2025 Readings 69

 As we've discussed, as part of this year of reading I'm picking up all sorts of books that I wouldn't normally read. I say this a lot, but what do I mean when I say books that I normally read? First, I guess, would be the eternal rereads: any number of Dickens's novels, but especially Bleak House or David Copperfield or Great Expectations; Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (yes, I know, I've read it four times, which is worthy of abuse I receive for it) and books about ROTP; Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (and I've started giving presentation on it, FFK) or books about Pessoa; books on Islam specifically or faith in general; novels by Murakami, especially The Windup-Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore or Norwegian Wood, etc. I guess I should include the Iliad and the Aeneid and the Ramayana and the Shahnameh and Journey to the West, or books about the Iliad or the Aeneid or the Ramayana or the Shahnameh or Journey to the West, although that's also related to my massive writing project, so they seem more, at least at this particular moment, completely necessary. Seriously, do you really need to read Bleak House or Swann's Way or The Book of Disquiet for a fifth time? Obviously, that's a trick question, because the answer is obviously yes. Duh.

Anyway, this year, beyond merely chronicling what I'm reading, I'm also throwing a broader net. Sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don't. Last night I finished a book that falls into the latter category: Kim Ho-Yeon's The Second Chance Convenience Store. I think I read a good employee review of it at Northshire or maybe I just thought I'd read a popular South Korean novel (or maybe I was trying to balance out the Squid Game). It's pleasant enough, and you might like it if you specialize in "pleasant enough" readings, but there's not a lot going on here. The ending is clumsy enough to fall into the egregious category with Chris Pavone's Two Nights in Lisbon, although the crime is more silliness as compared to breaking the agreement with the reader.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend it, although I wouldn't stop speaking to you if you read it.

Lisbon Pride Parade

 One of the unexpected joys of my recent trip to Portugal was being in town during the Pride Parade. I'm stumbled across it, which is a surprising thing to say about a massive parade. Nevertheless, I wasn't planning on going downtown - my legs were very unhappy with me after a long day of walking - but it was a beautiful evening and I hadn't made it into the city center yet. I ended up hanging out on the side of the road waiting for the parade to pass by, and it had already been going for a while when I got there. I leaned against a building and wept. It was impossible to not think about what was happening at that moment back in the US, and members of the LGBTQ+ community were suffering because of the actions of Trump and the radical right. For not the first time, I was deeply ashamed of my country.

This was one little glimpse of a massive parade that snaked throughout downtown.

The vibe was extraordinary, so positive and loving and accepting. I say this way too often, but I love Portugal so much. They are such welcoming folks.

Barn Dance

 This just popped up in my email this morning. As I've told many people, it's quite wonderful to live in one of the unabashedly liberal corners of our increasingly christo-fascist county.

I love our loopy little corner of the world.

Sodom Pond

 Yeah, I know, Sodom Pond, but that's what it's called. It's the lovely pond across the street from the Adamant Co-op. Adamant used to be called Sodom for a while, which was a commentary on the rough nature of the crew that lived there during a brief granite boom in the town. Close to it is a place which is still sometimes called Gospel Hollow, which I guess tells you all you need to know about the battle for the soul of Vermont.

I get tired of making the drive in from Montpelier to Calais, so I increasingly take the more circuitous backroads up the hill. Truthfully, there's not a drive that isn't beautiful.

2025 Readings 68

 "To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same."

Yesterday I started, and today I finished, Anne Michaels's Held, which probably gives you a pretty good idea of how much I loved the novel. Oddly, I had never read any of her work before, but I'll definitely be reading more of it. Her writing is beautiful, and she doesn't go out of her way to make things easy for the reader, which I almost universally admire. Each chapter jumps forward and backward in time, and she's clever in how she shows, subtly, the relationship between the different characters. It's definitely not a book that you'd have success with if you set it aside and picked up after a while; rather, you need to be more inside the story or you'd missed the not always obvious connections between the different characters. I don't think it worked brilliantly and consistently throughout the novel (especially an appearance late in the novel of someone who just doesn't seem to fit at all, but maybe at my next reading I'll understand the logic more clearly). 

"To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognize the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other - the apartment block, the school, the nursing home - citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in the hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child's body, will be read as war has always been read: stranger to stranger, parent to child, lover to lover. And, even if it is possible to return to one's city, even if one has never left, it will be a history told as it has always been told: far from home.

What was Alan's task? To write what no one could bear to read. What was anyone's task? To endure the truth. To act upon it. But even empathy, compassion, was to feel and think in terms of separation. And Alan could only feel and think now in terms of entirety, or humanity as a single organism, a single entity of cause and consequence, the human union of breathing and being we are born to. A man's brain spraying across your face. A baby in the womb. a bullet hole in its forehead. Exsanguination. Decapitation. The physics of ballistics in human bone and tissue. Soldiers praying for a successful massacre."

Living in an age where Trump callously supports Putin's slaughter of Ukrainians and Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a shield for his own crimes, these words seems almost painfully prescient.

Old West Church

 Lately I've been trying to go out for walks on the days that I don't actually make it into the gym. There are days when my legs are simply a lot worse than others, and I've had a slew of terrible days later. As I told my neurologist recently, there are days when I simply feel like I'm losing the ability to walk (which I think I mentioned in an earlier post, sorry for repeating). Still, you have to fight on, and so I'm forcing myself out to walk, although it's awfully painful. Yesterday I walked around the grounds of the Old West Church, which I'm sure had something to do with reading Weston Cate's Forever Calais. From the very beginning it was designed to be ecumenical. 

