YES On Tax Fairness

Something I voted for actually won.

I can hardly believe it. This never happens.

Except this time we managed to beat the Howard Jarvis-inspired, Prop 13-inspired, difficult two-thirds rule on tax increases – by a whopping nine percent over the required two-thirds affirmative.

Local taxpayers consulted both their wallets and their consciences and voted a one-eighth of a cent sales tax increase into law by an approximate ratio of 11 to 3, countywide. Hooray and congratulations!

Soon, Mendocino county will open libraries five days a week instead of three; can afford to reinstate after-school programs for children; can once again purchase significant numbers of new books; will “not only survive but thrive,” as one librarian said.

On a closely related subject, you may have heard about the shady tax break some Internet companies offer California customers by failing to collect state sales tax on their purchases.

Californians who don’t pay sales tax are supposed to pay an equal use tax instead. Few do.

State law requires purchasers to pay tax on tangible property “used, consumed or stored” here. According to the law, “Consumers in California owe use tax on purchases from out-of-state retailers when the out-of-state retailer is not registered to collect California tax, or for some other reason does not collect California tax.”

Booksellers have been in the vanguard of a nationwide effort to change this situation – to level the buying field and increase fairness, not to mention needed revenue for the state. They ask why a book purchased in a California bookstore costs an additional 7.25% in state tax plus local tax, when the same book purchased from Amazon, for example, is in effect completely tax free?

Many forces are coming together in an effort to fix this, not only in California but in other states losing out on millions in dollars that the law says is owed but is rarely collected.

The big news recently was the announcement that a bipartisan – if you can believe it – bipartisan group of US Senators introduced the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act, which would grant states the authority to compel online retailers to collect sales taxes.

The proposed legislation would ensure that online retailers collect taxes, while dealing with concerns raised by smaller online vendors who fear they would be unfairly impacted. The proposed law would exempt online sellers whose annual sales are less than $500,000.

The National Retail Federation came out in favor of this version of the proposed law. Their CEO said, “In a 21st  Century retail industry, we ought to have a 21st  Century system to ensure uniform collection of sales tax.... Congress has gotten the message and is ready to act. As the industry that employs one out of every four Americans, we are determined to help make this goal become reality.”

And here’s the amazing thing – Amazon supports this bill, even after spending millions of dollars and much lobbying time to defeat previous proposals. Not long ago Amazon temporarily cut loose all their California vendors as a protest against attempts to make the giant e-tailer collect sales tax in the state.

An Amazon spokesman said, “Amazon strongly supports enactment of the (bill) and will work with Congress, retailers, and the states to get this bipartisan legislation passed.”

This reversal from Amazon puzzles me. Why would the world’s largest online retailer willingly give up a tax advantage? Apparently, the justification is in the provision exempting vendors who individually sell less than half a million dollars of goods a year. Amazon likely could continue to avoid collecting sales tax on consumer purchases from these small fry who sell on Amazon’s pages – which sales make up a significant part of Amazon’s overall business.

Whatever the motives, this bill reflects a national change of mood. People have shown themselves willing to pay taxes to support services. National politicians have heard that message.

Many communities this past Tuesday voted in various tax increases. Who knows, maybe we can return to the days when there was music and art in the schools, libraries were open seven days, roads were repaired...

No, don’t wake me up.

I like this dream. I think we have a winner.


NOTES:

Publishers Weekly reports on recent developments... as does Shelf Awareness.

California tax FAQ brought to you by the Board of Equalization...

FURTHER THOUGHTS: However final vote goes, some retailers will be helped by this, some not. There is serious lobbying by trade organizations and corporations large and small  on both sides of this bill. Comments on the InterGoogle are all over the place – from thinking it’s an unalloyed good thing, as I do, to believing it’s an attempt to kill the largest online retailers or at least to curtail their success.

One commenter points out that Amazon could neutralize the effect of sales tax simply by choosing to additionally discount purchases in each state by the exact amount of local sales tax, so that a discounted sold at $50 item with no sales tax would be equal to the same discounted item sold at, say, $47.50 plus local sales tax, or $50. We shall see...

Good News about Bookselling, Really, I Mean It, No Kidding!

Want to hear some bad news? Some ankle-wobbling throat-tightening bad thing? Neither do I. Here’s some good news, culled from recent editions of various trade journals in the publishing and bookselling sectors.

From Shelf Awareness, a daily trade online newsletter:

October 7: “A mobile pop-up bookshop shaped like a cat is the result of a second collaboration between arts collective NAM and Numabooks, a group of artists whose medium is the book. The latest incarnation, Numabookcat, will be on display at (their) gallery in Tokyo... For 4200 yen you have a little conversation with the host, who, based on those talks, will select 12 books for you. You will then get one book in the mail for an entire year.”

October 12: Two new bookstores reported opening. Owner Lara Hamilton of The Book Larder on Facebook in Seattle says she wants her cookbooks store “to be a place where people can gather and linger, where if we're not too busy, someone might offer you a cup of tea or something we've been cooking from a book.”

And the former Border’s location in San Francisco’s Stonestown Mall has become an independent bookstore named ODE Books. New owner Martin Carmody saved a ton of money on signage – ODE is three adjacent letters leftover from the old Borders sign. Sort of like the Toyota pickup we saw around Mendocino re-branded TOY.

October 13: Seven former employees of a now-closed Borders Express bookstore in Capitola are in the process of putting together a brand new store named Inklings at the same location in the mall. One of them told Shelf Awareness, “We really want to make a place for the people that come here regularly and just keep doing what we love doing.... They saw how we ran this store, how passionate we were about what we were doing and how much we wanted to keep doing it. They weren't really buying the store. They were buying us.”

In Kansas, Shawnee Books & Toys opened recently at a former Borders. New owner Michelle Ranney had “stayed through the chain's liquidation process, seeing firsthand the effects of a bookstore's closure in a community. Those were the ones that would make you cry: the teenagers that would come in that had been coming to the store for like 10 years and be like, ‘this is my home.’” She added, “I want people to still feel that way. I want kids to grow up here.”

October 17: Nancy Duniho, owner of the The Corner-Stone Bookshop in Plattsburgh NY plans to keep her store open “for the foreseeable future” after discussing the possibility of selling with 15 potential buyers this fall. “I had great encouragement from my clientele all summer long to stay open. They said they didn't want Plattsburgh to be without a bookstore,” Duniho said.

October 21: The Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA celebrates its grand opening tonight with a party featuring music, a poetry reading, and the ‘ringing in’ of the permanent art installation in the children's section. Tomorrow afternoon the store will have a celebration for children that includes story times, visits by storybook characters and more.

Bookselling This Week profiled Broadway Books in Portland, OR, noting that earlier this year, when Borders was closing, some of the bookshop's customers expressed concern for the indie. “People kept asking, ‘Are you going to be alright?’” said Roberta Dyer, co-owner of Broadway Books. “So we felt an honest response was needed.”

They produced a State of the Union address which, in addition to explaining the recent changes in the book industry and what they meant for the store, listed 10 things that the store was doing to remain competitive, and 10 things that customers could do, in turn, to keep Broadway Books alive.

“Oh, we put it everywhere,” said Dyer. “We really wanted to make sure we got the word out. The response was terrific. We wanted to be as transparent as possible. We worked really hard on it and carefully considered every word, so we were really gratified when the response was so strong.”

The response led to what Dyer said has been the shop's “best year ever” and customers are now “more understanding of how our business works... (It’s about) being informed enough to make a decision about where you're shopping or how you're shopping. It empowers people. We're sensing that our customers are smarter about that kind of thing than they used to be.”

