Browsed by
Category: books

The Library Place

The Library Place

Comments 0 Comment

The book group met at my house last night. Two people sat on our sagging blue couch, the other two in the faded wing chairs, the ones that belonged to Tom’s parents so many years ago. I pulled the rocking chair over to the far end of the coffee table, which gave me an unaccustomed vantage point — staring straight at the built-in bookshelves, our pride and joy.

I think about the part books have played in the life of our home, the schoolbooks and novels, the histories and poetry, our old college books and now our children’s, too.

And then there’s the “library place,” the shelf of a hutch so named because it’s where we put library books that need to be returned. In the enchanting shorthand of family conversation, the library place has become a repository for anything that needs to be protected or preserved: retainers, driver’s licenses, a pile of  downy parakeet feathers.

It still serves as family safe — a spot once meant for books that now holds other precious cargo.

I can’t find a picture of the library place. This shot of my bedside table will have to do. There’s always danger of an avalanche.

The Poetry of Pittsburgh

The Poetry of Pittsburgh

Comments 2 comments

When I began this blog more than two years ago, I didn’t think long about the quotation I would use across the top. I knew it would come from Annie Dillard’s book An American Childhood.

“When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

A few years ago, on our way back from visiting Tom’s family in Indiana, we stopped in Pittsburgh, where Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945. It was a literary pilgrimage for me. Our first view of the city (where I had lived as a toddler, pre-memory), came at dusk, as we drove into a tunnel and out and suddenly there were the three rivers and the bridges crossing them all lit up with white lights and it seemed magical to me, this old city of groaning steel and trestles.

Was it the place itself that exerted this magic, or was it because I was primed to love it by Dillard’s words? “I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding.”

It was both, I think. The place of poetry. The poetry of place.

 Photo by Peter Tooker 2010 All Rights Reserved. From the blog Open Windows.

Third Place

Third Place

Comments 0 Comment

This is Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, a place to meet friends, to picnic, to hang out. It is neither home nor work. It is what Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place.” But there are few such places in modern cities. “Our urban topography presently favors those who prefer to be alone, to stay in their homes, or to restrict their outings to relatively exclusive settings,” Oldenburg says in his book The Great Good Place.

I would say this design flaw applies most of all to suburban topography, to the design of subdivisions without center and without stores and without a pleasant place to congregate for an hour or two.  I know of nowhere in my neighborhood where people can gather with a regular crowd for a beverage and some conversation; and there certainly are no Central Parks. The closest tavern is a sports bar with a dozen or more conversation-killing TV screens on the walls. The one local coffee shop closes at 2 p.m. We buy our goods at anonymous malls and shopping centers.

“The problem of place in America manifests itself in a sorely deficient informal public life,” Oldenburg says. “The structure of shared experience beyond that offered by family, job and passive consumerism is small and dwindling. The essential group experience is being replaced by the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals. American lifestyles … are plagued by boredom, loneliness, alienation and a high price tag. America can point to many areas where she has made progress, but in the area of informal public life she has lost ground and continues to lose it.”

I finished Oldenburg’s book with a stunning takeaway point: that what we think are individual and family failings are actually deficits of community and place. That we have only just begun to plumb what placelessness has done to us.

Serendipity

Serendipity

Comments 0 Comment


Before there was Amazon one-click ordering, there was the serendipitous joy of finding a book that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time on a dark dusty shelf in the nether regions of the library.

Though it could be any book, this time it’s Wallace Stegner’s When the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. I can already tell that it will be a keeper, that I’ll probably end up buying a copy of my own through — yes — Amazon one-click ordering.

But back to serendipity, to the way it feels to look up a book in the library catalog (and in the old days those wooden boxes ), scribble the number on a card and then go in search of it. This might take a while, especially if it’s a Dewey Decimal system; those numbers always give me headaches. But soon I have zeroed in on the row, then the shelf and then (miracle of miracles) the book is actually there, where it is supposed to be.

What’s captivating about the library find is the book’s tangibility, its placedness, it’s being there. But what fuels the joy of discovering it? It’s the plain simple (but intangible) fact that good books, in some way, become a part of us. More us than our bones and breath.

Wild Places

Wild Places

Comments 0 Comment


A few days ago I wrote about Robert Macfarlane’s book The Wild Places, how the author sought remote mountaintops and bogs as comfort and as challenge. I’m almost finished with the book now, and Macfarlane has learned something.
–>He talks about the wildness that is all around us, the simple views of field and fern that may be recorded in a journal or a letter or may not be recorded at all but simply held in mind.
Most of these places, he says, “were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along — these might be enough.”

A few paragraphs later, Macfarlane says this: “It seemed to me that these nameless places might in fact be more important than the grander wild lands that for so many years had gripped my imagination.”

