HARASSMENT! ... WITCH HUNT! ... NO COLLUSION!

The Bottomless Sit

Simon Barnes, from Rewild Yourself: Making Nature More Visible In Our Lives:

I was in an ebony glade in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, sitting with my back to an ebony tree. I had been sitting there for an hour, scarcely moving. ...

When I entered the glade, every bird in the place would take to the wing and vanish, shouting alarm calls, and the impalas—more antelopes, grazers, usually seen in gatherings of at least 20—would bark their own alarm call and vanish. I had emptied the place in an instant. I had broken it.

The spell for mending was all in the sitting.

Bit by bit, life would reassemble itself all around me. ... It was as if I was slowly becoming invisible: my human nature drifting away into the landscape or being absorbed by the tree. And after a while my invisibility began to make other creatures visible. I was ceasing to matter. ...

Sitting still. We humans are busy creatures, always getting on with something, always moving or talking or checking our phones. We have a terrible fear that if we stop for a moment we will miss something. The exact opposite is true.

Here's a little more from that [Rudyard] Kipling tale quoted above, a story from The Second Jungle Book: "Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big cities have the reputation of being able to work miracles with the wild things, but all the miracle lies in keeping still, in never making a hasty movement, and, for a long time, at least, in never looking directly at a visitor." ...

Introduce yourself to the bottomless sit by easy stages: after all, you're enjoying yourself, remember. At the start of every sit—especially when you're new to it—you will get fed up and restless pretty quickly: how long have I been sitting here . . . Seems like hours. Whose idea was this? I thought there were supposed to be birds here? You may find your hand creeping towards your phone; you've just remembered something frightfully important and incredibly urgent.

But there's a moment when you go through a door. The urge to move decreases. ... And—suddenly but subtly—you realize that time has changed gear on you. You're no longer waiting; you're just sitting, and you're not sure whether that's ten minutes you've been sitting or twenty, or maybe even more. ...

"Teach us to care and not to care," wrote T. S. Eliot in "Ash Wednesday." "Teach us to sit still." ...

Perhaps a quiet mind is easier to find when you're not seeking it for its own sake. ...

You are becoming less an observer of the wild world than a living part of it.

Robert Caro: "I'm Not Sure I Ever Think The Writing Is Going Well ... I'm Naturally Lazy"

I am reading Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, by Robert Caro, which, at about 220 pages, is a mere post-it note when compared to his lengthy biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson. (The first four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson total more than 3,300 pages.)

Working is a brief, but illuminating, peek behind the curtain at how Caro works, and how he feels about non-fiction, and some remarkable examples of the breadth and depth of his research.

Caro talks a lot about power in Working. It can corrupt, yes, but not always.

Once you get enough power, once you're there, where you wanted to be all along, then you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he's doing it. What power always does is reveal.

Caro is 83 years old and working on the fifth volume of his epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. The first four volumes are: The Path to Power (1982), Means of Ascent (1990), Master of the Senate (2002), and The Passage of Power (2012). In January 2018, Caro said the fifth and final volume could be completed in anywhere from two to ten years. Caro also plans to write a lengthy memoir.

Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography (1975 and 2003), three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has won virtually every other major literary honor, including two National Book Awards (one for Lifetime Achievement) and the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2010.

In 2016, he was interviewed by James Santel of The Paris Review. A portion of the interview closes Working:

I can't start writing a book until I've thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two or one—that's when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That's what you see up here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages. That's the fifth volume [of his Lyndon Johnson biography, which he has been working on since 1976].

Then, with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let's say if it's a long chapter, seven pages—it's really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I've done.

The boiling down entails writing those paragraphs over maybe . . . I can't even tell you how many times, over and over and over. The whole time, I'm saying to myself, No, that's not exactly what you're trying to do in this book.

If you saw me during this process, in the first place you'd see a guy in a very bad mood. It's very frustrating. I can't actually say anything nice about this part of the work. It's a terrible time for me. I sometimes think, You're never going to get it. There's just so much stuff to put in this book. You're never going to have a unified book with a drive from beginning to end, a single narrative, a single driving theme from beginning to end. There's just too much stuff.