I could go on with all this not bad, actually very good, news. I read about things like this almost every day. But we’re out of time and space. On my blog I’ll have links to all this and more. Go booksellers!


NOTES:

Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino CA recently held a community meeting along the lines of Broadway Books and other stores. Their manifesto...

Thanks to the good people at Shelf Awareness for keeping us up on all the news.

KillingFloorDieTryingTripwireRunningBlindEchoBurningWithoutFail

The frost is on the pumpkin. Dr Bronner’s 18-in-1 Pure Lavender Castile Soap Made with Organic Oils congeals white each morning, a sure sign that winter is approaching. The temperature edges below 40 degrees and the Myers Lemon has new purple buds. It’s fall, the nights are long, and it’s a good time to read scary books.

I don’t mean vampire scary or ghost in the woods scary. I mean Lee Child scary, books like Killing Floor and Die Trying, books where bullets fly and often hit things, loyalties are tested, and the hero always wins. Books like that. Books by a British TV writer turned New York thriller author.

When the sun shines there are things to do. When the sun goes down, around here it’s readin’ time.

Lee Child has a formula and he repeats it from book to book. There is a predictability to the mayhem, just as predictable as the Pachelbel Canon at a Mendocino wedding.

Hero Jack Reacher echoes John Wayne, down to his repeatedly stale, old-fashioned relationships with women. You know he’s going to survive. After all, he has to appear in another dozen books. But you still worry maybe this time his captivity, torture, mistreatment, misdirection, bullet wounds, chain whipping and so on will be his last. No, it won’t. He will survive.

You’d think these books would pall, that you’d stop midway and ask yourself: Don’t I have better things to do? Why am I wasting my time with these gory things? But you don’t stop, because Lee Child is a master of this kind of writing. You think ahead and try to guess what’s coming next. You spend serious moments pondering who is loyal and who bent.

These books are long – the first three in the series run more than 500 pages each – and I read each one in a burst of enthusiasm. I pretty much used every spare moment to find out how Jack Reacher would get out of the next situation, how he would dispense frontier justice, how he would say sayonora to the inevitable love interest.

At one point in Die Trying, which is the second Jack Reacher novel in a line that stretches to 17 so far, at one point I put the book down in despair. Oh not again – these bad guys are militia-nuts super-patriotically holed up in Montana with a roomfull of old dynamite and a warehouse full of guns and missiles? I care about this?

I sighed – I don’t care if they wear shiny black boots, I don’t care about their back story – I don’t want to spend time with these characters – I sighed, then dove back into the book and didn’t put it down until 2 in the morning. Die Trying and Killing Floor and Tripwire – they are that absorbing, that well done.

Lee Child readers don’t much care that the plots are hackneyed and the characters stiff. We enjoy the sudden squeeze of fickle fate, the surprise, the joy of puzzles that slowly resolve.

In anything approaching real life I would recoil from visions of heads exploding, ingenious tortures, quasi-military confrontations, all of that. In a Lee Child adventure the violence is there to entertain– the artificiality is what allows a weak-kneed pacifist such as me to stumble forward through the gore. The final confrontation feels like the final innings of a good  World Series game – one team wins and the other loses – burned to death in an exploding warehouse stuffed with dollar bills, say.

Jack Reacher hitch-hikes away from his latest adventure. He’s not seeking trouble, but trouble seeks him, book after book after book. Lee Child grabs you where it hurts and you’ll stay grabbled for at least a couple of days of intense reading.

And that’s a good thing, when the nights are long and the days are cold.



NOTES:

You don’t have to read these Jack Reacher novels in order, but it’s more fun that way. The first three:

Killing Floor by Lee Child. Penguin paperback $9.99. ISBN 9780515141429.

Die Trying by Lee Child. Penguin paperback $9.99. ISBN 9780515142242.

Tripwire by Lee Child. Penguin paperback $9.99. ISBN 9780515143072.

Lee Child has an extensive website. These three pages will tell you more than you need to know:
FAQ...   The Books...    About the Author... 

Paul Revere's Pony Ponys Up

I want to thank everyone for pitching in during the pitching to help raise money for this community radio station. Thank you!

If you are hearing this on Sunday, between Celtic and This American, good morning, and the pledge drive is now in its final day. If you are hearing the repeat broadcast on Wednesday, good afternoon, and the pledge drive is a fond memory.

If you are reading this online you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. And that’s OK.

I stayed home this week nursing a small stone that decided to descend from kidney to outside world. While screaming in pain (I exaggerate, but not much) I managed to finish an entire novel. I’m all better now, thank you.

Listen my children and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere...

The Fort by Bernard Cornwell celebrates the Penobscot Expedition – a now-obscure battle that took place in 1779 during the American Revolutionary War. Told with the freedom of a novelist but closely following the facts, Cornwell’s The Fort is a refreshingly clear vision of events that over the years have been both simplified and patriotically glorified.

And I on the opposite shore will be

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm...

In a note on Heroic Myths Cornwell writes, “The Penobscot Expedition is a forgotten campaign of the American Revolution, and many people probably wish it would remain forgotten. For the Americans it was a disaster, though in the end it made no difference to the war’s outcome or to their eventual triumph, while for the British it was a victory that did nothing to avert their humiliating loss of the Thirteen Colonies.”

Basically, the Americans screwed up. Paul Revere was there, for example, and he did not do well.

... And yet, through the gloom and the light,

The fate of a nation was riding that night;

As an artillery officer in the Massachusetts Militia, Revere was “utterly ineffective...(as well as) consistently uncooperative, awkward and belligerent toward his comrades.”

It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who years later made Revere famous with the poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

“And Americans have been hearing of the midnight ride ever since,” Cornwell notes, “mostly oblivious that the poem plays merry-hell with the true facts and ascribes to Revere the heroics of other men...”

In fact, of the several riders that famous night Paul Revere was the only rider who did not complete his mission.

Cornwell continues, “Before the poem was published Revere was remembered as a regional folk-hero, one among many who had been active in the patriot cause, but in 1861 he entered legend” due, in part, to Longfellow’s wish to rouse Northern patriotism at the start of the American Civil War.

For those who read The Fort, Revere’s reputation will never be the same. Some of his contemporaries “believed Revere’s behavior (at the battle) was disgraceful. Revere’s present reputation would have puzzled and, in many cases, disgusted his contemporaries.”

There are other, more important actors in this story, but throughout their adventure Paul Revere is the prime prima donna – at crucial moments in the battle he returns to his anchored ship for hot meals. Ordered to move cannons he delays or denies or questions the order. His gunners are inaccurate due in part to Revere’s inexperience and insouciance. Revere was a patriot, an excellent silversmith and successful businessman, but no soldier.

We’ll talk again next week. In the meantime, thanks for supporting this wonderful station.


NOTES:

The Fort by Bernard Cornwell. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 0062010875.


To “pony up” -- informal. to pay (money), as in settling an account: Next week you'll have to pony up the balance of the loan.  Origin: 1650–60; earlier powney < obsolete French poulenet, diminutive of poulain colt < Medieval Latin pullanus (Latin pull(us) foal + -anus -an); see -et
 — Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2011.

Good friend Adam Springwater sends this link about another midnight rider, perhaps more heroic...

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Written April 19, 1860; first published in 1863 as part of Tales of a Wayside Inn:


Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,-
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,-
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,-
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,-
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,-
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Time to Feed the Meter

Let me tell you about an unusual bookseller. His name is Charles Mysak, no relation, and he sells books in New York City from his parking spot on the corner of Columbus Avenue and 68th Street.

