Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

remember?

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:07:00 +0000

Hi. A brief placeholder entry for this blog. Do you remember? I remember books and book people and bookshops and reading a whole lot. I remember bookhunting and library sales and the passion I felt for the world of books. Simultaneously small and large, that world. I remember writing about it for years and years. And inhabiting it as fully as I could. Ryan and I navigated it together. Without him I doubt I ever would've been brave enough to open my own shop. He always said, "You're ready," to whatever I was hemming and hawing about. It's been just over four and a half years since Ry stepped away, or moved toward whatever comes next. Before he died he told me that he thought the world was entering another dark age, and I see that fear has come to pass, in our country and far beyond. And yet he would never only say that. That wasn't him. He loved life and the world, and offered a positive uplift in most all that he did.

Over the past year I printed a lot of writing of his from the last few years of his life, and got copies into various special collections in libraries and historical societies here in Maine and farther afield. It was one of my goals to honor him in this way, and I met that goal. My memoir The Ocean of Trees remains unfinished but I completed a pass through the manuscript before the end of the year and made what I think are the final edits. I hope to print a few copies privately in the spring, just to have for myself and for history perhaps. The book holds our basic story, or at least the parts of it that I can express - some of the facts and feelings.

Hodge the cat died over a year ago, the other third of our chosen family. He lived to be almost nineteen and his going was definite. He let me know it was his time. I miss him too and remember my chosen family - the three of us. How could I forget? Ry and Hodge seem far away now, and yet the grief washes over me in fresh waves often. I know they aren't the grief itself. They were life-affirming and we sure lived. I yearn for the relative innocence we had in the world before the pandemic, before a lot of things. I remember the safety of our privilege, the stretches of time during which nothing terrible happened to us or the people we loved, or our neighbors. The deep joy. The quiet contentedness. In some ways I know these times were dreams, because of course difficult things happened all over the place too.

These days, in this dark age, there is still some happiness. I have a new friend whom I love and who loves me; I see my family and a few close friends; I paint and write a lot; I live quietly. Present also is fear, sorrow, and helplessness, and then action toward what I hope is the just and the good. Peace.

the ocean of tears

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 15:59:00 +0000

Hi, friends. A brief update from here. Summers are not so great anymore. The day that Ry died was July 24th, and his birthday was August 18th. Those milestones came and went. I made it through the third year of grief, and am beginning the fourth. Grief. "It doesn't end," as a widowed acquaintance said to my sister, after Ry died. I don't know what to do any more about much of anything, so I coast a lot and try to meet what each day seems to require. I work and swim and take walks and spend time with my sister and our family and a few friends, and take care of Hodge the cat, who is eighteen and a half and doing well. I think of ways to fill the hours of each day so I can take a book or two and go back to bed as early as possible. I listen to the Red Sox on the radio. I write. I spent a lot of time this past year writing the new memoir, The Ocean of Trees. Then I set the manuscript aside and will return to it this winter with perhaps some renewed ambition or will to complete it. But it's mostly there. It's about 250 pages. The first substantive page begins this way:

And the beginning of part one is this:

Then the beginning of part two is this:

I wish I could use other people's words to write our story, the story of Ry and me. Mine don't feel good enough. I have a lot of wishes. Most of all I wish Ry was still here creating the story alongside me. A terrible realization came to me the other day, that our marriage and time together was a chapter of life. And I will have other chapters it seems, since time is doing what it does. Our early years of being young and in love are a chapter, as is my childhood, teenagerhood, and the years before I knew Ry. The bookshop years were good and another long chapter of life. Then came our forties, when things got really great, mostly. Ry and I were happy and doing what we most loved.

What next? I don't know. I'm grateful I can work. I'm painting and showing and selling my paintings. I'm still keeping a diary, and writing this new memoir. I can't see the future, anticipate much, or make plans the way I used to. The loneliness I feel is so specific that not much seems to touch it. I used to love solitude, and my own company, and quiet. Now I have too much and it makes each day feel over long. I know I have more to give in life and I'm actively seeking healing in many ways. One of my daily affirmations is this: I trust the universe; I believe in what I'm doing (breathe in; breathe out). All for now. Thanks for reading and love from here.