I come home and Ina doesn't even want to see me for several hours, because I'm all wound up. I get up during the night to write that couple of paragraphs. I think, Oh, I've got it, I've got it, and then I get up in the morning and I look at it and I say, No, this isn't it. ...

Getting that boiled-down paragraph or two is terribly hard, but I have to tell you that my experience is that if you get it, the whole next seven years is easier. When you have it, it's so comforting, because you're typing away, and you can look over—it's usually stuck on the wall right there, but I don't want you to see it, actually. I put it away. I don't like anyone to see my notes. ...

I'm not sure I ever think the writing is going well. Every day I reread what I wrote the day before, and I've learned from hard experience that it's a real mistake to get too confident about what I've written. I do so much writing and rewriting. And Knopf knows. I rewrite the galleys completely. I even rewrite in page proofs, which they don't actually allow you to do, but they've been very good to me. I'd rewrite in the finished book if I could.

[You start writing in longhand, correct?] Yes. I write on white legal pads. I seldom have only one draft in longhand—I'd say I probably have three or four. Then I go and do the same pages over on the typewriter, and then I throw them out. I go chapter by chapter. I can't go on to another chapter until I feel this chapter is done.

I generally get up around seven or so, and I walk to work through Central Park outlining the first paragraphs that I'm going to write that day. But the thing is, as you get into a chapter, you get wound up. You wake up excited—I don't mean "thrilled" excited but "I want to get in there," so I get up earlier and earlier. ... I work pretty long days. If I'm doing research, I can have lunch with friends, but if I'm writing, I have a sandwich at my desk. ...

[Do you set daily quotas?] I have to, because I have a wonderful relationship with my editor and my publisher. I have no real deadlines. I'm never asked, When are you going to deliver? So it's easy to fool yourself that you're really working hard when you're not. And I'm naturally lazy. So what I do is—people laugh at me—I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young, everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I'm going to a job.

I have to produce. I write down how many words I've done in a day. Not to the word—I count the lines. I do it as we used to do it in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make me remember it's a job. I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don't, but without some kind of quota, I think you're fooling yourself.

In another part of Working, Caro writes:

People are always asking me what my daily schedule is. It's not fixed. I write each day as long as I can. As I've said, I write my first drafts in longhand—pen or pencil—on white legal pads, narrow-lined. ... [When I type the drafts] I triple-space the lines the way I did as a newspaperman, so there will be plenty of room to rewrite in pencil. I rewrite a lot. Sometimes I look at a page I typed but have reworked in pencil, and there's hardly a word in type left on it. Or no words in type left at all—every one has been crossed out. And often there's been so much writing and rewriting and erasing that the page has to be tossed out completely.

A Bear Visits Next Door

On Tuesday, just after noon, the dogs were making a lot of noise and running around the back yard. I figured the old dog next door was also out. ... He wasn't. When I went out on the deck, I saw a young bear cub sitting on a tree branch next door.

After we herded the dogs inside, we could hear the cub loudly mewing. Eventually, he climbed down and out of our sight. Laura called a local conservation officer and was told the bear was likely frightened (undoubtedly by the sound of the dogs barking) and his vocalizing was telling Mama Bear where he was. When he perceived that the threat was gone, he climbed down reunited with Mama. The cub sounded like he was in distress, but he was likely just staying in touch.

The bear was likely about three months old, having been born in the spring.

Our House

Uproot our lives and move to Canada? Okay.

Move across the country and live in a small town? Sure.

Decide, as satisfied, life-long renters, to buy a house in that small town (and then do so, and move in, within two months of said decision)? WTF?!?

As Laura wrote in late May:

All our lives -- until now -- renting was the only thing that made sense. The price of real estate in NYC and the Toronto area is nuts. Purchasing a home would have meant tripling (or more) our monthly housing costs, or having a two-hour (each way) commute, or buying a condo. None of those options were appealing. We also didn't want the responsibility of home ownership. We simply didn't care about owning.

But the landscape has changed. We live in a place where homes are affordable, and where the tenancy laws for families with animals make renting very insecure. We have moved too many times in the last 10 years, and as we plan for our older age, this gives us more security.

We got the keys yesterday and will start moving our stuff tomorrow morning. (Actually, I took over some fragile kitchen stuff today. I also timed the drive between the two houses: 2 minutes, 15 seconds. It's good that it's so short, since we'll be making a lot of trips back and forth!)

