Ernie Seckinger's Reading for the Year 2000.

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"Feed your head." --The Door Mouse.

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January

** Six Days of the Condor by James Grady. As I perused the Salvation Army Thrift Store bin in Montgomery, AL, I came across a book club edition of this book for a quarter. Have recently seen again the fine Robert Redford-Faye Dunaway movie of almost the same name, I snatched it up and before work dawned the next day had it read. Quite a bit more hard-edged than the movie with a less philosophical and more Cold War spy like ending. File this one under light, but entertaining reading.

** The Golden Ocean by Patrick O'Brien. A few weeks ago I caught a few minutes of a conversation between Patrick O'Brien and Walter Cronkite on BookTV. When I heard that he died in early January, I thought it was about time I read something of his. A co-worker had also highly recommended him. Since I had a long road trip coming up, I checked this one out of the Daphne Library on Recorded Books, unabridged, of course. It occupied the tape player for the entire trip, the book being eleven hours long. The evoked scenes and dialogue were interesting but I found the story far fetched. The dénouement was, in a word, missing. Back to Moby-Dick I go.

Once again perused Jackson Street Books in Athens, GA where I rounded out my Alexandria Quartet with the purchase of Clea for an amazing $6. Also hit Atlanta Vintage Books, just a grand bookshop only a couple of minutes off I-85. Bought a VG+ copy of Barry Lopez's About This Life for $12.50. I do like these prices!

***** Journal, Volume 5 by Henry David Thoreau. In April 1999, I began reading the free text edition of Thoreau's Journal published by Princeton University Press. So far five volumes are out. This month I finished Volume 5. An attempt at an understanding of this great experience follows:  As I began my first reading of this free text, unabridged version of his journal, my first thought was "Such joy from the reading of simple words."  There is so much there that is so wonderful, or at least deeply thoughtful, that I do not wish to cheapen it for me or for you by some trite words or litanies of quotes. It is, I think sufficient to say that those of us who have written about keeping a journal feel chased out of the room by the Journal of Henry David Thoreau when he says:

My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste. --gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods-- They are my correspondent to who daily I send off this sheet, post-paid. I am clerk in their counting room and at evening transfer the account from day book to ledger.

There is so much there. True, the aphorisms that show up as quotes on lame websites and greeting cards abound, but the whole is so much more. It is the record of a mind expanding, interpreting reading, Nature, and human interaction through his Transcendental eyes. Or as the Bhagavad-Gita says: "When he renounces all desires and acts without craving, possessiveness, or individuality, he finds peace. Two out of three ain't bad.

*** Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck. On unabridged Recorded Books narrated by John McDonough. If this is Arthurian, I really need to read the Arthurian Tales again. But this is a fine, and powerfully interesting book about strange people who are, nonetheless, friends.

**** The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. Wakefulness at 3 AM requires some deep reading. This book demonstrates, in red, black, and white, the power of imagination over the forces of ennui. As ...... fresh now as upon my first reading in 1957 or 1958.

Clea by Lawrence Durrell. One fourth of the Alexandria Quartet. As a unified work, it receives ***** stars. I need -- or one needs--to take these four books: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea; to a cabin alone and read straight through on one's second reading. As Thomas Mann begged of the reader of The Magic Mountain, The Alexandria Quartet requires a second reading.
    The first three books are, as Durrell said, siblings not beginning and sequels. They view the world--and love--from different angles. Clea does come later in time. All a most beautiful collection of words.
    Favorite quote: transcendental knowledge somehow rules out purely relative knowledge (176).

Attended a talk sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Foundation Speakers Bureau and the Friends of the Daphne Public Library. Pam Kingsbury spoke on Southern male writing. An enjoyable mix of Rick Bragg, Jimmy Buffett, Dennis Covington, Winston Groom, and others.
 

February

Began reading The Life of the Mind in America by Perry Miller that I bought last December at Atlantic Books in Charleston. Miller had a very fine mind and was, unfortunately, too short lived. I find this book more than interesting since my heritage lies in the Revival Movement, a trend he expends many pages explicating. Of course, my father would take exception to his not naming the Effingham County Georgia camp meeting as the first. Local history dates it to 1790 at Turkey Branch.

***** Miscellanies by Henry David Thoreau. Riverside Press, Cambridge (our fair city), MA. An 1893 printing of the 1863 publication. A book so grand and so wide in its scope that each chapter stands alone. The first important piece here is "Thomas Carlyle and his works, which, if memory serves, was Thoreau's first national publication. A wonderful description of Carlyle's Chelsea house and some complimentary words about his books. It soon becomes clear though that he does not share his friend Emerson's view of Carlyle, "Carlyle is not a seer, but a brave looker-on and reviewer..."

Then there is "Civil Disobedience," or as he called it "Resistance to Civil Government." My copy was manufactured in 1893. Most of the pages are quite sound yet the leaves of this essay show much wear. Though not my first reading of this, perhaps his most influential, work, with this copy I joined a community of readers stretching back 107 years. To those who choose to retain symbols of slavery over their statehouse, he would repeat a line printed here: "This people must cease to hold slaves...though it cost them their existence as a people." To continue my polemic for a bit, those who would wear a bumper sticker reading "Heritage--not Hate," have conveniently forgotten that upon arrival African Americans were separated so to remove their most basic symbol of their heritage--their language.

His conclusion stands as an eloquent cry for the rights of the individual and of modernity.

