Cool, Clear, Spectacular

These cool May mornings make the heart sing, don't they? In light of last summer's drought, it seems a miracle that anything came up in the garden this spring, but everything looks sharp again, and in a shady yard like ours, many of the plants will never look better than they do now, especially the violets, the bleeding heart, and the brunnera, with their tiny blue forget-me-not flowers.

Now's the time to divide and move things around, of course. A few days ago I uprooted a volunteer pagoda dogwood, maybe three feet tall,  that had been doing well in the sunny side yard (where we never see it) and moved it to a position in back where, if all goes well, it will contribute to the leafy, though slightly feeble, woods that screens us from the neighbors all summer.

Wandering the yard on a Sunday morning, I see the fruits of two winter projects that had been on my mind for years. Back in January I lopped off the tops of the nannyberry bushes that had been getting leggy. Now they look much better. And in February we hired someone to remove a volunteer elm that was blocking much of the sunlight coming in from the south while also littering our deck with yellowish leaves all summer due to Dutch elm disease. 

He carefully removed the tree, section by section, using a small chain saw on a pole while standing on a ladder. His wife held the ropes to insure the sections fell into the neighbor's yard rather than across the power-lines, and she also carried the limbs away. He volunteered to cut the tree into fireplace lengths, to avoid the cost of disposing of it. That sounded like a good idea to me.

It's always fun to watch an artist at work. The entire operation took three hours. We'll see how much the added sunlight does for the garden. Well, it can't hurt!

I noticed just this morning, while on a stroll though the back yard, that a serviceberry tree is flowering deep in the woods, and so is one of its offspring closer to the house. A less pleasant discovery: the deer have already begun to chew down the clematis recta. (Time to get out that bottle of spray that's been sitting in the garage for years.)

Out front, I initiated another project that's been on my mind for years: to make better use of the sunny patch on the north side of the driveway. To this end, I removed a large chunk of sod from the lawn, moved the peony that was getting smothered by the neighboring bushes three feet further out toward the driveway, and planted some day lilies from the vegetable garden in front of it. Hilary has some Mexican sunflowers that might also do well in that space.

But matters of garden improvement aside, the chief joy of these crystal mornings is simply to feel the cool air on your skin and gaze lovingly at this or that plant, perhaps admiring its translucence when struck from behind by the rays of the early morning sun. 

On a day like today a clump of Virginia waterleaf looks as fine as the rarest and most delicate exotic, and spotting a golden-winged warbler amid the leaves of the linden tree is merely frosting on the cake. 

Long Live Latin: the Pleasures of a Useless Language

Nicola Gardini, Italian by birth and upbringing, now a professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Oxford, is here to share with us the joy he feels every time he reads one of Horace's odes or a few lines from a letter by Seneca—in the original, of course. And I, who have desultorily studied German, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek without retaining much about any of them, can feel the joy myself, due to the charm with which Gardini relates his own story and the clarity and enthusiasm with which he lovingly reviews the works of Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, Ovid, and other poets, philosophers, and historians of the classical era, giving each of these authors marks of distinctive character and highlighting their stylistic idiosyncrasies.

The book is a quick read, in part because it contains many long quotations in Latin—often half a page—which readers who don't know the language will have no choice but to skip; there is little point in scanning one's eyes across line after line of meaningless gibberish.

Anicetus villam statione circumdat refractaque ianua obvios servorum abripit, donee ad fores cubiculi veniret; cui pauci adstabant, ceteris terrore inrumpentium exterritis. Cubiculo modicum lumen inerat et ancillarum una, magis ac magis anxia Agrippina, quod nemo a filio ac ne Agermus quidem: aliam fore laetae rei faciem; nunc solitudinem ac repentinos strepitus et extremi mali indicia. Abeunte dehinc ancilla, “tu quoque me deseris?”

Of course, each such passage is followed by an English translation, and these are often interesting, though being in a different language, they don't possess the same stylistic nuances as the Latin, and Gardini's attempts to convince us of their wondrous literary merit will fall mostly on deaf ears. It would have been helpful for him to provide at least a primer of how Latin is pronounced, perhaps in an appendix. (Maybe no one really knows?!?) Lacking such a tool, we're at the mercy of his judgment, and there are one or two places where his praise of these illustrious Roman authors seems slightly misplaced.

