Notes for a Short Lecture

Here begin my notes for a short lecture about -- “music” -- as if I could even begin to talk about all the things music means to me... but here's a start:

“To some it is Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle, to me it is allegro con brio.”  Arturo Toscanini

Five of us attended Tuesday night a talk on the mathematics behind sound. We learned that people progressively lose their hearing, that school kids can keep ring tones secret from their teachers if pitched high enough, that sound is a transmission of energy, not a movement of molecules, although they seem to move a bit, too, and we saw this demonstrated by a Slinky.

All this, and I still don’t know (or know enough about)...

• Why I prefer Mozart and Dvorak over most other composers. Well, I sort of know.

• Why I like hearing music in the first place.

• Why I listen to anything, but play only classical.

• Why the best musicians turn professional and many then lose their love of performing.

• What music does that makes it so pleasing – or unpleasant.

• How the thought that we now need a series of chromatic eighth notes in a particular order at a particular tempo at specific pitches for a specific length of time with a slight emphasis on the second of each group of four, at an increasing volume that gradually separates itself from the surrounding sounds in order to bring the listener’s attention to itself – I don’t know how something inside the player can direct limbs and fingers to create the conditions – virtually instantly – to produce these particular notes in that particular way – and then to be able to repeat the sequence when needed.

• Why one performer astounds and another bores.

• How playing music is similar to learning a language. It is exactly like learning a language.

• What one piece of music for cello is my favorite.

• Can one separate the composer’s biography from the music? Should one?

• Composer’s “signatures” – repeating tropes – and why no one objects to this kind of shorthand.

• The alienated feeling in an orchestra vs in a small group; the dysfunction of groups.

• Whatever happened to music / art / culture in the schools?

• Why I like one cello more than another; why I like mine.

• The effect of a bow on a particular instrument.

• Why we think of “baroque” music (approx. 1600 - 1750) as so exotic it requires different instruments and bows and styles to play well; and we think that those things are just ‘normal’ and usual when playing “classical” music. In other words, why is one era exotic and another just the usual thing?

• The answer may lie in the sheer volume of music written in the classical era – 1750 - 1900. That’s the sweet spot for great stuff and it’s when most modern instruments reached their final/highest development.

I’m talking here of classical music, because in truth, although I love many genres and hear lots of different kinds of music, I most prefer the classic classical kind of music – the music that was created from Bach to Brahms – 1700 to 1900. That is my particular sweet spot, and in that two hundred year period can be found more than enough meat to feed me the rest of my life.

The music I usually play spans maybe 200 years. The music I listen to (other than classical) spans only my lifetime – from the 1950s to the present. Life would not be worth living without the blues, early Bob Dylan, David Bromberg, John Prine, Ry Cooder. If I was deaf I’d feel it through the thumping and vibrations.

I started out on drums because the idea of banging on things appealed to me. A lot. Based on a written test I apparently aced, which was administered to graduating sixth graders in San Francisco, on the first day of Band, Mr Jenkins from the string orchestra entered the room, called my name, and asked me to drop the drumsticks and follow him next door, where another room full of junior high adolescents awaited. The tall girls and boys were put behind basses. The smallest people on violins. In the middle, violas; and I guess the regular-sized people on cellos. The rest is history.

We played on beat up instruments that had been banged upon and carried home for probably decades, predating the Civil War, or at least WW II. We used gut strings, which made our sound warm and appealing, but those strings were devilishly difficult to keep in tune and when one snapped it could slap you in the face. To this day I’m chary of staring down at the high quality steel strings on my current cello.

Think about it: A middle sized middle school in a middle sized city had a band teacher, a band room and all the instruments; and a string orchestra, a strings teacher, and all the instruments. I was there for two years. In the second year the people who had started with me were performing Beethoven’s Fifth symphony (well, parts of it) for the school assembly. Our school colors were red and gray. I’ve always liked red and gray together.

When I got to my private boy’s college prep high school, entrance by examination only, no tuition, music existed there because the charismatic English teacher (also a published writer) sponsored some boys who wanted to try playing in a string quartet. We performed for the school assembly, too. But the difference, even then – public schools could sustain large music programs – private schools maybe not so much. This is an important point: The boys who played instruments in high school and later, often got their start as I did, in a public school band or orchestra. These graduates still staff the bulk of amateur orchestras and fill the ranks of amateur chamber music workshops, and the audience for classical pieces. And we’re very very gray these days. Joselyn started on the violin in school.

My mother much preferred cello over drums, so she bought me lessons. Three memories stand out from that period: 1. At my teacher Bonnie Hampton’s house in Berkeley I glanced into what I remember as a dark, dimly lit room, and saw the famous Griller String Quartet talking with each other in rehearsal, with Colin Hampton on cello. They appeared to me as tired, strange, old men who smelled musty. I never heard them play. 2. One day at the SF Conservatory where Bonnie also taught, while waiting for my lesson I heard another cellist, my age, playing for the teacher. After a few seconds I had the startling realization that I would never be able to play nearly as beautifully, and I’d better think of a different career than music. 3. Lest you think I was always graceful about all this: I hated practicing so much that my mother ended up placing a kitchen timer in my room and starting it when I picked up my cello. At one point I reached into my closet and punched a fist sized hole through the side of the cello, right through the canvas case. The violin shop in Oakland fixed it as if it had never happened. I told my parents I had dropped it. They never disputed that tale, the same way they believed I hadn’t been leering at the bra ads in Sears catalogs.

NOTES

Speaking of the best violins in the world... they are difficult to identify, even by experts, blindfolded.

About the difference between mechanically produced music (aka drum machines) and human made -- try this. If you have a metronome (you can download a metronome app on your smartypants phone, too), run it along with some slower piece of classical music -- the slow movement of a violin concerto or sonata, say... and you'll soon discover that the better the performance the more "wrong" the metronome. In other words, part of the music is to push and pull the beat as needed to create the most powerful effects... often subtle enough not be noticed, but the metronome will pick it up as it goes out of phase with how the piece started. Same true no doubt with jazz and many other genres.