He snagged his spot more than a decade ago and he hasn't budged since. Mysak stores his inventory in a green ‘94 Honda Civic and he manages to feed the meter $36 a day – in quarters.

Which brings me to the current fund raising drive here on KZYX. Feed the meter. Hold on to your spot. Show your staying power, your dedication. Drop some quarters into the radio slot on a regular basis. Help keep us on the air.

Mysak was quoted in a radio interview: "I've been here for 11 years," he said. "Barnes & Noble is now closed. I'm the last resource for books (in the neighborhood). I'm here from 7 to 7 every day."

Just like this radio station. We are here every day and every night, pumping fresh, pollution-free information into your personal space whenever you want to listen. To be on the air we have to feed that meter every day, too. You can help with that.

So far during this fall pledge drive we've been pleading, joking, and otherwise encouraging you to make a move on your wallet and give us a call at (707) 895-2233 or pledge online at KZYX,ORG.

At this point maybe it's time to step back and consider why we go through this exercise two or more times a year. KZYX runs on a model first successfully used by the listener-supported Pacifica Foundation in the years following World War II. It worked then, and it works now.

Many people are astonished to discover a radio broadcast operation owned, administered and paid for by the listeners themselves. That is what Pacifica pioneered, and that's what we do here. It's truly democracy in action, and that always has been our goal -- to free radio from the almighty advertising dollar,  depending instead on the free will donations of people like you, listeners who find freedom of the airwaves important in their lives and important for their community.

KZYX has a different history from Pacifica - we're much younger, for one thing. KZYX took shape 20-plus years ago when community radio enthusiast Sean Donovan arrived here to beat the Mendocino bushes for the earliest supporters of Mendocino Public Radio.

On the KZYX web site you find this: "We are a hybrid of sorts... we are not just community radio (radio that encourages volunteer programmers and focuses almost singularly on locally relevant news and information) nor are we just public radio (professionally produced commercial-free radio). Instead we are a combination of the two: we feature some of the finest Public Radio programs available and we have over 100 local volunteer programmers."

That unusual combination sets this station apart from most others; certainly apart from Jefferson Public Radio to the north, which steers away from controversy, offers no local news and minimal local programming.

We have managed to create something here that is precious, and like many precious things, something fragile, too. We don't depend on grants, although national funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helps. We pay the bills the same way you pay yours - by digging deep, asking for help when we really need it, and economizing everywhere. Feeding the meter before it expires.

The physical plant is difficult - components break down or need upgrading – and professionals from larger stations are sometimes amazed when they see how well we make do with aging equipment and a distinct lack of sleek offices to impress – who?

The hard working staff and volunteers make it work. We succeed because of you – a person who does care about community radio in general, and this station in particular.

Finally, let me repeat a story I’ve told before. I have a friend whose car radio car broke and she couldn’t afford to replace it.

She told me she is giving KZYX a generous donation even though she can’t hear us much. I don't know how to characterize that kind of generosity, but I sure know how to appreciate it.

Now is a very good time for you to add something to what you've already given. If you haven't joined and pledged yet, this is your moment. Let us hear from you. Feed the meter!

Different books, different publishers, same jackets

I was struck by the similarities of these covers. The Fort was published in paperback in 2011 by HarperCollins; Imperium in 2006 By Arrow Books (a division of the Random House Group Limited, Great Britain).

Each book has the same ALL CAPS descriptor at the top, author name in red, same contrasty silhouette illustration style; although Cornwell's title appears gold (he sells more copies, so he gets the gold) both titles appear ALL CAPS, with a summary phrase at the bottom. 

US book this year; UK book five years ago. Someone is stealing someone else's cover art. Or the same artist is stealing from herself. Or there is a formula for best selling historical fiction paperbacks and these two books follow that lead. Whatever the explanation, it's a bit disconcerting.

I'd love to hear from anyone who might explain this more believably...

In the Deadly Game of Power, One Man Will Risk It All

You can look at the novel Imperium two ways – the way the publisher sees it, “In the deadly game of power, one man will risk it all” – or the way it feels when you read the book – Marcus Tullius Cicero of Rome was a good guy who had an interesting career.

In the Senate of republican Rome Cicero got off some punchy lines. He destroyed his opponents in court with nothing more than documents and shrewd speeches. Very little in the way of knives and blood in this particular deadly game of power.

This is a good historical novel, crammed with real incidents and actual intrigues, informed by a careful study of Cicero’s own words and deeds. Some readers will not find this particularly exciting. For gripping courtroom drama you might better turn to writers such as John Grisham.

Author Robert Harris specializes in novels set in ancient Rome – we enjoyed Pompeii a few years ago, following an aqueduct engineer as he puzzled out why water is not flowing along the enormous Aqua Augusta. Something’s wrong on the slopes of Mt Vesuvius – it smells like sulfur – and in the deadly game of power, one man will risk it all.

A substantial part of this story takes place in ancient Sicily, and no doubt that’s why I discovered a discarded copy of Imperium in a hotel in Taormina last week, just in time to help kill ten slow hours flying home. Under other circumstances – such as being able to stand up, walk around, stretch – I may not have mustered the patience to read this book.

We seem to be flying over some frozen section of northern Canada and already I’m on page 321 and I can’t feel my feet any more. Deep vein thrombosis is setting in...

Imperium can also be read as a bruising critique of our own times, from the perils of democracy to the response to terrorists. The story is told as a memoir written by Cicero’s amanuensis – a slave named M. Tullius Tiro,  who actually existed, and who was indispensable to Cicero’s success. Always at his side, able to record the great man’s utterances on small wax tablets using a shorthand he invented, Tiro recalls “at first this was exciting, then astonishing, then arduous, and finally extremely dangerous... I witnessed his private meetings and carried his secret messages. I took down his speeches, his letters and his literary works, even his poetry – such an outpouring of words...”

Imperium appears to be as true to what we know of Roman history as any novel could be. The people are real, the events are real, the decisions are final – no, wait, that’s Judge Judy – and the author has to invent very little.

Cicero, while personally ambitious, was consistently honest and dedicated to democratic principles, against great odds. That kind of person was enormously rare in Rome, as he would be today in Washington DC. Considering the powers arrayed against him – the wealth of Crassus, the cunning of Pompey, the ridicule of the aristocrats, the conspiracies of Julius Caesar – Cicero emerges as a people’s hero, someone to admire and emulate.

Because Cicero was an orator, not a soldier, Harris has a problem here – not enough blood and guts for some readers. With grace and cunning based on unceasing hard work, Cicero managed to counter the misdeeds of corrupt officials and in court convict even the most powerfully connected criminals.

Harris is brave to tell the kind of story that could easily cost him his popular audience. The fact that his novels have been consistent international best sellers speaks well for modern readers.

NOTES:

Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris. Pocket Books paperback $15.
ISBN 0743498666.

The sequel to Imperium is Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris.
Pocket Books paperback $16. ISBN 0743266110   EAN: 9780743266116

Pompeii by Robert Harris. Random House Trade paperback $15. ISBN 0812974611.

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not traitor, he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." - Cicero, 42 B.C.

The Art of Fielding

WORDS ON BOOKS and A FEW OTHER THINGS FROM TIME TO TIME
by Tony Miksak for KZYX&Z-FM, 90.7 Philo CA
Airs September 4, 2011 at 10:55 am & Wednesday, Sept 7 at 1 pm
Title: The Art of Fielding

(MUSIC UP) This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books...

In 509 magnificently crafted pages, first-time author Chad Harbach this month will introduce himself, his characters, and a wonderful new novel to the world.

