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.)

Gods and Soldiers

My review of Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing has appeared at Scott Esposito’s online magazine The Quarterly Conversation. I’m a bit more critical than other reviewers have been—for instance, noting the absence of writers like Tahar ben Jelloun, Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, M.G. Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nega Mezlekia, Malidoma Patrice Somé, and Aminatta Forna.

Meanwhile, the article ”Clout of Africa” by James Gibbons uses Gods and Soldiers as the centerpiece of an investigation into whether Africa is experiencing a literary boom. If so, he notes, it is a boom marked by displacement and exile. “Nearly all the Francophone writers [in Gods and Soldiers] have settled in France, and the typical English-language writer has an American MFA and professorship.” Like me, Gibbons notes that “the choice of nonfiction is a little scattershot,” and he has his own list of notable omissions, including Ben Okri and Assia Djebar.

Gibbons’ Africa roundup also includes the new collection The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (my own review will be in The Quarterly Conversation), Secret Son by Laila Lalami, and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih.

Gibbons’ article is thoughtful and well-informed, though he refers to the demise of Transition magazine (as of 1992) without mentioning that it was revived in 1991 and has published fifty issues since then. He is able to be quite harsh on certain aspects of a book (”Secret Son can be remarkably lacking in subtlety") while recognizing where it shines ("a narrative logic that is polemical but never overheated or shrill").

The Thoreau You Don’t Know

At Book Court not long ago, where I went to hear Mimi Zeiger talk about Tiny Houses, I was reminded of Thoreau and his own tiny house by the shores of Walden Pond. I took the train to Concord many times when I was living in Cambridge, and on an early date with Jenn we got drenched in a rainstorm on the way back from the pond. (She continued to go out with me anyway.)

Leaving the bookstore, I looked at a schedule of readings and was sorry to see that I had missed Robert Sullivan reading from his new book The Thoreau You Don’t Know.* I loved his books The Meadowlands and Rats, and was curious to see what he would make of Thoreau, the writer I have probably delved deeper into than any other.

A lot, as it turns out. The Thoreau You Don’t Know is largely devoted to blowing up the usual image of Thoreau as a recluse, a crank, a skulker, a prig, even a jerk. (It is also devoted to erasing the false idea that Thoreau drew a sharp line between nature and man, and came down hard on the side of nature. Those who complain that Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t in the wilderness, and that he took his laundry home for his mother to clean, miss the point that Thoreau was interested not so much in pure wilderness as in the places where man and nature interacted.)

The Thoreau you don’t know sang, danced, played the flute, looked after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, and threw big watermelon parties. Though he avoided the usual careers that awaited a college graduate (medicine, law, religion) he was hard-working not only as a writer but in more practical ways. Answering a question from his alma mater, he wrote, “I am a Schoolmaster—a Private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.”

The Thoreau You Don’t Know is full of things I didn’t know about Thoreau, and am glad I do now. He owned seventeen dictionaries. He subscribed to a magazine called Businessman’s Assistant. He did magic tricks: making pencils disappear, then pulling them out of children’s ears. He once trapped a bothersome woodchuck and carried it two miles away rather than kill it. (I once did something similar with a raccoon.)

And he liked Walt Whitman and New York City quite a bit more than is usually reported. “When I think of them together,” writes Sullivan, “the ultimate city poet and the ultimate nature writer, the divide between city and country, between nature and civilization, melts away like a polar ice cap.”

*As it happens, I didn’t entirely miss the reading. It’s available on Sullivan’s quirky and engaging book blog. ....