An excellent book and the one I mentioned this morning -- esp. the chapter where the author Arnold Steinhardt (first violin, Guaneri String Quartet) tries to recreate the experience of playing well with others is titled Indivisible By Four, A String Quartet in Search of Harmony, available in paperback. I can't find this book on my shelves, or I'd loan it to you. I mistakenly today gave Richard the title The Four and the One by David Rounds, which is also an interesting book on string quartets, but not the one I had in mind. Steinhardt's two books (the other is a first rate memoir, Violin Dreams) are very much worth your reading time. Lots of fun.

Another book -- in answer to the question "what is your one favorite piece of cello music?" is The Cello Suites, JS Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin.

The Civil War and the Trojan War

Sometimes the books you read talk to each other. Something you read about the Civil War reminds you of the Trojan War which in turn makes you think of something in the mystery novel that kept you up until – gasp – 5 o'clock this morning.

A kind salesperson sent me an advance copy of Song of Achilles by scholar and first-time novelist Madeline Miller. I dove into the old story made new. How Achilles was raised in a castle in Phthia, "set in a northern crook of land between the ridges of Mount Othrys and the sea," how the exiled prince Patroclus came to live there and how Achilles and Patroclus became lifelong friends and lovers, through war and the inevitable tragic ending.

The gods are alive in Song of Achilles and they are dangerous. The reader rushes to the end. My friend would have forgotten to exit her airplane had the flight attendant not tapped her on the shoulder and said it's time to get your bag down, honey.

1861, The Civil War Awakening by historian Adam Goodheart at first glance couldn't be more different than this novel about the Trojan War. At second glance the books have a lot in common. There is the run up to wars that changed history and civilization itself. Zeitgeist evolving. Events that raise some up and drop others over a cliff. Gods and demi-gods messing up and messing things up. Things in common.

In 1861 Goodheart pries open with astounding scholarship and depth of feeling the largely overlooked months before the American Civil War broke out.

"...the last New Year's levee of the Buchanan administration was a sadly diminished affair... The White House... wallpaper was greasy in places where visitors had brushed against it with sweaty hands or pomaded hair; its carpets were worn down by muddy boots and stained with tobacco juice."

We meet the aging and ineffective Buchanan, but we also follow his splendid self-made rise from poverty to "one of the best-qualified men ever to win the presidency." We meet poet Walt Whitman, writer Henry Adams, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and on the train a young pregnant woman being conveyed back into slavery. Unforgettable people and vivid moments.

The ante-bellum Midwest – places such as Milwaukee, Madison, La Crosse, Kalamazoo – was a place of "imaginary canals and railroads," Goodheart writes. "Conjectural towns, utopian communities – that might vanish in a puff or, more remarkably, take shape out of nothing, just as the glorious statehouse arose on what had recently been a manure-covered pasture. Such a world required every person in it to be nimble, ambitious, adaptable, and free."

If the post-war American myth is forming in the Midwest, in Song of Achilles the stories are embodied in immortal gods with unfathomable power and all the faults of humans.

"'Thetis!' I screamed it into the snatching wind, my face towards the sea. 'Thetis!' The sun was high now... I drew a third breath.

 "'Do not speak my name again.'

"I whirled to face her and lost my balance... her skin was paler even than usual, the first winter's ice. Her lips were drawn back, to show her teeth. 'You are a fool,' she said. 'Get down. Your halfwit death will not save him.'"

Don't mess with Thetis, son.

Achilles as a boy chooses Patroclus to be his Therapon – "brother-in-arms sworn to a prince by oaths and love. In war, these men were his honor guard; in peace his closest advisors. It was a place of highest esteem." Their bond is lifelong and intimate. In the end it is the death of Patroclus that drives glorious Achilles to his death before the walls of Troy.

In antebellum America educated men knew the Greek stories. Some wrote and read in ancient Greek. For this and for other, less easily divined reasons "The idea of the brotherhood of man was more than an abstraction," Goodheart writes. "Not only did... friends address one another as 'Brother' ... they also felt intense emotional – at times also physical – bonds with one another... Young men in the mid-nineteenth century could be passionate in ways that some readers today find disorienting... They found nothing unorthodox in strolling arm in arm, addressing letters to 'my dearest' or 'lovely boy,' and sharing fond embraces in a common bed."

These books, set thousands of years apart, one a history and the other a novel, speak to the reader in related images. Love, hate, war. Reading them together in the same week created newly connected worlds to ponder.



NOTES

The mystery mentioned in the first paragraph is Stardust by Joseph Kanon. Washington Square Press paperback $15. ISBN 9781439156322. Kanon is a first rate writer. Do not read this book in bed unless you don't value sleep.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. HarperCollins hard cover $24.99 ISBN 9780062060617.

1861, The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart. Vintage paperback $16. ISBN 9781400032198.

Not from the book, but fascinating: General Grant and the Jewish Question

One of many Civil War timelines

New information on the number of deaths in the Civil War -- more than we supposed.

Spaghetti Harvest Days at Words on Books

Here I was, all ready to do a serious think piece on a new novel starring Achilles and his heel, and Achilles’ boytoy Patroclus, when I looked up at the date and realized this is absolutely the wrong day to attempt any serious thing.

April Fools Day. Why can’t every day be April Fools Day? And does Fools have an apostrophe or does it not?

On the Google there are collections of the best April Fools Day hoaxes of all time. Number One, according to The Museum of Hoaxes, and yes, there is such a thing – or – could it be a hoax? – Number One April Fools Day hoax is the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.

Spaghetti does not grow on trees, and Swiss maidens on ladders do not harvest it – or do they? The BBC on the first day of April, 1957, not only reported a bumper spaghetti crop in Switzerland due to mild weather and “virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil” but showed television viewers footage of “Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees.”

My favorite in this collection is not the Taco Liberty Bell, the instant color TV set, or the curious case of fastball savant Sidd Finch. No, my favorite is the Guardian’s seven-page special report on the little-known island nation of San Serriffe.

In 1977 the London newspaper reported on “a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands.”