Kitchen, with a crazy amount of drawers and cupboards. The sellers left a card and a small plant for us.

The deck is out the big window on the right. Laundry room is through the door and after that, the garage.

Wood stove. Not as nice as a fireplace, but ...

Not sure if we'll do anything with these plant beds. The one with the short green plants contains strawberries. Also hoping Cookie will confine her digging to these beds, if uncovered.

Most of the 40-foot deck is completely covered, which is perfect in a place where it tends to rain nearly every day during the winter months and for people who prefer shade to direct sun. Also included: firewood!

The previous owners did a lot of landscaping.

The view from Laura's office window.

Our offices. We actually like the colours. Mine's the green one.

Crawl space connecting main bedroom and my office.

With a Pup Rock poster!

The new home of The Joy of Sox.

In addition to the Pup Rock poster and the firewood, the sellers also left us a piano. (I think I know why: it is insanely heavy. We cannot budge it.)

Bob Mould, 2016

Whenever I consider a list of my absolute favorite musicians, I tend to forget about Bob Mould. That absent-mindedness makes no sense at all because I have loved nearly 100% of Mould's music since I first discovered Hüsker Dü way back in the (celebrated) summer of 1984.

I've been listening to Bob Mould for 35+ years (Hüsker Dü, Sugar, and albums under his own name) and I can throw on any album from his discography at any time and be thoroughly engaged. I cannot think of anyone else about whom I can say that.

I find some of his stuff, like 1993's Beaster, just as musically mind-blowing as it was when it first came out. (Once it was recorded, Mould said he found it "unnerving" to listen to his lyrics.) The Times (UK): "Rarely has a band rocked out with such bleak intensity and utter conviction. A vast cathedral of noise and despair, erected and demolished in half an hour flat, this is an album which has to be heard to be believed."

Bob Mould has never done anything other than exactly what he wanted to do. His early work influenced many bands, but that acknowledgement came years after the fact. He will turn 59 this fall (We share a birthday!) and he shows no sign of a creative letdown. It's amazing.

There are other musicians who have steadfastly done their own thing (Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Elvis Costello), but that usually means there's a lot of their stuff I don't care about or actively dislike. Case in point: The songs on Elvis Costello's four albums from 1977-79 are endlessly inventive, both musically and lyrically, but I haven't cared a whit about anything he's done in the last 33 years.

That is not the case with Mould. Hell, I even like most of Modulate, his 2002 electronica-influenced album which confused (and turned off) a lot of the fans of his deafening guitar sound. (Though I freely admit I have never listened all the way through the 219 seconds of "Megamanic"!)

Bob Mould

October 15, 2016, Bologna, Italy, with John Wurster (drums) and Jason Narducy (bass)

A Good Idea / Changes / The End Of Things


Hoover Dam / No Reservations / Tomorrow Morning


Something I Learned Today / Come Around / Losing Time


In A Free Land / Celebrated Summer

KEXP, Seattle, WA

April 16, 2016
Hoover Dam / See A Little Light / The Descent / I Don't Know You Anymore / You Say You / Voices In My Head / Hold On / If I Can't Change Your Mind / Makes No Sense At All



May 10, 2016
The End Of Things / Losing Time / You Say You / The Descent / Black Confetti

Hüsker Dü

Camden Palace, London, UK, May 14, 1985

New Day Rising / It's Not Funny Anymore / Everything Falls Apart / Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill / I Apologize / If I Told You / Folklore / Terms Of Psychic Warfare / Powerline / Books About UFOs / Chartered Trips / Diane / Celebrated Summer / Every Everything / Makes No Sense At All / Pink Turns To Blue / Ticket To Ride / Reoccurring Dreams/Dreams Reoccurring / Eight Miles High / Love Is All Around

May 1: When Most Of New York City Got Up And Moved

Dan Lewis, Now I Know, September 26, 2013:

There are roughly eight million residents of New York City. According to a 2010 article in the New York Times, 70% of them rent. That's about 5.5 million people, each of whom could be moving to a new place once their current lease runs out. Yet despite the incredible number of both apartments and renters, in general, the process of renting an apartment in New York City (and particularly in Manhattan) occurs over a short period of time. Typically, a renter starts his or her search only a few weeks before moving, checks out a dozen or so places over a day or two, and upon finding something suitable, quickly readies an application and bank checks to cover fees. The whole system — to use the term loosely — is a frenetic ordeal which hardly seems like it could be worse.

