Thoreau on cicadas

On a walk near my mother’s house in Burnt Hills, New York, I heard the unmistakable drilling, shrilling sound of a cicada — often, though inaccurately, called a locust. It was July 18, the same day in 1851 that Thoreau heard his first cicada of the year. Below are a few of Thoreau’s observations of cicadas, arranged by day of the year.

July 18, 1851
I first heard the locust sing, so dry and piercing, by the side of the pine woods in the heat of the day.

July 26, 1854
I hear borne on the wind from far, mingling with the sound of the wind, the z-ing of the locust, scarcely like a distinct sound.

August 18, 1841
I sit here in the barn this flowing afternoon weather, while the school bell is ringing in the village, and find that all the things immediate to be done are very trivial. I could postpone them to hear this locust sing.

August 26, 1860
The shrilling of the alder locust is the solder that welds these autumn days together. All bushes (arbusta) resound with their song, and you wade up to your ears in it. Methinks the burden of their song is the countless harvests of the year, — berries, grain, and other fruits.

September 2, 1856
Frank Harding has caught a dog-day locust which lit on the bottom of my boat, in which he was sitting, and z-ed there. When you hear him you have got to the end of the alphabet and may imagine the &. It has a mark somewhat like a small writing w on the top of its thorax.

Best advice on money

Andrew Tobias today featured a collection of financial advice from people including Jack Bogle, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, and Robert Shiller. Worth a look.

Here’s the best money advice these 40 people – ranging from mutual fund managers to Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams – ever got.  Some of the nuggets underwhelm, but I love this one, about avoiding debt, pretty much disagree with this one (“Don’t Save Too Much”), live by this one (minimize your transaction costs), said “ouch” to this one, and actually made it all the way through to this last one, the brilliance of which I can only barely begin to describe. 

A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker

The Nicholson Baker buzz these days is about Human Smoke, his pointillist, revisionist take on the origins of World War II. But the book I’ve just finished reading is his 2003 novel A Box of Matches, a book that hearkens back to such early works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature.

Each of these books relies for its substance on almost insanely detailed observation of everyday life. I enjoy them, but I question myself while I’m doing it. A Box of Matches, for instance, concerns the thoughts that go through a man’s mind each morning as he gets up very early, makes himself a cup of coffee in the dark, and starts a fire in his fireplace. The book comes to an end when he gets to the last wooden match in his box, after which the early-rising impulse seems to leave him.

The book creates a quiet atmosphere that is easy to sink into, and it is full of the pleasurable shocks of recognition that come from seeing something familiar described with a loving accuracy that you would never have expected. Nearly every page could furnish an example, but the one that stuck with me begins on page 140, when the narrator discusses the bar of soap that he uses in the shower.

It is filled with very dense heavy soap material: it’s harder and heavier than, say, Ivory soap. And it is a beautiful smooth oval shape, an egglike shape almost. But it’s as heavy as a paperweight, as hard as travertine when dry or newly wetted, and extremely slippery. More than once I have lost control of a bar of this soap. And yesterday when I dropped it I noticed that as soon as the soap squirted out of my fingers, my toes lifted, arching up from the tub as high as they could go, while the rest of my feet stayed where they were.

His toes, evidently, had learned on their own that if the soap happened to drop onto them, it would hurt less if they were arched than if were flat on the bottom of the tub.

All this is wonderful in its way (how did Baker know that travertine was just the right kind of stone to compare his soap to?) but after a while you ask yourself, “Is that all there is?” Updike can do this sort of thing too (it’s no accident that Baker created a book from his obsession with Updike), but it’s generally in the context of a real story with real characters and something real at stake. The main character of A Box of Matches, on the other hand, seems all but indistinguishable from Nicholson Baker himself, at least to those of us who don’t know him personally, and you wonder whether his book, beautifully written though it is, might not have come pretty directly from the author’s journals. Is it even a novel at all?

Dove & Hudson Old Books

Once or twice a year, usually with my mother in the course of a family visit, I spend an hour or so in the Dove & Hudson bookstore in Albany. (Photo is courtesy of Maud Newton, who blogged about the store some time ago.) Mnemonically named for the corner where it’s located, the Dove & Hudson is probably the best of all the many used-book stores I’ve visited in a long career as a bookbuyer.

It’s not as big as Boston’s late lamented Avenue Victor Hugo, or as physically beautiful as Housing Works in Soho, but it has the best combination of excellent selection and reasonable price that I’ve seen anywhere. Rather than go through the titles one by one, it almost seems I should move entire shelves from the Dove & Hudson into my living room. A key part of the experience is the presence of the owner, Dan Wedge, in his broad-brimmed hat, reading behind the counter or puttering around the shelves, never hurried or flustered, making friendly but not intrusive conversation in his resonant voice, and dispensing purple money for future discounts with the change. How can you not like someone who’s read the Aubrey-Maturin novels more times than I have?

Like sheep to the slaughter

Now that military credentials have become a political football in the current presidential race, it’s worth remembering that having led soldiers in battle can be a mixed blessing in a campaign. This is from pp. 379-380 of Teddy Roosevelt’s Autobiography:

The men of the regiment always enthusiastically helped me when I was running for office. On one occasion Buck Taylor, of Texas, accompanied me on a trip and made a speech for me. The crowd took to his speech from the beginning and so did I, until the peroration, which ran as follows: “My fellow-citizens, vote for my Colonel! vote for my Colonel! and he will lead you, as he led us, like sheep to the slaughter!” This hardly seemed a tribute to my military skill; but it delighted the crowd, and as far as I could tell did me nothing but good.

At a regimental reunion, Roosevelt goes on, one of his ex-soldiers admitted that he had recently had “a difficulty with a gentleman” and killed him. He was pleased that the judge had let him out in time to meet his old colonel.

“How did it happen? How did you do it?” asked Roosevelt.

Misinterpreting my question as showing an interest only in the technique of the performance, the ex-puncher replied: “With a .38 on a .45 frame, Colonel.” I chuckled over the answer, and it became proverbial with my family and some of my friends, including Seth Bullock. When I was shot at Milwaukee, Seth Bullock wired an inquiry to which I responded that it was all right, that the weapon was merely “a .38 on a .45 frame.” The telegram in some way became public and puzzled outsiders.