The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, part Twenty-one: Mark Rich

 

Readings 2024

by Mark Rich

 

         

   Now that many of my friends and peers are retired, retiring, or worrying the thought of it as do dogs their stuffed toys, I have taken a job. Being paid to work for anyone besides myself makes me itch. This job, though, pays nothing, except indirectly. I am clerking in an antique shop where Martha and I have things for sale.

 Yet I have retired in one sense—from working in silence. For decades I have gone without listening to music. At the shop now once or twice a week, my day starts with early-Baroque consort music, moves on into the Baroque, and around three p.m. sometimes leaps centuries to Bebop and Swing. My selections started out scant, since some of my old CDs play only the graphic tune, "Disk Error." Lately, some thrift-shop finds have let me stay in the Baroque until closing time, if I so choose.

 My frustration at having little time to read has become worse, now that I have found a new way to work for nothing. So far, anyway. I chose a midweek day to be at the shop, thinking business might be slow enough to slip in some idle reading. I even placed a copy of Frost's poems among our books for sale, in case I wanted to do some memory-refreshing work with them, in odd moments. Some miscreant bought the book before I was back the next week.

The job may turn out to be only suited for random re-reading. Of the books I did read this year, three are already candidates for this treatment. Two I respect for their clarity and directness: Maria Lydig Daly's Diary of a Union Lady, 1861-65, and Henry Adams's Democracy, subtitled "An American Novel," written in 1880. Adams's portrayal of Madeleine Lee might well have been written expressly for our own time when so many, who presumably started into adulthood with bedrock intellectual, moral, or emotional verities beneath them, now live in straw-built piggy-houses sold to them by their friendly neighborhood wolf. In the novel, the call to social power that threatens Madeleine's principles takes the form of a corrupt Senator who hopes to marry her.

I had already longed to re-read The Education of Henry Adams, the narrative of which falls, in part, over the same years as Daly's diary. Maria Daly is cogent, insightful, and catty ("I had quite a pleasant time, having heard some ill-natured things and said some myself"). She was married to a judge whose opinions influenced and aided the government of the North; and if her personal nature and social situation led her to favor the Union while feeling some distaste for Lincoln and the notion of racial equality, her heart seemed genuine and her capacity to learn ample. If they exist, her journals from the years of Senator Blaine and President Grant would tempt me. Those years gave rise to Adams's novel. I suspect the real Maria Daly and the fictional Madeleine Lee might have shared many attitudes.

           

Not only concision and sharp perception prompt my desire for re-reading time, apparently. For I wish I could re-read Richard Holmes's Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage. Months ago on social media, Eleanor Arnason posted her observation that the use of adverbs was declining. "And quickly!" I responded, facetiously. Soon thereafter, in Holmes, I found a passage so weighted with modifiers I was tempted to post it to her page. The passage conclusively made it ringingly clear that the elusive reason for my having been paging doggedly but dazedly through the book, while woefully sensing that desirable facts had wiggled eel-ishly from my usually eel-snatchy hands, was that its author, with slippery intent, slap-dashedly dulled the murderous steel of Mr. Savage's notorious sword by coyly coating even so pointed a fact with emotional slanting, guesswork, and, to my mind, unreliable logic. I did sometimes see the statement, "Now, what I think was happened was this." I gained the impression that more often he slipped his opinions to the reader concealed in modifiers; and I learned, at the end, that I had learned little. Far from having obscured it in a London fog of pedantry from which one emerges misted and mystified, Holmes put his scholarship in plain view, but all too often prettified, uglified, or dramatized it in a way that made me start distrusting even the facts.

All the same, I may revisit Johnson's London and its characters as Holmes presents them — if, after bracing myself first with a splash of Henry Adams, I can just dash through the book.

 For hours each day I pretend to re-read things — by which I mean I pursue memory-work in Bach's preludes and fugues. Last year I memorized the odd-numbered preludes of Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier — one per month. By each month's end I could falteringly make it through one prelude completely — only to forget it completely in working up the next. The exercise mainly clarified for me aspects of Bach's phrasing. At some point late last year, finding my memory of all these pieces more or less gone, I retackled prelude No. 17, then its fugue — wondering if I could put the whole into more permanent storage, in the way that I seem to have, for instance, Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality."

Around January or February of this year I learned that a villain had snuck into my life: Maria Sofianska, who in her time was, no doubt, a delightfully skilled pianist. I had followed some of her fingerings in my early work on No. 17. Yet in two passages in the fugue, I found that with Sofianska's fingerings my hands had no option but to present Bach's writing as textural music. Individual voices contributed to the texture, but with their contours — essentially their meanings — made indistinct and confused. Of these two passages, one falls mid-fugue; the other, more disastrously, at the end. As a monumental concluding texture, musically that ending does work for the ear. Yet the monumental texture makes the main voice disappear. The primary melody is not in the soprano. It also makes the supporting voices lose their reasons for moving in the way that they do.

It took me some three months to fully dispense with the hand-memory of one fingering and replace it with a new one that let the different voices play their parts. To this day, in trying to get these passages right, I not uncommonly stop midway, to re-start them.

When asked about how his works were to be played, Bach said, "As they are written." To read such writing can be daunting. Yet if one has time to work through all the impatient, inattentive, and inaccurate ways to read Bach's writing, one has at least a chance at rising to the measure of the measures.

This ending evidently occurs to me because I am presently reading Sidney Poitier's The Measure of a Man.

 

 

 

 

In 2024 poems by Mark Rich appeared in Poem, The Lyric, Blue Unicorn, Quiet Diamonds, and Penumbric.com — which seems remarkable to him, since although he writes poems regularly he almost never sends them out into the world. He lives in western Wisconsin with antiquing-and-life partner Martha Borchardt, the Scotties Callie and Hutton, and the constant thought of getting back to both prose-writing and guitar.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening 2023, pt. 26: Mark Rich

 

 

Readings & Echoes, 2023: Two Notes
by Mark Rich

 

 

First Note

    "The boy had heard once that some people had so many books that they only read each book once."

 It was only last night, as I write this, that I happened on this line.

 And how happy I was, that I read these words while actually re-reading that particular book! 