In 1828 the first apportionment was made with usage of the meetinghouse on Sundays divided as follows: Baptists 10 Sabbaths; Universalists 20; Congregationalists 9; Christians 6; Free Will Baptists 4; and Methodists 3. Twenty years later the division was Universalists 32; Congregationalists 7; Methodists 5; Baptists 4; and Christians 4. (Cate, 77)

I suppose, if I'm honest with myself, one of the reasons why I'm interested in this local history is that our time here is coming to an end. If all goes according to plan, a year from now we'll be in Sicily, on the first leg of the great move. 

Inexplicably, I've never actually been in the building, which isn't open that often. There's always a Christmas Eve service, which we always say we're going to attend, but never do. I think this year I'm going to insist.

I'd always heard that the back of the structure is painted red, but I finally got around to finding out that it's true. Apparently, at least according to legend, red paint was cheaper than white paint, so, to save money, the back was painted red; and now it's just tradition. This shot was taken from the cemetery at the back of the property.

2025 Readings 67

 This morning I finished Weston Cate's Forever Calais: A History of Calais, Vermont. Janet gave me a copy of this book when I moved in with her three years ago, and to my shame it took me this long to get around to reading it. I'm sure it benefitted from my decision this year to read a variety of books that I usually wouldn't, which is not to say it's not a good book, but, instead, it's more a commentary on me getting into a rut. It's interesting/odd to think that it wasn't that long ago that Calais had a much bigger population, at exactly the time when it would have been much harder to live out here in the wilderness. There are some much larger socio-economic factors that you can't fight, although the good folks of Calais do a pretty good job trying to not only keep the town going but make things better. One of my favorite section was the final chapter where Cate focused on a few of the really interesting personalities who came from Calais. I especially liked the story of Sleeping Lucy Cooke.

Lucy Ainsworth, better known throughout most of her lifetime as "Sleeping Lucy," was born in Calais May 4, 1819. She was one of nine children, and it is therefore not surprising that the family was poor. When the older children were forced to go to work to help support the family, Lucy learned to braid straw and make bonnets. She later became a tailor's apprentice for a time, but her work led to a sickness, which confined her to bed for two years.

Doctors agreed that there was no hope for her recovery. The family, however, sent for a brother living in New York state who seemed to have mastered Mesmerism sleep. The brother came home and help Lucy to fall into Mesmerismic sleep. Shortly thereafter it is said that Lucy spoke clearly saying she would get well if someone would put together a collection of special herbs and give them to her. This the family did, and Lucy gradually returned to good health.

Lucy first appeared to have powers that allowed her to help people find missing objects. Her reputation spread throughout the countryside. While she was not always successful, she was right often enough to maintain her reputation.

In 1846 Lucy married Charles R. Cooke, a native of Morristown. It appears that Coke was a Mesmerist though little is known about him. With the help of her husband Lucy became a professional clairvoyant physician. Her psychic powers seemed to grow. The couple moved to Reading, Vermont, where Charles died in 1855. Shortly thereafter she moved to Montpelier where she lived for 16 years. She had retained Everett William Raddin as a secretary following Cooke's death.

She probably practiced self-mesmerism after her husband died, for she was only able to find missing articles or prescribe medicines when she was in a mesmeric state. Further, when she awoke, she had no memory of what she had said during the trance. Her medical practice included the ability to set broken bones mesmerically and help those with dislocated limbs. She also did a considerable mail order business in herbal medicines.

In 1876 Lucy and Raddin moved to Boston. Her later years were not always pleasant. She was estranged from her only daughter, and family members felt that Raddin had taken advantage of her financially and otherwise. She died in 1896 and was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from her early beginnings in Calais.

The story sounded familiar, although I'm not certain where I would have heard it before. It led to a shallow rabbit hole (I'm too busy writing to give too much time to anything at the moment). Apparently Lucy was involved in a couple famous events when she helped locate missing bodies, and she later married Raddin, although she was decades older than him (hence the note above on why her family felt he had "taken advantage of her financially and otherwise.") 

I'd definitely recommend Forever Calais, and not simply if you live here in the wilderness, but also for folks interested in Vermont or more generally a glimpse into life in a very different time.

Sleeping Lucy Cooke

Jeff the Mothman

 I'm posting this mainly because of my childish glee at seeing Mothman the name of the email sender. Yes, I'm that immature. I sent away for a few Mothman swag items lately and I was checking on the status (one of them was a onesie, and I didn't want the kid to be too big before the swag arrived). Until that moment, I didn't know that the Mothman's name is Jeff.

Actually, Jeff is a great guy, replied promptly, and immediately helped me out. Obviously, you should visit the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, WV, and in the meantime order Mothman swag online. I really should teach a class on the Mothman; by its very nature, it's interdisciplinary.

Anniversary

 I can't believe that it's already our third anniversary. Janet is out in Iowa at a writing festival (which she's loving), so I'm bumming around here without my wifey - although I'm so happy that she's out there with her fellow writers, working on her craft. A dozen times since she made the initial reservation she talked herself into backing out, and I talked her into staying in. This morning I sent her a long thread of pictures, starting with one I snapped on our first date and ending with this one from our wedding day.

I'm very, very blessed.

2025 Readings 66

 I just blew through Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection in two days. Granted, it's a short novel, but mainly this is a testament to what a great novel it is. I picked it up several weeks ago at Northshire, another one of the books I  grabbed from their New York Review Books display. So, it was already in the queue, but then I read a BBC article singing its praises as books to read this summer, so it jumped the queue. It tells the story of Anna and Tom, an expat couple living in Berlin and the life that they think they're living. Essentially, they're the couple that Janet and I do not want to be when we head overseas. Yesterday I shared this section with several of my friends.