more grief diaries

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 17:05:00 +0000

Hey there, friends. This is another placeholder post for the end of this long sad year. I'm still here. And I'm working on my next book. It's slow going but I keep adding to it and editing what I've already written, so I hope that someday it will be complete and ready to print. It's the memoir I started before Ryan died, about painting and walking in the north woods of Maine, and the experience of reading Thoreau's Journal and The Maine Woods. The book was underway and I was excited about it. I felt like there was more than just a kernel there. I had really begun. I could see it. In the winter and spring of 2021, I made a big push to finish my first memoir, Autobiography of an Island, about painting on Bear Island for all those years. And finish it I did. Then Ryan left, in July of 2021, and everything stopped. Life changed forever. Our time together, that often-joyous span of nearly thirty years, ended. What I could pick up again was fragmentary, for two years. It still is, in many ways. And I am writing down those fragments. The new memoir has become the story of us. It has two parts - before and after - the book I wanted and meant to write, and the book I now have to write, because of what has happened. I feel committed to writing our story, the story of us. No one else will. The purpose this project lends me is strong and bright, like Ry himself. I hope it will carry me forward through the next part of my life alone. I say alone, but Hodge is still here, and my close family and nearby friends, and the beach a mile or two from home. I can't say I'm looking forward to anything, but there is love here. And good work to do. That's a lot. Peace in the new year.

grief diaries

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Mon, 01 May 2023 14:39:00 +0000

Hi friends, it's been a long time, I know. I'm writing today as a placeholder, for myself and for Ryan, because I don't want this blog to be deleted due to inactivity. A brief life update: Hodge and I are living quietly at home. I have a daily routine that keeps me in motion when motion is required and helps me be still when I need to be still. Writing in my diary is one of the first things I do each day, after feeding Hodge his early breakfast. We miss Ry more than words can say. Tears arrive at some point each day, often several times a day. I also have some good times, being with my sister and our family, my niece, and a few close friends. Otherwise I spend my time alone, working in the studio, reading, and doing the necessary tasks of daily life. Grief is ever-present but sometimes a whisper and not the whole shout of pain. So much has happened since Ry died, it feels impossible to encapsulate. I will say that a few things I've done have been specifically for him, and a few are ongoing projects I want to share in the future. So I may write here again, about that. Until then, thank you for reading my blog all those years, such good years, when we were able to speak about books and bookshops and library sales and reading. I've read a stack of books about grief and bereavement, and they have helped that part of me which can be helped. But there is a part of me now gone, beyond that kind of help, because the essential trouble is unsolvable. When Ry left, half of me went along with him. Who we used to be. Who I was, with him. I'm slowly learning to live with a new version of myself, and reality. Enough for now. Thanks for reading. Peace, and gratitude for what we had, and what remains.

the love of my life

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 15:28:00 +0000

We were deeply happy together, for almost three decades. We met in our early 20s, and lived through so much, but not the summer of 2021. I lost my dearest Ry, to heart disease, at the end of July on the night of the full moon. How I miss him. Beyond words.

Dennis Ryan King II, August 18, 1969 - July 24, 2021.

Ry. My love, always and forever.

heat wave reading

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 14:33:00 +0000

It's too hot to think much, this morning. The windows are shut since the temperature is currently just under 80 degrees in the house, but it's hotter outside and may be in the low 90s this afternoon. A fan is pushing some air around, and Hodge is in the coolest place indoors, the north-facing living room. He's flat, sacked out for the day. I'm going to get a few things done and then join him, with a good book. Current reading is as follows:

Yesterday was also revoltingly torrid, so after completing something momentous, in my little universe at least, of which more in just a moment, I sat for a few hours and read books. I've been painting for days, and working on lots of other things, and had almost forgotten what relaxing felt like. It was good to lose myself for a while and inhabit some other interesting places and times. I re-read The Summer Book by Tove Jasson (nyrb edition 2008) from cover to cover:

I first read it when a dear friend found out I never had, and sent me this copy. It's like nothing else I've ever read, except it holds a few shades of Gerald Durrell's memoir My Family and Other Animals, a book inextricably linked to my childhood, since my family and I read it aloud several times, on long car trips especially. The Summer Book holds the same kind of hilarious/dreadful combination of events which aren't even truly events, just happenstance or life observed, in there alongside the over-arching theme of an oddly absent parent, which is barely explained, and yet the family carries on with life as it is. I might re-read My Family and Other Animals soon, too, come to think of it. It's perfect summer reading.

As is today's choice for a re-read: The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth von Arnim (Macmillan 1900). Certain books ask to be read again every few years, and this is one of them. Gentle yet piercingly thoughtful, if memory serves. She says (pp.1-2): "I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls, they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend months in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests.... I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out there on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have discovered there is peace."