I read it when quite young — although the echoes in my mind of the scenes as they progress are so clear, sometimes, that I begin to suspect this is not my first re-reading.

I have been thinking about those echoes partly because of J.S. Bach. The other day I was page-scrutinizing one of the fugues I have memorized, being curious if the restatements of the theme saw modification through the course of the piece, or if they cleaved to the lineaments of the original statement. It turns out that Bach, in Book II Fugue 17, restates his original theme, which takes a question-and-answer form. When he moves it up or down in the scale, he accommodates the scale but retains the lineaments. The musical context, along the way, bows to the theme, not vice-versa.

This surprised me, since the musical effect is one of great exploration and variation. Most of that occurs around the theme — above, below, and in the trailing-along after-phrases. The theme itself appears as statement and restatement, then slightly altered statement which is itself restated, then restatement. 

The ear reacts to the iterations positively, thanks to that precision in their character.You might think the world would value the fantasia or musical fantasy above the fugue, for by its very nature the fantasy must show a constant level of invention and cannot rely upon a structure of strict reiterations. Yet the fugue tends to win higher regard. 

Wm. Armstrong, who wrote Sounder, the book I am re-reading, states in a prologue that it is not his story that he is telling. It belonged to an old black man whose personal story it apparently was. For Armstrong, the act of composition was in itself the act of echoing.

Each act of reading, then, adds a reverberation, or a new echo in the reader's soul.

The copy that I am now reading I picked up at a thrift store. Yesterday I came across the prior owner's bookmark, a folded-up foil inner wrapper from a famous-name chocolate which is, to me, worthless stuff, being mainly sugar. This placemark was around page 32 or so. I suspect the prior owner gave up reading the book around there, because the book has so little sugar in it. 

So very little, in fact, that I like it greatly.

 

Second Note
 

The boy should have heard, too, that some people have so many books that they only hope to open each book at least once.

This spring or summer, Martha and I were in a valley thrift store that opens two Saturday per month. I had already scouted through the closet where books are shelved, but in coming back from looking at kitchenware in the basement found Martha there. She held out a book. "Don't you want this one?"

I did, although I figured it would go into the pile of books to read sometime or never. Last year I re-read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, however; and because of my interest in that cusp period in the early 1950s when Galaxy magazine seemed to be transforming the field, it had become a small goal to dig out the issue, buried somewhere in those sometime-or-never piles, that contained "The Fireman," the Galaxy story that became the famous novel.

This book Martha dug up, though, was a Bradbury collection: A Pleasure To Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories, published in paperback in 2011. It includes "The Fireman." Out of curiosity one day, I read the first story in the anthology, which purports to contain sixteen works that prefigure the novel. In a way that some Bradbury stories can, this story both dissatisfied and refreshed me. The notions of books and of burning played into it. They play into nearly all the stories here; and then they numb the reader who persists through the novellas that presumably are both pre-envisionings of the Montag-quest novel: "Long After Midnight" and "The Fireman." I emerged from the anthology, after many bedtime readings, having the clear sense that I had read a half-dozen tales that followed Montag and his fellow characters. But apparently there are just these two.

 Have you ever read Bradbury's Surround Yourself with Your Loves and Live Forever? In 2008, through the efforts of John L. Coker, III, editor and publisher, it brought together seven accounts by Bradbury of his pivotal and literally galvanizing youthful meeting with "Mr. Electrico." While nothing might seem less enticing than a collection of stories each of which tell the same story, I found this sequence of tales fascinating in the way that waves on a beach are fascinating. Each one has its own claim to existence; no two are alike.

I am not sure I would recommend A Pleasure To Burn as highly as Surround Yourself. Yet it offers a window into Bradbury's soul that does not diminish it, in the way some windows can.

I say this because I clearly recall the point when, in my teens, I gave up reading Bradbury. In one of his seemingly endless R Is for Ray and B Is for Bradbury anthologies in the 1970s, I came across a story I had read before, in another of these Bantam collections. I read it again anyway, only to find that here it had a different ending. I felt as though I had caught Bradbury stealing from himself, and then trying to hide the fact.

Apparently I was responding to echoes and reiterations even then. How would I respond to those stories, which were the same except in their endings, today? I am not sure. In A Pleasure To Burn, in contrast, I came to feel the struggle that must have stirred in Bradbury, between the themes that obsessed him, that insisted on rearing their heads in his work time and again, and the contrary striving he felt toward the new. In a sense his work yearned itself toward the fugue while he himself yearned toward the fantasy.

    I am cutting this short due to this week's health and time constraints, but think I can close on a note that may ring nearer the hearts of some Aqueduct stalwarts. 

At another thrift shop I found a book I expected to just price and try to sell for a few dollars: Karenna Gore Schiff's Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America. I still expect to do that. One afternoon, though, I idly picked it up and looked at the contents and thought to myself that I really should know more than I do about at least three of the book's subjects — Ida B. Wells, Mother Jones, and Frances Perkins. I have gotten as far as Mother Jones, so far. Schiff's book is clearly stated and seemingly reliable in its sources; is a good, solid effort, admirable and useful. 

I should have known beforehand that Mother Jones's great issue was child labor. Now I do.

I have a fat old paperback, an Oscar Williams-edited poetry anthology that I have been perusing nightly, more or less randomly. One afternoon during the week I was reading Schiff more actively, I had the brilliant notion to look at Williams's contents pages and see what poets exactly were included. Coming across the name Sarah N. Cleghorn, I had the inevitable jerk of the knee: "Who the hell is — ?"

I went instantly to her page, and her quite short verse — which must have been touched by Mother Jones.

    The Golf Links

The golf links lie so near the mill
    That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
    And see the men at play.

It was more likely touched, I should say, by the echoes of Mother Jones. (And the verse has no sugar! I like it.)

