Books and Baskets

While I was upstate, I visited Books and Baskets in Saranac Lake, a store that combines well-chosen used books with handmade baskets, including the distinctively potbellied Adirondack packbasket. The place is just as warm and inviting as the photo on its home page shows. It’s a challenge to make a living in the Adirondacks at all, and I admire anyone who can do it selling books. (The trick, here as elsewhere, is to have some other revenue streams.)

I was especially happy to find Herman Melville’s Redburn in its fifty-year-old Anchor paperback edition, with cover illustration and typography by Edward Gorey. I had that edition once and somehow lost it. The first person I ever heard praise the book was Maurice Sendak, who was taken by its scenes in 19th century Manhattan. In The Thoreau You Don’t Know, Robert Sullivan mentioned that Redburn describes “the horror of a famine ship in transit,” making it—along with Thoreau’s Cape Cod -- one of the few works of American literature to mention the devastating famine that drove so many of the Irish to America.

Mentioned by The Mumpsimus

In a post reviewing the latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation, Matthew Cheney of The Mumpsimus focuses on ... my review of Gods and Soldiers! Here’s an excerpt:

The piece that has, for the moment, most caught my attention is a review by Geoff Wisner of Rob Spillman’s anthology Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing.... I found myself mumbling, “Yes, yes, yes...” as I read his review. For instance, he notes one of my first hesitations, the oddity of including Chinua Achebe’s classic essay “The African Writer and the English Language” and not an essay by, for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong’o in response—there has been, for decades, a passionate debate among all sorts of different post-colonial writers about English, native languages, etc., and to offer only one perspective on it, even one as nuanced as Achebe’s, does not admit the debate and thus distorts the context.

Literary baseball

Words Without Borders has made me the pitcher for its (imaginary) softball team. I’m honored, though no one who saw me play for the Skaneateles Little League would have let me on the team, much less as pitcher.

Team members talk about what they’re reading, or plan to read, this summer. I recommended the 1983 book An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie. (At last night’s Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Mingle, I met Sara Kramer from New York Review Books, the publisher of An African in Greenland, and learned that Kpomassie is alive and well.)

Enough. by John C. Bogle

The latest book by the indomitable Jack Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, takes its inspiration from a poem by Kurt Vonnegut in which he recounted a conversation with his friend Joseph Heller. Both men were guests at a lavish party thrown by a hedge fund manager, whom Vonnegut said made more money in one day than Heller’s Catch-22 (a bestseller) had made since it was published.

“Yes,” said Heller, “but I have something he will never have ... enough.”

Bogle’s book Enough. (the period is part of the title) doesn’t say a great deal more than Bogle’s earlier books and speeches—but given the ongoing financial crisis, it seems more timely than ever. Bogle reiterates his message that the financial industry adds no value to the economy, and that the fees it extracts from investors make the stock market a worse-than-zero-sum game. For everyone who beats the market over a certain length of time (and this is usually due to chance, he argues) someone else must lose. Bogle repeats his case that the rational response is to invest through low-cost broad-based index funds that will capture the overall returns of the market while costing the investor less than the average.

In Enough., Bogle combines the index-fund case with a more general plea for ethics in business and life. The chapter titles tell the story: “Too Much Counting, Not Enough Trust,” “Too Much Management, Not Enough Leadership,” “Too Much ‘Success,’ Not Enough Character.” Despite this emphasis, Bogle still doesn’t seem to have discovered the existence of socially responsible investing. But apart from this notable omission, Enough. is a solid, concise introduction to Bogle’s views on money and life.

Remembering John

Over the Memorial Day weekend I traveled to Lake Placid with my mother, to be on hand for the first golf tournament in memory of my brother John, who died unexpectedly a little less than a year ago. The event was organized by Gary and Patricia Warrington, Kathleen Hayes, Nancy Morelli, and Debbie Preston to raise money for a memorial scholarship.

Although it was a raw, blustery morning, and although I don’t play golf myself, it was a privilege to be at at the Craig Wood golf course early on Saturday morning, as the forty participants milled around and what seemed like at least a dozen volunteers made sure everything ran smoothly. It’s a beautiful setting for a course, surrounded by the High Peaks, and John spent many happy hours there. Later in the day many of the participants met again at a sports bar near the high school that my brothers and I went to, doing something else that John could appreciate: having a beer with friends.

Thanks to everyone who attended, everyone who made the event possible, and thanks to John’s many other friends who couldn’t be there, but were there for him when it mattered.