Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Regular readers here will remember Ken, who lived here at the abbey on and off for a number of years and who wrote his books here. He’s featured in a new podcast from The Art of Manliness that I think is brilliant. The podcast is about Ken’s first book, Walden on Wheels.
Podcast #980: Walden on Wheels — A Man, a Debt, and an American Adventure
What is it about Alexander that continues to fascinate us? Wasn’t he just another ruthless conquerer? Or did he, in a mere ten years, leave the Mediterranean more civilized than he found it, setting the stage for the classical age, and changing the course of Western culture, by humbling the Persians and elevating the Greeks?
Historical docudramas are not usually of this quality. The drama is excellent. The mysterious English actor Buck Braithwaite was born to play the Alexander role. The scholars are very good.
This is a six-part series that quickly became very popular on Netflix. You can watch the trailer here.
Starting in 1910, books in the Tom Swift series (written for teenagers) have sold more than 30 million copies, according to the Wikipedia article. And yet I don’t recall ever having seen a Tom Swift book in a (used) bookstore until yesterday. My brother had six or eight of the 1954 series, so when I saw the blue denim cover in the store I recognized it immediately as a Tom Swift book.
I also had no idea that the Tom Swift series of books continued until 2019. I can see on eBay that the older books are highly collectible. They’re inexpensive because there are so many copies extant. I’m not sentimental enough about the Tom Swift books to collect them. I read them, I think, when I was a little too young (eleven or twelve), and they didn’t make a great impression on me. Still, they’re classic nerd fiction, and, as the Wikipedia article points out, the books inspired several generations of engineers and scientists.
⬆︎ There actually was never an author named Victor Appleton. That was a pseudonym that the publisher used for multiple authors, some of whom were women. According to Wikipedia, the 1954 series were written by Harriet Adams, who was the daughter of Edward Stratemeyer, who originally conceived the Tom Swift series starting in 1910.
I love dictionaries, and I always check out dictionaries when shopping through used books. This Danish dictionary, because of its beautiful bright red cover, almost jumped off the shelf into my hands. I know exactly one word of Danish — hygge.
If you hear a Danish person say this word, it will sound like “hooga,” or “hugga.” Thus I have no idea why it is spelled with a “y.” The Danish word hygge is surely related to our English word hug. Webster’s gives the source of the English hug as an Old Norse word, hugga, meaning “soothe.” The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, is wishy-washy. It says that hug appeared in English in the 16th Century but that the origin is unknown. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, 1966) seems to agree with Webster’s. It says that hug is probably of Scandinavian origin and also mentions an Old English relative, hyge, meaning mind, heart, or mood.
The OED’s caution notwithstanding, it seems pretty obvious that hygge and hug are related — the sound, as well as the meaning, as well as the geography. But maybe the OED couldn’t find a source to prove it. I don’t know. I hope they’re still arguing about it at Oxford.
I can testify that the Danish are very serious about the concept of hygge. I got to know a lot of Danes because I helped install a Danish publishing system at the San Francisco Chronicle. I’ve also made a couple of trips to Aarhus. Once, in a training session on the Danish publishing system, the Danish instructor spent at least twenty minutes talking about hygge. I suspect that part of his motivation was to explain to workaholic Americans why holidays and private time are so sacred to Danes, especially in winter. Newspaper people are accustomed to working on Christmas day, because daily newspapers don’t take a day off. But Danes on Christmas day, the instructor said, “are home having hygge.” The word conveys physical comfort, as in warmth; and it also conveys emotional comfort, as in family and friends, conviviality, food and drink.
I would assume, since this dictionary was printed in Denmark (in 2002, first edition 1995), that its purpose was to serve as reference for native speakers of Danish who work with English. The sound of Danish is completely incomprehensible to me, but as I browse through the dictionary, I see can see from written Danish that Danish and English have many more cognates than I would have guessed. And though my ear can’t hear the connection, in writing the relationship between German and Danish is pretty obvious.
One of the things that keeps me interested in Sir Walter Scott is the gothic atmosphere. The Black Dwarf is rich with gothic atmosphere — moors and bogs in the dark of night, spectres by moonlight that may or may not be real. Still, this novel has a simple and well worn plot. It’s one of the early Waverley novels, 1817.