— Cashton, Wisconsin, 13 & 15 December 2023

 Mark Rich  has had two collections of short fiction published — Edge of Our Lives (RedJack) and Across the Sky (Fairwood) — as well as chapbooks from presses including Gothic and Small Beer. He is also the author of a major biographical and critical study, C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, published by McFarland and, most recently, of Toys in the Age of Wonder: Science Fiction, Society and the Symbolism of Play.  His poems have recently appeared in The Lyric, Penumbric, British Fantasy Society's Horizons, and Blue Unicorn. He lives in Cashton, Wisconsin, with partner-in-life Martha Borchardt and two partners-in-happy-hours Scottie dogs.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 17: Mark Rich

 

Readings, 2022

By Mark Rich

 

Do I dwell too much in memory? I walk in Frost, in Wordsworth, in Milton, and in other old gardens, and do so in part for gardening discipline. The world is wide and full to overflowing with newer places I might visit. But how to find time when I cultivate the same rows over and over? "Nine bean rows will I have there," Yeats said. Why nine? He probably knew. Or he knew his limits, even in his dream of Innisfree. Or his dream was that he had the power to know them. We usually cannot quite know our limits, despite the fact that we keep meeting them, over and over, in those same rows.

 I will cease apologizing to myself, someday, for how little time I find for simple reading. But let me tell you of a path down which memory led me. It has to do with Emerson, whose importance professional philosophers take comfort in dismissing. Being unprofessional in almost all matters, I must have seen, perhaps unconsciously, an opportunity. I have not quite run with it, but have done my share of garden-walking.

This past year I began spending more time in "Self-Reliance," which ranks high in popularity among readers. I try to memorize passages, since Emerson often speaks in-between his sentences. In this case my eye caught upon a line in which I learned which context. It seemed strangely suggestive. "We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause." I often refreshed my memory of these words, in the way one pauses, in passing, to admire a curious shell in a glass cabinet.

 

Enter a package from my mother, packed with miscellaneous life-detritus. One item was an old Mentor Books paperback with my dad's signature within, and the notation, "University of Chicago 1950." I was pleased to see this book: Philosophy in a New Key, by Suzanne K. Langer. If you are one of the two or three who have read my Toys in the Age of Wonder, then you know that my effort there was to see the Modern wonder tale, which I see as a distinct form, in symbolic terms, in much the same way I was seeing Modern playthings in symbolic terms. Even though modernity is broadly traced from the 1600s, I was following Northrop Frye's impulse to speak of a "Modern Century," which for my purposes began in 1859 with Darwin's Origin, along with other historical markers, and ended with the achievement of artificial satellites: so 1957-8, for an ending point. Frye placed his beginning point slightly later than 1859; but my interest in evolutionary theory is greater than his.

 Langer's study, itself a Modern Century work, moves the study of symbolism from more traditional philosophical realms, such as "mentality," into the sphere of the arts. Since at one point she mildly chides another philosopher for not introducing his major hypothesis until midway through his book, it amused me that on pp. 79-80 of hers I found her own hypothesis. After encountering this I went on reading, and reached perhaps two-thirds of the way through when I found myself going back to those pages. Recently those pages are all I have had time for, learning them word for word. slowly, on days when I have some early-morning time. Langer condenses a great deal of carefully worded perspective into these pages. They give me insight into Emerson's koan-like statement, as well as others of his. I will attempt to set forth neither Langer's nor Emerson's thoughts, in terms of my understanding. But I have provided the pages in Langer for any who might be engaged in a search akin to my extraordinarily snaillike one. "Here is the fountain of action and of thought," said Emerson. "The fountain light of all our day," said Wordsworth.

 May I recommend a novel to avoid? After E.O. Wilson's death I picked up his Anthill. It has problems as a novel, as might be expected from one who dedicated his life to his science. The story does come alive for a time in the middle, when it follows developments among various ant colonies. Unfortunately, the hint of Southern faux-gentility and antebellum nostalgia, in the framing human narrative, finds its amplification in the ant depiction. Its supercolony picture, in which multiple queens' subjects coexist rather than battle one another, seems offered as a metaphor for social multiculturalism; and this supercolony of ants, it so happens, requires chemical eradication, in the novel. The human narrative happens to center around a character who belongs to the NRA. The "one-drop rule" receives mention. No would-be sources of such "drops" play a role in the story.

 A few weeks ago in Science News I was reading a review of a new book written by a professional biologist whose skin color is not Wilson's. He won an unprecedented full scholarship to study biology at Harvard, but ended up pursuing his degree elsewhere, since no Harvard professor would agree to be his advisor. I leave it to you to consider whether a bad novelist may have been capable of acting in bad faith within his own profession.

Drawn by its title, I picked up Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah immediately afterward, as tonic and restorative. This wonderful novel reaches for the magical, in places, in its bringing human souls to the page. Its tragedy relates to the central character who remains true to his potential, and who finds himself pitted against a friend who has betrayed his own youthful promise. The titular anthills only barely appear. (Had I read this novel as a youth, this last would have disappointed me severely.)

 

I mentioned my Toys already. In the decade-long pursuit of its ideas, I encountered no novel quite like Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, and so never felt prompted to to reflect upon this sort of technological positivism. Taking it in this year, I found it a lovely piece of writing, full of the old-fashioned practices which I, and apparently many others, love to dwell upon. It came as a surprise, then, when — at a point in the novel when a crucial plot-matter might be expected to unfold — a new, noisy agricultural machine, large in scale, comes to the family's aid. The event provokes happiness as well as a wonder which is technologically inspired. In the Modern wonder tale, the machine succeeds, but then arrives at its point of destruction. This literary form, put into shape by Poe but fully realized by Verne, makes people think the author is embracing positivism when the actuality is opposite that. They are offering a critique and, they hope, a rebuttal.

 In Wilder, no such rebuttal appears — at least in terms of narrative. The future for the family is made whole, in a sense, by the intrusion of mechanical progress.

 

I read The Invisible Outlaw, a novel by Frederick Faust, aka "Max Brand," which interested me in part because of its vision the Old West — a vision which I suppose had origin in Faust's experience in both Western matters and in Western pulps. In this vision, ethics and ethical systems have no particular place, although they might be glimpsed in the orderly lives led by those living in orderly towns. The lonely individuals who occupy Faust's attention live, instead, by personal codes of conduct. I had a peculiar feeling come over me that in this novel, quite effectively constructed and delivered, that I was dwelling in a land of such ultimate loneliness that we might call it post-millennial. For who has a presence here, in this Old West, in exactly the same proportion as those of African descent in E.O. Wilson's novel? No whisper of the dead Native American's soul breathes in even the slightest breeziness of these woodpulp pages. The novel's events take place after the apocalypse has swept away the prior inhabitants.