Sounds like heaven, although after the enforced solitude of last summer, I have doubts. Solitude may have come easier for von Arnim than for most, seeing as how she was married to a count, lived in a schloss, and had servants. I do not fault her for that (and I recognize how those very circumstances trapped her in certain ways), instead I enjoy the fact that she had time to write, and did write, very well. Her schloss-life did not last all that long anyway, since the count created trouble for himself and lost everything. The Elizabeth von Arnim Society offers a fascinating look at the ruins of the manor house and surrounds, as it exists today.

The other books shown are either finished or in process. I just read In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary (Flatiron 2016), and it was enlightening to discover the life story of the woman behind all those children's books we know and love. I wish the book had more direct quotes from Brown's diaries, though, not just the one tantalizing quote at the very end of the book. The Jed Perl anthology, Art in America 1945-1970 was a long long read, and utterly fantastic. It took me two or three months to navigate all its 800+ pages, but it did what all great books should do - led me straight to more great books. Since many of the selections he chooses are from other sources, and while I already own some of them, some I didn't. But I do now! At the moment I'm halfway through another recent arrival, retired pastor Rob McCall's collection of brief essays (and sermon-like commentaries) Some Glad Morning: Holding Hope In Apocalyptic Times (Pushcart Press 2020). In the introduction he says (p.9):

"The world is gradually moving from dogmatic religion established by male hierarchies and based on supernatural revelation to open-sourced religion established by consenses and based on Nature. We are moving with it."

Sign me up, although as always I have my doubts about the word religion. There is something, though, something undeniable and sacred and I experience it when I'm outside, and I love it and feel at home there, and feel loved in return. This is, in part, what my book is about, not just about painting, and the little island I stayed on for years. Speaking of my book - this is the momentous event I would like to mark, and share. Yesterday I finished working on the remaining details of my manuscript, and today I have turned over the whole messy thing - cover mock-ups included - to the lovely woman who will format it for me, so it looks like an actual trade book, and I can send it to the printer. All this will take a while, but I hope to have copies in hand before the end of summer. Another wonderful reason to get some lemonade from the fridge, put my feet up, and take the rest of the day off. When evening arrives and the day truly cools down, Ryan will be home, Hodge will wake up, and we'll open the windows wide and watch the fireflies dance in the dusk. They are out there, tiny lights in the dark, showing us the way. Enjoy these hot summer days, they are so fleeting. I eye next year's already-stacked woodpile with satisfaction, and think more than a little fondly of winters past and future.

bookselling in the time of covid

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Tue, 18 May 2021 13:30:00 +0000

A quick note this morning to say hello, and mention that I returned to my book booth late last week, for the first time in over a year. The antiques mall where I sell books closed for some of the pandemic, then opened again, then closed again, than reopened. Here at home I had a ton of books for my booth, from one of the last public events I attended, pre-pandemic: a library book sale during the first weekend of March, 2020. In a fit of spring cleaning, I also culled a lot of books from my own stacks, and ended up with around fourteen cartons and assorted bags of books and other items to bring in. It took me a few hours to clean and tidy up my booth (which was a sad mess), and shelve all the new books. I remember how immaculate my shop used to be - first thing every morning I'd straighten the books on their shelves, touch the spines, put a few new things on display, and give everyone a pep talk as I opened the shop - and seeing my booth in a relative shambles was disheartening. But throughout the last year I just wasn't willing to be in public places, stores especially. The wonderful folks at the antiques mall understood and kept my little business going for me, while I stayed home. It was good to be back, and have my hands on a lot of books again:

Ryan helped me get all the books inside, then waited, took a few pictures, and was generally supportive while I did my thing. Business throughout the last year was slow but surprisingly decent. And the owner of the antiques mall didn't charge booth rent for the times they had to close. I made some money here and there, and enjoyed seeing what sold, and what would therefore live to be read another day. Oh world of books, I miss you. But the corner has really been turned in my life, from being a professional full-time bookseller to being a professional full-time painter (it only took a decade or so, to make that transition), and I don't think there's any going back now. I still love and want to continue with bookselling, but my art life is ascendant. I just brought sixty paintings to my primary gallery for my solo show there in June, and the gallerist would like even more for the remainder of the summer. The second gallery representing me also wants more work. Maine is about to reopen for business, and is one of the safest states to visit right now. We could have a very busy season. However, I'm going to continue to stay away from highly-populated places, and out of stores and other enclosed spaces, whenever possible. Ryan and I both are cautious people by nature, and see no reason to take chances when we've made it this far. I'm glad that painting is solitary. It suits me fine.