Two examples, from opposite ends of the literary spectrum, spring to mind. On the one hand, Gardini idolizes Cicero, rhapsodizing that in the end, he "came to represent a model human being: a model of political and moral dedication, an unrivaled example of the power of words, a hero and a martyr of democratic freedom...who still today has the power to stir our emotions."

Even in this short passage, it's clear that Gardini is conflating three distinct aspects of Cicero's contribution the Roman history: his literary style, the import of his writings, and his statesmanship. My dim recollections from college of Cicero's role in Roman political life conjure a highly vain individual who articulated a lofty deal of how government might best function, though his own checkered political career had plenty of highs and lows.

Then again, Gardini raves about the poetry of Catullus, but the reasons he gives for that assessment aren't convincing. Perhaps you have to know the Latin, though I doubt it; Gardini devotes an entire chapter to a detailed explication of Catullus's sexual terminology, word by word. Here is a translation of one of the satirist's less scabrous pieces.  

If not by all that his friends boast,

at least by pin-headed Otto’s unattractive pate

by loutish Erius’s half-washed legs

by Libo’s smooth & judicious farts

by Sufficio’s old man’s lust turned green

may great Caesar be duly revolted. Once more

my naive iambics strike home . . .

                                                                unique general

 

I suppose one might applaud the down-to-earth freshness of such a lyric, but you can find that same quality in the satires of Horace, put to the service of a far more mature and wide-ranging vision. Gardini knows this, of course, which explains why he reserves his highly appreciative treatment of Horace for the last part of the book. Before arriving there, he devotes chapters to Petronius, Augustine, Propertius, and others, each of whom, he suggests, brought new elements to the language, and hence to the vocabulary of our "modern" understanding of things.

Of Horace, Gardini writes:

 Ancient and profoundly classical, Horace feels contemporary in every age. His voice emanates from afar, and yet it reaches us with impressive clarity, inviting dialogue. Every century has sent him its share of fan mail. At the dawn of humanism, Petrarch wrote him a letter brimming with admiration {Familiares, XXIV. 10), perhaps the most beautiful of those he sent to the ancient authors, focusing on his lyrical output ... Still more letters were dispatched from the twentieth century. Primo Levi, reflecting on modernity’s presumed achievements, felt the need to evoke Horace’s name; and the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky ... used him to take the pulse of modern poetry.

Long Live Latin offers us a friendly and erudite overview of the field, free of academic nit-picking and riddled with personal asides that allow Gardini's genuine love of both the language and the literature to shine through. Readers new to the field may well be entranced, while others who, like me, read and somewhat enjoyed Virgil, Ovid, or Tacitus in translation years ago, will appreciate the refresher course, and just might be inspired to take another look at the originals--in translation, of course.  

Still the question remains: how does Latin sound? Are there diphthongs? Silent letters? Is the "g" hard or soft? I occasionally have a pertinent quip at the tip of my tongue but hold back, not sure how to say it: manus lavum manum; omni ignatus magnificat est; veni, vidi, vici; delendo est Carthago...    

 

The Last Bookseller

 

Book dealer and sometime author Gary Goodman, who bought a dismal used bookstore in East St. Paul, though he knew nothing at the time about selling books, tells a good tale, not only about his own rise from those very humble beginnings to co-ownership in a prestigious used bookstore in Stillwater, but also about a wide range of dealers, enthusiasts, eccentrics, hoarders, and thieves who enliven the market, some of whom he encountered during his long and checkered career in "the trade." The writing is crisp and the tone is jaunty, though the humor tends to be mordant. Very few books, rare or otherwise, are actually mentioned, much less described in detail. (You can find that type of story in Used and Rare or Slightly Chipped: footnotes in booklore, by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, for example). Goodman is more interested in describing the atmosphere and some of the details of the trade and chronicling its slow and seemingly irreversible decline in the face of internet listings, which make it possible to scour the entire continent for a particular title almost instantaneously without leaving the room.

That's a very good way to find a book, and I've made use of Abe.com and other similar sites many times, but it delivers none of the surprises that browsing a used bookstore can offer, nor the conversation with unusual personalities that are often engaged in the business.