I don’t really have to review this book, and I don’t have to describe it to you. All I need to say is when it appears in hardcover this month, go get yourself a copy and be prepared to stay up late reading and enjoying.

The novel is titled The Art of Fielding. It will be available at your local bookstore, your non-local bookstore, in large print, in regular print, as an audio book, and no doubt pretty soon an e-book, too.

However, we have more time, and that allows me to share some of the things that make this book so intriguing. Start with the phrase The Art of Fielding. That is the title of the novel and it also is the title of a fictional baseball instruction book titled The Art of Fielding – got it? – revered by several of the ball players in the novel. The way they hug it to their chests, read it on the team bus, recite passages by heart, it’s like another character in itself. This doubly-fictional manual was supposedly written by the greatest shortstop ever, a made-up player named Aparicio Rodriguez. Confused yet?

Aparicio’s fielding manual reads like a Zen meditation:

Paragraph 26. The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.

The name Aparicio Rodriguez transparently was no doubt created by Harbach from the first and last names of two very real major league baseball players: Shortstop Luis Aparicio, who was an All Star 13 times, and is in the Hall of Fame; and third baseman Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod, Yankee’s 3rd baseman, who has hit more than 500 home runs, been an All Star 12 times, and admits he used steroids for three years due to "an enormous amount of pressure" to perform.

The pressure to perform is one of the main themes of the novel, and by bringing A-Rod obliquely into the novel, Harbach references the real-life stress of performing.

From the novel: “Baseball was an art but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer – you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability.”

And again: “But baseball was different... You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f****d up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? ... You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.”

The Art of Fielding is about ball players, but also college presidents and their daughters, misplaced French chefs, and the craft of writing itself. Take this passage, for example:

“Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them – you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt  better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the non-baseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends was made of words.”

Your job now, no pressure, is to go out there on the field in your own uniform. Ignore the cheers, ignore the boos, don’t let the opposing fans get to you. Walk out and find yourself a copy of The Art of Fielding. Pay for it. Bring it home. Focus. Enjoy. Stay up late. You will not be sorry.


NOTES:

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Little, Brown & Co. hardcover $25.99. ISBN 0316126691.

Chad Harback is all over the place online. His magazine and blog writing and his publisher’s website  and an interesting Bloomberg article about his finding a publisher and the $650,000 lottery for the right to publish it.

The real Luis Aparicio ...

And the also very real Alex Rodriguez...

another quote from the made-up Art of Fielding manual:

59. To field a groundball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.

Tonight's classical music play list

PLAY LIST
KZYX fm 90.7 ... streaming at www.kzyx.org

August 30, 2011 “Ensemble” (8-10 pm) Tony Miksak, sitting in for Marcia Lotter

8:00 pm station ID, underwriting. Music of Mozart, Haydn, Shostakovich, Smetana, Martinu and Dvorak

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio      5:37

Performed by the Capella Istropolitana, conducted by Barry Wordsworth.

Franz Josef Haydn Symphony No. 100 in G major “The Military” 26:49

Performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Sir Georg Solti
1 Adagio - Allegro 2 Allegretto 3 Menuetto e Trio: Moderato 4 Finale: Presto

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Concerto for piano, trumpet & strings No.1 C min Op 35 22:12

Performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. Soloists Ronald Brautigan, piano; Peter Masseurs, trumpet
1 Allegretto 2 Lento 3 Moderato 4 Allegro con brio
Shostakovich wrote his First Piano Concerto in 1933 when the composer was 27 years old, for himself to play. High spirited. Many changes of mood, parodies of popular music. Truly a piano concerto, but the trumpet speaks througought and has a lot to do, esp. at the end of the final fourth movement.

9 pm station ID, underwriting

Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) Piano Trio in G minor Opus 15 29:14

Performed by the Golub Kaplan Carr Trio.  David Golub, piano; Mark Kaplan, violin; Colin Carr, cello
This recording won the AFIM Indie award for best classical ensemble in 1995 in honor of its recording of Smetana and Tchaikowsky piano trios.
Smetana composed only four mature chamber works, yet each had a deep personal significance. The Piano Trio in G minor of 1855 was composed after the death of his daughter Bedriška. You definitely hear the influence of Robert Schumann; maybe some direct quotes, in fact, with hints of Liszt, and the overall tone is elegiac.

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) Concerto for Oboe & Small Orchestra (1955) 15:44

Performed by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Paul Freeman, conductor. We hear Alex Klein on oboe, Daniela Kosinova, piano.

Antonin Dvorak (Waldesruhe) Silent Woods; Notturno in B Op. 40 5:41 + 6:50 = 12:31

Damn you, Charles C. Mann and your big books with numbers on the cover

I was reading 1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, for about six years, when you popped up again with 1493, Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

The new books I really want to read are getting in the way of finishing the other not-quite-so-new books I also really want to read.

While waiting for 1491 to turn into 1493 I read 1945, The War That Never Ended (Gregor Dallas) I also read parts of Moscow, 1812, Napoleon’s Fatal March (Adam Zamoyski) and 1688 A Global History (John E. Wills, Jr.) I have to cover another 323 years of reading before I’m up to date. I also am dipping into a novel by Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, which turns out to be highly entertaining futurist fiction, so although it’s about a single year, with some flashbacks, it’s not clear exactly which future year she is talking about.

I can report that a lot of things changed after 1493. According to the author, that year marked the beginning of absolutely immense changes in the history of mankind, and the fate of all the other species.

It began with the now vanished town of La Isabela, personally established by Christopher Columbus, on what now is the island of Hispaniola, Dominican Republic side. “It was the initial attempt by Europeans to make a permanent base in the Americas” not counting the Vikings in Newfoundland five centuries before. It failed, as many other settlements, but even this small effort brought changes:

“(Columbus) and his crew did not voyage alone. They were accompanied by a menagerie of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms. Beginning with La Isabela,” Mann writes, “European expeditions brought cattle, sheep, and horses, along with crops like sugarcane (originally from New Guinea), wheat (from the Middle East), bananas (from Africa), and coffee (also from Africa). Equally important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitchhiked along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description – all of them poured from the hulls of (Columbus’) vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.”

From here, the author goes deep into the weeds of history, carefully delineating the changes – how New World silver changed everything, bankrupting Spain and bringing down a dynasty in China; the tobacco saga and the reinvention of slavery; the fatal progress of malaria; the growth of international trade and our subsequent dependence on it, and much much more.

This is a book in which you will rediscover some things you already knew, and many you never imagined. It’s rich in imagery, research, and plain good story telling.

I found myself bogged a bit in some of the detail – but there’s always another page, another story, another fascinating connection I had never seen before.

Mann and other historians call the process The Columbian Exchange. Most importantly, he insists, “there is a growing recognition that Columbus’ voyage did not mark the discovery of a New World, but its creation.”

When the Old World landed in the New, the effect of newly introduced plants, animals and diseases was to quickly wipe out the natives, plant, animal and human, and replace one ecological system with another – to make the New World in effect something of a replica of the Old. It was this accidental but overwhelming transformation that allowed Europe and Europeans to dominate the next several centuries.

We arrived ill-equipped and soon starving; in no more than 50 years after Columbus we were beginning to rule the New World and its inhabitants. We accidently invented what now is called Globalization, too. It is an amazing story, and in 1493, Charles Mann tells it exceedingly well.



NOTES:

1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Vintage paperback $14.95. ISBN 1400032059.

1493, Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann. Knopf hard cover $30.50. ISBN 9780307265722.

Wikipedia on La Isabela

1945, The War That Never Ended by Gregor Dallas. Yale University Press paperback $28.00 ISBN  9780300119886.

