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Thank you, Mr. Epstein

Thank you, Mr. Epstein

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I read recently of the passing of Jason Epstein, an editor and publisher who launched the paperback revolution. When he was 23, earning $45 a week and just scraping by in the publishing trade (I can relate!), he proposed to the higher-ups at Doubleday that they publish the classics in soft rather than hardcover. 

His bosses listened, and Doubleday came out with Anchor books, which provided the works of  Lawrence, Stendhal and other greats for as little as 65 cents a title. Epstein edited Roth, Mailer and Auden, and helped found the New York Review of Books, but it’s the paperback idea he’s known for most.

Before the early 1950s, paperbacks were reserved for “lowbrow, escapist fiction,” the obit said, so this was a novel idea. And it worked! The new line sold briskly, and what became known as trade paperbacks quickly became a profitable arm of the publishing business, much beloved of students and others who wanted a library of classics but couldn’t afford the hardback versions.

So now when I’m moving yet another box of books or cramming one more paperback onto an already-crowded shelf, I’ll say, with only the slightest hint of irony, “Thank you, Mr. Epstein.”

Viva Italia!

Viva Italia!

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Like many people these days I find myself relying on streaming entertainment more heavily than I would like. This has become a winter-time occupation, slowly supplanting my race to watch Oscar-bound films in theaters since so many of them are available online.

As we enter our third year of pandemic-enforced staying-put, I’m gravitating toward films that feature faraway climes. Films like “Under the Tuscan Sun.” I read this book years ago, even own a copy of it. I happened upon the movie a couple days ago, looking for something to watch while exercising in the basement. 

What a vision! I don’t mean the sexy Italian guys … I mean the gorgeous Tuscan countryside. There is the walled city of Cortona, the Amalfi Coast marvel of Positano. There are the tall, skinny Italian Cyprus trees, the olive groves, fountains and love of life that flourish in this sunny land.

Oh, I know there are gray days in Italy, too. It’s not the garden of eden. But right now it looks like it to me. 

Photos: courtesy Wikipedia, alas I have no recent Italy photos of my own

Farewell to Eternity

Farewell to Eternity

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The reasons we read a particular book are as various as the books themselves, but there are some general trends: a friend recommends it, the book group schedules it, we’ve read a good review of it and — my new excuse — the professor puts it on the syllabus. 

The reasons we give up on books are also legion: it doesn’t live up to the recommendation, it’s wicked long, the topic is arcane, the reviewers were wrong. Sometimes a book simply doesn’t fit into the time I have to read it, though truth to tell that seldom happens. In fact, I don’t give up on a book lightly. 

But when I find myself on page 80 of an 800-page novel, when I recall the rather flimsy reasons for picking it up — a friend told me decades ago that she enjoyed it and memoirist Willie Morris speaks fondly of the author, James Jones — and when I realize that I’m already on the line for reading I might not enjoy for the class that’s starting next week … well, then I give myself permission to put it aside. And so, farewell to From Here to Eternity. 

Flash Gratitude

Flash Gratitude

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I have in my temporary possession a book called The Best of Brevity. It’s a compilation of short essays from the journal Brevity, which features flash nonfiction. 

The genre of flash nonfiction is relatively new to me, although I write it everyday. It is the true-to-life equivalent of flash fiction. part of a trend — probably long since peaked if I’m catching onto it — toward the brief, the ephemeral, the transitory. 

Let me add to this canon with what I’ve come to think of as flash gratitude. 

Flash gratitude is the sudden, piercing awareness of life’s blessings. Stubbing one’s toe and thinking … at least I have a toe to stub. Or hearing the gentle purr of forced-air heat and giving thanks for the warm home I sit in as a result. 

I had a moment of flash gratitude yesterday when I heard about fellow Virginians trapped for 18 to 20 hours on an impassable I-95. They were cold, hungry, frightened and, most likely, angry. They were bearing the brunt of the snow storm in a real and all-too-personal way. 

Let this be a gratitude trigger, I told myself. Whenever life looks bleak and purposeless, I will conjure up those poor souls trapped in their Kias or Toyotas or Hondas or Fords, those poor shivering drivers and passengers, and my heart will nearly burst with joy that I am anywhere else but on a snow-packed, jack-knifed-tractor-filled I-95. 

(This snow has its beauteous moments, too.)

Doing the Reading

Doing the Reading

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Finding the balance point for this new phase of life is not going to be an exact science, I can already tell. I crave big blocks of time but am also terrified by them. I tremble at not having enough to do, then compensate by piling on too much.

For instance, I continue to try and do all the reading for class, even though it can be an insane amount. Last night, for instance, I realized that there’s an entire book we’re supposed to read for today.

In my mind are the words of my children. “Mom, you don’t have to do all the reading.” Wise words from people who, as I recall, were taught that they should do all the reading. 