 The machine had already arrived, in other words. And since the Native American response to it, in making their own critique and rebuttal, had proven to be inadequate, the machine never met its demise. The preexisting ethical system, instead, did. Unseen ghosts also dwell in Wilder's pages: for this is a nostalgic vision. Nostalgia can only exist where a situation, a fact, an environment, is irretrievable. Willa Cather's power, in My Ántonia and elsewhere, may come in part from her having been able to watch as successions of incursions upon established ways of life proved profitable enough to destroy what came before. The thought arises, now: what if Wellsian positivism, the main source for Gernsbackian and Campbellian wonder tales and itself cemented into the "science fiction" guise by the end of the Modern century, acquired its particular power and popularity due to the hunger felt in the Modern soul to escape the machine of Modernity? In our society that machine had gone unchallenged, largely uncritiqued, and almost never rebutted, except in the wonder tales which were put into the hands of children, whose capacity for wonder was powerful, but for critique, weak. But Wells broke from the Verneian mode. I guess I am asking this. What if Wells's readers saw this as escape literature, rather than as literature leading them deeper into the machine?

 I have just had the recollection that Bertie Wooster often invokes "the Code of the Woosters." I have read little in the Western genre but can hear the phrase "the Code of the West" ringing almost as clearly. And the Code of the West relates to the conquerors, not the conquered and eradicated. If Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster novels have any element of the post-apocalyptic about them it must be in the sense that the arrival of bureaucratic colonialism had already firmly altered the world, installing top-down codes of conduct which had a few whiffs of humanism about them but mainly the stiff gales of air-freshener and deodorant. To be a civil servant became a norm to such a degree that one never afterwards weighed the thought that one's servitude was so baldly stated.

 

I read Right Ho, Jeeves! this year. It had been some years since I last read Wodehouse and, because of that gap, was surprised to learn how much of the texture and character of the badinage, between fictional characters or between narrator and reader, relies on the traditional English canon. Unless you have some key works in your head, even if only dimly held in the usual manner of adult remembrance, you will sense the wit at play without knowing why it is witty.

 This novel does have a few passages that shake before the reader a snooty racism. Whether Wodehouse himself held these thoughts, they seem in character for Wooster. Can we have a proper depiction of Bertie's type without being shown this? Had Wodehouse omitted it, would he have been guilty of glossing over a weakness in his subject and, by some extension, in himself? One might argue that, given the gentrified layers of servitude put into place by colonialism, it was decent of him to bring out a few blots of blasphemy against humanistic ethics in cheery Bertie Wooster — who consistently, and forthrightly, blunders in both thoughts and actions. At the time of the novel's first release, some if not many of its readers found such passages consistent with the overall flavor. Readers now may take exception to them; but part of this comedic act involves the master's abusing the slave who then saves the master from himself. And it is in the master's nature to never quite come clean about it.

 

I fear I have too much to say, or try to say . . . and must hurry on so that I can at least mention Richard Winters, whose novel Hillborn is fascinatingly concerned with characters who might have been grotesques in another's hands, but who are fringes-dwelling, knotted-up beauties in his. I feel this has less concentration, in its paragraphs, than has his novella Sawhorse, which I hope I celebrated here last year; but my reading of Hillborn is colored by the great admiration I have for his previous version of this novel, which he named Ila. I have lacked a chance to revisit that earlier work. Something that Winters does in his writing, however, reminds me of a quality I have found in some young-adult novels by Clyde Robert Bulla. Both writers can depict characters who are, in a way, superbly able, but who, at the same time, are damaged souls. I hope it says not too much about myself that I admire both writers.

In writings about writings, I read C.E. Montague's A Writer's Notes on His Trade, a likeable little Penguin paperback originally from 1949; Philip Larkin's Required Writing; Northrop Frye's The Educated Imagination; and Chauncey Brewster Tinker's 1929 The Good Estate of Poetry. I do believe that had Tinker adopted the pen name of, say, Max Brand, he might have slaughtered Modernism in a more gunfighterly way. I like his well-educated restraint, all the same. To find similar conservatism in Larkin surprised me, a little. That he held a dear affection for Margaret Thatcher may be enough to make me invoke the Code of the Riches in favor of selective ignorance of politically questionable poets, should a full book of his poems come my way. Yet such an impulse might force me to consign too many Modernists to the dust bin.

 I seem to have made it a part of my personal code (assuming that I have one) to mutter to myself, "Know thy enemy," at least now and then — to judge from the fact that, recently, I felt I had no choice but to pick up a thrift-store copy of a work for Fundamentalist children: Dinosaurs and the Bible. I dip into it regularly, each time to emerge amused and disturbed. Albeit I sip the author's poison for perspective upon the technique of poisoning, I will not honor him by naming him. (But, O! The pictures of dinosaurs emerging from Noah's Ark! My comments in Toys about extinction and the 19th-century Church apply even now!)

 I am leaving credible and lively books unmentioned, having run short on space. (And Bach! And issues, as well: why were there so many guns — naturally in Faust/Brand, but in Wilder, in Wilson, in Achebe?) Some among my readings were novels I wanted to re-read, and did; I plan to re-read many more. The ghost of one whose centenary falls in 2023, Cyril Kornbluth, has been asking if he might visit my parlor again. The spirit of Judy Merril whispers, as well: for there remain matters to set to words, and truths to be told. It has been rude, I know, to keep my parlor barred to them for so long — even if the door's being closed seems so accidental, and the result of scrambling for a living in antiques.

 I looked back just now to see how I began this short essay, and am amused to see that I spoke of meeting limits. I have met many, including ones relating to my parlor guests. But I have run into enough walls and built up enough callouses on my forehead, now, that maybe I can blunder forward once more. For sometimes that is what one must do — just blunder ahead — despite the dreams of nine bean-rows and of Innisfree waters lapping the shore, which one hears even when far away and standing on gray pavements.