Transcendentalism has become a subject of great interest to me as evidenced by my subpage on the subject.

Had to check out in Atlanta's  NorthLake Mall the Goodwill annual booksale.  I bought Herold's Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël; Nigel Hamilton's The Brothers Mann; and Diringer's The Book Before Printing.

*** Maurice Ravel: His Life and Times 1875-1973 by Eduardo Rescigno.  A brochure really, meant to accompany a set of records. Bought "in the vault" at the Blairsville, GA ongoing library booksale.  Diversity is a positive force--his father Swiss, his mother Basque, he French. Considered a rebel in music circles. The composer of what is now considered a most romantic--if not outright sensual--piece, Bolero, apparently never had any romantic engagements, remaining devoted to his parents.

Dawdling about in The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental by David Diringer and The Confident Years 1885-1915 by Van Wyck Brooks.
 

March

In reading, we bring to the piece ourselves. Ourselves as we are that moment. That explains why we can read the same book over again without boredom because during the second reading, we are not the same person we were on the first pass.

My--and the reviews of most reading websites--make no pretense of professionalism. Actually, our claim is quite different. A professional reviewer presents a work from one of two perspectives, a complete summary or an analysis from a particular and often stated point of view. We on the other hand bring all of our psyche to the review. A point of view thus taken is too complex to state and makes the review, often quite short, relative to how we felt reading the piece even more than a summary of it. So, read, enjoy, and write your thoughts.

When I began ***** The Bhagavad-Gita in February, I was sitting on my deck reading while cardinals sang and the breeze kept the humidity at a tolerable level. My serenity did not last long though as this material began to sink in:
 

When he gives up desires in his mind,
is content with the self within himself,
then he is said to be a man
whose insight is sure

Did not Henry David Thoreau actually rephrase and this this very concept? He within it included desire of all forms: for money, for sex, for things.

Today the sun struck crystals in the kitchen window announcing spring as I finished this translation (March 5). This one is by Barbara Stoler Miller with an Introduction by Huston Smith. In reading it, I of course found a few aphoristic verses: Oppenheimer's use of the verse:

If the light of a thousand suns
were to rise in the sky at once,
it would be like the light
of that great spirit

to describe the first atomic blast, and another

all undertakings are marred by a flaw,
as fire is obscured by smoke.

But I did not read this first century Hindu poem as a source of quotations. Between our culture's use of The Bible, Shakespeare, and Bartlett, we have well enough aphorisms. No, I wanted to understand what excited Emerson and Thoreau as they read it. I hope one day to read the actual translation they did, but in this modern one, I can get more to the bottom of what it is trying to say than what they thought it did.

What I found in this reading were the very seeds of Transcendentalism. Perhaps beyond Emerson and Thoreau to Kant and Goethe:

It is the senses that engages in sense objects

And in her introduction Miller tells of how Krishna draws Arjuna into a world beyond experience, "the transcendence of empirical experience in search of knowledge and liberation. Again, in the Thirteenth Teaching, verses 24-34 reveals God in us, a transcendentalist tenet. It is good to know the antecedents of one's thoughts.

A strong mystery that remains for me though is in the Eighteenth Teaching, verse 58: but if you are deafened by individuality, you will be lost. This certainly is intended to speak to the notion of oneness with all, which Thoreau shared, as do I, but both he and I are individuals unwilling to be wholly swallowed by any ism.

*** A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass written by himself. An unabridged book on tape.  A moving portrayal of this ex-slave rise to become a famous orator of his day. Serendipity can come at any moment in any form. Under a contract with the Mobile District, US Army Corps of Engineers, Brockington & Associates has underway a cemetery study at West Point Lake that includes the David and Sara Philpot cemetery. David's gravestone notes that he was born in Maryland. It would seem that partly contemporaneous with David Philpot's sojourn in Maryland, Frederick Douglass lived in Baltimore on Philpot Street as a slave! Perhaps other details to follow.

**** The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Perry Miller. HB&W 1965, published posthumously. The two large essays in this unfinished work are of the Revivalist Movement and the history of the law in America. It is odd (to me) that I found myself embroiled in a history of American law and kept reading. Especially since I came to the book expecting something more akin to intellectual foundations of Transcendentalism My simple minded anticipation was soon dashed on the rocks of the Revival Movement and then the long central essay on law. I am coming away from that essay with a few points and a generality or two.
 

"The people" have always mistrusted lawyers. The revivalists even more so.

Lawyers conspired to import English Common Law as the foundation of the American legal system while at the time "the people" still felt enmity for England.

Jeremy Bentham had as much influence here through his concept of codification as did Kant with his transcendentalism.
 

Near the end of this unfinished work, Miller finds that the debate about mind to object can occur without reference to Kantian idealism or Transcendentalism. That is to me sad. He continues saying Everett and others sought to "protect" the tremulous American mind from Transcendentalism. In doing so, he sought the "realistic." Is this black and white view of the world "the People" tend to now display an outcome of Everett's ill-conceived guidance?

A great book that would have been one for the ages had not Miller tragically died before its completion. With his deep understanding of the transcendentalists, I particularly miss the opportunity to read his planned volume on Nature.

*** Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 by Peter Matthiessen. Ah, a reprise of the Snow Leopard to some extent, this even more personal account takes the reader through his Zen start to his full-fledged pilgrimages to Japan and the Himalayas. During is ordination as a Zen monk, some offered this 11th century poem:
 

I have always known that at last I would take this road
But yesterday I did not know
It would be today.