They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.

Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. An astronaut singing in outer space. A girl riding a wrecking ball. They would light up their pillows as they roused from sleep, and parade, one after the other, beneath their fingertips while they used the bathroom. They would be there in the kitchen on the tablet as Anna and Tom waited for their coffee to brew, then reappear seamlessly on their monitors in the home office. A jealous husband's threats graffitied across the front of a house. Goats teetering on a cliffside or at the edge of a highway overpass. Whenever they went out for lunch, the images would shrink to the size of the rectangular screen, and hover, midair, a foot above their plates. A tornado of sharks in the sky. While they waited for the U8 or the M29. While they took a piss. A famous woman spraying an arc of champagne backwards over her head into a wineglass balanced on her tailbone. Those images lit up their faces in the dark bedroom when they went to set the alarm. The faces of strangers. The faces of handsome criminals. Avocado slices.

Granted, millions of people live that "double life" here, without ever bothering to move overseas, but for some reason it seems so much worse if you've made the break with your home country and you're throwing away your time in your new dream. If you're living that double life in Kansas I guess that's just a form of self-medication, but if you're doing it in Italy or Portugal it seems almost criminal.

Latronico's Perfection is very highly recommended.

Republica dos Fantasmas

 Here are a couple pictures that I snapped in Coimbra of the Republica dos Fantasmas, which was part of a series of Republicas that are associated with the University. Truthfully, I don't know if I completely understand the concept yet, but I'm going to research it. From their website: "The Store - Royal Association of Ghosts Republic"

"History of the Store. Rooted in the experiential culture of the University of Coimbra, and consequently in the history of the city of Coimbra itself, the Republica dos Fantasmas (Republic of Ghosts) is a group of academic residences designed to house the student community, institutionally linked to the University of Coimbra. Founded in 1969, it has been located in its current building since 1971, with recognition granted by the Rector4ate of the University of Coimbra on February 17, 1982."

"Products and Services. True replacement communities, alternative homes for those left behind in their homeland, the Republicas go beyond other student houses or university residences, representing the traditional form of academic life in Coimbra, with all that this entails from bohemianism to ideological issues."

2025 Readings 65

 This morning I finished Miranda July's All Fours. I came to it in a strange way, in that I read an article in the BBC which discussed how the novel was single-handedly tearing book clubs down the middle. I talked to Janet about it, but she didn't seem impressed, but then she picked up a copy at a local bookstore and thought it sounded interesting. So, as part of my year of reading things that I normally don't read, I took a gamble. I don't know if I loved it, but I think I liked it quite a bit, and lord knows I finished it in just a few days. I didn't know that she was 1) born in Barre, right down the road, and 2) that it's, as hard to believe as it might seem, is at least partially autobiographical. If nothing else I give her a ton of credit for courage, and I'm definitely going to check out her other books and films. Some of it, at least to me, clearly didn't work, and only made sense if it was designed to be purely metaphorical tools (the idiotic young dancer and the decorated room in the rundown hotel, both of which, I guess, are also unbelievable enough to be completely believable). 

Monday Morning Philosophy

 It's amazing how much of my YouTube stream has been taken up by Nicole Wallace and Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller and George Conway and the Bulwark and the Lincoln Project, etc. I guess, on one level, I get it, because I'm clearly not someone who is in favor of the current authoritarian regime. That said, it doesn't mean that I like this crew, and, seriously, they can fuck off. The reality is that they're all Republicans, all children of Reagan, and some of them directly played a role in the nightmare that George W. Bush unleashed on the world. I can't help but think that their rage is directed less at Trump's authoritarian regime, but rather that they're no longer the inside players shaping the autocracy. If Trump and MAGA disappeared tomorrow, they would happily skip back to an only slightly less abhorrent and slightly less racist and slightly less Islamophobic and slightly less misogynistic GOP, but one that provided the requisite tax break. The fact that they're given such a central role in the anti-Trump world is a testament to the right wing dominance of American media and the total failure of the Democrats to provide a different path forward.

2025 Readings 64

 Last night I finished Sarah Kendzior's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. This is the third book of hers that I've read in the last couple months and I still have one left. I'll probably wait a bit, mainly because it angries up my blood. If you don't know about Kendzior you need to find her work, both in print and also online. She's been right about so many things over the last decade, including being one of the few people who predicted that Trump would win in 2016. You can tell she takes no great pleasure about always being right about Trump and his class of kleptocrats, and would prefer an America closer to what America was supposed to be. Besides bringing the good with extensive research, she's also a very good writer. Here's the beginning of her thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction:

The story of Donald Trump's rise to power is the story of a buried American history - buried because powerful people liked it that way. It was visible without being seen, influential without being named, ubiquitous without being overt.

The Trump administration is like a reality show featuring villains from every major political scandal of the past forty years - Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial collapse - in recurring roles and revivals, despite the widespread desire of the public for the show to be canceled. From Roger Stone to Paul Manafort to William Barr, it is a Celebrity Apprentice of federal felons and disgraced operatives dragged out of the shadows and thrust back into the spotlight - with Donald Trump, yet again, at the helm. 