Moscow, 1812, Napoleon’s Fatal March by Adam Zamoyski. Harper Perennial paperback $16.99 ISBN 006108686X.

1688 A Global History by John E. Wills, Jr. W. W. Norton paperback $16.95. ISBN 0393322785.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Anchor Books paperback $15.00 ISBN  0307455475. Set in the same future as the author’s earlier novel Oryx and Crake. YouTube author interview on the subject of Book Three of this trilogy

Vote YES on Libraries

Vote Yes on Libraries! is the battle cry of freedom going around Mendocino County. All it will take to make our public libraries forever financially independent will be a 67% yes vote on the library initiative, Measure A next November.

Which vote will include a teeny tiny little increase in the county sales tax.

I forlornly hope this thing does pass with two-thirds of the voters plus one affirming it. 67 per cent in favor of an increase in sales tax? Forlorn hope.

According to supporters, the tax increase will amount to 1/8 of a cent on the dollar, or 13 cents for every hundred dollars spent on taxable items. It might cost the average household, if there are any of those left around here, maybe $2 a month. The result would be an estimated windfall for county libraries of $1.3 million each year. The money could be spent only on supporting libraries, nothing else – providing longer hours, more staff, better book replacement, more outreach, more programs for children.

About that term “forlorn hope” ... I came across it in Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels. British soldiers fighting Napoleon, ordered or volunteered first into the breech to face fully loaded cannon and muskets, were termed the Forlorn Hope. Few survived, but they fought with honor. Honor was not a small thing in those days.

Our more recent ancestors built magnificent libraries – their descendants so far have not managed to keep them open.

Today I walked up to the Fort Bragg Public Library. It was closed, of course. I could see walls of books, computers, comfortable reading chairs and tables. I pictured knowledgeable librarians ready to point out good reads and collect overdue fines.

A sign taped to the locked door disclosed this library now is staffed by two 36-hour employees, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, for a total of 23 open hours a week. These tragically short hours are damaging to our community, a drag on the future and a blow against the general well-being.

Presently there are virtually no services for children in local libraries. In Fort Bragg the summer reading group for children is ending and nothing will take its place. Supporters of the library initiative report that state funding for Mendocino County libraries has dropped more than 80%. Three years ago local libraries were open 40 hours per week.

Due to lack of funding you no longer can enter a Mendocino County library to obtain a book from out of county. You just cannot do it. Until recently if the book was on a library shelf in, say, Modesto, upon request it would shortly appear in Fort Bragg and be held for you at no charge.

If you’d like to find out more or support the Yes on A campaign, you can phone a volunteer, or look into their web site. The coast contact phone number is (707) 937-5925; inland call 485-5827. The Yes on A web site is voteyesonlibraries.org

Are libraries still relevant? Is visiting the library on your to-do list if you have a smart phone in your pocket and an iPad in your backpack?

Let me list the ways...

Some children have a parent who will read to them, talk them through the pages of a picture book, associate reading with happy times together. Some do not. Those children especially need the nurture and support a librarian can provide. And the responsibility of returning a book on time.

Not everyone has access to digital media, and not everyone is able to use it successfully. Help is available at the library.

Not all reading materials are digitized and available through Google. And not all books and documents are free, but these materials can be found for free in a library. No serious researcher can afford to skip library research. Where else can one read actual newspapers, magazines and books, listen to books on tape and see videos. Find sheet music to play. For free.

You can read alone, you can browse alone, but it’s fun sometimes to share with others. It is inspiring to hear about a new author and it’s inspiring simply to watch others enjoy reading.

Peace. Quiet. The ineffable smell of actual books. The library as refuge. Vote yes, and keep libraries open!


NOTES:

Origin of “forlorn hope”

Vote “Yes” on Libraries

Radio Play List

... sharing my notes for the next classical show on KZYX where you can listen live at 10 am to noon on July 15, 2011...

PLAY LIST

July 15, 2011 “Wondrous World of Music” sitting in for Gordon Black

10:00 station ID, underwriting. Music of JS Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, Francais, and Cimarosa.

Johann Sebastian Bach Concerto for Violin no 1 in A minor, BWV 1041 15:00 approx
In three movements: Allegro moderato, Andante, Allegro assai. This Concerto written between 1717-1723.
Performed by Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)
The legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin was the eldest child of Russian-born Hebrew scholars who met in Palestine, emigrated to New York City, and moved to San Francisco soon after their son's birth. As it turns out, Menuhin grew up just a few blocks from where my mother lived, in a Jewish neighborhood where Yiddish was the common language amongst the many immigrants. A true prodigy, after only three years of violin study, Yehudi made a legendary debut at age seven with the San Francisco Symphony. His Carnegie Hall debut came three years later, in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which garnered great praise and began his long, internationally acclaimed career.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Trio in G Major for Three Flutes 4:26
First movement: Allegro
Performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal, Christian Larde and Alain Marion, flutes

Ludwig van Beethoven String Trio in E flat, Opus 3 38:14
Performed by the Grumiaux Trio – Arthur Grumiaux on violin, Georges Janzer, viola; Eva Czako, cello.
This is Beethoven virtually channeling Mozart – this six movement trio was published four years after Mozart’s wonderful Divertimento and in the same key – some scholars believe this trio was actually written in the same year – 1792 – Mozart’s trio was published, and no doubt Beethoven heard Mozart’s trio performed in Vienna, and may have been able to study the score as well.

Antonin Dvorak Serenade for Strings in E major, Opus 22. In five movements 27:27
Performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, conductor
Composed in no more than 12 days, 1875. “The most extrovert and ebullient of all Dvorak’s early works” ... In a very happy period, just after he won the Austro-Hungarian State Prize (Brahms was one of the judges), a year into his marriage, and just before the birth of his second child. During a space of five months he produced a string quintet, four duets, a piano trio and a piano quartet, a major symphony, sketches for a new five-act opera, and this work, the Serenade for Strings.

Jean Francais (1912-1997) L’Horloge de Flore for Oboe & Orchestra 15:50
Performed by Lajos Lencses on oboe with the Radio Sonfonie Orchestra of Stuttgart.
... in 7 short movements, no breaks between them, each lasting less than 3 minutes. Inspiration for this piece came from a poem by Stephane Mallarme which in turn referred to a “flower clock” or “horloge de flore” invented by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus in the 18th century – a garden plan that would create a clock that corresponded to the day and night opening time of different flowers. Each movement here corresponds to a particular flower – Galant de jour, Cupidone bleue, Cierge a grandes fleurs, Nycthanthe du Malabar, Belle du nuit, Geranium triste, and Silene nociflore.

Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) Concerto in G Major for Two Flutes 9:51
Movement 1 - Allegro
Performed by Robert Dohn and Helmut Steinkraus, flutes, with the Wurtemberg Chamber Orchestra.

At the Speed of FedEx

It’s a tiresome truism – the virtual world makes the other world, the so-called “real” world real small, really fast. In the virtually real world I talk to my Italian teacher in real time on my real computer, even though she lives in Istanbul within sight of the Bosporus, and I live near the sea at the western edge of California.

Electrons have carried us closer. Out in the world of tangible things, things with weight, that must be moved around by hand, conveyor belt, airplane, truck, and feet – in the world of wine, flowers and dirty sinks – things here also are changing quickly.

This afternoon the FedEx driver showed up in our driveway with a small package. Inside was a book I ordered online from Italy two days ago. Two days ago! It was shipped from Via Verde 8 in the small town of Settala, near Milan, Italy on July 12. It walked down my driveway at 1 pm on the afternoon of July 14. These things can happen, even in the Real World.