A quote from an old Zen practitioner struck me: If not now, when?

As my journey down the path of life passed its 50 year mark in late March, books were all around me. I served as the rare book and silent auction manager for the Friends of the Daphne Public Library semi-annual booksale. Net revenue from this sale was $11,022! This being the 7th consecutive recording setting sale, I think you can agree with me that Daphne has a deep appreciation of its library and its continued growth and improvement.

The one book I received upon this dubious anniversary was the long sought Francis Harper's Naturalist Edition of The Travels of William Bartram in a fine trade pb reprint from the University of Georgia Press. This marvelous tome comes to me through the kindness of my younger son, Chris, who is, IMHO, the most well read Auburn University engineering student.
 

April

My 51st April began with my completion of *** Ellery Channing by Robert N. Hudspeth, a volume of Twayne's United States Authors Series from 1973.  Channing's greatest contribution seems to have been his catalytic friendship with the Transcendentalist group: Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller (also his sister-in-law), and most deeply, Henry David Thoreau.

Perused the Friends of the Pensacola Library booksale. A fantastically successful sale from a financial point of view. I will use some of their setup as ideas for the next Friends of the Daphne Public Library Booksale 8-10 September 2000. Volunteers to sort and price books are welcome as are book donations.

** It's Never too Late: Leading Adolescents to Lifelong Literacy by Janet Allen. A 1998 Recorded Books, Inc. unabridged book on tape from the Daphne Public Library. Dewey's debate about societal good here pales. What matters is finding a way to allow reading to enter a kid's life. Period. End of story. Unfortunately she keeps going. I only made it through tape 2 but great vignettes in those segments.

I, like any bibliomaniac, cannot resist buying a book on my list. Yesterday it was Walter Harding's Annotated Walden at George's Books in Daphne, Alabama. While this is a fine bookstore, contained in the Daphne Antique Galleria, it says little for the Mobile metro area in that it is about the only used bookstore here. I say you can never have too many bookstores or too large a library.

It sit here surrounded by books (a first edition The Good Earth, an 1883 Uncle Tom's Cabin, an 1880's Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger, a signed copy of Crazy in Alabama) that I am pricing for the next Friends of the Daphne Public Library booksale, coming up September 8-10, 2000 in conjunction with the Daphne Jubilee Festival. Come on down or participate in the booksale through our website where books of an unusual nature are featured.

*** American Heritage - Great Minds of History. Interviews by Roger Mudd of the History Channel on tape. Audio version from the Daphne Public Library. To know something so well you -- and your audience-- can be moved by the sacrifice and grandeur of it all. Quite 19th century, and great!

Stephen Ambrose, a pacifist and most knowledgeable about war and now director of the World War II Museum in New Orleans. Gordon Wood on the radical element in American history. David McCullough on the greatness of America. Richard White on the West as theater. James McPherson on the continuing legacy of the Civil War.

When I read -- or listen to -- stuff like this I am at once proud and ashamed of the American story. Proud because there just is nor has ever been a better place to realize your dreams. Ashamed because of the denial to so many access to this pathway.

*** The Plantation Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822-1890) edited by Theodore Rosengarten and Susan W. Walker. The journal begins in 1845. A nice long paragraph from July 4, 1845 got me to start at the beginning and read the whole journal. This is the same day that Henry David Thoreau, quite some distance north, entered his cabin on Walden Pond to stay the next two years, two months, and two days. I repeat his paragraph here:

July 4th.  Friday. Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of these United States. Felt too unwell to go to Beaufort, went to the muster house. An oration was delivered by Mr. C. Belcher, Declaration of Independence read, or at least spoken by E. M. Capers--he had all by heart--prayer by Mr. McElheran. The oration was a plain, well-written speech, a very good repetition of the history of the Revolution, but not oratorically delivered. We dined about 1/2 past 2 p.m., drank 12 bottles of champagne, & returned to the village at about 5 o'clock--all sober. Preparations were then made for fireworks, which came off about 8 o'clock p.m. I had the misfortune to get my right eye very much hurt from the bursting of one of the rockets. They went off very well. After which, the young ladies gave a picnic in Dr. Scott's piazza. I did not eat any of this supper, but expect it was very good. I furnished 6 bottles of champagne--I know that went off very well.

Then his notes from later:

** Fool forgot about your 10 Negroes sold! Ah, Low! Low! **
** Date my weak eyesight from this same occurrence **

I guess he saw no contradiction between the Declaration of Independence and his trade in human beings.  People have done and are still doing some mighty strange things. In terms of today's use of political correctness, I was pleased with his use of the term Negro but generally not his treatment of slaves. He fell, in my eyes, in 1856 when in a moment of frustration, he recorded his  use of the N word.

This is a tale of privilege wracked with fiscal difficulty and the constant presence of death. He often mentioned mosquitos and fever in the same paragraph but never connected the cause and effect. This journal is found as Part II of Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter by Rosengarten, mine a McGraw-Hill Paperback 1987.

I again visited The Cottage Bookshop in Tupelo, Mississippi. A fine place to browse an hour. Yes, there is more to Tupelo than Elvis. Their catalog is on Bibliofind.