My next adventure with Sir Walter Scott is Castle Dangerous, 1831, which was the last of the Waverley novels.
My quest for bread that is both truly good and truly healthy probably will go on for the rest of my life. Bread is probably my favorite food. I could live on San Francisco sourdough bread, Havarti cheese, wine, and strawberry preserves. Though I probably wouldn’t live for long.
A combination of barley flour and whole wheat flour (about four parts barley to one part wheat) makes a tasty biscuit or quick bread. Barley has a wonderful taste. But the bread is dry, with a mealy texture. Potatoes both moisten the bread and improve the texture.
Lately I’ve been cooking potatoes in advance and letting them chill before I use them. The chilling both improves the potato’s glycemic index and makes the potato a better food for the microbiome. Just mash the cooked potato into the bread dough.
The daily requirement for potassium is shockingly high. Most people, it seems, are deficient in potassium. In fact, many people probably get more daily sodium than potassium. That would be “upside down on potassium,” which is not at all a healthy thing.
Low-sodium V8 juice is nice way to get some potassium insurance. It’s supplemented with potassium chloride, though the vegetable juices are naturally high in potassium. Per cup, it has 850mg of potassium, 140mg of sodium, and 45 calories. That’s a good deal, nutritionally. I also find that V8 juice helps me cut down on wine consumption, because V8 juice goes very nicely with meals.
Once or twice a year, I get an irresistible craving for fried oysters. Here in the American South, at least within easy trucking distance from the coast, the art of frying seafood is extremely well understood. Any town of any size will have a fried fish house.
I’m in North Carolina. North Carolina does produce some oysters, but most of our oysters here come from the Chesapeake Bay. Last year, the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Maryland had the biggest oyster harvest in 35 years:
“The Chesapeake oyster is still in the very early stages of a comeback after a tremendous amount of investment in reducing pollution to the Bay, years of diligent fishery management, and significant successful state and federal investment in oyster restoration. To keep oyster numbers growing, harvest increases must continue to be done slowly, incrementally, and cautiously, as VMRC staff recommends.”
I never appreciated just how vast the Chesapeake Bay is, and how much coastline it has, until I flew over the full length of it, north to south, on a flight from New York to Greensboro. Such flights normally would take a more westerly course over land. But on that particular day, a line of inland thunderstorms pushed air traffic east. It’s good to hear that the Chesapeake Bay — a classic commons — is making a comeback after years of abuse. We understand very well now that a commons must be regulated, or it will be abused and depleted.
Everybody I know, no matter where they live, said that January was miserable. Now that February is here, things are looking up. The daffodils should be blooming here in a couple of weeks.
The first of Isaac Asimov’s robot novels, The Caves of Steel, was first published in book form in 1954. I had wanted to read it as escape fiction, but I’m afraid it must now be read as historical fiction. The plot is so-so, and the anticipation of the future misses the mark. It’s really just a murder mystery set in the future. But the writing is good.
I bought both The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun (which is the second robot novel) in a hardback book club edition that I think was published around 1961.
I’m finding that I like the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings films better than the theater versions. The scenes that were cut from the theater versions clearly were cut to reduce the run time, not because the scenes that were cut were inferior. The restored scenes include a lot of beautiful dialogue straight from Tolkien and a lot of excellent character development.
The extended versions can be streamed from HBO Max.
The oldest white deer in the woods here is at least eight years old, because it was eight years ago that I first got a photograph of her. There have been rumors of a second white deer for quite some time. But only a week or so ago did a neighbor get proof of it on a game camera. There are two white deer in the same frame. One is smaller and may be a yearling.
White Girl, in my driveway, three days ago, shot from an upstairs window. It was odd, but just before White Girl was in the driveway, a red fox was standing in the same spot, then scampered into the woods. I asked a neighbor, who has lots of game cameras and who has given names to a lot of the wild critters, whether the deer and the fox are friends. “I think they just use the same trails,” he said.