 

  In 2022, Mark Rich rescued, from pools within a block of his house, countless tadpoles — for the pools were about to dry up or be destroyed by construction. He released some to a village-outskirts pond, but ended up raising hundreds of tree frogs and American toads for release. He feels hard-pressed to say if he achieved anything else this year, at least during summer. His poems have recently or soon will appear in The Lyric, Penumbric, British Fantasy Society's Horizons, and Blue Unicorn. He lives in Cashton, Wisconsin, with partner-in-life Martha Borchardt and two partners-in-happy-hours Scottie dogs.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, part 25: Mark Rich

 

Readings and Re-Readings, 2021
by Mark Rich

At an auction where there was hardly a book to be found, a two-dollar bid bought me one that has provided minor but distinct and ongoing pleasure: Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of Alfred Holt Colquitt, Jan. 8-Feb. 16, 1895. The dates evidently refer to the dates of the memorial addresses and not of an amazingly brief life. I say "evidently" because I cannot read a word of the text.

In its entirety, back maybe in the 1910s or '20s, someone turned it into a scrapbook.

*

The scrapbook and the obsessive project must be one and the same, at some point in their spectra. My Colquitt scrapbookist's obsession focused on verse, with occasional allowance for writing by or for children, along with a few illustrations. It also focused on covering-over every word of prose, assiduously. All I know about Colquitt, therefore, comes from the three or four verse fragments quoted by memorialists, which remain carefully unscrapbooked-over. This tells me not a lot, since Bryant's "Thanatopsis" must have come in for a nod at every gathering of eulogists, in those decades. (Though I recognized the lines when I encountered them, I like the fact that the scrapbookist penciled in the poem's title beside the verse.) Remarkably, on pages where the memorial text ended before the bottom of the page, leaving a blank space, the scrapbookist left that blankness there to speak for itself. A need to obliterate prose moved the scrapbookist. An empty space was somehow sacrosanct, and as worthy to preserve as a quoted verse.

For some reason in the autumn — when reading, as an activity, began to seem a possibility for me again — I picked up a volume of Sophocles and read it through with pleasure. I then picked up an old Dell Laurel edition of King Lear on a similar whim, and similarly enjoyed it — partly, I think, because it offered the text without notes. I then read a series of other Shakespeare plays, my choice determined entirely by whatever old, slender paperback editions I had to hand. These were "improved" editions, so that my enjoyment was less: for try as I might I cannot keep my eye from flitting to a facing-page or page-bottom note. Even if I know what old Shake is shaking from his venerable verbal saltcellar, my eye still flits over or down — to check my or the editor's acuity.

This sort of presentation makes it hard to simply read a play without stopping — making these volumes, in common with most editions of Shakespeare, akin to on-line reading with its myriad electrical distractions. It makes me think that reading's degradation from a form of immersive experience festers in seed within these overly explicated and glossed pages. Personally, I love notes and glosses and marginalia and bottom-of-page minuscules. Yet in reading the Dell Laurel edition of Sophocles and then a single Shake play, and in going from there to a later Dell non-Laurel and other paperback-publisher editions, it seemed clear to me that I immersed myself pleasantly in the former, despite whatever erudite observations or even simple word- or phrase-meanings I was missing; and that, in contrast, I went a bit glossy-eyed through those other paperbacks. So: I love glosses. And I hate glosses. I hope these utterly simple statements of mine last ages enough to warrant an intrusive footnote.

I fell into liking Dell Laurel editions, by the way, for a nontextual reason. The poetry entries boast Richard Powers covers; and I think his ink depiction of Poe magnificent. (I have only three authors in this series, having also Dickinson and Donne, but four volumes — since I have two copies of Poe and am keeping both. Richard Wilbur's introduction being so cogent, I have ruined the spine of one copy.)

*

Memory plays interesting tricks. I mean that not in the usual sense. For instance, I had learned some Shakespeare lines quoted without context in an old poetry volume — one which I watch getting grubbier by the year, residing as it does in the workshop where I raise wood- and rust-dust while cleaning old boxes, pulleys, drawknives, and sadirons. I knew the passage about "the quality of mercy" came from The Merchant of Venice, for instance. Yet in reading that play, this fact slipped far from mind. When unexpectedly, then, I plowed into Portia's soliloquy about the quality of mercy, I felt a sudden glow and warmth. For I discovered that within my being I contain an atom that belongs to one of Shake's most attractive female intelligences.

In one of my passes through my dusted and well-fingered workshop volume, I had settled on Polonius's advice to Laertes, to learn — not really remembering much about my long-ago reading of that play nor my viewings of it, also long ago. So when I came to this Polonius soliloquy in Hamlet it brought me up a bit short. The glow did arrive, as from meeting a friend unexpectedly. Yet also to me, at that point, came lines from T.S. Eliot: "No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor ever meant to be; am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, etc." (My apologies to Eliot, for probably mangling his words.)

This is to say that I have taken in an atom, too, of a secondary figure of dubious if conscientiously upright character. A priss and a toady, he, to my mortification, dies stabbed by the prince when concealed behind a screen. Talk about death in obscurity! Do I have an atom of that doom in me?

We all do, I suppose.

A scrapbook, in a way, repudiates memory. It simply presses between covers the tidbit, the picture, the verse, making it unnecessary to truly remember any of it. One just goes back to the pressed-flat thing. When I was reading Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which I naturally enjoyed since I enjoy snails, the scrapbook notion kept coming to mind. The author draws in many a thought or quotation from a Darwin or Humboldt, often seemingly out of the blue; and though it seems clear she actually read and studied at least some of her sources, I could never leave behind the image of the screen-lit visage of the Internet writer, the Barney Google who draws forth from all knowledge the pertinent quotation from antiquity but who actually never learns a thing. With all human knowledge right there at the fingertip, why disturb those happily sleeping neurons? Again, Bailey is no Barney Google type: she shows herself to be truly intent on the observational mini-drama before her, involving a snail. Yet the scrapbook impression kept reappearing, in my reading. Her ruling organization has to do with the memories of an illness in which she had molluscan company — a wonderful circumstance if one can overlook the dread hours of the long debility itself. The Colquitt scrapbookist's ruling organization had to do with covering prose over with verse — making me wonder if Bailey's scrapbooking, too, was covering over something that the reader, as a consequence, never learns about. Since, by the end, the reader remains clueless about the illness, the author's need for the old scissors and paste may well relate to that. The book's silence about her long debility comes across rather loudly.