** Three Centuries of American Poetry Edited by Allen Mandelbaum and Robert D. Richardson Jr. Bantam 1999. From the Daphne Public Library. When I saw Richardson's name on the cover, I grabbed this book knowing I was in for a treat. And to a great extent that prediction came true. Yet two things about the book shock me:

(1)    It has no header, so to find a poet requires a return trip to the index, and
(2)    Robinson Jeffers is absent. When all else is gone, his rock will remain.

* Gap Creek by Robert Morgan. An Oprah book. I tried to read this book but only got as far as the first chapter where the dying child throws up masses of worms during his death throes. I am glad this is 2000 and not 1800 something. I just am having a hard time thinking viscerally these days. Hopefully I can still cerebrally think.

To end the month, I have launched into The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance by Leon Chai, Cornell University Press 1987. Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville.  As I read through this dense volume, I was enlivened in the way that only completely new information can. Simply put (as the book does not), reading this book is a joy. It is however, fattening so I--at the halfway--point, put it aside for more varied sustenance and will come back later for its desert.
 

May

A biography of  ** Winston Churchill unabridged on tape.  Written by Piers Brendon , narrated by Ian Stuart on Recorded Books. From the Daphne Public Library. The author quickly answers his question of why another bio of the man about whom so many words have been written. In Churchill's case, according to the author, too many words in the available bios put off the reader. This one, is by design, accessible. I will say that even given its brevity, the depth to which the writer goes to share with us the negative side of Churchill's personality is a bit much, regardless of how important that may be to history. I rushed to finish my first bio of Winnie so to finish before he died in 1965. A bit of hero worship here.

*** John Quincy Adams by Paul C. Nagel.  I launched into this book anticipating an intellectual biography. And to a great extent it is that, yet I wanted more. Perhaps I have become inured to the biographer's technique of chronology. This should hardly be taken as a harsh criticism of the author, since he says much the same about previous works. It would seem that even though Adams left a journal comparable to that of Pepys, we know so little of him. Or...perhaps the sheer volume of words he left behind leaves little room in the mind of the biographer to see the whole, the forest for the trees as it were.

D-Day by Stephen E. Ambrose. An abridged Simon & Schuster audio book. For this prosperity, this English language, this ability of (nearly) free speech, we owe these guys' stark attack on Hitler's Atlantic Wall. Complaining about my day at work becomes silent when I consider that day for these thousands.

Just when the tomes begin to weigh too heavily, along comes another Nevada Barr! Far from disparging her, I revel in her Anna Pigeon stories cast in the light of Federal resources management and law enforcement of which I have a minor role in the former. Barr, herself an erstwhile park ranger, has the Federal jargon down just right for fellow Feds to enjoy but not too heavy for the rest. Her allusions to American popular culture lie on each page and are a fun way of putting these mysteries into our reality. *** Deep South, as are all her others, is a blast to read.

**** Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson always lurked just beyond my peripheral reading vision. I heard of it often; through Faulkner's life in New Orleans, a title in the American semi-canon; an ubiquitous volume on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. But until now I had not read it. As soon as I started the book, I knew it was the American Dubliners. It also became apparent that Anderson's patronage of Faulkner in New Orleans was more than a place to stay. These character studies ring of the Yoknapatawpha County yet to come (but this set in the Midwest, not the South). The last line, which if I included here would take too much away from your reading of the book, sums up not only Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but the genre. His influence on writers to come can hardly be calculated. Read this and your home community will be seen in a light most clear.

Ended the month beginning Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure by Victor Nell, a 1985 Yale U. Press Book. A good summary statement of this book "Placing bookworms under the laboratory microscope."

On May 30, 2000, I was honored to become the President of the Friends of the Daphne Public Library.
 

June

Finished *** Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure by Victor Nell.  While it certainly must seem strange to you, this book gave rise to much thought in my feeble mind. His notions about the storyteller led me to the following hypothesis about religion: Religion can trace its roots to the storyteller. First came the stories then came the pedanticism. First the storyteller told us how they lived (as in Harold Bloom's analysis of The Book of J), then the priests told us we MUST live similarly.

One thinking thread that stayed with me through this book concerned the setting of its writing and associated research: apartheid South Africa. Would I be able to detect any influence of this flawed social system on the results of the research? I think so. One of the large questions remaining in my mind is how readers who began life with a pre-literate language take to reading for pleasure in their adopted language. As you might guess, this was not mentioned in the book and it is perhaps intellectually dishonest to ask him in the past to conform to my present day topic of interest. But at one point, he does admit the limited cultural and linguistic diversity of his sample.  One interesting fact: South African TV did not start broadcasting until 1974!

Reading to him is the only mass-media entertainment that is wholly user controlled.

As an old Star Trek fan, I found it interesting to learn that the first like use of the term engrams was by Russian bibliopsychologist Nikolai Rubakin (1862-1946).

New term for the month: he calls reading for pleasure "ludic reading," and places it in a Jamesion context of consciousness change.

**1/2 The Martian Race by Gregory Benford. Aspect Warner Books. 1999. His usual--and good--mix of science, realistic science fiction, and interpersonal relationship. Great double entendre in the title. Plus, let us not forget, he is originally from the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay!

*** The Professor's House by Willa Cather. She finished this in 1925. Library of America edition from the Daphne Public Library. It was easy to see that morning how delicious retirement will be. I arose at 5:30 and showered. Then coffee and cereal entabled before me, I pried open a slice of early 20th century Michigan that soon moved to New Mexico. The day job called too early for this ambiance to continue though. I wonder if the Mesa Verde part of this story within a story is based on the Wetherill brothers? At its bottom line, her writing is amazingly modern (meaning to us) and imaginative since it is about a man getting through male mid-life crisis. A very good read.

*** Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather. Published late 1940. Library of America edition. This very good read exhibits a complete absence of political correctness. She had some direct connection with former slave owners but I do not know how close that relationship was. She describes the god-like attitude--and not always a beneficent god--they often exhibited. We sit here 135 years later condemning slavery and those attitudes, me deeply so. But lest we so raise the blood in our eyes with self righteousness, it is best we quietly sit for a bit and contemplate the question "In that situation, what would I have done?" Also covers some of the Underground Railroad.

*** 1/2  Loren Eiseley's two Thoreau essays in The Star Thrower. In the 20th century, it took two to make up anything resembling Thoreau--the scientist/philospoher side Loren Eiseley; the writer side E.B. White. "Seeing is not the same as understanding."

Also a week's sojourn in Colorado reading Nature in the Denver Museum of Natural History, Rocky Mountain National Park, and the Garden of the Gods. Meanwhile recording it all with fountain pens. Bought ink from the Colorado Pen Company where I finally got to hold the Titanic of pens, a Pelikan M1000.
 

July

A trip to those other mountains, the Blue Ridge of Georgia, turned out also to be hot. Going and coming, listened to *** The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman on an unabridged Recorded Books. At least my second time. The copy from the Daphne Public Library has its original charge our date pocket covered over with three pastedowns. A popular tape.

*** The People of Darkness by Tony Hillerman for also not the first time. Now let's see. That black rock I picked up in New Mexico....  It just doesn't get any better than Tony Hillerman when you have to barrel down I-85 and I-65. This time a couple of meetings in Atlanta gave rise to the trip.

Still at times leafing through The Book Before Printing. Ending soon at a breakfast table near you. I must also acquire Diringer's Illumination and Binding and his The Alphabet.

*** In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike. A 1996 book. The book begins with the portrayal of a preacher struggling with his newfound realization there is no god and moves on through his descendant at a Colorado based Waco-type setting. It is quintessential Updike slice of life with most well done descriptions of characters. A good book for writers. A continuation of Updike's search for the place and meaning of religion in the white man's world.

At the mid point of the month, I came back to Leon Chai's The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance ****. Within this generation, it will probably not be possible for a more comprehensive treatment of the subject to occur. Source book as it is, it hardly lends itself to one of these mini-essays as my many pages (elsewhere) of reading notes will attest. I will instead provide some of the topics and some of the characters:
 

Topics
Allegory vs symbolism
Subjective vs objective
Romanticism vs Rationalism
Symbolic aspects of Nature revealing the Divine
Nature or Man as the temple of God
Romantic science as seekers of a unified theory
The unity of poetry and science
The Good, the Beautiful, the True
Fundamental nature of consciousness
Reconciling the past with the present. Or not.
Pantheism
Teleology
Neoplatonism
Love and possession
Tradition
Becoming, not being.

People
Balzac
Poe
Cousin
Kant
Shelley
Adam Muller
Stendhal
Hawthorne
Melville
Emerson
Schleiermacher
Goethe
Theodore Parker
Brownson Alcott
Margaret Fuller
But amazingly not Thoreau. He gives his reasons, but from what I read here, a mistake.
 

A book most rewarding for an understanding of the Romantic Age in Germany and England (and even France) and the American Renaissance.

***** Emily Dickinson: Poems and Letters. Recorded Books. While it is important to at least often think of poetry in terms of sound, one poem at a time must be read. For this reason, I fail to see how one gets through large compendia. A poem is read, then thought ensues, then should writing. Time becomes apparent in this model of reading poetry. In many ways then, I have come to a person realization that the important part of poetry is in the writing of it. But I am sure that one day you will want to read mine!
 

August

Finally got to the last page of  *** The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental by David Diringer, a Dover reprint purchased at the Atlanta Goodwill Booksale, coming up again 22-25 September at their Glenwood Avenue location. For the first time not at Northlake Mall. But back to the book. Many pages of notes in Private Reserve Copper Burst ink laid down by an old copper colored Esterbrook pen. A most enchanting book that takes the story of the book from its clay and stylus days to Chaucer. If you are a person who appreciates the physicality of the book, you must own this one. And read it.

*** Fountain Pens: The Complete Guide to Repair & Restoration. Revised Edition. 1999 by Frank Dubiel. Those on the pen listserv at Zoss.com and elsewhere, affectionaly refer to this as "Da Book." It is not hard to see why as you peruse it. It is a glimpse into the inner workings of most fountain pens made before 1970. This... Da Book will have you writing without the use of a keyboard in no time! Available directly from the author at pen shows. He can also be found through an inquiry to the list to which you can subscribe at www.zoss.com. I recommend it!

*** Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany by Steven Ozment. Viking 1999 trade paperback. Embattled inner life in the spiritually turbulent sixteen century. I acquired this book in an attempt to learn something of how my ancestors lived. Well, these people were not my ancestors; the characters in this book would today be called blue beards. The book profiles several families through letters and diaries. I would suppose that few of my ancestors in sixteenth century Germany were literate at all let alone living in circumstances that resulted in the preservation of their papers. But an edifying read nonetheless. Since most were Lutheran, perhaps my ancestors sat in the back of their church! I grow cynical. The book is fine, I found much about life, love, disease, education, and thought in sixteenth century Germany here. Now I need to find out why my ancestors left there in 1749. I need references!