I would have ordered this book from my local independently owned bookstore if they dealt in books in the Italian language, published in Italy, but they don’t. I hope the Gods of Shopping Local forgive my electronic order, but don’t the Gods want us to be happy? In my personally made-up religion they do.

By the way, the book looks fascinating, and when and if it’s translated into English I will recommend it to you. It’s titled Canale Mussolini or “The Mussolini Canal” and it’s a novel by Antonio Pennacchi. He recounts the story of the fictional Peruzzi family, from the end of the Great War to the Second World War, their struggles to survive in those crazy years.

The book so far reads like a fable told around a mythic fire, and indeed there are references back to the ancient Greeks (the main character is named Pericles). What makes this novel important to Italians is the way the story snakes through the convoluted track of recent Italian history. With the compelling honesty of a great novelist, Pennacchi demonstrates how local families get caught up in the ‘isms’ of their day. He explores the very idea of  fascism and questions the meaning of collaboration. Who, if anyone, can behave honorably in such strange and harrowing circumstances?

Canale Mussolini won the Strega Prize in 2010, awarded annually since 1947 to the best novel of the year in Italy, judged by a jury of 400 literati including former winners of the competition. Pennacchi came to writing late in life, after a workingman’s career and as a political organizer. Each of his prior novels won at least one major literary prize after a great number of early rejections.

About this novel, he writes, “Beautiful or ugly as it may be, this is the book that I was born to write. Since childhood I have always known I would have to capture this tale – the stories in fact are not the invention of the author, but seized out of the air – to tell the tale before it vanished. Nothing else. Only this book.”

By the way, I purchased the novel from ibs.it, who call themselves The Internet Bookshop, the best source I’ve found for books in Italian other than visiting the Italian Bookstore in London, or traveling to Italy itself.

The 2007 film My Brother is an Only Child is based on Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista. (The Fascist-Communist).

Returning to books written in English, it turns out that a book I mentioned dipping into last week is a novel you might want to read at the beach, say, while you’re reclining in the shade on a self-made puddle of sun screen, slippery cold drink to hand. The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel is a fine read, worth your time. The story unfolds in Brooklyn, in downtown Manhattan and on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.

On the first page Alexandra Broden, investigator for the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service Division, is listening to a ten-second intercepted phone call:

“The recording began with a click: the sound of a woman picking up her telephone, which had been tapped the day before the call came in. A man’s voice: It’s done. There is a sound on the tape here – the woman’s sharp intake of breath – but all she says in reply is Thank you. We’ll speak again soon. He disconnects and she hangs up three seconds later.”

Typical thriller, right? Maybe, maybe not. Alexandra Broden pretty much disappears from The Singer’s Gun until the final chapter. In the pages between there is some funny stuff – a twice-canceled engagement superimposed on a strangely disconnected romantic relationship, some travel adventures, and some danger, and some erotically strange doings in a Manhattan office building, and, well, pop open another one and get reading.

You will be entertained and beyond that, you may learn a few things you didn’t know about human nature under stress.



NOTES:

Canale Mussolini by Antonio Pennacchi. Mondadori (publisher website) paperback 14 Euro. ISBN 9788866210085.

Antonio Pennacchi has a Facebook page and a personal home page... both in Italian, easy to translate using Google Translate or similar services.

The Italian “Internet Bookshop”

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426. The author’s home page.

A day at the beach below Elk, California

Michael, Christine, Joselyn, Zipper and myself had breakfast at Queenie's Roadside Cafe, then walked down to the beach on a gorgeous July day...

Summer and a Book (& optional jug of wine, loaf of bread, thou)

Let the record show we were seven days into the month and my Sierra Club Wilderness Wall Calendar was still open to the North Cascades of June, not the Banff fireweed of July.

Already this summer is lazy, hazy and not overly crazy. I have my loaf of bread, I have my jug of wine. Let me take thou into my particular reading adventure.

A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler kept me enthralled as spring moved into summer. Author Jason Roberts rediscovered a traveler famous in his day and forgotten ever since.

The extraordinary fact of this tale is that after British naval officer James Holman lost his sight while serving shipboard off the coast of America in the early 1800s he went on to travel the world, alone, and blind. He did this at a time the blind were considered invalids, unintelligent, and incapable of living independently.

And he wrote well about his travels, publishing a number of books. Among many other accomplishments Holman became an authority on the fauna of the Indian Ocean, cited by Charles Darwin.

In the same vein of extraordinary travel stories, I came across in my favorite used bookstore in Eureka, California, an anthology compiled by John Julius Norwich. A Taste for Travel first published in 1985, is the best kind of anthology – highly personal and selective. Norwich groups his writers into somewhat arbitrary chapters such as Bad Moments, Hardships, First Impressions, Advice to Travelers, couched at all times within Norwich’s witty and perceptive comments. It’s a great summer read.

A different kind of travel book kept me up two nights in a row way past the time sensible people have entered the deep sleep zone of Rapid Eye Movement.

Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series, starring up-through-the-ranks hero Richard Sharpe, runs, so far, to something like 21 exciting volumes. I’ve read many Sharpes over the years, and since in the bookstore I couldn’t recall exactly which ones, I arbitrarily purchased Penguin paperback volumes 9 through 11, which propel the British officer through adventures in Spain fighting Napoleon’s expeditionary forces, all the way to the battle of Waterloo and beyond.

Remind me, please, never to start a Sharpe novel at midnight, OK?

This week I began a novel highly recommended by bookseller friends in Mendocino: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I was absolutely delighted by the first ten pages. We have a cellist involved in a very funny on-again-off-again engagement, a respite for her husband on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, plus strange and amusing business doings in Manhattan. There is an undertone of danger, and so far it’s not clear if I’m reading a fairly light-hearted novel or an espionage thriller. Either way, The Singer’s Gun is another great summer read.

On a more personal note, I’ve just received a copy of Volume One of a projected several-volume autobiography by Herbert Blau, titled As If. Along with director Jules Irving, Professor Blau was the founder of the Actor’s Workshop, which flourished in San Francisco from 1952 to 1964.

My father, Joe Miksak, was one of the Workshop’s featured actors, and the plays he was in and the neighborhood where Blau and my family lived are an important part of my childhood memories.

I remember being frightened to the edge of hysteria one night watching the production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Was that really my own father stumbling about on the in-the-round stage, gripping bloody eyes, screaming out in agony?

Blau describes the scene this way: “For even in the horror of it, that sight to awaken pity... there was what couldn’t be seen, strikingly there, emblooded, at the myth’s climactic blindness, as the awesome figure of Oedipus – played by Joseph Miksak, tall, stately himself – loomed over the spectators, with an awful knowledge inscribed.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been sitting in the first row, but it’s too late to change that now.



NOTES:

A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. Harper Perennial paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780007161263.

A Taste for Travel, An Anthology, by John Julius Norwich. Out of print. Purchased at Eureka Books, 426 Second Street, Old Town Eureka, CA.

Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series on his own website

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426.

As If, An Autobiography Volume One by Herbert Blau. University of Michigan Press hard cover $60 (get it from the library why don’t you). ISBN 9780472117789.

“As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at / much unease.”
   Marianne Moore “Elephants”

The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop 

Some of Joe Miksak’s credits are listed in the Internet Movie Database

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915 – 2011)

We lost an old man this month at age 96. They say whenever someone dies an entire universe – thoughts, feelings, experience – also dies. This could not be more true in the case of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

His books are inspiring, thrilling memoirs that inspire others to similar feats of travel and insight.