Colquitt I tend to dip into, reading a few pages at a time. A book similar to it, though, I did plod and sometimes zipped steadily through: Verse and Worse: A Private Collection by Arnold Silcock. With its emphasis on minor verse, you might think it off-putting as a book. Yet when I found it at a flea market I wanted to read it, and soon did. It lacked pretense, in its favor. It was hardly offering itself as the best of the worst verse, or any such thing. It is an assemblage reflecting a taste, much as Colquitt is. I feel grateful when encountering honest slices of life, which is what this seems to be. I especially feel grateful for the section in it that initially sent my dubiety-sense a-wiggling, which contains poems written in Pidgin English. Anyone thinking about cultural appropriation would do well to look at these verses. They preserve a certain vernacular with neither shame nor pride; they make addled sense without too much nonsense. My mind in reading them entered another world and time, where and when some Chinese dockside workers appropriated English-language sounds and notions to their need — which sounds and notions these versifiers then appropriated back, for theirs. I have a respect for the fact of Pidgin's existence that I lacked before.

If some would insist that these versifiers were intrusive opportunists and freeloaders, I might suggest that all cultural work is intrusive. Some of us do it more openly than others, is all. (And some of us hide ourselves behind screens, so as to be less obtrusively intrusive — only to get stabbed by the prince for all our troubles, and for our sensitivity to the situation.)

A scrapbook becomes interesting due to the obsession behind it — the obsession obliterated by yellowing newsprint clippings, while yet revealed by the same. The obsession in Colquitt almost becomes its subject, as in Snail — and as in another book I pick up now and then: Stewart Lee Allen's The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee. However fascinating I find it, I put it aside between chapters — for a week or more at a time. Why I should do this eludes me. Does it suit the episodic nature of the author's search? Putting it aside does underline how poor is my retention of facts when reading on impulse. But do I need to be reminded?

*

Although the doings of the racist-fascist political element in the U.S. fractured my attention this year, I did have some cohesive reading experiences. Three quite short experiences have proven especially memorable. Julia L. Sauer's Fog Magic I found both delicate and moving. Clyde Robert Bulla's White Bird shows what can be conveyed, even emotionally, by an objective approach to one's words. In contrast to these young-adult novels, Richard Winters, in his novella Sawhorse, compellingly offers glimpses into a damaged soul. Winters writes in a way I cannot quite fathom but wildly admire. He has also released a new version of his novel Ila, now named Hillborn. I stood bedside one day, fully meaning to not begin reading it. Then I stood there reading that lengthy opening section despite myself — just as taken by it, once more, as when I first read it umpteen years ago.

Then I hid the book away for a later time — now, maybe — when I might myself be less the damaged soul that I was, through the summer.

Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America ranks high among the weightier readings of my year. It offers insight into the lives and thoughts of the Holmses, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James, among others. Although I thought Menand unnecessarily condescending regarding Emerson, I wished that I could immediately give it a second reading.

I have been nursing some thoughts about a few oldish popular novels that I have read recently. But I push those aside in favor of ending with the classics — Milton and Virgil, both represented in Colquitt. Milton Murdock, I mean, with his poem "My Mother" — and Virgil Keller, with his "Ode to Ambition." Such little things do contain delight in them — not least my delight that I feel no desire to labor over their memorization.

Just yesterday (as I write these words), Martha and I had our booster shots; and while I sailed through the previous installments, this sequel gave me a rough night and a weary, bleary, achey morning. Virgil hits it on the head, with "Ode to Ambition": "O, I wish I were a little rock,/ A sittin' on the hill."

Today, a century after the scissors and paste, this sounds about right.

Mark Rich  has had two collections of short fiction published — Edge of Our Lives (RedJack) and Across the Sky (Fairwood) — as well as chapbooks from presses including Gothic and Small Beer. He is also the author of a major biographical and critical study, C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, published by McFarland and, most recently, of Toys in the Age of Wonder: Science Fiction, Society and the Symbolism of Play. With partner-in-life Martha Borchardt and two Scotties-in-life he lives in Cashton, Wisconsin, and gardens, shovels snow, still reads Bach daily, and remains faithfully behind in his book revisions.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2020, pt. 27: Mark Rich

 

 

Readings and Re-Readings, 2020
by Mark Rich

In pandemic isolation you might think you would do nothing but read book after book — if you have them piled in a clutter all about, as I do. The odd fact in an odd year for me has been that the combined horrors of the presidency and the dread of disease resulted in the opposite, to judge from the record of books I have read — the means by which I keep track of easily lost bibliographic information. This list had special value for me during the ten-year effort behind the book published this year, Toys in the Age of Wonder: Science Fiction, Society, and the Symbolism of Play. 

According to this list, in July of 2019 I read seven books — a higher number than the list contains thus far for all of 2020. 

 Our Scottiedogs this year have read nothing at all. Perhaps I am feeling their influences. Hutton, the larger, exerts about thirty pounds of restful, soporific influence upon the reading lap. Callie, the smaller, a bit less.

 No one has noticed the Covid effect, apparently, of its causing a shut-down in record-keeping. For some reason I stopped recording book titles in my book-list in February. In April, I stopped writing in my journal of many years — a hodgepodge of minor doings and thoughts that served a role in pulling myself out of self-imposed silence after my C.M. Kornbluth publication. Though it has importance for me, as an ongoing process it ceased. I have picked it up in an occasional way, recently. Even so, from the vantage point of a future day when I can look back on my past doings, this year will not so much contain gaps as be mostly a gap. Yet I was busy constantly in yard and garden, and in readings and thoughts — all fodder for journal-keeping.

Even given this Covid-year effect, though, I read very little, to gauge from book titles. Reading news and opinion absorbed hours in a way they had not, before. Too, concern about this winter's food supply, and about our income, made me diligent in the garden. And having finished Toys placed me in a situation requiring reassessment of where I stood, intellectually and personally. As a partial result, my reading time this year has often become study time. 