This week I'm working at home, looking at the empty spaces left by the removal of all those objects last week - so many books, so many paintings - and wondering what will arrive to fill the space. My instinct is to leave it empty. I only have one book on order right now, which is supposed to be published next week, but other than that I have no desire to buy, just to continue with my spring cleaning, and clear out even more. This is probably the residual effect of being cooped up for so many months. I'm looking forward to more space, greater clarity, and the open horizons of summer.

spring check-in

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 18:02:00 +0000

Almost the end of April, already! As of now, I'm two weeks past my second vaccination shot, and just beginning to experience the first glimmerings of... I won't say normalcy, because who knows what that even is, but rather a quiet peaceful happiness. One I usually inhabit, but which felt far away during the past year, and really throughout most of the last four years. I won't write a lot today, but want to share the good feeling while it's visiting, along with this new little to-be-read stack of books:

First and foremost, I just received the brand new Jonny Sun book in the mail, Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations (Harper 2021). I loved his illustrated book everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too (Harper 2017), not to mention the book of Lin-Manuel Miranda tweets he also illustrated, Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You (Random House 2018), which is utterly charming and heartfelt. I read his twitter account regularly, and love his highly-anxious-yet-positive vibe. Now I'm over halfway through this new book of his essays. Favorites so far are On yearning, On nostalgia, Staying in, How to cook scrambled eggs (which he should win some kind of award for, it's so odd and so good! like a storyboard for a perfect film short!), I am trying to decide if I should buy two rolls of paper towel or three, and Anxiety tax. Some of the essays are one paragraph, or even just a few sentences. Others are longer, and have line drawings and symbols accompanying them. All of them allow us, the readers, a glimpse at the truths of his life, a life in which he experiences depression and overwork, and examines the nature of happiness, with houseplants, friends, and family members making appearances along the way. Open and endearing.

My other books are all over the place, as usual. The Frugal Vegan cookbook by Katie Koteen and Kate Kasbee (Page Street 2017) was a gift from my mother-in-law a while back. I'm not vegan but have been mostly vegetarian for the past three/four years now, and after cooking for myself and Ryan for more than a year I'm very interested in learning a few new foodways. The book has some good ideas and illustrations. I'll at least have fun imagining them, even if I don't implement them.

The rest of the books I'm just dipping into. I've started and stopped Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer several times and am determined to read the entire thing, soon. What I've read so far is fantastic, but other books keep nudging her aside. Her long essay The Serviceberry, in December's Emergence magazine, is deeply beautiful, and gives a taste of her writing style. I also got a new book of poetry by local author Stuart Kestenbaum, things seemed to be breaking: visual poems (Deerbrook 2021), and a collection by art critic Dave Hickey, Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste (Ridinghouse 2013). Hickey says on the front flap of the book:

"I advocate site-specific optimism. Hope for a better tomorrow is delusional, but we can still look forward to the next few hours with a high heart."

On that note, which sounds a lot like what I'm feeling today, I'll sign off and walk out into this gorgeous afternoon. I might even paint the flowers in the back yard. The forsythias are a generous froth of bright yellow, and the dandelions and daffodils near them radiate almost the same color, against the fresh green of the lawn. We heard the first hermit thrush of the year, last night. Spring. SPRING...!

seeking permission

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 15:10:00 +0000

Another month! Like the last, except slightly warmer! I've been out painting (in the car, yes, but with the window rolled down), and birds of spring are returning to our yard (saw the first song sparrow this morning, under the cedars), and the snow is nearly melted away (some blue ghosts remain at the edge of the field). I've set Thoreau aside for now; I never did finish Volume Seven of his Journal. I'll get back to it another time, I hope. From what I read in the Thoreau biography about how it progresses, I'd rather leave him here now, before he gets much older, darker, and sickly. Perhaps around 3000 pages of the Journal is enough for one winter. All in all he's been a most excellent readerly companion, over these last few months. I opened my own diary at random to see if I could find a quote or two to illustrate this, but instead saw some passages I'd copied from Emerson's tribute to him in the Riverside Thoreau collection Miscellanies (snippets from pp.18-23):

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor.... His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with a microscope, heard as with an ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imparts, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.... His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresover he went."