Instantly, readers wanted to go there, despite the cruel dictatorship of General Pica. The Guardian said that “terrorism has been virtually eliminated from the beaches of San Serriffe” so come on down and get your sunburn, English person. 

The newspaper reported ongoing "antagonisms between descendants of the original Spanish and Portuguese colons and those of the later English arrivals, sometimes humorously derided as the semicolons."

The two primary islands of San Serriffe, Upper and Lower Caisse, feature the capital, Bodoni, and the national bird, the Kwote. Readers learned that due to shifting sands, the islands were moving eastward at the rate of 1400 meters a year.

“Due to a constant process of erosion that removed sand from the west coast and deposited it on the east coast... it was anticipated that the islands would collide with Sri Lanka in 2011. To slow down this movement, boats constantly ferried sand from the east coast back to the west.”

The massive one-day success of this hoax led to fan clubs, t-shirts, and one crazy publisher who really exists – or does he?

“Henry Morris, owner of the Bird & Bull Press in Pennsylvania... published a series of books about San Serriffe... His books include Booksellers of San Serriffe (first edition currently available for $300); First Fine Silver Coinage Of The Republic Of San Serriffe; and The World's Worst Marbled Papers: Being a Collection of Ten Contemporary San Serriffean Marbled Papers Showing the Lowest Level of Technique, the Worst Combinations of Colors, and the Most Inferior Execution Known Since the Dawn of the Art of Marbling Collected by the Author During a Five Year Expedition to the Republic of San Serriffe.

So... there I was this past week, reading The Song of Achilles, a first novel by Greek scholar Madeline Miller. It’s a love story, and a war story. It’s more personal and much more emotional than The Iliad but in the end it’s just one more story added to the many that have come down to us from the old Greeks.

There is no definitive history of that time, no single story, so Ms Miller has picked out the parts that make most sense to her and retold them from the point of view of Patroclus, lover of Achilles. The reader hangs on to every gripping paragraph, hoping somehow that the Gods will be deflected from their tragic path – as did the Greeks, no doubt, in their day.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller exists, and I read it, and I’ll review it further one of these days. Really, it does, and I will. You can believe it. Even on April Fools Day.

NOTES

The Museum of Hoaxes Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. HarperCollins hard cover $24.99. ISBN 9780062060617.

Excellent map of Homeric Greece

The Trojan war as told in the Iliad

Interesting essays on the Iliad, its meaning, performance, etc.

Bird and Bull Press, a division of Oak Knoll Press

Bird & Bull Press) Bachaus, Theodore The Booksellers of San Serriffe. Port Clarendon San Serriffe Publishing Company 2001 8vo. quarter leather with green leather spine label, slipcase. 89, (10) pages with various leaves with tipped-in plates. First edition, limited to 200 numbered copies. Those of you who were impressed by Dr. Bachaus's earlier book on the Private Presses of San Serriffe will be absolutely shattered by this in-depth survey of the booksellers of San Serriffe. The book has an historical introduction by Dr. Bachaus, which is followed by chapters on Hobart Flock of Hoki-Nol Books (hmm!), Ki-flongian Booksellers, Ltd., Grandiloquent Bookshop, Cloacina Books, St. Luke's Paper Mill and Bookshop, Contre Kook Mail Order Books, and Exterminator Books. Contains tipped-in photographs, a fold-out broadside, and three woodcuts by Wesley Bates (including one showing Robert and Mildred Flederbach in front of Hoki-Nol Press Books). The book is accompanied by a prospectus, and a letter from Dr. Bachaus to the purchaser of the book talking about the book, and enclosing four commemorative stamps from the Republic of San Serriffe inserted in an envelope with a canceled stamp. Price: $ 300.00 other currencies Order nr. 62199

Put it on the Shelf

Only so many things you can do with a book. Read it. Stack it. Lose it behind the couch. Eat it, if you’ve read it four times and you’re all alone on that desert island.

C’mon... industrial glue and recycled soy inks can’t hurt you. Can they?

But if you’re not ready to eat your books, you are going to have to shelve them. This is not as simple as it may appear. Designers and architects have been working on this. You can see some of their inventive designs to display and hold paper books at the British blog called Bookshelf, “the home of interesting bookshelves, bookcases and things that look like them since 2007.”

I get a new design every morning in my email box. Shelves designed to look like other things. Shelves that fill an entire wall, an entire room, an entire house. Shelves made of paper, plastic, fish scales, whatever. Some of these designs are laughable – as in they’ll make you laugh out loud but no one will ever build them – and other designs are purely beautiful and useful. Still other designs fall somewhere between the extremes of beauty and foolishness.

All this design intelligence is being collected in a new book that will appear in May, titled, necessarily but prosaically,Bookshelf. I haven’t seen the finished book, few have so far, but I can review it because I’ve been staring at the designs for a while now.

The book is edited by Alex Johnson who writes for The London Independent, is a webmaster for other design sites, and wrote the book Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution.

A few early reviews are in. Elle Decoration magazine noted "La folle passion du journaliste anglais Alex Johnson." The mad passion of English journalist Alex Johnson. Those mad Englishmen, noonday sun and all.

More recently Bookshelf blog presented The Tree bookcase by Roberto Corazza. His creation resembles a tree in outline form, if you hollowed out an oak and tacked it to the wall. It’s painted bright blue, and might hold a couple dozen books. More likely you’d place a few books in your blue tree, then stare intently at them. It is lovely.

Already this year there have been a great number of designs presented on the Bookshelf blog. The shelves named Juliette, for no clear reason, consist of a free-standing staircase that leans up against the wall, with books on each step. Another design will contain living plants as well as books. Watch out for stains if you over water.

One highly useful construction consists of wooden bookshelves erected at Union Station in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Friends of the Worcester Public Library hope people take advantage of the downtime to read a book from The Give and Take, a bookshelf of free titles for people to peruse and even take with them.”

The very first design on the blog was one of those things that seems to be more design object than practical book holder; more Slinky than shelf. It is a concoction of stainless steel coils that look like letters of the alphabet, corkscrewed in such a way they can be stretched apart and books inserted between the letters. It’s a work of art – it can scrape burnt grease off a fry pan – and, it’s from Milan, Italy!