But until about seventy years ago, it was. Because almost everyone moved at the same time.

Sometime in the 1600s or early 1700s, New York City developed an odd tradition. Leases, across the city, expired at 9:00 AM on the first day of May. The origins of this tradition are unclear. Wikipedia cites to two different sources, one of which references the English celebration of May Day (explained here), another which claims that the Dutch settlers originally came to Manhattan on May 1st, and the tradition is borne out of that. In any event, the cartoon above, from 1856, encapsulates the madness — thousands upon thousands of people taking to the streets, with all their stuff, moving from one apartment to another, all on the same day. Davy Crockett observed the phenomenon in 1834, as retold by Futility Closet:

By the time we returned down Broadway, it seemed to me that the city was flying before some awful calamity. 'Why,' said I, 'Colonel, what under heaven is the matter? Everyone appears to be pitching out their furniture, and packing it off.' He laughed, and said this was the general 'moving day.' Such a sight nobody ever saw unless it was in this same city. It seemed a kind of frolic, as if they were changing houses just for fun. Every street as crowded with carts, drays, and people. So the world goes. It would take a good deal to get me out of my log-house; but here, I understand, many persons 'move' every year.

All in all, this "moving day" was a terrible idea.

Being an informal one, and a custom at that, it should have been an easy one to change. And it wasn't universal. That is, not everyone's lease ended on May 1, so it should have been pretty easy for landlords or renters to demand a different date if given that one by the other. But the tradition persisted, to the point that in 1912, Harper's Weekly imagined a world with automated, flying "moving stations," as seen here. Moving Day was entrenched in a city which to a person, with few exceptions, hated it.

It quite literally took a world war to end the practice. When the United States mobilized its citizens in World War II, it created a shortage of able-bodied men stateside, making it nearly impossible to find someone to help you move on "moving day." Tenants stayed on past their leases and the practice of relocating on that date began to erode. And then, in 1945, the end of the war dealt "moving day" a death blow. As the New York Times reported in October of that year, troops returning from abroad created a major housing shortage in the city, which "turned 'moving day' into a myth."

Bonus fact: "Everybody moves!" days aren't a lunacy unique to New York of lore. July 1 in Montreal has the same thing happening. The operative word there is "has," because (as of 2013) it's still a thing there.

Jason & The Scorchers: Live 1984-2016

Ladies and Gentlemen ... Jason & The Scorchers!

Both Sides Of The Line - The Palace, Los Angeles, CA, 1984


Great Balls Of Fire - The Palace, Los Angeles, CA, 1984


The Race Is On - Roskilde Festival, 1985


Can't Help Myself - Roskilde Festival, 1985


Absolutely Sweet Marie - Roskilde Festival, 1985


If Money Talks - Roskilde Festival, 1985


Tear It Up (with Link Wray) - Roskilde Festival, 1985


Harvest Moon - Cat's Records Outdoor Show, 1985


White Lies - The Conan O'Brien Show


Shotgun Blues / Ghost Town - "After Hours" (Nashville Channel 5's late night variety show), 1986


Golden Ball and Chain - "After Hours" (Nashville Channel 5's late night variety show), 1986


White Lies - Farm Aid, Austin, Texas, July 1986


Broken Whiskey Glass - Farm Aid, Austin, Texas, July 1986


Absolutely Sweet Marie - Fairview Park, Normal, Illinois, July 4, 1987


I Can't Help Myself - Fairview Park, Normal, Illinois, July 4, 1987
[Jason sings the song while helping fans cross a small creek to get closer to the stage!]


Sing Me Back Home - Fairview Park, Normal, Illinois, July 4, 1987


White Lies - Fairview Park, Normal, Illinois, July 4, 1987


Great Balls Of Fire - Fairview Park, Normal, Illinois, July 4, 1987


If You've Got The Love - Lafayette Club, Bloomington, Illinois, April 1993
[First show in 6 years!]