An added benefit of Gary's book for local book enthusiasts of a certain age is that they've probably been to many of the stores he mentions. I remember Harold's on West Seventh in St. Paul, where I bought a signed copy of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop for $8. I knew Jim and Mary Laurie well and visited Laurie Books in its various incarnations in Stillwater, on  Snelling Avenue near Macalester College (where I bought a two-volume edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristics for $20) and on Nicollet Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. I have never been to their store in the North Loop, strange to say. But perhaps not so strange. Their stock is top-notch but their prices are high; I believe Jim spends a lot of time sending out catalogs to real collectors.

My store of choice, however, before it closed, was Biermeier's B & H books on the outskirts of Dinkytown, right down the street from Positively 4th Street. That's because I lived near there for several years, and also because it was easy to find a parking space out front, which is important if you're hauling in a few boxes of books to sell. I never knew Biermeier's first name. In fact, I didn't know if the slight man sitting grimly behind the desk was Biermeier.  But he had a high-quality fiction section heavy with twentieth century European classics. To this day, I'm still wondering why I didn't buy that hardcover Knopf edition of Jean Giono's Harvest with the stunning woodcuts for $7 when I had the chance. (Note: I do have the North Point Press paperback reprint with the same woodcuts, so I ought to give it a rest.)

Goodman refers to Biermeier in passing, and even gives him a first name. I was trying to find the reference just now, but couldn't. (Surprising that a book put out by the University of Minnesota Press doesn't have an index!)

photo: Mike Hazard

I used to see and chat with Melvin McCosh at the Salvation Army in the Minneapolis warehouse district, which is still there. He once invited me to one of his famous (or infamous?) gourmet dinners. I didn't go. But Hilary and I went out to his "mansion" on Lake Minnetonka many times to attend his seasonal book sales. Goodman gets the hand-written slogan of the advertising flyer right. "You need these books more than I do." Lots of stale, dusty books, many of them sitting in piles against the wall, but more than a few winners here and there among the dross. If you can spot them.

One of the few glaring errors in Goodman's book is his description of McCosh's "mansion," which he makes out to be the disused estate of a mining or a timber baron. In fact, it was an old-fashioned, multi-story brick sanatorium with rows of narrow hospital rooms lining the halls, upstairs and down.

Larry McMurtry

Goodman's book-hunting tours took him far beyond the Twin Cities, of course. The Welsh book town of Hay-on-the Wye figures prominently, and Larry McMurty's "book town" in Archer, Texas, also gets extended treatment, as does McMurtry himself. (I might mention here that Although McMurty is undoubtedly the better book scout, Goodman's book is a better read than Books: a Memoir—McMurty's unduly gossipy take on the same subject.) And there's an appendix consisting of Goodman's selected diary entries while on a book-buying tour that doesn't mention a single title but will give you an idea of the sums involved. One woman on the Upper West Side offers Goodman her entire collection for $20,000. He refuses. She drops the price to $2,000. No thanks. Finally she admits that she and her husband will be evicted at the end of the month, and he can have the collection for free. Still not interested. Goodman feels sorry for the woman, but the shipping to Minnesota would be exorbitant)

What Goodman conjures and sustains in these pages, more than anything else, is that sense of anticipation and excitement generated by the prospect of a mass of unexplored books. For the book trader, it's the thought of good deals, followed by heavy mark-ups, but also the joy of recirculating remarkable books that might easily have ended up in a dumpster somewhere. For those of us who actually read books, it's the thrill of finding that book you've never even heard of that "fills a much needed gap"; almost the book you might have written yourself, it you'd had the gumption.

In recent times I have restricted my book explorations to the book carts in the lobbies of public libraries. Our house is full of books we've read, and also quite a few we'll never read. But there is a third category of books that we might ready someday, and there's no way to tell which is which. For years, when I spotted my rare hard-cover edition of the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda's macaronic masterpiece That Awful Mess on Via Merulina on the shelf in the living room, I said to myself, "I'll NEVER read that." But one dark day this past February, spontaneously and without premeditation (which means the same thing, I guess) I saw it, took it down, and, in the course of a few days, I read it.

I liked it.    

Goodman knows he isn't really the last bookseller. Several new shops have opened in recent years, including Eat My Words in Northeast Minneapolis and Against the Grain near the Macalester campus in St. Paul. Another trend, not mentioned by Goodman, is the hybrid store that carries a robust selection of books, both new and used, intermixed. Magers & Quinn and Moon Place Books both seem to be doing well with this approach.