Oh, it goes on. Stacked tea cups that somehow hold books. White-painted limbs of a tree gracefully supporting a row of books. A bookshelf that spells the word READ. There are designs for virtual, IPhone-style books – you know, the kind of bookshelves made of recycled electrons that exist only in your pocket device. Another set of shelves resemble clouds, and these are tacked over the headboard, apparently, of Alex Johnson’s bed.

The This-is-Not-A-Bookshelf appears to be constructed recycled painted boards nailed together in the form of the letter A. The maker, Lewis Wadsworth, writes “It’s not an oddly painted bookshelf made of scrap lumber. It’s not.” Well, that’s what he says, anyway.

Back in the days of clay tablets, did designers plot ways to keep the things upright and intact? Did the scrolls of ancient Rome reside on prosaic shelves like you see in the movies, or did the Romans invent scrollshelves?

In the Middle Ages, when an individual book might take years to create and illustrate, and with heavy binding, chain and lock weigh quite a few pounds – did these books have special shelving?

The colorful history of tablet, scroll and book shelves. Is there a colorful history? Wouldn’t we like to know!

NOTES

Bookshelf by Alex Johnson. Thames & Hudson hard cover $24.95. ISBN 0500516146. Available May, 2012.

Bookshelf Blog home

Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution by Alex Johnson. Frances Lincoln paperback $29.95. ISBN 071123082X.

 

The Tree bookcase

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is dead, long live the Encyclopedia!

When I heard that the multi-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica would cease publishing on paper, I knew I’d have to write the inevitable eulogy. Or something approaching it.

Already you can read paeans to the demise on CNN. “It’s like losing a friend,” one librarian said, even though she also admitted “it can’t keep up” with the changing world, since it’s published only biannually.

I knew this day was coming. I haven’t touched my copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia in years. I haven’t spun the one volume Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged on its wooden stand – haven’t spun that baby in I can’t remember how long, except to bump into it or dust it once in a while.

At the moment it’s sitting in the corner, open to pages 1098 and 1099, left stage to Leishmania.

Leishmania: Noun. Any parasitic flagellate protozoan of the genus Leishmania, occurring in vertebrates in an oval or spherical, nonflagellate form, and in invertebrates in an elongated, flagellated form. Neologism, 1903, named after William Boog Leishman, who lived 1865-1926, a Scottish bacteriologist; see leishmanial, leishmanic, leishmanioid.

That’s the kind of life-changing, useless information I’ve always loved in dictionaries and encyclopedias. I grew up leafing through these books, and any number of high school papers came almost word-for-word out of these things, don’t tell the teacher.

As a kid I would browse the Columbia Encyclopedia, following the careers of a multitude of James and Henrys. Prince or scoundrel, the entries connected to other fascinating paragraphs, educating and entertaining me royally. I spent pleasant hours with that book, in the warm sunshine and bright windows of memory, traveling across acres of tiny print.

You can do that today, online. It’s called web surfing, not encyclopedia reading, but it’s very much the same thing. You waste time, you learn a lot, and never know when it may become useful.

So, to confirm how things are now, I looked up Leishmania on www.dictionary.com

To my utter bemusement, in less than a second I was staring at the very same definition, right down to Professor Leishman himself, life dates and flagellates and all.  Would anyone like to buy my dusty dictionary stand along with the dictionary that has rested on it since 1966?

The Britannica-ites themselves are finding it rather easy to say goodbye to 244 years of print. The president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., said in an interview, "Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it's much more expansive and it has multimedia."

User-sourced online Wikipedia has replaced much of what the Britannica once provided – an authoritative and constantly revised window into the factual world. Wikipedia is a creature of its times, reflecting the cultural mores and science of our day, changing as fast as we change. The Britannica does this online as well, just a bit more slowly, and perhaps more authoritatively.

The Britannica we’re talking about began in 1768, in Edinburgh, Scotland, when an independent bookseller (the only kind of bookseller that existed in those faraway days) and a copperplate engraver collaborated on the first edition.

It started as a collection of articles, sold by subscription, when bound running to three volumes. Over the years it grew to 32 volumes, requiring ever larger sets of bookshelves. With the 11th edition in 1911 “articles were shortened and simplified” to appeal more to American readers, and make it easier for the encyclopedia salesmen to sell the darn thing.

Interesting fact: The first Encyclopaedia Britannica “also featured 160 beautiful illustrations... shocking to some readers, such as the three pages depicting female pelvises and fetuses in the midwifery article; King George III commanded that these pages be ripped from every copy.”

I garnered all this online. That should tell you all you need to know about the print editions of theEncyclopaedia Britannica.

NOTES

CNN’s excellent article on the subject...  The NY Times...  Wikipedia...

Happy Birthdays

This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books...

It’s not my birthday today, not quite yet. It’s too soon to celebrate, but no one says you can’t celebrate past birthdays.

On my birthday in 1708 James Stuart (no, not the actor) entered the Firth of Forth. Say that ten times, fast. Patrick Henry declared “Give Me Liberty” or give me something else. The Russian Tsar was stabbed, strangled and trampled to death in his bedroom on my birthday in 1801.

Also on my birthday Mr Lewis & Mr Clarke took the first short steps on the long slog home; the first Otis elevator was installed; UC Berkeley was founded in Oakland, not Berkeley; Teddy Roosevelt left (again) for an African Safari. On my birthday more recently a refinery in Texas exploded, the Mir satellite fell into the Pacific Ocean, Taiwan held its first direct elections and cold fusion was either invented or discovered, or both.

Birthdays bring to mind children. A good friend of mine complained I don’t write Words on Books about books for children. At least I haven’t done so for a long time. There is a reason for this. I know very little about books for children.

For a couple of years my 3rd grade teacher-wife invited me into her classroom to read books to 8 year-olds. Several girls would cozy up in front of me, position themsevles so I had to catch their eyes over the top of Harry Potter, and eventually they got me – I would break up into laughter. This only encouraged them, of course.