The essay-slash-obituary is very moving, however Emerson also says that Thoreau lacked the kind of ambition that he, Emerson, wished that Thoreau had possessed, so he could be a leader on the world stage, "...engineering for all America," rather than merely "...the captain of a huckleberry party." (p.29) I tend to think, after reading many places that indicated as much in Thoreau's letters and writings, that Thoreau did not seek that kind of power, ever, and mistrusted it, and disliked it. He looked and looked, but didn't see anyone like himself in literature, or politics, or even society in general, and subsequently traveled his own path. And wrote into existence a new way of being in the world.

In his Civil Disobedience (also printed in the Riverside Miscellanies p.146), he says "I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad." Take that, Emerson! Also (p.156): "I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.... I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society." And that! Phew. And yet, here he is, in his life and writing: pointing, forcing the issue, attempting to open eyes wide. Bracing stuff.

I always feel like there is much more I could say, and want to say, but there's only so much time, and we have to go pick up our grocery order soon, and then I have paintings to finish, in my studio. So I'll leave Thoreau for now, in a stack of unfinished reading, with many bookmarks throughout. There's a new stack at my elbow, as we speak, with nary a Thoreau title among the many:

Mmmmm, new books. Nothing like them. I ordered up a storm in January, and this is some of the fruit, to mix metaphors. Let's look at two more closely:

Brand new, these ones. I just got the Anne Lamott book in the mail. And I continue to love all things Tom Cox. His Notebook (Unbound 2021) contains various selections from his own handwritten notebooks. I've sampled a few pages here and there and am about to read the whole thing cover to cover. I can't wait - reading other people's journals and diaries is turning out to be a life-long fascination of mine. I will also say that his work reminds me of Thoreau in some ways - especially in his book of nature memoir essays in 21st-Century Yokel (Unbound 2017). If Thoreau collected vinyl records and wore bell-bottoms, which he might well have done, had he lived at a later time. And I was going to say if Thoreau was edgy, because Tom Cox is, but Thoreau certainly was. And if they both love cats (check), and music (check), and rambling the countryside (check), and the minutae of nature (check). Anyway, read Tom Cox...! He is high on my list of exemplary authors for all kinds of reasons, but one of the most recent is this: he recently granted me permission to quote him, in my own book.

Since finishing the book, my memoir Autobiography of an Island, in January, I've been doing something I should have started a long time ago: seeking permission to quote from various authors and artists. In writing in general, I've always copied long and short passages from other people into my diaries. I started keeping a commonplace book for quotations when I was around ten years old, and I have it still. Here on this blog I've always had the habit of quoting others for purposes of review, or general adoration, or every so often, dislike. I think that (most of?) what I've written falls well within the bounds of fair use. But when something is going to be printed, in a book, the situation changes. I want to use other people's words as chapter headers, and I want to quote the people I admire, within my text. So in late January I made a long list, and started writing to ask permission. Most publishers have an online submission process, which is fairly easy, so I completed a lot of forms, wrote explanations about my book, and sat back and waited. So far, 75% of the permissions I requested have come back affirmative - yes, I can quote, with an endnote citation. In a few cases, I paid to use the words I want to use. They are worth it, to me, and I thought I'd have to pay a lot more, to be honest. But again, most of what I quote does fall within fair use guidelines. Some of it's even within the public domain.

The best part about seeking permission to quote has been being in touch with BOOK PEOPLE from all over the place. Book people are wonderful, and I've missed them, since I "retired" from my own open shop, and from the world at large during the pandemic. I've corresponded with literary estate executors, publishers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., archivists, and a librarian. Even a record label, for a song lyric I hope to be able to sing, in print. I'm only waiting now for a few final permissions to clear (or not - I did have one rejection, and had to rewrite two paragraphs), and the process will be complete. Then I'll work on designing the book, or have someone else design it for me, and hopefully print it in July. It would be earlier, but I already have a lot on my plate, work-wise. No rest for the self-employed! And gladly so. When I rest, I don't rest. I worry.