The crises of political corruption, organized crime, and endemic racism are all connected, and they shape everyday American life. But in addition to these structural problems, we contend with specific powerful individuals who have acted against the public good for their entire careers. We see the same old men, again and again, vampires feeding on a nation and draining the lifeblood from words like "treason" and "trauma" and "tragedy." They are buffered by backers who prefer to operate in silence, free from the consequences of scrutiny. There is a reason they call it a criminal underground: you walk over it every day, unaware it exists until the earth shakes below your feet.

In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity. As climate change brings unparalleled crises, the future becomes a rare asset, meant to be hoarded like diamonds or gold. To millionaire elites, main of whom already had an apocalyptic bent, a depopulated world is not a tragedy but an opportunity - and certainly easier to manage as they insulate themselves from the ravages of a literally scorched earth. The last four decades have led to the hoarding of resources on a heretofore unimaginable scale by people who have neither baseline respect for human life nor a traditional sense of the future. Their destructive actions have programmed a desperate generation to settle for scraps instead of settling the score.

Unless we were part of the opportunity-hoarding elite - the Ivankas and Jareds of the world - my generation did not get to have choices. Instead we had reactions. We fought to hold on to what we had before it was stolen, while thieves demanded out gratitude and supplication. The opportunity-hoarding elite told us we were imaging the permanence of our plight and sold us survival as an aspiration.

This book tells the story of how they cornered the market.

And the book is extraordinary, and damning and frustrating, but also incredibly necessary. One of the things that jumped out at me was gaining a clearer picture of Jared Kushner. I knew he was an idiot and a child of privilege (terrible grades and SAT scores, but, of course, got into Harvard), but I didn't know how corrupt he was/is; I mean, I knew he was corrupt, but he's off the charts corrupt. unbelievably corrupt. One of the strengths of Kendzior's work is that it shows us the holistic, generational nature of the corruption - it's not just Trump, who will eventually pass away, but the system will continue to fester. Obviously, Hiding in Plain Sight is highly recommended.

Unique Skill Set

 The other day, after finishing a workout at the Planet Fitness at the Berlin Mall, Janet walked into the nearby store to buy a couple shakes while I grabbed a table (mainly, I think she was giving me a chance to rest my weary legs). She returned with not one, but two, biographies of Charles Dickens. I don't know how she does these things.

It is a unique skill set. Still, I'm not complaining, I ended up with a mocha frappe and two books on Dickens. Now, how she's going to get cull out these books before we move overseas is anybody's guess.

Skeletal Remains

 On the last day of the latest Canada adventure, as we finally made it back towards the border on a blistering day, we stopped at the last Tim Horton's (at least the one that you'd bump into if you took 15 South as you headed for my favorite place to cross the border). Anyway, we were standing in line when a guy pulled it in a beautiful vintage car, which had a skeleton sitting in the passenger's seat. Of course, I immediately began chatting the guy up - and, of course, Kevin wondered why he ever travelled with me. The guy, yet another very nice Canadian, took me outside to show me the car and how he had set up the skeleton. It was pretty amazing. I asked him if he ever took his wife out for a ride; he said he did, although she had to ride in the backseat.

And what topped it off, the guy had adapted the skeleton so that its head swiveled. If you pulled up next to him at a stoplight he would get the head to turn to look at the people in the other car. I love Canada.

Night Stalker

 Somehow neither Janet nor her friend Erin had ever seen Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It's like they were raised in a nunnery or something.

Luckily, and obviously, I have the entire series on DVD.

Gabinete das Curiosidades

 I mentioned previously how visiting the famous library at the University of Coimbra was a bit of a letdown (five hour + wait, only twenty minutes total in the entire museum, ten minutes in the historic library itself, no pictures; if I could have had fifteen minutes in the actual library to take pictures I'd have a very different opinion on the experience). That said, the ticket did allow you to stroll around several different cool places at the University, including the Gabinete das Curiosidades (the Cabinet of Curiosities), which is a collection of truly odd artifacts that University of Coimbra professors had brought back from around the world. It helped that it was an appropriately dark and creepy room. If I lived in Coimbra (and Coimbra would make our shortlist) I'd drop into the Gabinete several times a year.

Highly recommended.

 

I loved this guy, and he sort of reminds me of the Banff Merman.

This is the first picture that I sent to my friends Mike and Cyndi, which inspired MK to respond that he wasn't really expecting my first picture of the day to be of a Siamese calf (it's like he doesn't even know me).

I needed to have brought my friend Steve on the trip to the Gabinete das Curiosidades. As a folklorist, he would have seriously nerded out.

I remember years ago visiting a display on Pre-Columbian civilizations in Memphis, and my friend Dave opined that the room with the mummies was where all nightmares were born - I may have an alternate theory.

Hopefully they dispatched this monster before he gobbled down too many members of the expedition.

OK, some are just naughty, and speak to the generally perverse nature of college professors.

Fascismo Nunca Mais

 Here's a picture I snapped in Coimbra on the Portugal trip last month. It seemed particularly meaningful as my own country is sliding into an authoritarian regime (which apparently makes around a hundred million people really happy). All of this is convincing me that my idea to teach a class on Fascism next spring is a great idea.

One of the few things that gives me hope in these dark days is that Portugal went through it's own authoritarian days, and somehow came out the other end as a healthy state.

Monday Morning Philosophy

 This is apropos of absolutely nothing, but it was a strange thought I had this morning. When you're in that intensely physical stage of an early relationship (what Janet and I jokingly/lovingly refer to as the "cheesecake & sex" stage), the first day that you actually don't have sex is either the true beginning of your relationship or the beginning of the end of your temporary relationship. I think this is an observation that will launch a thousand Rom-Coms.

2025 Readings 63

Every "scholarly" piece I've ever written:

"It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems."