When I worked in the bookstore what I did know I learned from sales reps, and various book expositions, mothers and grandmothers, and the children themselves.

I could tell from the questions parents asked what kind of books they were seeking. And by watching which books their children chewed, tore or otherwise destroyed I could see what appealed to them, too.

Last August my granddaughter Nora was born, creating a whole new set of birthdays. She is, of course, the most intelligent, beautiful and culturally advanced child ever born, pretty much like every other granddaughter in the world.

Long before she could speak let alone focus, I pulled together a starter set of wonderful books, knowing some had pleased me as a child, and others had delighted a great number of small children. A starter set for a new reader, in other words.

Here’s what I sent to Nora: 

First of all, and for all time, The Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown, with illustrations by Garth Williams. You can’t do better than getting lost in the woods, being found by your father, and coming home to a warm tree and hot food. Plus, most editions of this book have bear fur on the outside you can touch while listening to your mother read the story to you.

It’s synthetic fur these days, of course. The original book, which I still have, sadly but beautifully featured a super smooth hank of light brown rabbit fur.

Margaret Wise Brown was in her prime when I was a young child, and I obsessed on her books. I also chose her iconic classics Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny for Nora.

Hug, written and illustrated by Jez Alborough, is an all-time lap warmer. It’s even more special and to the point – Hug? Hug?? HUG??? – in board-book format. Easy to read, easy to chew. You can’t chew an E book now, can you?

Finally, the oversized picture book Ten Little Caterpillars written by Bill Martin, Jr. with bright new illustrations by Lois Ehlert called out to me with its cheerful and life-accurate drawings. This book not only is fun, it LOOKS like fun when you pick it up.

Please share with me your own children’s books thoughts and recommendations. You could leave a comment on my blog: wordsonbooks.blogspot.com

And Happy Birthday to You!

NOTES

The Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrations by Garth Williams. HarperFestival board book version $6.99. ISBN 0060759607. “There was a little fur family, warm as toast, smaller than most, in little fur coats, and they lived in a warm wooden tree.”

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrations by Clement Hurd. HarperFestival board book version $8.99. ISBN  0694003611.

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrations by Clement Hurd. HarperFestival board book $8.99. ISBN 0061074292.

The first three books are available in numerous alternative formats.

Ten Little Caterpillars by Bill Martin, Jr., illustrations by Lois Ehlert. Beach Lane Books hard cover $17.99. ISBN 144243385X. Originally published in 1967, republished with bright new illustrations. Hard cover only.

Hug written and illustrated by Jez Alborough. Candlewick Press board book $6.99. ISBN 0763615765.

Also available in paperback and a Chinese-language hard cover version.

and another thing...

As Leonardo used to do, I wanted to record the following passage in my "notebook" aka blog for future reference. This is from pp.35-36 in the book Da Vinci's Ghost by Toby Lester, in the chapter Body of Empire. For the review, look one blog entry behind this one.

"If the peoples of the world were to become members of a healthy and whole body of empire, Vitruvius argued, their natural excesses needed balancing out. And the gods had placed the Romans in Italy, halfway between the north pole and the equator, for just that reason.

"The people of Italy are the most balanced with respect to both north and south, in terms of bodily form and the spiritual rigor required for decisive action. For exactly as the planet Jupiter is temperate, running in the middle between the sweltering planet Mars and the freezing planet Saturn, so, for the same reason, Italy has the unbeatable advantage of being balanced between the southern and northern regions, but with admixtures from both. And so she shatters the courage of (northern) barbarians by intelligent planning , and foils the plots of southerners by force of arms. Thus the divine mind allocated to the city of the Roman people a superb, temperate region in order that it could acquire governance of the whole world." (Vitruvius, 1st Century BC)

"This is a remarkable passage. In effect, it provides the blueprint for a race-based ideology of empire that for two millennia would hold sway in Europe, and has yet to fully disappear. Geography and biology, Vitruvius was suggesting, are destiny. Placed at the center of the world by the gods, the Romans would rule the world forever as part of the natural order -- if, that is, they could assemble a coherent world body of empire. Which is exactly what Vitruvius set out to explain how to do in his Ten Books."

Da Vinci's Ghost

We will never be done reading about Leonardo Da Vinci, protean genius of the Italian renaissance. We have his rich body of paintings and drawings and sketches, and his sometimes ambiguous writings.

Like some of us, Leonardo was left-handed. Like few of us, he wrote backward, right to left, perhaps to avoid smudging his ink; perhaps because he liked looking at his work in mirrors; most likely because he was never in school and thus had no schoolmaster to correct his habits.

Leonardo moved from one interest to another, restless, questing, raising more questions than he could possibly address in one long lifetime. As a young man he was popular, successful and happy, and he had a “lifelong taste for jokes, light verse, ribald banter, riddles and fables, even party tricks. In his notebooks he recorded scores of jokes and anecdotes. “It was asked of a painter why,” one of them went, “since he made such beautiful figures which were but dead things, his children were so ugly. To which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day and his children by night.”

These insights into Leonardo come from the highly readable new book Da Vinci’s Ghost by Toby Lester.

His new work is breezily written and easy to read. It is based on deep research, vetted by an array of experts. Lester centers on one drawing – the most famous drawing in recent history, which depicts a man – perhaps Leonardo himself – placed inside a circle and a square. You’ve seen this four-armed four-legged ideal human in dozens of places. It is one of the most iconic images in our culture.

What is it really about, what does it mean? Where did it come from in the first place? What did it signify in Leonardo’s day, and what might it mean to us? These are some of the questions that Lester confronts in Da Vinci’s Ghost.

The image of man inside circle and square is now referred to as Vitruvian Man. The idea was first described by the 1st Century BC Roman engineer Vitruvius in his Ten Books on Architecture, but not drawn by him nor by the medieval scribes who transcribed his work.