The reading of two lengthy books interfered, too, with my reading of books. For I had to re-read most of C.M. Kornbluth to refresh myself after being long away, for an on-line interview. My entire July this year, shortly afterward, went first into proofing and then indexing Toys. Since I was indexing concepts and categories in addition to names of people, books, and manufacturers, this proved an ambitious, manual task. Then in October, my bedtime reading was, again, Toys in the Age of Wonder — because I never can simply read a book of my own until it sees print. (I learned this year that my prose in CMK was not so smoothly honed as I had thought. In Toys, I found a Department of Redundancy Department redundancy. I believe I did achieve the lucidity I strove for, in discussing concepts critical to my narrative — although in a few late-written sections, when I was struggling not to lengthen an already too-long book, I failed to make obvious some connections that were clear in my mind. One of these sections brings together various points concerning the nature of the wonder tale, which is a central focus in my book — more so than the late form of the wonder tale given in the title, science fiction.)

Reading more news and opinion led to pleasant discoveries. I spent more time online, and regained connections to a larger society than the one I have tended to move within, over this past decade. May I recommend a body of writing published on Facebook? Heather Cox Richardson offers an informed perspective on links and echoes between current events and U.S. history. I also have listened to a few of her afternoon webcasts, which I enjoy but lack much time for. Martha, by the way, found Richardson's seventeen-part history of the Republican Party absorbing — listening during her evening Scottie-grooming sessions when usually I was washing dishes in the kitchen and muttering poetry to myself.

Speaking of which, a few nights ago I happened to begin working on Percy Shelley's "London in 1819": 

An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king —
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. 

How is that for comment upon our moment in U.S. history, two centuries after? The subsequent lines are just as timely, in their untimely way. I had not planned to learn this poem. Try saying the first line to yourself a few times, though. It has the catchiness to leaves a poetically catchable person caught.

Early in the year I read a few stories the memories of which seem to have been blurred by the pandemic year — one being Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, never read by me in high school or after, and possibly never to be read by me again. I had often wondered where the writerly affection for low demotic gained its foothold, and now suppose that Catcher was a mud puddle of the sort that, being stepped into, spread influence by means of the evident footprints going this way and that, away from it. And just about everyone stepped in this particular puddle. How many said after reading it, "That book just kills me!"

Another image that comes to mind may be more apt. Think of a lake that draws us to its edge to admire its water's clarity. Unknowingly, in walking away we take from the shore that part of it that becomes our footprints — that part of it which was settled, as far as the lake was concerned, but which is new and merely adventitious to us, and which becomes part of the imprint we leave upon the world.

To know what low demotic means you need only know what high demotic means. For Northrop Frye, high demotic is simply common speech or writing on its best behavior. Low demotic apparently commends itself to writers for its depiction or conveyance of one social type or another, but also, I suspect, for its perceived alliance with feeling, or emotive meaning: for as a style the colloquial voice suggests to the reader an emotional veracity which some writers seem to feel is to be achieved by no other means.

Do you recall Ursula Le Guin's objections concerning writers who insist, at least once or twice in a sentence, on using sexual intercourse in all its four-letter glory as verb, noun, or gerund-adjective to accent their prose? What was this but a reaction to low demotic's ascendancy?

I have been wondering these days about writing that emphasizes emotional expression in order to make a point that, too, is primarily emotional. For I have been thinking about the emotivist expressions which have, for instance, dominated Republican rallies in our time, in which expressed emotion validates the perceived "truth" within the listening audience — a perceived truth which is itself emotional.

Literary emotivism, if it does exist as a distinct form, would use language overtly intended to prompt emotional response; and this response would itself be the story's "meaning." It would in essence reinforce the stance that has placed our country into so perilous a situation. Why should this be? For this reason: emotivism exists in the absence of any objective ethics. In emotivism, moral judgements are effectively nonexistent, since morals are simply feelings. Statements being offered as moral statements, within an emotivist context, are simply exclamations, commands, or entreaties. May I commend a wonderful essay by Brand Blanshard, "Morality and Politics," to you? It appears in a 1966 paperback I happened to pick up at a flea market a few years back: Original Essays on Contemporary Moral Problems, edited by Richard T. De George. I probably encountered ethical writings as clearly presented as Blanshard's essay in my college days. Those, though, suffered from being dipped into a teenager's scattered mind — one overly busy with improvisatory piano and operetta-singing to properly study anything at all.

Blanshard chose to elucidate emotivism in 1966 because he viewed it as a danger. After four years of Forty-Five-ism can we disagree?

Does the above seem far away from the fictional fields that appeal most to Aqueduct readers? Not for me, for this reason: emotivism resulted from positivist thinking — which means that analytic thinkers created the mental structure by means of which, in our Age of the Masses, demagogues in positions which were intended to be positions of ethical leadership could simply replace moral judgement — smoothly and, from a positivist view, rationally — with unverifiable forms of expression: exclamations, commands, and entreaties, as well as curses, threats, and insults. That they rely heavily upon falsehoods shows their consistency. Verification has no necessary relation to truth. 

Positivism to a great degree acts an antagonistic force in the tale told in Toys in the Age of Wonder. If my analysis in Toys is correct, moreover, when wonder-tale writers abandoned the anti-positivist stance found in Poe and Verne, they took an important step toward the form that would be called science fiction.

I am pointing not to a necessary connection between existing emotivist fiction and our present political turmoil. I would have to read much more low-demotic writing than I do in order to make this argument, and would rather not. I am instead expressing a worry. In writing Toys I was trying in part to understand the Modern Century, 1859 to 1957, in order to better see how we arrived at the Age of the Masses, which to my mind commenced with Sputnik, and which may end in the 2050s, the decade many observers are suggesting for environmental catastrophe and, we must suppose, civilization's collapse — barring the full return to our dying world of a rational humanism.

My worry, in any case, concerns the possibility that in our fiction we may sometimes contribute to a mindset that has made tyranny possible.

Please note that I am not worrying about emotions themselves. How vital feelings are has preoccupied thinkers about "the Good" since before Plato's time. Many readers become confused about what philosophers are saying who may use the word "pleasure" frequently — as G.E. Moore does, for instance. What comes to mind first to us is often something tainted with the sense of "empty pleasure," which is not these philosophers' intent. If you imagine the satisfaction deriving from meeting one's own human needs, or from achieving an inner self-realization, you will be nearer the intent.