Every conference presentation I've ever given:

"Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish."

This morning I finished rereading Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim for the first time in over thirty years. I remember reading it for the first time in my first year of graduate school and thinking it was the funniest thing I had ever read, and then reading it again as I was finishing my dissertation and still liking it, but thinking that it was not as funny as I remembered. And here we are three and a half decades later, and I thought it was funnier than on the first reread, but that I think, overall, I liked it better than on my two previous readings (such is our changing perception). It is one of the great "campus novels," so it helps if you're in graduate school or on the uphill side of the lectern. 

Shadows

 Over the years I've stumbled across some odd art exhibits (I always default to permanent catacombs above Budapest), and I did it again on last month's trip to Portugal. One my last full day in Coimbra I checked out a couple monasteries on the other side of the river, both of which I'll get around to discussing down the road. The second one I visited, which is the "new" monastery, was the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova. The Portuguese are not strong on signage under the best of circumstances, and so, typically, I wandered into the wrong door when I visited the new monastery. The door was shielded with some black cloth, which left the inside very dark, which seemed like a very unusual - or maybe not so unusual - monastery. As it turns out it was an extra space which was occasionally given over to exhibits, and in this case it was a series of artists which dealt with shadows. Once I figured out what the hell was going on, I decided to stay and enjoyed myself quite a bit. 

This particular one was very disturbing and oddly beautiful. At the end of the hallway a screen was set up, and on a loop there a video of a housing burning down. That was the entire performance.

I sat and watched this one for quite a bit. On the mismatched screens there were two hands flapping, and hanging down was a lightbulb that swung back and forth.  I felt the artist was channeling David Lynch.

More Mountains

 Like I said, eventually when I have more time - or when I've written enough that I can suppress my self-loathing sufficiently - I'll get into the recent trips more fully. In the meantime, we'll have to settle for dribs and drabs. Here's another picture of the Canadian Rockies up around Banff.

And I haven't even begun to look at the pictures on my camera yet.

2025 Readings 62

                   There are twin Gates of Sleep.

One, they say, is called the Gate of Horn 

and it offers easy passage to all true shades.

The other glistens with ivory, radiant, flawless, 

but through it the dead send false dreams up toward the sky.

And here, Anchises, his vision told in full, escorts 

his son and Sibyl both and show them out now

through the Ivory Gate.

Virgil, Aeneid

I just finished another reread of Virgil's Aeneid, which is partially in service to the Epics book but also simply because it's a book I love. As I sit here (with my writing assistant, Mollie), surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of books, it pains me to think of how many I'm going to have to get rid of when we move overseas. There are some simple decisions, however, in constructing my "take" pile, and that would include Virgil. As is the case with all great literature, I glean more and more with each reread. While students, mainly in high school, still read Homer (usually the Odyssey - my theory is because it has more family-friendly monsters and sex - as compared to the clearly superior Iliad), it seems that no one reads the Aeneid anymore, which is a pity. The passage above is one of the great overlooked sections, and I have to admit that I didn't grasp it on my first read years ago. These lines are found at the end of Book Six, when Aeneas has gone to the underworld to track down his father and thus receive prophetic news about the pending greatness of Rome. It's a key section, and I certainly make great use of the vision of Roman ascendance in the Epics books. However, here at the very end, Virgil tells us that there are "twin Gates of Sleep," and one, the Gate of Horn, offers "easy passage to all true shades," while the other, which "glistens with ivory, radiant, flawless," the Gate of Ivory, allows the dead to "send false dreams up toward the sky." And then Aeneas and the Sybil depart through the Ivory Gate. It's easy to miss the line as your head is absolutely full of information and ghostly images from the trip to the underworld, and you're finishing the first half of the epic and gearing up for the endless wars and confrontation with Turnus that make up the second half. Virgil gets a lot of criticism, I would argue most of it unwarranted, for simply being a propagandist for Augustus (which is a grossly overly simplistic reading of the Aeneid), but isn't Virgil clearly telling us that the legend of Rome and its role in providing law and order for the world isn't that simple? It nicely sets up the famous final scene when Aeneas brutally kills Turnus, who has already surrendered. Yes, Aeneas saw a belt that Turnus had taken from Pallas after killing him, but it also speaks to the fact that Rome may provide many things, but there's a dark side to their rule. It's often pointed out that Virgil showed tremendous sympathy for the defeated in the Aeneid, which comes through very clearly with his portrayal of Dido, and I think the other side of that is not steering clear of commenting, even obliquely, on Roman brutality.

Praia de Mira

 I'm way too busy to give my recent trips to Portugal and Canada the attention they deserve, so I'm just popping in now and then so that I don't completely lose the thread. When I left Coimbra I took a circuitous route back to Lisbon, wanting to see a little bit of the coast. Along the way I stopped at Praia de Mira, which felt like any pretty but slightly seedy beach town anywhere (which made it all the better). I stopped at the Restaurante Mar Azul for lunch, which proved to be a very good choice.

This supercharged me for the drive back to Lisbon.

Vermont Mountaineers

 While my history of Lake Monsters games stretches back twenty-five years, I had never, until last night, been to a Vermont Mountaineers game. Their history doesn't stretch back as far, but I still should have made it before then. I think they were founded after we moved from Barre up to Burlington, so there's that lame excuse. However, I have been living in the cabin for three years now, so I should have made it earlier. This trip is mainly Janet's doing, as she's been in a baseball mood lately (Lake Monsters game, three Toronto Blue Jays games on MLB TV, and now a Mountaineers game).I had fun, and will definitely go back for more games in the future. The field isn't as nice as Centennial Field, where the Lake Monsters play, but that's mainly a reflection of the Monsters long minor league history, and the fact that Burlington is simply a much bigger city than Montpelier. The quality of baseball seems fairly equivalent, with both teams playing in parallel summer college leagues (the leadoff hitters for the Mountaineers plays for the University of Cincinnati, where I went to grad school). 