But as with so much of life, relationships shift, patterns change, wisdom develops. 

And tonight, I will go to class at least slightly … unprepared. 

The People Behind the Pill

The People Behind the Pill

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I’ve always been an earnest, note-taking reader, especially now that I’m in class again. But increasingly more I enjoy the sidetracks and detours of reading, the rabbit holes, the inefficient digressions. 

For the next paper, we’re analyzing the public reception of a specific scientific discovery, and I’ve chosen oral contraception. It’s a rich topic, so rich that I’m reading more than necessary. 

For instance, in The Birth of the Pill, author Jonathan Eig tells the stories of the four people who are most responsible for the development of the pill:

There is Gregory Pincus, a brilliant scientist with a flair for publicity searching for compounds in his ramshackle laboratory in Massachusetts; Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who coined the term “birth control” and crusaded for women’s freedom all her life; Katharine McCormick, heir to the Cyrus McCormick fortune, who funded the experiments; and Dr. John Rock, a gynecologist and devout Catholic who took on his church to help the women in his care.

Though a drug company was involved — G.D. Searle — the pill would not have been created without the  “courage and conviction of the characters involved,” Eig writes. The book is a vivid reminder of how human personalities forge the technologies we inherit. It’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.

(Photo of Margaret Sanger courtesy Wikipedia) 

Reading and Weeding

Reading and Weeding

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The reading and weeding I did yesterday seem worthy of a post. The reading was for class, a chapter called Biology and Ideology. It was about Social Darwinism, eugenics, the values with which science can be laden, the ways science can be used. 

I take notes as I read, because it helps me concentrate and remember. Reading a chapter takes a while, then, as I jot down the main points and attempt to digest them. 

Which meant that I was ready for the weeding when it came. I was ready to swing my arms and pull out great fists full of stilt grass, toss it over the chicken wire fence. The motion freed my limbs, loosened my brain.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every day held a perfect combination of mental and physical work? I’m not saying mine did yesterday. But it was close. 

(No picture of weeds handy; here’s a shot snapped on the way to class.)

Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the Ghost

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I just finished Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost, a powerful story of childhood fears, adult sorrows and the writer’s ability to triumph over them by putting pen to paper. 

Mantel writes that she has a “nervous sort of nostalgia” for any surface she’s written a book on. “I think the words, for better or worse, have sunk into the grain of the wood.” In Mantel’s case, many words. The Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and Mirror and the Light trilogy about Lord Cromwell top out at more than 1,500 pages.

In interviews, Mantel says she had the idea to write about Cromwell even before she was published, which means that it was likely on her mind when she wrote her memoir, too. Perhaps when she wrote these words, some of the most evocative I’ve read describing books not yet written:

“Sometimes, at dawn or dusk, I pick out from the gloom — I think I do — a certain figure, traversing the rutted fields in a hushed and pearly light, picking a way among the treacherous rivulets and the concealed ditches. It is a figure shrouded in a cloak, bearing certain bulky objects wrapped in oilcloth, irregular in shape: not heavy but awkward to carry. This figure is me; these shapes, hidden in their wrappings, are books that, God willing, I am going to write.” 

Write them she did. In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Mantel says that as soon as she started writing Wolf Hall, she knew it was what she had been working toward. Starting the trilogy was “like at last delivering what’s within you … an enormous shout from a mountaintop.”

I marvel at such surety. I wonder what it would be like to feel it.

(The Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin)

Endings and Beginnings

Endings and Beginnings

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August 31 is a big day for endings. It’s the end of the month, the end of the summer — and the end of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. 

But it’s also my first day of class. This evening I officially start the master’s program I enrolled in months ago. 

In a way it’s just a return to the program I began a decade ago when I took a Georgetown class called A Sense of Place: Values and Identity. But it’s been 10 years. The program has changed, and I have, too.

Now I’m enrolled in one of four required foundation classes, Science and Society. To prepare for it I’ve read four chapters of a book on the history of science, taking notes on Bacon and Newton and Tycho Brahe. 

What will it be like to sit in a classroom again, to write papers, to be graded? I don’t know … but I’m about to find out.

(Lamplight on the Georgetown campus)

A New Milestone

A New Milestone

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I typically note the passing of blog milestones when there are round numbers ending in zeroes, but today I’ll mix it up a little and note the passing of a milestone ending in 9s. 

This is the 3,499th post I’ve written since I began A Walker in the Suburbs in 2010,  the 87th since I left Winrock and the 499th since my last milestone post. 

Since then I’ve written about the pandemic’s beginning and why despite its gift of time I’m still not getting anything done. 

I’ve written about trips I’ve taken, books I’ve read and walks that have inspired me. 

Mostly I’ve just tried to capture life in my little corner of the world, the joys and trials, the profound beauty of each day passing.