*** The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. Vintage 1999 trade paperback. Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway. I did not expect much from this book; it was at hand when the need to read fiction arose. For the first 2/3 or more, my expectations were met. Oh, it is not a bad story at all. Rather it falls into that place in my mind that attempts to deny meaning--perhaps enjoyment a better word here--to novels with a sociological underpinning. Perhaps this comes from a resentment about my bachelors degree in sociology. Complete burnout may be a fair description of that feeling.

Yet, when I encounter such works so well written as in Snow Falling on Cedars or so stark in their revelation of truth, as The Reader, I come to understand that this reluctance of mine is a shortcoming of mine and the not genre. Beyond the story, The Reader shocks us into the realization that there is such a concept of collective guilt and that to mitigate its effects requires individual action.

Of course the book nominally is about the horror of the Nazi death camps. I can do nothing about that since I am without benefit of time machine. But what about school boards in central Alabama, and most likely also elsewhere, that reduce funding for public schools since most white students are in private academies? Perhaps situations like this are an early misstep on a slippery slope to ...

I tried but gave up on * Maine's Golden Road by John Gould. A WW Norton 1995 book. I thought it was a re-do, a modern version of Thoreau's The Maine Woods. I did not abandon it solely because it did not meet my expectations but because it was too heavily anecdotal. So much so I had to coin a phrase to describe it: tangentially anecdotal.

*** Flannery O'Connor by Dorothy Walters. Twayne Publishers. 1973. I remain shocked that I cannot find a discrete memory of notice of her death even though I lived so near--the north side of Macon. I was reading ferociously at the time but not her work. Perhaps it was not even in the Lanier Jr High School Library, shocking as it probably was to people in 1964. Now I am of the flock that believes it is far more important to read the original then interpretation. But I have read her work. I enjoyed the stories, saw the abandoned Piedmont repopulated with her characters, but did not understand how her theology worked through them. So... I read this book. The meanings I came away with from this book of interpretations are ... well, in a way, shocking. Readings on "The River" like drowning into salvation is preferable to life in the midst of corruption; and her belief that Man is fallen and all his technological achievements cannot change that are different than my beliefs. But her work is valuable to me perhaps for more than one reason: 1) it chronicles in ways more real than many wish to admit the life of the rural Piedmont 60-80 years ago and 2) it is almost an ethnographic exposition of a belief system of another time and place.

I end out this month reading a volume of  Thomas Merton's Journals.
 

September

**** Dancing in the Waters of Life -- Journals, Volume 5, 1963-1965 by Thomas Merton. Edited by Robert E. Daggy, Harper San Francisco. 1997. Thomas Merton. In many ways an odd choice for me to read. I cannot countenance the constant references to a personal theology that centers on a denial of the self. Yet I find to read of a person's honest inner struggle between the self and larger issues--in his case God or the peace movement in the mid 1960s--illuminates the struggle(s) within me. Such reading in no way is an endorsement or even seeking of agreement with the writer's beliefs, but more a search for mine.

Reading Merton--whether it be his most well-known work The Seven Storey Mountain or this volume of his journal--puts me in the presence of a thinker. Merton here--at 50--had a full mind. I dare say he led more the "Life of the Mind" than one of spiritual retreat (more of that begins at the end of this volume) considering his deep reading, writing of books and articles on peace and literature (several notes on Flannery O'Connor), and even the introduction to a book on Shaker furniture. He may expend many words to convince himself that "to love God is his raison d'être, but his social action is clearly a personal priority for him--at least during the period covered by this volume.

It strikes me that he wrote these words in Kentucky as I began serious reading in Georgia. At 15, I was certainly struggling with myself as he struggled at 50. Now that I am 50, I feel much of that struggle is resolved. But now comes the work to make up for lost time! So, I read on and hope thought follows.

*** Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading by Robert DeMaria Jr. Johns Hopkins Press, 1997. Special order with a BN gift certificate from my fine older son. Having always been a fan of the ultimate curmudgeon Dr Johnson, I could not resist this book and have longed for it since its publication. We need Johnson to remind us that the life of reading is an as important endeavor as the life of writing.

DeMaria's goal is to describe Samuel Johnson's life of reading and to develop a language for describing other lives of reading (which is a statement fairly reflective of the sort of gobbledegook one encounters these days within academic departments of English). He describes four kinds of reading: study (or intense), perusal, mere reading, and curious reading.

Johnson lived astride the time reading shifted from intensive to extensive. Before his time, many readers only read the Bible--one boasted of 134 reads. For Johnson, reading literature supplied the guideposts for life. In his day the debate existed (which is still loud) between the pure reading of the text and the reading of interpretation of that text. Also, for those guilty over their reading of self-help, Johnson was a big reader of same, particularly in the area of diet and religious handbooks. In his day, books and patent medicines often were produced by the same people.

I certainly share a trait that DeMaria ascribes to both Johnson and Thomas Jefferson; a growing intolerance as they aged of the improbably and unprovable, yet Johnson was a champion of what Coleridge would call the "willing suspension of belief."

Samuel Johnson's mind was like a computer searching through large bodies of text. In some cases though, his failure to read books through was a product of his impatience, not his search technique. this is perhaps the strongest attribute separating Samuel Johnson from today's Harold Bloom.