Like Centennial Field, the Montpelier Recreation Field has its own unique history, and you have to love the fact that it was constructed during FDR's New Deal by the Works Projects Administration (back before the GOP decided that government was evil [or maybe not, the Republicans hated the New Deal even back then] and thus the government did things to make the lives of people better.

The view from right behind home plate. I think we'll sit higher up next time. Still, not a bad view for $7 (all the tickets are $7). That's definitely a beautiful view.

The Governor's Cup, which the Mountaineers had won earlier in the season in a series against the Upper Valley Nighthawks (the other team in Vermont). To be fair, the Nighthawks pummeled the Mountaineers last night.

The mascot, Skip the Woodchuck - I have no idea why. 

And, of course, the best part of the game was this crazy girl.

2025 Readings 61

 Rose Macauley's They Went to Portugal is exactly what the title would imply, a collection of stories about people who went to Portugal, although the "They" is restricted to English/British visitors. Macauley moved to Portugal early during World War II, and quickly became fascinated by earlier English folks who had made a similar journey. I picked it up at the Livraria Bertrand de Chiado (as is well documented by now, the world's oldest bookstore) on my trip to Portugal last month. Generally, I guess, I picked it up because of my love of Portugal, but, specifically, I bought it because I was thinking of my visit to Henry Fielding's grave at the English Cemetery the year before. I was pleasantly surprised by chapters on Thomas Stuckley and James Fitzmaurice, two adventurers who pop up in my dissertation. Some of the most arresting narratives relate, nor surprisingly, to English visitors to Lisbon during the 1755 earthquake. It won't change your life, but it's interesting, and it's definitely one of the books that will eventually make its way to Europe with us.

Mr Noodles

 I know that sounds like a villain from Dick Tracy, but it was my lunch on two separate Porter Air flights. I had never flown on Porter Air before, but Kevin and I thought we'd try it for the flight to Edmonton. It was fine, although it was strange to be on a flight as long as Toronto to Edmonton without movies, but, happily, I had brought a novel to read, so I was sorted. It reminded me of international flight back in the day. We missed a connector in Toronto on the way back, but that was our fault for choosing a flight with a short connection (we thought the gates might be close to each other, but we had to get from one to the other via Yellowknife; I was pleased that my legs, although unhappy with me, did manage to carry me on a forced march from one end of the Toronto airport to the other). As with most budget airlines, we had to buy our own food.  I went for a Mr. Noodles, mainly for amusement's sake.

It reminded me of the cup of noodles that I paid for on Wow Air (now, I believe, sadly deceased) on my flight to Iceland with my son. I sent him this picture, and he immediately responded with the appropriate line from The Young Ones, as I knew he would.

Honestly Average

 On last month's trip to Portugal I wandered down to the busy city center, partly to catch the sites and partially to track down some paella. I stopped at one place and asked the young waiter, "How's your paella?" He paused, then replied, smiling, "Honestly, pretty average." That was a good enough answer to inspire me to sit down and order, if for no other reason than his honesty made me laugh. If nothing else, it's, as you might expect, more than a bit of a challenge to track down squid ink paella in Vermont.

Actually, I think he was downplaying the paella, because I think it was at least 5% or 10% percent above average (actually, it was fine). I tipped him as if it were better, which clearly made him happy.

Metaphor

 Another picture of G and Ali's road trip west, I'm assuming somewhere in West Virginia (it's certainly not Indiana).

One of the many advantages of having such an excellent daughter-in-law is I actually have someone to send me pictures of my son.

Cruel But Fair

 It's time for the preparation to begin for the 13th season of the Twin Peaks Fantasy Football League. In fantasy football you don't normally draft in the inverse order of last year's records (like the NFL does, another example of how socialism only applies to the rich), but instead each league comes up with some odd way of sorting it out. We've settled on Sylvie Maple, Andy and Heidi's daughter, pulling the names out of a hat. It wasn't that long ago that she was a baby who they had to keep focused on pulling out random slips of paper, but now she's old enough to play a roll in creating the artwork and taking pleasure in the misfortune of league members.

Sylvie Maple, the league's Assistant Commissioner, getting too much joy out of Mike Lange's team ending up with the 14th and last draft pick of round one. It's the wretched slot I had last year.

SM's artwork gets more elaborate every year. Hopefully, she will not ever outgrow this chore. I imagine her pulling the names out of a hat from her college dorm room.

Clearly my attempt at a pre-draft cryptid bribe didn't work, as I'm picking 12th.