Shop It Around - Lafayette Club, Bloomington, Illinois, April 1993


Golden Ball And Chain - Lafayette Club, Bloomington, Illinois, April 1993


Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man - Rock Temple, Kerkrade, Netherlands, April 30, 2010


Broken Whiskey Glass - The Garage, London, England, August 5, 2010


White Lies - The Garage, London, England, August 5, 2010


Somewhere Within - The Berkeley Cafe, Raleigh, NC, January 2011


Take Me Home Country Roads - Helsinki, Finland, July 2012


When The Angels Cry - Manchester Academy, July 3, 2015


Self Sabotage - Music City Roots Live, The Factory, September 2015


Absolutely Sweet Marie - Bluegrass Underground, Cumberland Caverns, McMinnville, Tennessee, April 1, 2016


Shop It Around - Bluegrass Underground, Cumberland Caverns, McMinnville, Tennessee, April 1, 2016


Harvest Moon - Bluegrass Underground, Cumberland Caverns, McMinnville, Tennessee, April 1, 2016



FULL CONCERTS

Capitol Theater, Passaic, New Jersey, November 22, 1985

Lost Highway
Help, There's A Fire
Are You Ready For The Country
Last Time Around
Shop It Around
Broken Whiskey Glass
I Can't Help Myself
Harvest Moon
If Money Talks
Still Tied
Change The Tune
I Really Don't Want To Know
White Lies

Piedmont Park, September 4, 1995


MTV, The Cutting Edge, 1984

The Paperback Art of Robert McGinnis

J. Kingston Pierce, Crime Reads, February 1, 2019:

It's possible that you don't immediately recognize the name Robert McGinnis. But if you are even remotely interested in vintage crime, mystery, and thriller novels, you've certainly spotted his artwork. After all, he's spent the last 60 years painting exceptional covers for those sorts of paperback yarns, most of them by still-familiar authors (Erle Stanley Gardner, Brett Halliday, Ruth Rendell, John D. MacDonald), though others came from writers whose popularity has since waned considerably (Carter Brown, Edward S. Aarons, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Harold Q. Masur, and the like).

Over the course of his career, McGinnis—set to celebrate his 93rd birthday this coming Sunday [February 3]—has produced more than 1,000 unique paintings employed on American paperback book covers. His works are distinguished by their precise use of color, the artist's preference for portraiture over depicting story scenes, and especially the lithe and luscious women who are so often the focal point of his canvases. ...

"[T]here's nothing like a McGinnis woman," raves Charles Ardai, the editor at New York publishing house Hard Case Crime, which specializes in vintage-style paperback fronts and has made plentiful use of this artist's output over the last decade and a half. "Leggy, serene, aloof, unruffled, coiled, and deadly or enigmatic and sensuous, Bob's women are like otherworldly creatures, breathtaking and perfect." ...

"One thing I've noticed on the crime novels especially," says [Art] Scott [who in 2014 co-authored (with McGinniss) The Art of Robert E. McGinnis], "is how brightly lit most of his images are—rather unexpected, given how many of those books fall into the 'noir' genre. Together with his clean lines and uncluttered layouts ... he never missed a chance to work the light-and-shade angle and did it brilliantly."

Pierce edits The Rap Sheet and runs its companion blog Killer Covers. (In May 2018, he highlighted 12 exceptional cover artists.) In this recent article, he includes 39 McGinnis covers, but my favourite (of the ones I have seen) is not among them.

I also love certain editions of the Michael Shayne books, with the detective's head in a circle at the top of the cover.

47 Years Ago, I Caught A Really Big Fish

Sunday, February 13, 1972: I went ice fishing with my father and caught a walleye that we measured as 24 inches long (and 5½ pounds). I was eight years old - and I've never caught a bigger fish.

I love this next photo. I have done nothing to remove the various imperfections, which along with the dull grayness of both the snow on the frozen lake and the sky, gives the picture the feel of some doomed Arctic expedition from the 1910s.

We would get out on the ice around dawn. My father would drill 12-15 holes in a straight line, maybe 30 feet apart. Looking at the space between (what I think is) me in the middle of the frame and the "tip-up" in the foreground gives you an idea of the distance between the holes. (My father built his own tip-ups by hand. I never thought about the name of these things when I was a kid. For all I knew, it was my father's (or a regional) term. Looking online now, tip-up seems to be the general name.)