When Patrick Leigh Fermor was 19 he decided, having nothing better to do,  to walk alone from London, along the Rhine, down the Danube, to Constantinople, now Istanbul. This was in 1933, ten months after Hitler's accession to power, through a Europe soon to disappear.

Years later Leigh Fermor pulled out his battered old notebooks and wrote two books about the trip, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The first was written in 1977, the sequel eleven years after that. Both have become true classics.

A high-spirited 19 year-old sets out across Europe, but it’s his 63 year-old future self who tells the story. Youth transformed by maturity, experience enlightened by scholarship, impulse tempered by reflection. In these books there is more than one kind of time, more than one state of mind. Fermor blends his selves with grace and intelligence.

From A Time of Gifts "Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees...Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation... But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came?"

Fermor on the Baroque: "Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus..."

Walking lonely stretches in the dead of winter Fermor amused himself by reciting aloud the Latin poets or Shakespeare. At one point a peasant woman walked out of nearby woods with arm loads of kindling. Hearing the strange words she dropped everything and flew back into the forest.

Fermor concludes A Time of Gifts standing on a bridge between Slovakia and Hungary: "Close behind me, girls in bright clothes were hastening excitedly across the bridge, all of them carrying bunches of water-lilies, narcissi, daffodils and violets... I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels."

Fermor served as an irregular in the British Army in Greece during the Second World War. Living as a shepherd in the mountains of Nazi-occupied Crete, his small group captured the German general in charge of the island and conveyed him to British forces in Egypt. For this exploit and for his later writings Fermor was medaled and later knighted.

Over the years Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote a number of books, some set in Greece, all in his uniquely elegant style. This month, obituaries published all over the world praised both his courage and his creativity.

NOTES:

Newly reprinted this year, the story of that Cretan adventure:

Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, with an Afterword by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Paul Dry Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 1589880668. Stanley Moss was the other British officer on this raid.

A summary of the thrilling story of the General's kidnaping told in the New Yorker in 2006:  but to read the entire article you will have to register with Highbeam Business...

Fermor’s walk from London to Hungary:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $16.95. ISBN 1590171659.

Hungary to Constantinople:

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $15.95. ISBN 1590171667.

Words of Mercury is an out-of-print anthology of Leigh Fermor's writings. Many copies are available, mostly in Canada and the UK. Try Addall You can read a review here.

Fermor on the pleasures and rigors of monastic life: "In the seclusion of a cell – an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods – the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world."

Quoted from:

A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Karen Armstrong. New York Review of Books paperback $12.95. ISBN 1590172442

Obituaries:

Christopher Hitchens in Slate

The Guardian 

The Independent 

Casino Grande

I was describing The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, an odd book that demonstrates within Italy’s dark heart hides an even darker place, then takes it back in a postscript.

I can almost understand the contradiction. Almost.

Everywhere you walk in Rome are monuments to Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, heroes of the late 19th century when Italy belatedly and with untold difficulty merged its walled cities and foreign-owned principalities into a modern nation state able to collect taxes and participate in wars.

The merging process didn’t quite take. Italy still has more dialects than France has cheese, more cynics than patriots, and a rising political party ready to split their section of northeast Italy from the rest of the scuffed-up boot.

In March, Italy celebrated 150 years of nationhood. That didn’t take, either. The official merger was ignored and much more attention given to the matrimonial merger of a royal couple in Britain.

Italians live in a country much younger than the United States. They are more concerned with dodging small trucks in smaller alleys than voting in elections. Their best energies are given to discerning the freshest possible groceries and trying not to step on the neighbor’s dog’s droppings.

Italians casually display what is called menefreghismo – an I don’t care attitude to everything outside immediate family and friends. One highly impolite saying runs Non me ne frega niente! – “I don’t give a (blank) about any of it.”

It’s a useful attitude when it comes to living with blatant corruption in Italy’s only national sport, soccer; when lying politicians own the newspapers and television channels that report on them, when the accused endure decades-long trials whose decisions eventually are overturned, a place where convicted criminals often hold seats in parliament.

Italians admit they live in a casino – a brothel, a miserable confusion, a mess -- but they can smell the olive trees through the garbage.

Naive visitors come for the glories, not the ghosts, and there is nothing wrong with that. Pilgrims to Rome were amazed not only at the bones of the saints and the magnificence of St. Peters, but stunned by the falling-apartness of it all. They still are.

Americans complain how expensive everything is, how this storekeeper lied or that church was closed. We make our personal pilgrimages to Rome in search of Raphael, only to experience invisible hands in the backpack on a hot and crowded bus to the Vatican.

As I listened to the neverending complaints I thought about the joys of sunset at Hadrian’s tomb, Raphael’s erotic paintings in the Villa Farnesina. A freshly squeezed spremuta, the famous pizza bianca in Campo dei Fiori, sliced off cleanly with one terrific swipe of an enormous knife. Etruscan marvels in a spotlessly clean museum located inside a gorgeous palazzo located in turn inside a gorgeous park.

The trattoria down the street where you knock to enter. Nuns flying down the sidewalk. The marvelous marble of Chiesa Nuova which lost the right to be called “new” several centuries ago.

The first strawberries of spring. Homemade ravioli in a homemade sauce served by the person who cooked it. The shouting, the laughing, the unruly joy of it all.

Italy is an unstirred soup, a kettle of contradictions, a tantalizing work of art obscured by a long, dark passageway. A language so ethereal they invented an inflexible grammar to make it real.

All this... and I don’t begin to understand how it all fits together. Does anyone?

Italy: The Bad, the Worse, the Really, Really Bad Stuff and the OK Parts

By the first 100 pages of The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, Italy is looking more than a little dark.

In the first 100 pages Jones has detailed political scandals, failures of the criminal law, pervasive corruption in Italy’s one national obsession, soccer.

It goes from bad, to worse, to the really, really bad stuff, and finishes later with the OK parts – sort of like a terrible, overpriced meal that comes with a really good dessert.

Jones talks about how Italian television is a mind-killing wasteland, how cynicism and alienation are the enduring posture of most Italians’ relationship with government and bureaucracy. All this, plus self-destructive terrorism, an ongoing, simmering sort of civil war that dates to the end of World War II. I could go on, and Tobias Jones does, in sometimes sleep-inducing detail.

After an effective and fact-supported dissection of the Italian attitude toward women and feminism – “there are basically no female role models in Italy other than those confined to the role of television confectionary...” Jones reports the following conversation:

“How on earth can you put up with all this nonsense?” he asks one of his female students, noted for her firm, feminist opinions.

“That,” she said smiling, “is exactly what we ask of British food: how can you possibly swallow that rubbish?”

“Fine. But the difference is that we don’t spend a third of our waking lives watching TV, consuming what’s been put on our plate by the country’s most powerful politician (Silvio Berlusconi).

“Fine. But I would rather have crap television than crap food,” she laughed.

What Jones describes is essentially true and verifiable – the scandal, the lying, the evasion, the cynicism, the deadly inability of anyone in Italy to find the truth because it is so overladen with lies. And I haven’t even mentioned the really dark parts where he talks about the failed “Clean Hands” political cleansing, Italians’ troubled relationship with God and religion, the baleful influence of organized crime, and so on until you almost can’t stand it anymore.

Jones published The Dark Heart of Italy in 2003, and it became a best-seller in Italy, proving that even Italians enjoy hating Italy.

And still, as most of us desperately want to believe, there really is another, much more lovely aspect to all of this gloom, another way of experiencing the boot.