2025 Readings 60

 This morning I finished Fine Grabol's What Kingdom, which I picked up Saturday at the Bear Pond bookstore in downtown Montpelier. Something about the cover seemed familiar, and I recognized the time of the translator, Martin Aitken, who had translated The Employees (which I finished a few days ago, and loved). Maybe it's a new collection of Danish fiction that I stumbled across, and, if so, this is a wonderful discovery. It reads very much like The Employees, that is, a series of very brief and disconnected paragraphs (and sometimes merely sentences), that is more than the sum of its parts. It's set in a sort of halfway house for folks dealing with various mental illnesses, which is both a commentary on the illnesses but also the mental health industry - and I would argue, also what constitutes community. Let me include an example, in this case the first isolated from the third and final section, "Secrets":

We go in and out of each other's rooms all the time, open a door and lie down on a sofa bed, watch TV or sit with a jigsaw puzzle; we water the plants and bake bread, lean against the walls is if to make a physical contact apparent; we open a packet of cigarettes with the same restless ease, we look at each other's bloated stomachs and wink secretively. We increase our medications, decrease our medications, discontinue our medications and start all over again; we take Oxapax and laugh at the psychiatrists; we try to die in different ways, while life and the section and the system keep us here; we seldom cry; we drink beer on the patio on Fridays; we hear the favorite music of the infirm old people on the ground floor. We say hello to Ahmed the cleaning assistant we try to understand our medication plans; we draw up schedules detailing our entire lives; a meal plan, a week plan, a breakdown of our challenging behavior; we write things down when we suffer anxiety attacks, what happens before and what happened after; we prepare budgets and tear them up in sheer fright when the job center phones; we're on the sick and incapacitated; we swap clothes and borrow each other's shoes; we plan our summer holidays in the section's caravan and never see if through; we open the fridge and close it again. We take up boxing and we start a band; we sew a cushion cover and attend a yoga session; we participate in group therapy, in cognitive therapy, in psychotherapy, in dialectic behavioral therapy; we go for a psychoeducation appointment and suffer an anxiety attack on the sidewalk outside; we have no other option but trust; we bury our hands in the soft folds of our face and will never be the same; we eat thin cookies at night in each other's rooms, smoke another cigarette, and our mouths become dry.

It's sort of the product of an intermarriage between Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Highly recommended.

Busters

 Here's a picture of my oldest friend Jack and his first grandson, Crosby. It's hard to believe that this is the hoser (fellow hoser) that I ran around with in high school. This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Here is a shot of a life well-lived.

On the Road

 G and Ali are heading west to visit his mother, which always makes me happy, both for him and for her. They've been sending me pictures from along the way, which, of course, makes me even happier. Here's a shot that they sent me from the wilds of West Virginia. They look very happy, which makes me the happiest.

Having said all that, they passed up on the opportunity to stop at the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, a very poor decision which shows that they are clearly still works in progress.

2025 Readings 59

 Yesterday I finished reading Genki Kawamura's novel If Cats Disappeared from the World. This was another short work that I normally wouldn't have read, although I've traditionally read a lot of Japanese fiction, obviously. Barnes and Noble had a separate table next to the literature section that was devoted to what they labeled international fiction, which was both a welcome and somewhat odd choice. I grabbed a few books, all of which turned out to be short. Again, one of the things that I'm doing in this year of reading is tackling books that normally wouldn't be in my wheelhouse, which has proven to be a nice addition. If Cats Disappeared from the World was a bestseller, although I had never read an7 Kawamura work before. The protagonist of the story finds out he's going to die, and almost immediately. The devil, who looks exactly like him but in a much peppier Hawaiian shirt, makes him an offer: he gets one more day on earth for every single thing that he agrees to have disappear from the earth. It starts with cell phones, for which I'm in complete agreement (with that in mind, and thus apropos of less than nothing, my new regime is that I turn on the phone in the morning for some news and sports scrolling, and then I turn it off until the end of the day). With every object he's allowed to use it one last time, and so, in that instance, he takes the opportunity to call the first woman he loved. The reviews hinted at a profundity as the story unfolded which I don't think is a true observation, but it definitely did give me pause to reflect on certain things. I liked it a lot, so it's a definite recommended read.

My Old Friend

 This guy is always sitting across the street from the Café Brasileiria and the Pastelaria Benard, and he's the one street performer who is a constant in that area of Lisbon. The performer, well, at least his upper half, is hidden in the box, allowing him to operate the puppetry. It's pretty beautifully done. Truthfully, he doesn't actually look that different than his puppet.

He doesn't like to take pictures of him unless someone leaves a tip, and who can blame him. I always leave him something, even if I've just been watching him from across the street at the Pastelaria Benard writing, so I feel empowered to post this picture. Come on, people, if you stop by to enjoy the show, leave the guy something!

2025 Readings 58

 Last night I finished Ian McGuire's The North Water, which I liked quite a bit. It was very grim, but also beautifully written. It's the story of an ill-fated whaling expedition into the Arctic, featuring, mainly, on Patrick Sumner, the ship's surgeon for the trip, who has a dark past, and Henry Drax, one of the whalers, who has a much darker present. The ending fell apart a little, but, as I am wont to opine, the number of novels with truly great ending you could probably count on two hands. Still, it probably had to end the way it ended, if you wanted to tie things together. I can't imagine the amount of research that McGuire must have done on whaling to provide such an accurate portrayal. Highly recommended.

Broken Eggs

 Here are a couple pictures that I snapped on last month's trip to Portugal. When I was in Coimbra there was a little café where I would hang out in the afternoon after my day's adventures. Normally I just nursed a liter of sangria while I read, but one day the timing was right for a meal.

I can heartily recommend the Broken Eggs w/ Alheira.

This is about the most classically Scudder picture you could imagine.

