with Volume X, the Companion, a book-length encyclopaedia of all things mentioned in the Diary, sort of extended footnotes. And also a book I found on my own shelves with the wonderful title Samuel Pepys' Penny Merriments: Being a Collection of Chapbooks, full of Histories, Jests, Magic, Amorous Tales of Courtship, Marriage and Infidelity, Accounts of Rogues and Fools, together with Comments on the Times, selected and edited by Roger Thompson (Columbia 1977), a collection of 80 extracts from the 115 street-corner chapbooks Pepys collected and had bound together in a volume in his library.

That long subtitle could be for the Diary itself, it sums it up so well.

Trying to be good, as usual

2009-12-31T16:32:00.011-05:00

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume VII, p.62:

"And thus ends this month, with my mind full of resolution to apply myself better, from this time forward, to my business then I have done... - visibly to my prejudice, both in quiet of mind and setting backward of my business, that I cannot give a good account of it as I ought to do."

He takes resolution-making to a high art, by writing down his "vowes"of good conduct, carrying them around with him in his pocket, and referring to them. Often. When tempted. Which is, again, often. But hey, a person has to have some fun, especially while surviving the plague year of 1665.

Thus I progress with the Diary, but I am still missing Volume VIII and here we are, inside for the foreseeable future due to the impending three-day snowstorm. I see I will have to read something other than Pepys. Luckily, I do not lack for reading material.

Farewell to the aughts, and a Happy New Year, full of temptation and varying degrees of resistance (and some yielding).

Christmas is my middle name

2009-12-23T15:08:00.009-05:00

Really, it is. Sarah Noël, brought home from the hospital on Christmas Eve. Thus an innate tenderness for all things Christmas, both traditional and beyond tradition. Speaking of which, we finally did choose a tree, out in the woods - Ryan found one that looked as if it wouldn't have had much of a chance to grow big, where it was. Now the house is fragrant with balsam. In winter I love the time of early evening, with the warm orangey light inside and the cobalt blue outside, heightened right now because of the snow on the ground. A season of beautiful contrasts. We've wrapped gifts and decorated a bit, with mistletoe hanging in the kitchen - some friends kissed under it today - and peppermint candy canes in a pewter tankard on the dining table, a bouquet of holly and dark red candles, and colored lights on the tree, and favorite ornaments collected over the years, including one golden pear.

Blessings and a Christmas card from me to you:

***Joyeux Noël***