Having them in a long row made it easy to keep an eye on all the lines. When a fish grabbed the bait, a minnow usually a few feet above the bottom of the lake, it triggered the release of a bright orange flag (which was bent and on a hook of some sort). When you saw a flag had sprung up, or someone else pointed it out, you knew something was going on. And you'd run to the hole.

On exceptionally cold and/or windy days, running to the very end of the row was not fun - though the exercise did warm you up a tiny bit. You often had to break the thin film of ice that had formed over the hole before you could begin pulling up the line (and, hopefully, the fish). You tossed your gloves aside and quickly brought up the cold line with your bare hands. When it was time to re-set the tip-up, the small pile of wet line beside you had usually frozen and it took time to untangle it all. My fingers were often completely numb by the time I could put my gloves back on.

The smaller fish below look like perch.

French Readers and American Noir

Interesting comments from several authors, quoted in Gabino Iglesias's CrimeReads article, "Why Do The French Love American Noir?"

Jake Hinkson:

I think the French are fascinated with American noir because they're fascinated by America. They view noir as a body of literature that is critical and revealing of American culture. ... [T]hey've always had a fascination with ... the "real America" ... That's why the French were the first ones to the recognize the artistic merits of things like jazz and gospel. It's why they embraced regional artists like Faulkner. And it's why they were the first ones to recognize that guys like Thompson and Goodis weren't just failed pulp writers but rather authentic and unique literary talents.

William Boyle:

They know that American noir presents a true portrait of this country, that it doesn't hold back or hide things, that it isn't afraid to search the dark corners. I think they know that noir has always told the truth about America—they were the ones who first sensed that. Also, they're not turned off by unlikeable characters or unhappy endings.

David Joy:

In my experience, French readers tend to be a braver lot. I think the thing about good noir that's hard for some folks is that it forces you to go to uncomfortable places and to confront uncomfortable things and a lot of readers just aren't willing to do that. I think that's particularly true of American readers. ... For the most part, what moves in this country are airplane books—something I can pick up in a terminal, read on a flight, and toss in the trash before I catch a cab. It's something to fill time more than it is something to challenge beliefs. I hear people say, "Well, I didn't relate to the characters." I'm sorry, but I don't believe relatability is a requirement of good literature. In fact, I believe the opposite. I believe good literature allows us to walk in the shoes of someone we might otherwise dismiss. For me, that statement about not relating to characters boils down to a refusal to venture into uncomfortable ground. That's not something I've experienced with French readers. They tend to still want books that are challenging. They seem to still view literature as an instrument of critical thinking and change.

Benjamin Whitmer:

Books just matter more. Somebody over there once told me that the difference between their politics and ours is that we could never elect a politician who didn't profess to believe in God, and they could never elect a politician who didn't read. It's baked into every part of their life. Reading and books are afforded an entirely different weight in France.

Hinkson:

Reading in France is a national obsession. It's a wholly different culture than the States. ... At book events, writers don't read their work, they just discuss it with the audience. And the questions aren't "Where do you get your ideas?" or "What time of day do you like to write?" It's graduate-school level discussions of character and theme. It's probing and personal. And, I mean, these questions are coming from regular people. Americans have always been suspicious of intellectuals. The French just...aren't. They respect intelligence and expertise. ... For a writer, it's extremely exciting.

Joy:

For starters, the French consume more books. You look at the statistics and the French are always in the top ten well-read countries in the world. They're typically somewhere around number seven. The U.S., on the other hand, we're lucky to make the top 30. People just don't read here. In this country, one third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Forty-two percent of college graduates never read another book after college. Eighty percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year. Seventy percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years. That's staggering.

Whitmer:

To be honest, I'm not sure it's especially a French thing. I think people all over the world read noir, read tragedy. The only place where there is no place for noir or tragedy is America. As David Vann said, "We have the idea in America that a book should have likable characters and make us feel good by the end. This is a new and idiotic idea and erases 2,500 years of literary culture." No other culture is dumb enough to believe that. That takes a specifically pathological self-concept and denial of reality.