2025 Readings 57

 This morning I finished Olga Ravn's The Employees, which I had just picked up a couple days earlier. Partially, this is because it's a very short novel, but also it's a testament to how good it is. Janet and I are members of this local unofficial book club, and I've chosen The Employees for my first turn for heading up the discussion. Our first two novels were by Ursula Le Guin, so we're sort of stuck in this science fiction theme, but even considering that I'd happily have chose Ravn's novel. It oddly reads like Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, which is probably one reason why I was organically drawn to it. I told a couple of friends of mine that it was one part science fiction, one part commentary on corporate culture and productivity, and one part reflection on what it means to be human. It's a series of anonymous "reports" from humans and humanoids on this spaceship carrying strange objects. It's obvious that the spaceship is being shutdown, and everything starts to awry pretty dramatically, although you really need to fill it all in yourself. Here are three examples, in order, from late in the book:

STATEMENT 172

There are people outside in the corridor waiting their turn. We don't car eif you've got ulterior motives now, it no longer seems relevant. We want to confess, and you're going to be our confessional. We want to write our testament, and you're going to be our notaries. We want to say goodbye, and you're going to be our next of kin. It's all happened so quickly. I sleep all the time. I was there in the lab at January 01, one of the first ceremonies. I saw them hatch out of the pods. It filled me with wonder and joy, I applauded vigorously, and my coworkers around me did the same. I don't think they can be blamed for anything. They're trying to shape their own destinies, just as any human would. Everyone's fighting for their own survival, you can't old that against them. It's the way of nature. I'm wondering what you're feeling? How are you coping? Are you going to be all right? Do you know what's going to happen to the objects after we're gone?

STATEMENT 174

You can't say I absconded from the lab, because at that time we were allowed to go out on our own. I came out of one of the first pods, but certainly I may have gone further than I knew they were comfortable with. I couldn't stop myself. I'd reached an area I hadn't seen before, a woodland stretching out in one direction, gentle hills rolling beneath a brilliant white sky in the other. I was walking at such a pace that I was sweating. There wasn't a person or anything similar in sight for miles around, and as I climbed one of the hills and looked out over the woods, the ducks suddenly came flying in arrow formation from beyond the trees and passed above my head. They were quacking loudly as they flew, and I breathed in deeply. I stored that landscape inside me forever. The only thing I think about now is that day. The day I experienced something that wasn't part of the program. The day when everything was mine alone.

STATEMENT 175

it felt good to kill a human. I regret that it's caused such an uproar among the crew, and I'm sorry too for the dismayed looks on your faces, however much you're trying to hide them. I'm a pomegranate ripe with moist seeds, each seed a killing I'm going to carry out at some future time. When I have no more seeds inside me, when there's nothing left but flesh, I want to meet the man who made me. These are my conditions.

All of these reports are told to some vague bureaucracy, sort of like the HR that we've all grown to accept and hate. Highly recommended.

Canmore

 I snapped this picture at the Canmore Brewing Company, as we stopped on our way back from the Continental Divide. As you head west from Calgary, Canmore is the last decent-sized town on the way to Banff. I liked Banff a lot, and it's certainly in an extraordinary location, but it also felt awfully Outlet Mally, whereas Canmore felt more like a legitimate city (with many of the same advantages of Banff).

Not a bad place to spend an afternoon.

2025 Readings 56

 Last night I finished Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, which I had started the day before; obviously, it was an engaging/enraging read. Snyder is one of two Yale professors (along with Timothy Snyder) who write on fascism and tyranny who decided to transfer to the University of Toronto. When you have professors who specialize in authoritarianism leaving the country, you're clearly not in a good place. I think I mentioned earlier that I'm planning to teach a class on fascism next spring, although I don't suspect that the University of Toronto will take me in once I'm deported. I think anyone who is paying attention understands where we're heading, and it's not simply that I have a unique understanding as a historian (although it helps). Still, Stanley lays out out so clearly, and in such a structured fashion, it would be difficult to read this book and not understand this moment in time. Just looking through the chapter titles alone would allow any educated reader to fill in the blanks: 1) The Mythic Past, 2) Propaganda, 3) Anti-Intellectual, 4) Unreality, 5) Hierarchy, 6) Victimhood, 7) Law and Order, 8) Sexual Anxiety, 9) Sodom and Gomorrah, and 10) Arbeit Macht Frei ("work will make you free," from Auschwitz). The problem is, of course, the paucity of educated readers, or even readers. Hence, the importance of teaching a class on fascism, although I'll do my best to avoid overdoing the bully pulpit. My main goal is to give students the intellectual content to make sense of this age. As Snyder tells us in chapter 3:

Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one's own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.

As I discussed in the previous post, all you can do is do your best and fight on.

The Left Hand of Existence

 On Sunday, after our last meeting of our unofficial book club to read The Left Hand of Darkness, I took advantage of the fact that I was already on flat ground to go for a walk. Truthfully, there are days when I fear that I am losing the ability to walk. I just went through another battery of bloodwork, and it was, per usual, inconclusive. My neurologist, who is bright as hell and dedicated and hard-working, is clearly flummoxed (and if he can't figure it out I don't know who will). I'm discouraged, but I don't know what to do other than to grind on, doing the best I can. With that in mind, I've decided to try and walk as much as I can (in addition to my usual regimen of working out and swimming), even though it is exhausting and painful. I don't know if I think the extra walking will help, or I'm just enjoying the activity while it's still an option.

Curtis Pond is right above the Maple Corners store. During the flooding a couple summers back there was fear that the dam would give way and flood the area. Happily, they built the new dam before the next wave of generational/weekly weather anomalies. 

This dirt road, skirting the pond, is the first place where Janet and I went for a walk a few years ago, although it was winter and cold as hell. Janet is infinitely supportive, but I feel bad that we got together just as my health was collapsing. In some ways I feel that she got a raw deal, although she doesn't see that way.