It was an Italian theorist and builder, Franceso di Giorgio Martini of Siena, who “sketched...” in the margins of his own Treatise on Architecture “the first known picture that can legitimately be called Vitruvian Man,” Lester writes. The sketch was no idle fancy but “an attempt to sum up the essence of the human analogy, the idea... that “all the arts and all rules are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body.”

Francesco and Leonardo knew each other, traveled together, questioned and learned from each other, even competed on the design of the Milan cathedral.

Da Vinci and others came to believe that by deeply understanding the universal proportions of humankind – down to the distance between elbow and shoulder, upper lip and nose, the ratio of the distance between thumb and palm and so forth – one could come to understand God. Since God had created the world and mankind, by understanding ourselves we would understand the universe.

Done right, every drawing, painting and building would be in harmony with the divine, clearly an exciting and worthy goal if it could possibly be achieved. Lester speculates because Leonardo “had observed and studied the natural world more thoroughly than anybody before him... perhaps he felt he was on the verge of attaining what had eluded others for so long: the godlike ability to see and understand the nature of the world as a whole.”

The figure of man inside circle and square can be understood as “a hinge moment in the history of ideas,” Lester writes, “the intoxicating, ephemeral moment when art, science, and philosophy all seemed to be merging, and when it seemed possible that, with their help, the individual human mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of ... everything.”

This is what you get with Leonardo, a seeker who flourished in exciting times, an artist and philosopher who sought the inexpressible. “Everything proceeds from everything,” he wrote in a notebook, “everything becomes everything, and everything can be turned into everything else... The earth is moved from its position,” he wrote, “by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.”

In Da Vinci’s Ghost Toby Lester conjures a living, breathing Leonardo. Meeting him here is unforgettable.

NOTES

Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image by Toby Lester. Free Press hard cover $26.99. ISBN 9781439189238. Also available in audio versions.

Another excellent book on Leonardo, used by Lester as one of many sources is Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind by Charles Nicholl. Penguin paperback $18. ISBN 0143036122.

It's a small store. You have to choose carefully.

Everyone assumes edifying thoughts can be found in books. Often everyone is right.

“The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. That’s a good one. Speaking of newly-minted Americans he added, “Can we never extract this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?”

I post-it-noted those lines in my copy of Lions of the West by Robert Morgan. The context – a discussion of Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward the frontier –  doesn’t much matter. The lines quoted are simply –  juicy.

A college professor, a novelist married to a novelist, first turned me on to reading with a kind of focused detachment – letting the story carry you along but also paying attention to the craft.

In The Enemy author Lee Child has a small-town character who owns a small hardware store in a small town. He understands that of the things he sells, a few could be used as murder weapons.

The old guy shakes his head. “I have to choose what I carry very carefully. Which in some ways is a burden, but which is also a delight, because choice is very liberating. These decisions are mine, and mine alone. So obviously, for a crowbar...” and so forth into the weeds of quality crowbar sourcing.

We’re talking crowbars, of course, and that paragraph suddenly struck me as a semi-hidden anti-big box store message. Lee Child may have intended nothing of that sort, but that’s what his words did for me. A few words on the joys and pitfalls of business. It’s a small store. You have to choose carefully. It’s a burden, also a delight.

“I sell one of these crowbars a year... two, if I’m very lucky,” the old man added. “They’re expensive. And appreciation for quality is declining shamefully. Pearls before swine, I say.”

Another passage in the same book might as well be addressing the disaster unrolling right now in Syria, even though The Enemy was written eight years ago:

“... The twentieth century’s signature sound is the squeal and clatter of tank tracks on a paved street. That sound was heard in Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and Stalingrad, and Berlin. Then it was heard again in Budapest and Prague, and Seoul and Saigon. It’s a brutal sound. It’s the sound of fear. It speaks of a massive overwhelming advantage in power. And it speaks of remote, impersonal indifference... the very noise they make tells you they can’t be stopped. It tells you you’re weak and powerless against the machine.”

That is so Syria, so accurate and so visionary.

In Adam Hochschild’s recent book on the moral drama of World War One, To End All Wars, I found sentences everywhere that speak to the current condition. Describing the German invasion of Belgium and the emotional British reaction he remarks, “... citizens of a great imperial power always like to think of themselves as anointed protectors of the weak.”

Good one. And this passage, concerning the prolific pro-war novelist John Buchan:

“Like the best propagandists, he was not just a manipulator but a believer, for his sunny personality allowed him to imagine the upside of absolutely anything. The inevitable British victory, he claimed, would produce a more democratic society, and so ‘this war may rank as one of the happiest events in our history.’”

Happy, of course, if you don’t include the countless deaths and massive devastation. And for the opposite feeling, this passage from To End All Wars:

“Recruiting posters... appealed to shame: one showed two children asking a frowning, guilty-looking father in civilian clothes, ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ ... Bob Smillie, leader of the Scottish mineworkers, said his reply would be: I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child.’”

I quote these juicy words for no other reason than to share with you some small part of the pleasure I get from reading. Pretty much wherever you look, in the most unlikely places and least likely contexts, authors may speak in terms that resonate through the years or hit the reader like an unexpected slap.

And that’s something almost any author seeks – to have a more than trivial effect. To change things, open eyes, move mountains, or at the very least simply share.

This two-way exchange between storyteller and listener is one of the most human aspects of being human. Perhaps it’s the only thing.


NOTES

Lions of the West by Robert Morgan. Algonquin Press hard cover $29.95. ISBN: 1565126262. paperback will appear in August, 2012 at $18.95. Also available on compact disc read by David Drummond.

The Enemy by Lee Child. Dell Publishing Co. paperback $9.99. ISBN: 0440245990. Also available in compact disc, Mp3 audio and large print.

To End All Wars, A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin hard cover $28. ISBN 9780618758289. Also available in compact disk and Mp3 audio.

Interesting what a large difference there is between what can be published and what can be aired. Too bad the free speech pioneers who fought for TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, DH Lawrence and V. Nabokov couldn't have managed to establish similar free speech principles for American radio...