It has quite interested me, in Emerson — whom I only began actively studying after finishing Toys — that rhetorically he often places the realization of human potential in opposition to "toys," used figuratively. One of two Emerson lines that I have to mind on this perspective is this: "population, interests, government, history: 'tis all toy figures in a toy house." Elsewhere he calls the great attractants in Forty-Five-ism — "houses, land, money, luxury, power, fame" — toys.

One novel I read does reveal feelings in relation to self-realization, or to one's return to one's own lost humanity. I thought I would never read this book. In a radio interview — this must have been long ago, since I am no kind of radio listener at all these days — Kazuo Ishiguro made so preposterously pompous a statement that I dismissed his work from my mind. He said, with a culturally-higher-than-thou modulation to his voice, "What I do that science fiction does not do is that I ask, 'What if?'"

A thrift-shop copy of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day came into my hands, as it happens, and not his superior-to-science-fiction novel. Despite his pomposity, I felt curious enough about his writing to open it and even to persevere through the narrator's own pompous loftiness. I may mortify Northrop Frye's ghost by calling that narrator's voice "way-too-high demotic." It may be better to call it "high un-demotic." Persevering in the novel proved worthwhile, for me, however. Although I will let memory make the final decision, I feel an urge to shelve it somewhere near Patrick McGinley's Foggage or Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, both of which I read long ago but still treasure. This book wrenches the reader around, a bit. I would add that it seems not at all Japanese to me — not that I expected it to be another Botchan or any such thing. In any case, I took care of my dismissal of the novel beforehand. Now I can accept its authenticity as not a sham authenticity.

I have spoken too long here about seemingly little, but must succumb to an urge to speak of something littler: Facebook. How ironic, to be reading historian Richardson regularly there — where, apparently, thousands of others do the same. Thousands, including some of my own "Facebook friends," hit the "like," "love," or other such button. I have used such buttons in my Facebook interactions. I know that this public shorthand reveals a route to our hearts, for the convenience of advertisers — or "business and industry," those foes to humanism in Verne's conflicted universe. All the same, I keep reading on Facebook, often looking for news that others have encountered elsewhere; and in haste I do hit "like" or whatever else. Facebook is, after all, about faces. Expressions. Being this way, it offers no button for "I think this is true," "I had not thought of that," "Thank you for the perspective," or simply "I have read this." I do sometimes use "like" in this last sense. I think "Kilroy was here" would make a fine additional button, for readers who like to be counted, but anonymously. 

 Readers on Facebook enter a house whose foundation was set by philosopher David Hume. In this house our judgments are never rational but always likings and dislikings. As we have witnessed, this offers a prime environment for creatures such as Forty-Five who have no need for moral responses from their Face-viewers. They have no need since, as emotivists, they cannot make moral judgements. The values they offer to their viewers are purely emotional ones, presented in a calculated way to advance the fortunes of corporations or individuals — or corporations masquerading as individuals — and not to advance the greatest good. (I was pleased to note the other day Das Spiegel's naming Forty-Five "The Loser of the Year" for his having ignored the greatest good.)

So I ask this. One person sends a heart emoticon to Heather Cox Richardson when she gives a reasoned analysis of the political situation of the day. Is this any different from another person's sending the same emoticon in response to a hatemonger's diatribe? Do not both reinforce a house built upon a foundation of air, in the same way? Some people do post comments, to be sure; but how many readers look first — if they read those comments at all — at the tally of emoticons?

Does an identity between these two responses matter? I suspect that both acts, as I said, support a medium which encourages the hollowing-out of ethical response. If this be true, this matters extremely. Think of the type of voter whose existence has sparked commentary lately: the type that disagrees with Forty-Five on central issues but votes for Forty-Five all the same because Forty-Five "makes them feel good."

The image comes to me of the three piggies. With such a house as this that I mention above, the Big Bad Wolf need only huff and puff. The Big Bad Wolf — here is where his intelligence lies — has shown that he knows that this is all he needs to do. 

And what has worked before will work again.

##

Besides the essay collection that includes Blanshard, I have been spending time still with Emerson and am working my way into G.E. Moore's Ethics and through — this is quite a different beast — Swift's Gulliver, which I apparently only read in abbreviated or excerpted form before this. Writer Anna Tambour tells me this book is a constant mental companion for her. It should have been for me, especially in these last ten years when I allowed a fragmentary acquaintance to serve. I am also reading a book by a cousin of Ralph Waldo: Joseph Emerson's Lectures and Sermons, of 1897. Though he admired his famous relative, this Emerson — well versed in Greek literature, lofty but without pretension, and inspiring in the way a good Classicist can be — proves to be a different sort of stimulating company.

One book I found marvelous and eye-opening in a fairly no-nonsense and even-toned way. It pestered me to be read it so many times that I finally did: Iris Origo's War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-4 — an account of times in and around a large estate during Mussolini's rule and in the time when the Nazis took control. Origo's obvious competency and intelligence, her compassion for those under her care and guidance, and her fine grasp of the larger situation all emerge clearly. Her leading a body of children away from a situation rapidly becoming too dangerous, seeking safety across the countryside, brings tears to my eyes even in memory.

As in prior years I continue my J.S. Bach program. At the present moment — I am putting these final words down on Dec. 13 — I am halfway through this year's twelfth reading of the Preludes and Fugues, Books One and Two. Feeling fairly comfortable with these forty-eight compositions as I do, I keep thinking I should expand my readings. Yet gaining ever-increasing familiarity with these continually impressive works satisfies me for now, given time restraints. After Dec. 24th, in the year's remaining days I will each evening revisit Book One Prelude and Fugues Twenty-Three and Twenty-Four — which I recommend as lovely pieces for the Yuletide and for New Year's Eve, when I will be pondering whether to change this reading habit with the calendar.

Happy readings to all in a difficult season of change!

Mark Rich  has had two collections of short fiction published — Edge of Our Lives (RedJack) and Across the Sky (Fairwood) — as well as chapbooks from presses including Gothic and Small Beer. He is also the author of a major biographical and critical study, C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, published by McFarland and, most recently, of Toys in the Age of Wonder: Science Fiction, Society and the Symbolism of Play. With partner-in-life Martha Borchardt and two Scotties-in-life he lives in Cashton, Wisconsin, and gardens, shovels snow, still reads Bach daily, and remains faithfully behind in his book revisions.