** (With flashes of *****) The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems by Robinson Jeffers. Afterword by Tim Hunt. Liveright, NY, 1977. Purchased at Bird in a Cage Antiques, Alexandria, VA (many nice used books at nice prices).

"I dipped my hand into the future"

In the afterword, Hunt ties Jeffers to Emerson and Thoreau as have I. We must worship "organic wholeness" and "not man apart from that." Nor as Hunt adds, that apart from man. Jeffers referred to this poem as the Faust of his generation.

In one of the additional poems, "Day After Tomorrow," Jeffers returns to one of his frequent themes by going forward to the time after the passing of man"
 

"...the world resumes the old lonely immortal
Splendor."

He wonders if our time here was "moderately admirable."
 

October

Don DeLillo's **** Underworld. What is this book? What is its meaning? Does it have meaning in the conventional sense? Can you distinguish "reality" from its "cyber" reflection? What is the distinction between peace and not peace? Was the 1951 Bobby Thompson home run significant? Can some books defy review and require reading? To the latter question, I answer "YES." Do so.

This month, from a reading perspective, was fragmented. I began Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness. Great introduction where he lays out his plan for an intellectual history of America (which he unfortunately never finished). I frankly bogged down in some of the essays on Puritan thought, but will get back to it during quieter times.

I then moved on to his larger of two anthologies of Transcendentalism: ***** The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. While it lies unfinished at the breakfast table, I have come upon an epiphany or two. One was the (finally) understanding that the Transcendentalist movement is most accurately defined as a religious demonstration. Its literature must be read as an expression of religious radicalism in revolt against a rational conservatism of Unitarianism. In particular, Emerson and thoreau viewed themselves very nearly as prophets rather than artists, "Free to worship and free to rail," as Emerson said. They were preachers masquerading as poets.

He points out the great impact the Transcendentalists had on their contemporary American experience. After all, they had ideas about politics and economics, relations between the sexes, woodchucks, and sunsets. It did not remain a disturbing force for two reasons (1) America adopted it and made it orthodox and (2) it consumed, shattered, and destroyed its adherents. It was, in the final analysis, literature as a substitute for religion and religion as a substitute for philosophy.

My reading of individual selections continues.
 

November

Too much travel this month and too little reading. I did read  *** 1/2 Donald Hall's String Too Short to be Saved: Recollections of summers on a New England Farm. 1979 edition. This farm, where he now lives, figures strongly in his poetry. A Currier & Ives country setting never existed. This is the next best thing--and it was real. "I no longer require a wished-for future to cancel the present."

Still working through ***** Perry Miller's Transcendentalist anthology. A most powerful collection of pieces from a, if not the, supreme intellectual moment in this nation. Why then, do "the people" vote in such numbers for someone less intellectual than the average college football coach?

*** Catullus - Odi et Amo: The Complete Poetry. Translated by Roy Arthur Swanson. 1959. The poetry of the short-lived poet Caius Valerius Catullus, c. 84-54 B.C. Some Roman reinterpretation of Classical Greek mythology, some insults to named people as base as present-day school-yard taunts. Another one of those ancient works almost lost. Only one manuscript is known. It was found in Verona in 1311. That original was subsequently lost but not before two copies were made. In an attempt to understand his poetry better, I referred to Gilbert Highet's Poets in a Landscape. 1957. How odd that in 57 B.C., Catullus could say what he meant; in A.D. 1957, Highet bleeps himself with asteriks as he quotes Catullus! Highet suspected that Catullus may have been of Celtic origin since Italians conquered Celtic Verona only a year or so before his birth. Highet values him as a great lyrical poet while acknowledging the difficulty of teaching one who on one page creates a great lyrical flow and on the next a blaring obscenity. Love, intrigue, betryal--the stuff of life--and poetry.

** The Loop by Nicholas Evans on unabridged tape from the Daphne Public Library. Certainly within the genre of best sellerdom, nonetheless quite entertaining. What more can you ask for than mountains, wolves, and love? I am left hoping that native Montana ranchers are not really that mean-spirited.

* The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans. Unabridged tape from the Daphne Public Library and the movie on DVD from Blockbuster. The movie purported to be directed by Robert Redford; he and Kristan Scott Thomas star. I doubt the movie makes much sense to those who have not read the book. To cover the last third of the book's story, the movie would have to be another third longer. My but is its ending ever Hollywooded out! Why the hype? I mean there are scenes remarkly written to evoke Montana (another case of an outsider taking over the Big Sky--Evans is British), but it is stereotypical of "rich Easterner" motifs and best sellerdom. Something about the book bothered me. Almost too formulaic even for a best seller. Have our lives become so formulaic that we must live by that formula even in an illusion? Perhaps so. Is it the way to be? Perhaps not.

** American Barns and Covered Bridges by Eric Sloane. It is as I remembered from my bookstore employee days--1972 in downtown Atlanta--Sloane writes all over the map sans editor. But, his evocation of the material culture and landscape of early America makes me forge ahead. I wanted to say he speaks of no bridges in Madison County, but a bridge census at the end lists 13 covered bridges in Iowa in 1954. Sixty in Alabama!
 

December

** 1/2 Our Vanishing Landscape by Eric Sloane. Not in his words, "drippy nostalgia." However, at times... His evocation of past roads and bridges follows closely my interest in transportation archaeology. In the Covered Bridge chapter, he unfortunately omits mention of Horace King, a celebrated African American builder of bridges in Alabama and Georgia in the mid 19th century.

*** Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman. Unabridged audio tape. Tony Hillerman is the best solace for driving down boring I-65 ever invented!

More driving up I-65 and 85 resulted in a listening of *** Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie on Recorded Books, a 9.5 hour recording of a book published in 1957. This recording 1992. This is Guadacanal and war straight up. Leckie recounts some of his combat activities in a completely neutral tone, even though he may have, in that action, been responsible for the deaths of 3 or 4 men. While he does recount combat sometimes with a chilling detachment, he also thinks of those departed lives, the meaning of life, and the significance of being human. This is a Pacific theater precursor to the kind of absolute realism seen more recently in Saving Private Ryan. Let us not forget, War is Hell.

Still dipping into Perry Miller's The Transcendentalists.

*** American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions by Arthur Versluis. 1993. Oxford University Press. A most amazing book about a most amazing group of people, the Transcendentalists and their incorporation of Eastern teachings. This is a book whose every line is a source of information that will not be recounted here. It will heavily figure into the revamping of my Transcendentalism webpage soon. At this point, it is perhaps sufficient to say that Thoreau assimilated Eastern teachings more so than most; this can be seen in his hermitage at Walden, his vegetarianism, his ethical purity, and his imaginative life.

*** Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by D. B. Johnson. Houghton Mifflin. Boston. 2000. I first head of this book from Daniel Pinkwater as he reviewed it on NPR. It is a re-telling of Thoreau's statement about the two paths to Fitchburg--walking or working the full day to earn the train fare. Some shallow thinkers may say that it devalues work, but I think it rather points out that every now and then you need to stop and smell the roses! This is a fine book for young readers and old alike. It is produced for 1-2 grade level. I am so proud to see it has been checked out of the Daphne Public Library 12 times since July. I am the lucky 13!

*** 1/2 A Pilgrim's Progress: Orestes A. Brownson by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The 1966 edition, Little, Brown and Company. Schlesinger's Honors Thesis turned into book form. In some ways the study, by a liberal, of how a liberal turns conservative (and dies a depressed, frustrated old man).
    At one point in Brownson's intellectual development, Schlesinger calls him Marx's nearest forerunner in America in his understanding of the laboring class.
    A most shocking revelation to me was his philosophical camaraderie with John C. Calhoun. They both based their analysis on Artistotle and declared government to originate legitamely in human behavior. Their common solution to the politcal errors they saw--States' Rights!
    In his early career, Brownson was known as the strongest and most intellectual spokesperson for Transcendentalism. His 1840 view of what Transcendentalism's aim was, "to ascertain a solid ground for faith in the reality of the spriitual world." This presages his spiritual transformation soon to follow.
    By 1843, he contemplated a move rare in New England. There Catholicism was often called The Scarlet Lady. In late 1843, he unified his spirit and flesh and became a Catholic. In seeking the church of the future, he found the church of the past. Atoning for his previous works, his early Catholic writings were doctrinaire to the extent of muddying his social analysis. His ultramontanism--obedience to the state justified only when it meant obedience to God--played into the hands of the Know-Nothings and turned many Catholics against him. In this battle, he came early to see the only resolution of the struggle between the notions of Catholic and Irish was to make Catholicism American, a notion dealt a fatal blow when in 1864 Pius IX banned efforts to create a compromise between the church and the spirit of the times.
    Brownson was in a constant search for a philosophy to counter Kant. He found Gioberti--Ens creat existentias (Being creates existence). Man perceives that nature exists, that it has been created, and that there is a creator. Even as his views changed, he could not drop intuition, but perhaps its meaning to him was not as radical as it sounds. To him intuition meant the irrestibble presentation of an object to the mind, not the active grasping of it. Intuition of God was God affirming himself by creating the human intellect.
    His failure were in the area of the lonely pursuit of truth and the worship of unflinching honesty and rigorous logic. Thus, as revealed in his reborn Boston Quarterly Review, in 1873 he seemed to be against everybody and everything from Dickens to Darwinism to feminism. He declared war on the world to make peace with heaven.
    His successes include the first realization that the frontier was a softening agent on class distincions in America and the organic nature of the business cycle. He was the first to speak of depression as integral to capitalism.
    As is his way, Schlesinger presents often complex ideas in straightforward, understandable prose.

** Vlemk the Box-Pointer by John Gardner. Life is all we are and all we do. Gardner lived his life without a helmet and so died. To live life fully is one thing; to do it helmetless on a motorcycle deprives one of life and us of his mature work. A maturing master lost. This is a novella within the story collection The Art of Living and Other Stories.

*** The Year 1000: what life was like at the turn of the first millennium, An Englishman's World. Robert Lacey & Danny Danzinger. Back Bay Books 1999. A nice, fast-paced view of AD 1000 in England. Makes the argument that the work ethic associated with western civilization firmly in place in AD 1000. More on the place of women in society than in the average book. Interesting discussion of the Anglo-Saxon word mann referring to a person, not male. For me, it brought the archaeological Anglo-Saxons to life.

Thus most likely ends a fruitful year of reading. My theme this year has been Transcendentalism and have have miles more to travel down that path. I welcome your comments and suggestions. Please email me at ernieseckinger [at] yahoo.com. Happy New Year!

Ernie Seckinger
Daphne, The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, Alabama