Because of one word, I can’t use this quote on air (from The Enemy) ... "The cotton items were worn and soft and the jacket was neither cheap nor expensive. Together they made up a soldier's typical Saturday-night outfit. Shit, shave, and shower, throw on the civilian duds, pile into someone's car, hit a couple of bars, have some fun."

Do E Books Get Dusty on Your Shelf?

Been reading through the Paris Review Blog online. Good writing, stimulating essays. But I have to wonder why a literary magazine able to publish anything it wants also runs a literary blog, and publishes there as well?

Why is the weekly New Yorker Magazine also online? Who besides politicians can possibly have THAT much to say? Why is Karen Brown, of the esteemed Karen Brown travel guidebooks, publishing her annual guides this year only in electronic format?

Why do successful travel guides from Lonely Planet, Frommers and DK Eyewitness plus BBC Travel and TimeOut and Hearst now come in a new app for Pads and Phones and Touches, not to mention Androids? The Wenzani app combines amateur feedback with professional research, producing – well, if you read the early reviews from users –  producing a flawed piece of software that crashes easily and doesn’t yet have a lot of useful information on it.

All this puzzles me.

Any time I feel a bit out of synch I can look around my study and gaze at seemingly endless shelves of books. The more obscure the happier they make me. These silent books provide inspiration just by standing on the shelf.  I don’t have to open one to feel the joy. Blowing the dust off is enough.

Here is my high school copy of Candide (is Voltaire still read in American high schools?). Early chapter: How Candide Escaped from the Bulgarians and What Became of Him.

In this underlined passage the amazingly naive Candide is referring to his mentor, Doctor Pangloss:

 “(He) was right in telling me that all is for the best in this world, for I am vastly more touched by your extreme generosity than by the harshness of the gentleman in the black cloak and his good lady.”

Candide has made his way across a bloody battlefield, seen villages ruined by opposing armies, begged unsuccessfully for a crust of bread, had a chamber pot dumped on his head for not acknowledging the Pope as Anti-Christ, and finally been rescued by a stranger who feeds and washes him. This adventure is detailed in two pages, by the way.

Why did I underline so much? Did I fear it would be on the test?

Jefferson and Franklin and the other reluctant revolutionaries were all alive in 1759 when Voltaire published Candide. No doubt many of them read the book in the original French or the immediate English translation. Voltaire was an effective agent of change. He gave courage to French intellectuals and to the Americans as well.

This week a book trade publication reported the results of a Book Industry Study Group survey on Consumer Attitudes Toward E-book Reading. Some of the findings are surprising. According to the survey, three-quarters of people who buy books have not yet purchased a single E-book. As many as 14% of people who own an e-book reader have not yet purchased anything to read electronically.

In other words, three out of four people who purchase books to read still read on paper, despite the rapid growth of electronic alternatives, and a significant number of people possessing e-readers don’t use them much.

The survey also reported that e-books continue to sell in increasing numbers, but the rate of growth has slowed substantially. Maybe the novelty has worn off. My unscientific guess is that people who read books on e-devices do so for specific reasons – while traveling, for reference purposes, to play Sudoku, but for long-form literature, not so much.

I have been asked many times, as if I had special knowledge, and I don’t, what to think of the e-book phenomenon, as if suddenly we had reached the end of the 500-year Gutenberg experiment. At first I didn’t know what to say – people were afraid the trickle of e-readers would soon become an avalanche, sweeping away everything – shelves, dust and all.

But that has not happened. Electronic access to reading materials is becoming simply another path to reading. E-everything E-expands the universe of choice, and will suit some more than others. More readers, more things to read and more ways to read them. How can that be a bad thing?

I look around this room, pull down a few dusty books from a high shelf, and flip through. Here is An A.B.C. of English Usage Price 2s. 6d., published in 1936 at the Clarendon Press, Oxford. It was once owned by Schuyler G. Urquhart, who has excellent handwriting, and Schuyler I want to thank you for the loan, probably to my mother, and let you know you can have your book back any time now.

Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy reading the explications of terms such as apodosis, apostrophe and apopthegm, which, apparently is much the same as aphorism.

Now I know something new, and I’m happy.

NOTES

A new conglomerated travel app

http://goreng.my/spark/article/lonely-planet-joins-forces-with-frommers-dk-eyewitness-for-new-app 

Dream Walking Through Bookstores

If there is one thing I know well, it is bookstores. I used to own one, and over the years I’ve probably visited another couple hundred, in many countries, not all English-speaking.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to stop in to three independent stores in just a few days... all owned by the same people, Paul Jaffee and Barney Brown, co-founders of Copperfield’s, in Sonoma County, California. You can find two Copperfield’s in Sebastopol where they began, and two in Petaluma. They’re also in Montgomery Village Santa Rosa, plus the downtowns of Napa, Healdsburg and Calistoga; altogether, eight iterations of the same store, each one different, including two that specialize in used and rare books.

I shopped and browsed for the same things in three Copperfield’s, and the experiences could hardly have been more different. The Calistoga store felt winter sleepy and somewhat empty, like the surrounding town. The Healdsburg store by contrast was crowded, compact and well stocked. The one in Napa had the deepest selection and put me into a fine book-induced dream state.

There’s always an interested mind behind any truly interesting bookstore. How can this be, you ask? After all, all new books bookstores draw on the same universe of currently published books. That’s where the interested mind comes in – both the customer’s and the book buyer’s. If you purchase science books and cook books, say, the store will stock more of these. If the manager happens to be obsessed with chess and travel, you’ll find more of those as well.

Local management at Copperfield’s clearly influences each store’s style and content. I found many of the same authors in each store, but there were differences. One store stocked one Lee Child thriller; another store carried more than a dozen of his titles, some in multiples.

Contrast this with online stores that endeavor to have everything you could ever want in one virtual space. That very comprehensiveness can be discouraging. When you have everything, you want nothing.

The pseudo-friendly algorithm will attempt to tailor the shopping experience to what you’ve liked in the past, but only a human, with all the subtlety of cultural interaction between not-quite strangers, can put in your hands exactly the book you wanted before you knew you wanted it. Here’s a toast to people over data-mining mathematics.