It takes a lot to wear out a book, but I wore out my copy of The Joy of Cooking that I had bought back in the 1970s. Even when I bought it it wasn’t a young book. It’s the 1943 wartime edition, probably the most collectible of this cookbook’s many editions. I bought it in an antique shop. When it fell apart, I saved the pieces, tucked the book into a safe place in the back of a bookshelf, and ordered a new copy of the same 1943 edition on eBay.
Then some neighbors had a need for a recipe for homemade butterscotch. I suspected that The Joy of Cooking would have a recipe for making a butterscotch concoction from scratch, and it did. The neighbors were fascinated by the cookbook and its old-fashioned cook-from-scratch charm. I had been curious about bookbinding and book repair. But it was my wounded old cookbook that led me to watch a bunch of YouTube videos on bookbinding and then to order (from Amazon) what one needs to rebind books.
The material for rebinding a single book doesn’t cost that much — two dollars or less. But the materials can’t be ordered in one-book quantities, so the cost of getting started in bookbinding adds up. One needs boards for the covers, heavy paper for the spines and end sheets, fabric for the covers, “headband” material, the gauze-like material that reinforces the spines, lots of the right kind of glue, some brushes, a cutting board, a sharp cutting instrument, a “bone folder,” and, most expensive of all, a book press.
There are many good videos on rebinding book. I found this one particularly helpful. The job is mostly about measuring and cutting accurately and doing a good job of glueing without making a mess.
I’d now argue that every serious booklover, and in particular anyone interested in antique and collectible books, should rebind at least one book. That way one learns how books are put together. It’s an old guild craft that hasn’t changed that much since Gutenberg. The construction of most hardback books is actually pretty good, but there are some details that are found only in higher quality books, such as a well-made spine with an “Oxford hollow.” In rebinding a cookbook, I wanted to be sure that the rebound book would stay open and all the pages lie flat, as with the original binding. You’ll find information on what an “Oxford hollow” is in the video I linked to above, and the video explains why an Oxford hollow makes a more relaxed but just-as-strong binding. An Oxford hollow is easy to make, which makes me wonder why all books don’t have them.
The 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking, I would say, is the most complete reference on standard American cooking ever published. People know what they are now, and the 1943 edition has gotten fairly expensive on eBay. You may remember a scene in “Julia” in which Julia Child meets Irma Rombauer in a publisher’s office. Rombauer is depicted as very dowdy, while Julia Child was sophisticated. The Joy of Cooking is a dowdy cookbook, but because it’s so complete, and because it was published in 1943, before Americans started subsisting on ultra-processed foods, you’ll find a scratch recipe for just about any American dish that you might want to make.
My next rebinding project will be a 1974 edition of a Webster’s dictionary that I wore out. As with the cookbook, I bought a new copy. But books that you’ve had for a long time and have worn out are like old friends. You’d almost think that there are tiny ghosts inside old books.
I just finished Kenilworth. It’s the ninth of Sir Walter Scott’s twenty-six Waverley novels that I have read. What stands out is his treatment of Elizabeth I. Scott’s Elizabeth I must surely be one of the most terrifying characters in English literature — absolute power and the willingness to use it. I found myself often almost trembling along with her courtiers, down on their knees in terror of losing their heads.
Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester, managed to keep his head, though he came close to losing it. It’s not a piece of English history that I am particularly interested in, but the Wikipedia article on Robert Dudley suggests that more recent scholarship sees Dudley as less a fool and toy of Elizabeth and more as one of Elizabeth’s most important advisers. Scott, it would seem, was no great fan of Dudley.
Kenilworth is set in Berkshire and Warwickshire. There are not even any Scottish characters. I’m eager to get back to Scott’s Scotland in whatever I decide to read next.
For my 75th birthday, a friend who now lives near Edinburgh brought me a stunning gift that he had carried in his luggage across the Atlantic. It’s a complete 13-volume set of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, bound in leather, printed in the Old Country in 1876. He bought the books at McNaughtan’s book shop in Edinburgh. There are 26 Waverley novels, two novels per volume.
Sir Walter Scott was once one of the most popular writers writing in English. Today, for whatever reason, very few people read him. I have read ten or eleven of his novels so far, and now that I have a complete set of the Waverley novels I’ll make a years-long project of reading all of them. I’ve written here previously about the novels of Walter Scott, and I don’t want to repeat myself, but you can search for “Walter” (on this blog’s main page) if you’re interested in my older posts.