To take Macfarlane’s idea one step further: These nameless places are what attach us to a place, what make us feel bound to the land around us. This morning, I think about my own “wild places.”


Marquez and Memory

Marquez and Memory

Comments 0 Comment


When I read this morning that today is the birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in 1927 and still living, I thought of his best book. Not 100 Years of Solitude, which took me almost 100 years to read (though I did eventually finish it). But Love in the Time of Cholera.

It has been several years since I read this novel, but I still remember the transcendent last chapter, when the beautiful but aged Fermina and Florentino, the man who has waited 50 years to be with her, take a steamboat voyage down a river bloated with corpses.

Love triumphs over death is the theme, but I can remember little else of that last chapter, only that I held my breath from the beauty of the language and the depth of the thoughts. This morning I’ve looked for quotations that might give a hint of this book’s grandeur and I found this one by Florentino: “Love becomes nobler and greater in calamity.”

But I’ll leave the last words to Thomas Pynchon and a review of the book he wrote for the New York Times in April, 1988:

There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance — at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.

Book Nook

Book Nook

Comments 0 Comment


On the same weekend that I finally dipped my toes into the Kindle, I also bought two new bookcases. Tall, skinny ones that slip nicely into an oddly shaped alcove that we’ve been trying to make the best of — design-wise — since we bought the house.

So while I’m willing to try the electronic book, I’m making room for more of the real articles. Today I’ll read a library book on Metro. I’m racing to finish it so that I can dig into the latest Ann Patchett novel that Suzanne is lending me (and which someone else has lent her).

And so goes the community of book readers — trading, discussing, and yes, even hording. I imagine that soon my Kindle will be as full to bursting as our book shelves.

Meanwhile, we’ve created a little book nook in our bedroom: a rocking chair, a pouf (soft ottoman), a reading light and lots and lots of the the real things, just waiting to be plucked from the shelves onto our laps.

Not exactly this but something like it…

The Dark Side

The Dark Side

Comments 0 Comment


Today I went over to the dark side — the electronic e-reader, the Kindle. A generous Christmas gift from my brother Phillip, it has been sitting unopened on my bookshelf (interesting place for it to wind up), taunting me with possibility and with dread.

What of all the posts I’ve written about “real books”? What of my English major stand in favor of ink on paper and the codex? Are these scruples gone?

Of course not. The e-reader will always be a supplement, one more way to read a book. It will be interesting to see if I can navigate it, of course. Already I’ve had to enlist help from Tom (how to scroll) and Celia (how to return to my home page). They have rallied bravely to the cause of this technophobe. And now I have several free books in my queue (including Aristotle’s Ethics and the entire Bible!) and a couple sample chapters to peruse.

I’ve read four times more books since I got my Kindle, a friend told me a couple days ago. That’s what made me do it. Four times more books! I’m in.

Above: a more old fashioned way of retrieving books.

Stegner and Place

Stegner and Place

Comments 0 Comment


Today is the birthday of Wallace Stegner, writer, teacher and celebrator of place. The American West was his place and he described it well, its aridity and openness, the loneliness of its grain elevators and grasslands, the way it has shaped our character.

The New World transient is a person in motion, Stegner says. “Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none.” Because he moved frequently himself, Stegner knows “the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness.” Which leads him to this conclusion:

“A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities, over more than one generation.”

I have thought about these words often since reading them this fall, have considered their truth as I try to feel at home in the suburbs. Thinking about them has led me to the library, to books about the people who lived here before us, to local historians who’ve discovered lost roads. I’m trying my best to feel at home here. But the “dissatisfaction and hunger” remain.

Dickens the Walker

Dickens the Walker

Comments 1 comment


Too busy writing about the anniversary here yesterday to mention Dickens’ 200th birthday. David Copperfield is one of my favorite books — in fact, it’s about time to re-read it — and I revere most of author’s classics. (I’ll admit, Bleak House was a bit tedious in parts.)

What I didn’t know until yesterday (or perhaps once heard but had forgotten) is that Dickens was a walker. The “Morning Edition” story I heard about him yesterday said he liked to walk “far and fast.”

“He did these great walks — he would walk every day for miles and miles, and sometimes I think he was sort of stoking up his imagination as he walked, and thinking of his characters,” said Claire Tomalin, author of the new biography Charles Dickens: A Life.

Imagine going for a stroll and coming back with Mr. Macawber. Or Bob Cratchit. Or any number of the other real, human, flawed, funny, rich and revealing characters that people Dickens’ novels.

Learning of the great man’s walking habits makes me appreciate my ambles all the more. A walk may not yield a masterpiece. But it almost always produces a thought or two that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t moved my legs and jiggled my old brain a bit.