Nice And Naughty

Dan Lewis, Now I Know:

The word "nice" comes from the Latin word "nescius" which literally meant "not knowing" — basically "ignorant." When the word was coined in the 14th century, it retained that meaning — according to Oxford Dictionaries, the word "nice" "began life in the fourteenth century as a term for 'foolish' or 'silly.'" It was, unambiguously, an insult, which in a roundabout way, is how it got to this catch-all way to give faint praise today.

For its first generation of use, the denotative meaning (let's go with "foolish") held firm, but in time, that gave way to the word's negative connotation. Before the 14th century was out, people began using "nice" as a one-size-fits-all insult; as Huffington Post describes, the word "was used to refer to a variety of less-than-great sentiments including wantonness, extravagance, ostentation, lasciviousness, cowardice and sloth."

As the Middle Ages waned, so did the breadth of the term. The word "nice" became increasingly about laziness and less about extravagance, which is still not very nice, but less so than before. Still, that wasn't enough for the word's meaning to change to something lukewarmly positive. But we were long on our way. Lazy people were also seen as reserved, private, and demure, and, the word "nice" became somewhat of a neutral term. Huffington Post summarized it like this: "Dive deeper into the Middle Ages, and the meaning deflated. The word started to hint not at ostentation or cowardice but shyness and reserve; not in a negative way, but certainly not yet positively."

Of course, that changed. With the emergence of the Enlightenment, people liked their elites more reserved, more, say, "ladylike," and the word "nice" accurately described these people. As a result, "nice" became the word of praise (faint as it may be) it is today.

Bonus fact: The word "naughty" has a similarly muddled history, and one which may reflect on how we, by default, often blame those in poverty for their situation. It literally means "having nothing" — someone with "naught". The negative connotation came later, as GOOD Magazine explains: "In the 1300s, naughty people had naught (nothing); they were poor or needy. By the 1400s, the meaning shifted from having nothing to being worth nothing, being morally bad or wicked."

Writing A Book About Books

I've never given much serious consideration to those "1000 _______ To _______ Before You Die" books. However, this Literary Hub conversation with James Mustich, who spent 14 years researching and writing the recently-published 1000 Books To Read Before You Die, makes me want to track down his book. Completing a project like this properly requires a ton of time and effort, and it sounds like Mustich took his job extremely seriously.

Thomas DePietro has known Mustich since they were "high-school poets together over forty years ago" and he states that Mustich "walks a fine line between literary critic and enthusiast" and has created "a book that ... exults in the sheer joy of reading, and sharing those pleasures with others".

From Mustich's comments:

It's almost a thousand pages, nearly 900 pages of text and then various indexes to help people navigate through the list that I've made. For each of the thousand books I've written a brief essay, and added endnotes with relevant information and lots of recommendations for further reading. Altogether, there are more than 5,000 books referenced in it. ... I signed the contract for this book 14 years ago. It's been quite some time in the making. ...

The idea is: What about books speaks to people? In general and then specifically. What has spoken to me in particular? There's everything in here from, in terms of a reader's lifetime, from Goodnight, Moon, to The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's book about grief. And chronologically it ranges from the Epic of Gilgamesh up to a book published last year called Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman. ...

[T]here's probably, say, 250 of the 1,000 that are what are generally considered classics, so you can trace in what I've done a kind of course, if you wanted to, in literary history. ... Toward the end of the project, I begin to realize something that was motivating me, somewhat unwittingly. I have two daughters, who are both adults, in their twenties. They have always been readers, and they couldn't walk out of their rooms in our house without tripping over a pile of books. But they don't have the constant sense of the continuum of literature that was so important to me when I was growing up, which, frankly, I absorbed from spending so much time in bookstores in my formative years—not enough fresh air! So I've been reconstructing all of that by my own lights as a kind of record for them, I think. Again, that wasn't a conscious thing, but I think it's certainly part of what gives my book its shape. ...

I framed it for myself like this: what if I had a bookstore, and I could only have 1,000 books in it? I'd want to have classics, yes, but I'd also want to have something for anybody who walked in, and said, "I want a good mystery," or "I feel like reading something about golf." Or medicine. Or theology. Or true crime. One of the things I write about in my introduction is that inveterate readers read the way they eat: hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next. ... [R]eading isn't all high-mindedness. ...