Sooner or later, it seems inevitable to me that, either in America or in Britain, someone will make a beautiful movie based on a Sir Walter Scott novel, and that will start a revival. Then, instead of my being a Walter Scott boor, people might start asking me for recommendations on what they might read. For the record, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d suggest The Heart of Mid-Lothian, or The Antiquary. I do not recommend Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe is not even set in Scotland, and its story of chivalry and Robin Hood will already be familiar to most people. It’s Scott’s stories about life in Old Scotland that I find most appealing — Highlands to Edinburgh, peasants to princes, castles to Highland huts, violent coastal storms to spring in the mountains, and all manner of speech and dialogue.
Yes, reading Scott can be hard work, even compared with other 19th Century writers. The structure of Scott’s novels also can be a deterrent. Typically, in the first third (or so), it appears that nothing is ever going to happen, as Scott introduces his characters and settings and sets up what writers call exposition, covering all the details and background that the reader needs to know to follow the story. In the last third of the book, things will definitely happen, and every element that was introduced early in the novel will play its part.
I was very curious to know whether any information about the previous owners of these books had survived. I emailed an inquiry to McNaughtan’s, and I received this reply:
Thank you for your enquiry. I am glad that you like the books and I can see even from your photo that they have found a home with plenty of friends around.
This set came to us from the estate of a collector of leather bindings based in the north of Scotland. They were likely previously acquired within either the Scottish book trade or from a London bookseller, beyond which the trail goes cold, I’m afraid. The most probable earlier history for the set is that they were originally bought by inhabitants of a large-ish house and remained there through several generations before entering the secondhand book trade.
When I started scanning the illustrations, two clues were tucked inside the books (see below). Inside volume 9 were fragments of a Dundee newspaper dated February 15, 1948. In the back of volume 13 was an invoice. The books had been purchased at an auction in Edinburgh on November 5, 1994. A best guess, then, is that the original owners of the books lived in Dundee or thereabouts. The books probably were in the hands of the original owners until well after 1948. Then, probably in an estate sale in which the contents of a “large-ish house” were sold, the books were bought by a collector in 1994. Then that collector’s books were sold to McNaughtan’s much more recently.
I will never ask my friend how much he paid for this set of books, but some Googling reveals that, in 2000, Christie’s sold what appears to be the same set for £1,645.
My guess is that few universities other than the University of Edinburgh do Scott scholarship anymore. In Googling, I came across a thesis for a master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh, written in 2008 by Ruth M. McAdams. The title is “The Posthumous British Editions of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, 1832-1871, and the Evolution of his Literary Legacy.” The abstract reads:
This thesis argues for the importance of the posthumous editions of Sir Walter Scott‟s Waverley Novels in shaping his literary reputation between 1832 and 1871. In the series of editions published by Robert Cadell and later A. & C. Black between Scott’s death and the centenary of his birth, changes were made to the paratextual presentation of the novels, particularly through illustrations and notes. By tracing these changes, I will show how Scott’s literary legacy evolves over this crucial period. Furthermore, by demonstrating that these posthumous editions reached a far wider audience than ever before, I will suggest that these editions, rather than any published during Scott’s lifetime, most powerfully shaped his status as a cultural icon in the nineteenth century. These editions are, thus, still important to the way that Sir Walter Scott’s place in the literary canon is understood.
There is even a reference in this paper to the Nimmo editions that I now have.
More than half of the hits on this blog come from Google. Over the past 16 years, I’ve written on many subjects. Some of those subjects are not exactly in the mainstream, subjects on which one has to dig a little to find information. For example, a good many people have come here from Google to read my post from 2022, “We’re overdue for a Sir Walter Scott revival.” I suppose I’ve joined the rarefied ranks (most of them probably are in Edinburgh) of Scott evangelists longing for a Sir Walter Scott revival.
Also, the engravings in my Nimmo editions are beautiful and beautifully printed. They are, of course, in the public domain, and in addition to making them available here I’ll also post the scans at Wikimedia Commons.
I was able to find very little information on William P. Nimmo. There’s not even a Wikipedia article. He was, however, a writer as well as a publisher.