Another way I know a good bookstore is by the physical effect it has on me. Often people in bookstores fall into some kind of trance-like state as they wander around.

This cannot happen to people who work there. The best ones are constantly aware of books out of place or leaning over each other; listening for customers with questions (My all-time favorite remains: “Where is your non-fiction section?”); aware of music too faint or too loud; of the need for a break or a crack at lunch.

Having left day-to-day bookselling behind, now I too fall into that browsing trance. It’s not that I start bumping into things. It’s more like entering a smooth, stand-up dream, where each book, fiction or not, kicks off a new story. Minutes after walking in I’ve already visited wartime France, seen loggers clutching axes. I’ve checked out a few favorite authors, and thumb-flipped through the most beautiful islands of Greece.

Walkable bookstores charm, seduce, excite, challenge and educate the open-minded dreamer, especially so for some lucky children.

Which brings us to World Book Night, April 23. Hundreds of people will be giving away thousands of free books around the world that night, and I just learned that I will be one of them.

“Don’t gloat,” the welcome letter cautions, “if a friend or colleague didn’t get this email.” Perhaps they picked one of thirty titles that already had been taken to zero by other enthusiastic potential book-givers. Or they entered their email address incorrectly.

As it turns out, several people in the Mendocino area have been picked to give away books in April. Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino plans to have a meeting for these people so we can compare notes and share fears about walking up to complete strangers, asking something such as “Have you read THIS book?” and then handing it to them.

Like The Millionaire of vintage TV, we aim to make people happy readers, with no negative consequences. If only the rest of life could be that easy.



NOTES

Copperfield’s home page...

World Book Night USA

World Book Night UK and Eire

Now Into Folding Paper Airplanes, Thank You Professor Weinstein

There are so many things one might do with one’s short time here on the surface of planet Earth. One might save the world, or a small piece of it, or just for fun, one might fold paper airplanes.

If one wanted to fold paper airplanes, one might benefit from expert assistance. Maybe a PhD expert. Yes, that’s it – a professor of molecular genetics at Ohio State University who also is an experienced pilot and longtime origami enthusiast. Origami – you know – the art of folding squares of paper into magical things such as cranes or flowers, stars, dragons, boxes, roses, hearts, even Yoda.

The professor has arrived. He is here to help you fold paper that flies, soars, dips and looks good doing it.

The successful California publisher in Fort Bragg, Cypress House, later this year will present On Folded Wings, Paper Airplanes for All Ages, written by molecular geneticist Dr. Michael Weinstein, with aircraft illustrations by Mike Dietz.

You can do this. You can create the Diamondhead Staggerwing.

“An antique aircraft, the Beech Staggerwing is one of the most elegant ever built,” professor Weinstein writes, before entering nerdland: “This canard* is similar, in that the canard wing is lower and forward of the main wing.”

Can this book actually be For All Ages? I doubt my new granddaughter can do canard wings or inside reverse folds yet.

Before I read this book and learned about canard wings, measuring the speed of the River Seine, Smart Dart stun planes, Mandelbrot sets, Bird-base fighters and more, I already knew how to make one paper airplane. Someone showed me on a slow day in algebra class. I’ve flown my paper jet into teachers’ hair-do’s. One of my best efforts once came to rest stuck between the teacher’s sock and the Achilles notch in his sneaker.

Most often, however, my personal jet launched with a quick baseball toss, then lurched to the floor with a pitiful dent in its binder paper nose.

With the professor’s book I would have learned something about aerodynamics. I could have benefited from centuries of research on why things fly or don’t. I could have built a tail-dragger, a Gremlin, a Triangulon, or an Enormously Abstract Heron. I could have hit my teachers more often.

On Folded Wings shows you how to fly pieces of paper. But that’s not all. It’s a short introduction to the science of flight, written light-heartedly but seriously, too. Clear schematic drawings in full color take you step by step into the sky, or at least the ceiling.

You will learn pitch, roll, yaw and basic folds. Master these folds, build your airplane. All but one plan calls for a single piece of paper (the Twin Star, being a twin, takes two pieces of paper). You will learn about air speed, and why piston powered planes need overhauls. You will find out what makes an airplane go fast (“The answer is actually a bit more complex than you might think.”)

This book is a gem, highly recommended as an educational tool and as plain fun and games.

Right now I’m trying a radical new design – folding the entire book into the world’s heaviest paper airplane. 

NOTES

On Folded Wings, Paper Airplanes for All Ages by Michael Weinstein. Cypress House paperback $16.95. ISBN 9781879384798. Publication date April, 2012.

Cypress House on the web

Yes, there is an Online Paper Airplane Museum!

And you can find them on Facebook as well... 

And another one on Maui!

*Canard: (1) duck (2) a false report; rumour or hoax (3) an aircraft in which the tailplane is mounted in front of the wing. Tailplane: Also called (esp US): horizontal stabilizer  a small horizontal wing at the tail of an aircraft to provide longitudinal stability. (From the World English Dictionary)

My Application

This is what I wrote on my application to give away books on World Book Night...


Where do you intend to give away your books? (please give as much detail as possible)
I don't shop often at Safeway, preferring the local organic foods market and the locally owned bigger store. I see all my friends in these two locations, but few people I know in Safeway. Therefore, it will be a nervy challenge for me personally, and a great opportunity to approach relative strangers with such a magical gift.

To whom do you intend to give your books?
I'll be looking for people I never saw in my bookstore, people perhaps not dressed expensively. If I have copies of Because of Winn Dixie I'll look for children approx 8 - 13. Bel Canto is a fairly high level book but full of excitement and tension -- can be read purely on the adventure level so it won't be "literate" and offputting, but it is quite deep when one ponders what happens and the implications. Also has quite an emotional punch to it. People who read this book remember it.

Why do you want to give this book away? (less than 100 words)
As an independent bookseller for 26 years in Mendocino CA I recommended books endlessly; but never had the opportunity to give away a pile of them. What a pleasure and a treat to do this!

Note: it's "fewer than 100 words" not "less than..." but I didn't write that on the application. I want those books!