[F]or a long time, 1,000 seemed like so many. But then when I got towards the end, it was too few, by half at least! There are just so many good books. And closing in on the 1,000 put a fine point on what, of course, had haunted me all along: there is so much I haven't read. Through all the years I worked on the book, I tried to be thoughtful about it, but every week turned up books or authors I'd missed. And every conversation I had with a fellow reader seemed to add to that pile. ... But sooner or later, I had to draw a line. ...

One of the things that takes so long is that you not only need to know enough about the book to have something to say, but you also need to know enough about a subject or an author to know what not to say. ... If you're going to write 500, 600 words about Darwin, or about Madame de Staël, or about Ishmael Reed, you want to know enough about the extent of their work to be able to judge what's important, what to share with someone who may not have any context, and also know enough about the breadth and depth of their thinking to represent it credibly, especially if you're dealing with someone outside one's own tradition or one's own education. You want to be respectful of what you're reading and you want to make sure that you have enough sensitivity and sensibility—or just enough sense with no suffix—to recognize that the work has its own existence whether you read it or not, no matter what you say about it, and to represent that in some way. ...

What I tried to do, especially with those authors whom readers might assume they know about, or assume they're not interested in, or whose work they've always been daunted by, is to give an invitation to their books that is engaging but still robust enough give a sense of the landscapes they create. To suggest that this is what you'll be thinking about if you read this author. For most of us, too much of our reading of serious literature is when we're very young, and they're school assignments. And we approach books a certain way because of that—like they're homework. ... This is a book which I hope people will keep on their shelves and pull off when they want to read Conrad, or they want to read Virginia Woolf, or they're looking for a good mystery. It's meant to be used as a resource. ...

[T]here is a sensibility that runs through my book that I hope readers will find congenial, and come to trust. I don't mean trust as in "agree with," but respect and react to in considered ways. ... [R]eading, and the kind of interior life it presupposes, is really important to one's mental health, and I would also venture to say, to one's moral health and to the mental and moral health of society at large. And that when you pick up a book you are also acknowledging others, because you're reading someone else's words, and you're learning about new worlds. That dialogue that books encourage is critically important. ... I think books have receded from the frontlines of the cultural conversation in a way that's not healthy for the culture.

The Washington Post praised the "scope and diversity" of Mustich's choices. The book "invites rapturous browsing even while eliciting, and expecting, argument. ... It's hard to imagine that such a massive compendium could have been done better or demonstrate a more supple and catholic taste."

 And a look at some sample pages reveals a gorgeous layout.

Winter Rain

Port Hardy does not get cold enough during the winter months for much snow to accumulate. Instead, it rains. A lot, we were told.

It was raining on the night we arrived. We drove the final two hours through endless forests in the dark, with copious rain and heavy fog. I hoped the elk living in those forests had the good sense to stay home that night. (Two signs along the way instructed us to watch out for elk for the next 65 kilometers (40 miles), then another 45 km. So pretty much constantly!)

That was the only rain we saw for our initial week. But most of the last three days have been very wet. There is a baseball field near our house and walking Diego (not pictured at left) in the outfield is like walking in two inches of water. It's like the grass does not exist.

I finally got my work equipment this past Monday and was connected for my shift on Tuesday. So far, the only drawback is the delay in retrieving and saving documents. Of course, those delays are measured in handfuls of seconds, but it still can be frustrating.

But, in general, working at home - I'm going to really enjoy this. Finish a job, then walk down the hallway and put some wet clothes in the dryer. ... Change the CD in the small stereo in my office. ... Email a co-worker that I can start a job, but I need to walk my dog first. ... Continue organizing my office while keeping an eye on the in-box.

Last evening, for my dinner break, I grilled a couple of burgers, had some tater tots going in the oven, and built my first fire in the fireplace. I brought a comfy chair over by the fireplace and ate with Diego laying beside me. Later, he got up and sat rigidly behind me, just over my left shoulder, keeping his sharp eyes focused on the dwindling supply of tater tots.

Baseball: In the summer, most weekday Red Sox games will begin at 4 PM (or 5 PM), which means that home night games will likely be over by 7:30 PM. During the first week of the 2019 season, the sun will set about 8 PM. In late June, it will get dark at roughly 9:45 PM. ... Two hours of daylight after a night game!