Category Archives: books

home again

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I don’t think I remembered to post that we were going on vacation, but we did–go on vacation, that is. We spent ten days in Wisconsin, all but one day in Door County. The weather was wonderful, and The Alpine, a funky old resort where we always stay, was as it always is, warm, hospitable, friendly, full of people who love to stay there, as we do, and have grown fond of the Bertschinger family who operate it.

I like to buy books in Door County. My favorite bookstores are The Peninsula Bookman, in Fish Creek and Wm. Caxton, Ltd., in Ellison Bay. Caxton is actually Kubet Luchterhand, a retired anthropology prof from Roosevelt U. I didn’t manage to buy anything from him this year, but last year I bought a beautiful copy of the two-volume Victor Lowe biography of Alfred North Whitehead. At Peninsula Bookman this year I bought a mint copy of Least Heat Moon’s River Horse. A few of years back I found a beautiful copy of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword there.

At Solbjørg’s, in the Sister Bay Café, where we usually have brunch at least once, for the last several years I’ve bought novels by Henning Mankell to read on the Alpine veranda, a pastime we have christened “verandizing.” This year I bought and read three Mankell novels, but in order to prevent myself from running out of them too soon, I’ve decided to read Mankell only on vacation at The Alpine. Right now I’m working through the Kurt Wallander series. When I finish with them, I’ll start on the others.

The Sister Bay Café is a favorite brunch place on “the door”–what some people call the Door County peninsula, a name reminiscent of its origin in the epithet, La Porte des Morts of early French voyageurs. Waters around the door were treacherous in former and more recent times, as a trip to the Door County Maritime Museum amply demonstrates. But enough of that. Another favorite place is Al Johnson’s, whose sod roof with goats wandering about chewing the grass likely attracts as many folks with cameras as the Swedish pancakes attract hungry eaters.

On the way to “the door” we stopped for a short time in Madison, where I had a chance to visit The Overture Center, about which I wrote a magazine piece in 1983 when it was called The Madison Civic Center. Refurbished and restored a second time, The Capitol theatre still nestles in the center’s heart, an elegaic stanza in the free verse of Overture’s steel and glass. I plan to write more about this place later on.

Down the Street at Avol’s Bookstore I found a copy of Betty Adcock’s 1995 book, The Difficult Wheel. I was especially happy to find it since I hadn’t kept up with Betty’s work since Beholdings (1988). The Difficult Wheel includes a poem I remembered from the late 1970s when Betty was among the first writers in residence at Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC, where I had an office for a while.

The idea in those days was that poets-in-residence contributed poems that evoked the center in some way. Betty’s poem, “Written in a Country Mansion of the 1920’s Now Partially Restored as a Retreat for Poets,” evokes the gulf of time menacing between imagined raisers of the house and those first literary residents of a new decade, but it does so wistfully, as though time itself were a cosmic perplexity.

Before you could blink away erasure, before
you could wake wholly to the afternoon’s
cut flowers, the mirrors, the folded headlines
from Europe, a hand across your eyes—
you might have guessed, almost,
the longleaf pines around this house
the last of their thousand mile forest,
light changing into future, the workings of light
become knowledge towards annihilation.
And you might have seen us, strangers flickering
dark here, darker. And the whippoorwill
practicing a dying art.

A dying art, perhaps. Dana Gioia’s famous essay on the matter is worth a read. But it’s an art that many still treasure, as I treasure this poem of Betty Adcock’s, not the least because I was present when she read a draft of it to an audience for the first time. I think the year was 1979, the first year Weymouth Center operated as an independent entity. I’ve been back twice for short residencies, in 1987 and 1998. The writers’ program continues and is a feature of this year’s thirtieth anniversary celebration.

snakes may safely graze

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No spiel promised: A caller from the democratic congressional hoo-ha, just now, promised “no spiel,” then cozied up with a couple of comments designed to make me feel part of the in-group, I guess, and wound up by suggesting that I contribute $209 to the cause of keeping the congress Democratic. Myomy! I’d have been more inclined not to hang up if the leaders of my party, Pelosi, Reed, Feinstein, etc., would rein in their egos and get to work.

Rick Warren: Beating a horse that perhaps ought to be dead, I intend to listen very carefully to Rick Warren’s prayer on inauguration day. I don’t like Warren, don’t like religion hucksters generally–from Joyce Meyer to Deepak Chopra. And I think my guy could have chosen any number of better people to deliver the invocation before he, himself, delivers the most important speech of his career thusfar. Nor do I think the choice is clarified by the claim that we have to listen to folks with whom we disagree. But what the hell–this is America, God love us:

in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

No child left: Two interesting pieces in today’s Washington Post (here and here) tell an ironic tale about education in the land of the free. The Shrub of legacy-seeking touts his putative achievements in the realm of education reform whilst a political pressure group lobbies a DC area school system for lower grading standards, complaining that “students [are] at a disadvantage when they seek college admission or scholarships.” I’m remembering a Czech graduate student who worked for me back in the last century. She told me one day that she was grateful to have come to the United States for graduate school because education in her country consisted of “dictionary learning” only; whereas she found herself surrounded by intellectual stimulation and creativity at our large, public, provincial, American university. That’s what we stand to lose by the pursuit of education as measurement and measuring up, what Jill Ker Conway found at Harvard in the ’50s and details in her book, True North (1994). My guy got a very good education that also included Harvard. His education secretary-in-waiting notwithstanding, I very much hope he doesn’t sign on to the Nicklebee ideology.

All we like sheep: As part of my holiday reading binge, which is by no means done yet, I read last week a wonderful little book entitled Three Bags Full (2005), characterized by author Leonie Swann as “A Sheep Detective Story.” It reminded me that The Good Shepherd remains a powerful a myth of leadership, and rightly so. A classical evocation of the myth (designed to do honor to a secular prince and not to God as is sometimes thought) occurs in Bach’s hunt cantata, #208. Everyone knows the tune, but it isn’t every day one gets to hear it performed by authentic sheep. Read through the comment thread attached to this lovely performance of “Schafe können sicher weiden.”

ill winds

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Ben smith picked up this snippet today from First Read:

A polarized electorate: NBC/WSJ pollster Peter Hart (D) passes along this finding from a recent poll he conducted: 37% of McCain voters say they detest Obama and would have a hard time accepting him as president, while a similar number of Obama voters (36%) say the same thing of McCain.

Smith’s comment is “Whoever wins, doesn’t look like we’re in for a new era of good will.”

And speaking of ill will, I’ve been trying to sort out Leon Wieseltier’s antipathy for Louis Menand, most recently displayed in the current New Republic. Wieseltier takes Menand to task for several crimes against right thought (and Lionel Trilling) in this week’s column. Here’s a little of it:

what really rattles Menand is Trilling’s magnitude. In his conception of the intellectual life, Trilling was big. Menand is the professor of littleness. He is a man in flight from the seriousness of his own vocation.

It turns out that Wieseltier is using Menand’s recent New Yorker essay on Trilling as a reason for continuing an attack on Menand that goes back some years, at least to 2003 when Wieseltier accused Menand of impure thinking about George Orwell. Here’s a site that reviews some of this, though a few links are out of date.

So — the culture wars aren’t over. Whatever change we’re engaged in runs deep and generates powerful antipathies. I guess I’ve written a bit about that already, but it’s beginning to seem to me (even though there’s no longer a real academic debate about it) that vituperation like Wieseltier’s against a fellow humanist is maybe an index of something deeper than disagreement. I’m going to think about this and write some more after a bit.