In a revised postscript Jones gets around to admitting that “... I occasionally blush with embarrassment... (When I first wrote this book, five years ago) I was... fuming disbelief and fury at what I thought was happening in a country I presumed to call my home... (In this revised edition) I decided not to erase or soften my (words) because what made me angry then still makes me growl deeply today.”

“It’s only, perhaps, when you’ve been away that you realize the true value of the place,” he writes. “I was astonished at the intimacy and warmth of it. Whilst various sordid scandals make the news, the charm of street-level humanity goes unreported.”

More on this to follow...


NOTES

The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones. North Point Press paperback $15. ISBN 0865477248.

This appears to be the original 2005 edition, without the revised postscript which changes the conclusions of the book a bit. The edition I read was purchased in Rome in a Faber/Penguin edition: ISBN 9780571235926.

More information is available at the Faber web site.

Tobias Jones has left journalism for the fraught joys of community. He no longer writes a column for the for the London Guardian, but you can still read them here (“A Life Less Ordinary”).

Rome -- The fruits they are a-changin’ ...

May 21, 2011

The fruit and vegetables are changing... artichokes (carciofi) are done, except in restaurants catering to tourists. We are in the middle of peas (piselli), and now it’s strawberries and nectarines (fragole e nettarine).

I have yet to taste a single sour, flat, cruddy piece of fruit. Tomatoes, even purchased pre-packaged at the local supermercato, have that just-off-the-vine taste. Strawberries – at least the ones I bought yesterday – taste like they were picked off the vine as I ate them – hard to describe how delicious. Same for the nectarines... I lean over the sink and just devour them.

I took another walk in Trastevere today, this time with three goals – the Villa Farnesina and up the Gianicolo hill behind it to visit San Pietro in Montorio. On the way down the hill I managed to find an excellent Japanese restaurant on the big street Viale di Trastevere... and again, the four pre-sliced slices of orange were as sweet and delicious as you are imagining... and it’s not in season for citrus.

The Villa Farnesina was built by the richest man in Europe, the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi. He decorated this ravishing place with the assistance of Raphael and his helpers, architect Baldassare Peruzzi, and others. The paintings reflect the (now much reduced) gardens and orchards outside that originally led down to the Tiber (Tevere). Some are made to look like tapestries, with ruffled edges and faux tie-downs. It’s all erotic, colorful, cheerful, and the most fabulous love-nest you’d ever want to own. The large loggia rooms were intended to be open to the outside (now glassed in top to bottom)... peel me a grape and call me honey, honey.

The Gianicolo hill was the scene of months of deadly fighting between French troops defending the Pope’s rule of Rome, and volunteers from all over Italy who streamed there in defense of the newly-created and short-lived Republic (the wrenching of Rome from the Pope’s control took place a few years later). In this case the French won, with the loss of many lives. Garibaldi was there with a large contingent, and when the struggle was over, escaped to fight again.

The fallen Italians later became folkloric heroes. One of them died of gangrene at 21 from a battle wound. His words – poem, song, not sure – became the Italian national anthem. In the park at the top there is a 1941 fascist mausoleum in Mussolini’s favorite travertine marble with the saying O ROMA O MORTE enscribed above (this was one of Garibaldi’s mottos – another was “God and the People” and another was Obbedisco! ("I obey!") and another was... well there were several.

Along the path – actually a busy street – near the top of the hill – a spot with merry-go-round, big equestrian statue of, right Garibaldi, and a grand vista of the city – along the path is a row of busts of heroes – most looking like they could be working in any bar or wearing a business suit instead of military insignia and hats. The busts are very accessible both to passersby and to pigeons, yet have not been defaced or graffitti-ed. I don’t know if this is from respect or indifference. Either way, it’s unusual.

Another phenomenon... the asphalt below the vista lookout makes a perfect chalk board for lovers... I saw signs – big – many feet across – saying in effect that this marks the day that Alonso and Maria fell in love — and so forth.

I was pouring sweat. Not only was today hot, it had an undercurrent of humidity. At the very last moment, returning home, a few drops fell.

If you recall, I visited the church of San Francesco di Ripa earlier in order to see the voluptuous statue there, but only saw the feet and midsection. This time was even more – what, frustrating? Funny? – the church was closed for another hour, and I wasn’t waiting around. I made a return visit to Santa Maria in Trastevere – no wedding, but it appeared that a number of pre-teens were being rehearsed for an upcoming ceremony – not a bar mitzvah ... probably first communion.

I witnessed two weddings in progress... and afterwards on the way down the hill watched pigeons getting stomach pains eating rice off the paving stones.

A concert, a kiss and a half-eaten sandwich...

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I have just purchased a single ticket for what sounds like a great concert, 28 May at the same place as before -- the Parco della Musica. I know the way there and back (basically, taxi), I know the place and how it works and the time is nice and early -- 6 pm, so I'll be home before it's too late.

Here's the program -- all eastern Europe:

Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Constantinos Carydis direttore, lexander Toradze pianoforte

Borodin
- Danze Polovesiane
Šostakovic
- Concerto per pianoforte n. 2
Cajkovskij
- Sinfonia n. 6 "Patetica"

That's of course Borodin, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky. A powerful show. And if this link works, the red dot represents my seat...

I actually had wanted to go to a concert that is sold out -- the Israeli/Palestinian Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Daniel Berenboim... too bad. But this one will do.

This afternoon I managed to miss my school mates and an aperitivi party. As a warmup and wifi check-in I stopped for a glass of excellent red wine with peanuts and chips at Cafe Barnum at about 6:30, thinking to catch up with the gang in the Campo de’Fiore ... the wine and checking mail was fun, but although the cafes in the Campo were all packed, I never did find "my" group...

However, next best thing, I did finally find a friendly Lavandaria -- where they take your pants and your shirt and return them in 24 hours washed, dried and hung on hangars... what luxury!

I'll find out tomorrow where everyone was, but I don't think I missed much...

After turning my pants in to the red-headed lady behind the counter I decided to extend the evening by walking to Hadrian's Tomb (Castel Sant’Angelo) at sunset... glorious gigantic famous round thing on the Tiber... with a pedestrian bridge leading to it, lined with statues... of course I took pictures.

If you return into Rome along the bridge and on to the street in the same direction, Tomb at your back, the street leads you back into my neighborhood. I had not realized just how close these things are. From Hadrian's tomb it's a straight shot to the front of St. Peters... They basically are connected, and you can see one clearly from the other. Rome gets smaller every moment.

Wrote Jane Corey (we met in Firenze last Saturday) to ask how she's doing... Great, it turns out. In Paris visiting/staying with friends from Berkeley, eating salmon; tomorrow everyone's going to Giverny. Jane noted that in my case time must be going faster and faster... and it's true. So much I still want to do here -- walks in Trastevere, the Etruscan Museum not far from Villa Borghese, the Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Naples, and so forth... eating in every last tasty-looking hole-in-the-wall trattoria...

I'm keeping up with the work at school. It's getting easier, as we seem to be in a kind of review/holding pattern, repeating stuff we've studied earlier. A lot of this detail – the trapassato remoto? -- will be useless in conversation, but it's good to know more than one uses, I guess.

I'm hearing, reading and speaking Italian every day, all day long, and sometimes even the most humble human interaction can be surprising. There was a couple in a doorway embracing and kissing. She had a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, holding on to it with the same hand she was using to run her fingers through his hair. I know, it sounds creepy, but it wasn't, exactly. As I passed I called out "baciare e mangiare!" ("kissing and eating") and the guy looked at me and laughed.

Moments like that are why I'm in school. Not. Wait a minute... really? I guess so! Tell me what else Italian is good for. You can do opera in German, if you have to.