Good luck trying to find newly printed editions of Walter Scott’s novels! You can buy the 30-volume set from the Edinburgh University Press for $2,445. You’d be able to buy Ivanhoe easily enough on Amazon. But I highly recommend finding, reading, and preserving the old editions. There is a good market on eBay, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. If you buy a single copy, that copy probably came from a set which was broken up for sale. It’s sad that so many sets have been broken, but on eBay you’ll also find sets that are complete or nearly complete. These old editions, unless they’re rare and collectible, are not expensive.
Just last week the new edition of Tolkien’s letters was released. There was a previous edition of Tolkien’s letters (1981, a book that I have had for years), but the new edition adds about 150 new letters, bringing the total number of letters to 500.
In many ways, I find the letters of notable figures just as interesting as biographies — Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, or the Freud-Jung letters. My to-be-read stack is pretty high at this point, but I’m eager to get to this volume.
A couple of weeks ago, a strange new book on UFO’s was published. I haven’t yet read it, but apparently it takes UFOs very seriously. Ken made me aware of it. Ross Douthat mentioned it in his New York Times newsletter (to which Ken subscribes) and included a link to an interview with the author: “UFOs and Aliens Are (Probably) Not What You Think: An Interview with Diana Walsh Pasulka.” (For the record, neither of us is conservative enough to follow The European Conservative, but Ross Douthat certainly is.)
Ken has almost finished the book and is intrigued. I will write more about the book after it comes up in my stack of reading.
Ken is here for a week. He spoke at High Point University on Monday, and he’ll be here not only for a proper American Thanksgiving (he now lives near Edinburgh) as well as — dare I mention it — my 75th birthday, a few days after Thanksgiving.
Ken’s last book was This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take it Back, in 2018. I’m very excited about a new book proposal he’s working on and that he plans to have ready for his agents in a month or so. It’s such a great idea that I’m sure he’ll get a book contract, and, if so, of course I’ll write more about that later.
Meanwhile we’re caught up in a social whirlwind, because everybody wants to see Ken while he’s here.
A few days ago, I mentioned here that I am very enthusiastic about a five-part BBC series from 2012, Parade’s End. (The series can be streamed on HBO Max.) The series is visually beautiful, perfectly cast, and brilliantly written, with some of the best dialogue I’ve ever encountered. I don’t yet know to what degree the perfect dialogue should be attributed to Tom Stoppard, who adapted the novels and wrote the screenplay, or to the author of the novels, Ford Madox Ford, who published the novels between 1924 and 1928. I had not heard of Ford Madox Ford, but I was determined to explore the novels. First editions of these novels are rare, but I found a 1961 revival edition on eBay. This edition contains all four novels in a single volume, at a hefty 838 pages. My guess is that even this 1961 edition is not common.
When the book arrived, I was sad to see that it had been injured. The front end paper was broken at the hinge, exposing the innards of the binding. No doubt librarians have a standard method of repairing such injuries, but I had to make up my own solution. That was to cut a strip of strong paper and glue it in with rubber cement to close up the rip in the end paper. That worked great. Books with lots of pages are particularly vulnerable to this kind of damage. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the book. Some previous owner clearly understood the book’s historical value, because inserted under the back cover was a printout of an article about Ford Madox Ford from the September 17, 1950, issue of the New York Times Book Review.
The 1950 article from the New York Times Book Review can be read here but requires a subscription to the New York Times. The article is “The Story of Ford Madox Ford: In Parade’s End a Master Novelist Caught the Essence of His Generation.” The article was written by Caroline Gordon, who I now see represents some literary history that I need to explore, including a connection to my native state of North Carolina. Here is the article’s first paragraph:
In 1938 Ford Madox Ford made a talk before a class of girls who were studying “the novel” under my tutelage. It was in April. In North Carolina. April in North Carolina is like July in less-favored climates. Ford was then in his early sixties and already suffering from the heart disease that killed him; he seemed to feel the heat even more than we had feared that he would. My husband and I debated as to whether it would be safe to let the old man make the talk he was bent on making. When we reached the classroom the next morning and I saw that his veined, rubicund face had gone ashen from the effort of climbing the stairs I wished that I had not accepted his offer to speak. He sat down at one end of a long table, his chair pushed well back in order to accommodate his great paunch, his legs spread wide to support his great weight.
Also:
It is easy to see why Ford’s work was not popular in his own day, but it is hard to see why it has been neglected in our own, for he would seem, in these times, to have a special claim on our attention. He is a superb historical novelist, seeming as much at home in a medieval castle or in Tudor England as in Tietjen’s twentieth-century railway carriage.
I am not yet certain what Caroline Gordon’s connection to North Carolina was, but I suspect it was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I am hoping that I will like Parade’s End and that Ford’s novels — as long as I can find copies of them — will be as rich a mine of literary history as I have found in the also-neglected historical novels of Sir Walter Scott.
This Netflix series is just barely over the threshold of watchability. The characters are sweet, but cloying, often to the point of being irritating. The dialogue was some of the worst I’ve encountered in a long time. Most of the scenes are about 30 percent too long. It’s one of those stories that tries to manipulate us into liking it, usually by being sentimental.
The novel All the Light We Cannot See was published in 2014. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
How, I kept asking myself, does mediocre material like this win a Pulitzer Prize? I found my answer in the Wikipedia article. The novel is written in the present tense. This is a proven technique that the very worst of writers figure out: If you develop some sort of quirky and irritating style of writing, then many people including critics will think it’s good writing. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was published in 2009. I strongly suspect that Anthony Doerr was copying Mantel’s gimmick of writing in the present tense, though Doerr is less opaque than Mantel. (I read a sample of Doerr’s novel on Amazon. As for Hilary Mantel, I tried to read Wolf Hall and flung it after about four pages because the writing was so obnoxious.) Writing like Mantel’s accords with bad writers’ notions of what good writing sounds like. After all, that stuff wins prizes, doesn’t it?
Doerr’s dialogue is what I call lazy dialogue. That’s when the characters say the obvious thing for carrying the story forward, as the writer cranks it out. Good writers will see to it that their characters rarely say the obvious thing. Good writers put far more effort into dialogue that not only carries the story forward, but that also amplifies characterization and that adds color to whatever situation the characters are in.
And then there is rhythm. The rhythm of Doerr’s English sounds like a woodpecker.
I know I’m testy on the matter of bad writing that passes itself off as good writing. If it were merely bad, it would be easy enough to ignore it. But that bad writing wins prizes is an insult to the many better writers who remain more obscure, and an injustice to good editors who see bad writing for what it is but for whatever reason have to let authors get away with it. I have a fantasy of having someone like Hilary Mantel or Anthony Doerr trapped beside me on a crowded train so that I can berate them with what they never hear — that they are terrible writers badly in need of a fearless editor, from whom they might learn a great deal.
All that said, All the Light We Cannot See does contain a warm and edifying story, though a story that could have been much better told. And Doerr was very wise in choosing the medieval town of Saint-Malo, in Brittany, as his setting. Saint-Malo is an extremely picturesque walled town that was occupied by the Nazis in World War II and liberated by American forces in 1944 in battles that nearly destroyed the city. Saint-Malo was carefully rebuilt after the war. It’s now a tourist destination. According to Wikipedia, the population is under 50,000, but in tourist season there may be up to 300,000 people in the city. There are ferries to Saint-Malo from Portsmouth and the Channel Islands. Saint-Malo is now on my travel wish list, though I’d want to go in the off season to avoid the crowds.
It’s my practice not to read other people’s reviews before I write here about a book, a movie, or a television series. After I wrote the above this morning, I Googled for some reviews of All the Light We Cannot See. The New Republic savaged the novel as “a sentimental mess” and described Doerr’s writing as “pompous, pretentious, and imprecise.” Yes, yes, and yes.
But there’s worse. During the last fifteen minutes of the Netflix series, I cringed lest Doerr, being a bad writer, ruin the ending. The Netflix ending was just as it should be in the art of storytelling. But I learned from a review of the novel that Netflix changed Doerr’s ending, because Doerr had indeed ruined it. Knowing now that Doerr botched the novel with the kind of ending that amateur writers write, I reduce the grade from a C-minus to a D-minus, with thanks to Netflix for correcting such a crass authorial error.