The only times right now I'm not worrying seem to be when I'm reading, or painting. Thought - and anxiety - goes, and I'm in the moment, a place I dearly love to be. So I work a lot, and read a lot. When I set Thoreau aside, I re-read some of the novels of Ruth Moore. She was originally published by Morrow, and now her work is being reprinted by Islandport Press, in wonderful softcover editions with cover images from the original first edition dust jackets. Her novels about Maine are unsurpassed, in my opinion. My favorites are Candlemas Bay and Spoonhandle. The Weir is a close third, tied with The Fire Balloon. She has a gimlet eye when it comes to characterization, and so many of her people are unforgettable. We know them. She writes about families, and entire small towns. The good people, and the bad seeds. I ordered a few of the Islandport Press editions, even though I have most of her work in hardcover first editions already, just to support their endeavor, and to triple-check the quotations I'm going to use in my book, and the copyright citation. The good folks at Islandport granted me permission, which I'm so grateful for. I don't want to hide behind the words of others, when I quote from them. I want to use what they say to illustrate what I myself believe and care about. That's what I've tried to do - draw up a bucket from the great well of world literature and art and then offer a dipper to drink from. Read the quote, then go buy the book! Support the publisher, the author, and their heirs. This is how books will continue to be written and published, by people who care about such things. Us!

In closing, for today. Requesting permission has another facet to it. As I worked my way through my list of quotations for the book, I realized that the very act of asking for something has never come easily to me. It's like asking permission to exist, in a way. Calling attention to oneself. Stating one's intent clearly, with no obfuscation: I want do do this; or tempered for politeness, I would like do do this. Part of what my book has become, in writing and rewriting, is a statement of this kind: I exist, and do what I love to do, with no one's permission sought or needed. It took me a long time to come to this place. Decades, I'd say. But here I am now, and it's a good place to stand. The view is fine. Almost Thoreauvian. Until next time, be well, and... keep buying books.

alone, in a small house

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 16:14:00 +0000

Sending a little Valentine's Day love, a day late. As if individual days matter much, right now. The pandemic inches along. Each day feels eerily the same. Awaken, feed Hodge breakfast, see Ryan off to work, if he has to be in his office instead of here at home, brush my teeth, wash my face, roll out the yoga mat. Experience a few moments of peace and spaciousness, if I'm lucky. Shower, dress, make my own breakfast, determine the scope of work for the day. Water the plants. Fill the woodbox. Take out the compost. Keep up with minor housework. Make sure our groceries are holding steady. Putter in my studio. Make an effort in the morning to make definite progress of some kind, any kind, with my projects, then have lunch, continue with work, and then set everything else aside and read in the late afternoon, or get outside again, if it's not too cold. I'm doing my best to keep my spirits up, in any way possible, but whew it's difficult, in the depths of winter, in the times we are in. To say I am looking forward to being eligible for vaccination is an understatement. Around here, we are months away.

Let's not dwell on that unfortunate circumstance. There's no point. Here's a Thoreau update. And my current stack of reading and just-finished books:

My winter reading project, as it stands today, is this: I'm seventy-five pages in to Volume Seven of the Journal, which is not very far along, considering that last time I mentioned the Journal was a month ago, and I was in the middle of Volume Six. However, I stopped reading the Journal, read my copy of Walden, then read the recent biography Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (University of Chicago Press 2017), then read Thoreau's Letters to a Spiritual Seeker edited by Bradley P. Dean (Norton 2004), then read the New Riverside edition of Thoreau's Familiar Letters edited by F.B. Sanborn (Houghton Mifflin 1894). I also read the chapter about Sophia Thoreau in Little-Known Sisters of Well-Known Men by Sarah G. Pomeroy (Dana Estes 1912), along with some of the other lives of women described therein, during which I had to grit my teeth and clench my jaw from time to time, over the so-called noble sacrifices made by and helpmeet status of nineteenth-century women. I am now embarking upon the two late Thoreau manuscript fragments reassembled and edited by Bradley P. Dean, Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings (Island Press 1993), and Wild Fruits (Norton 2000). There is a lot I could say about each of these books, and goodness knows I've taken my usual copious notes as I've been reading them.

Walden, to start with. I'm glad I didn't read it when I was younger. To come to a classic like this with fresh eyes, and no real preconceived notions about much of anything, other than a willingness to be pleased, because I've been enjoying his Journal so much, was a good way to experience the book as a whole. The beginning is such a rant, it was unexpected. In fact the entire book is kind of a rant, I mean a real diatribe! The sections I love best are those in which he slows down, sets his judgments about society and his neighbors aside, and describes his life experience in loving ways, as a painter might. Luckily these sections are plentiful. His descriptions of communing with nature, and coming to know the divine in nature, are achingly beautiful. The narrative as a whole is much less of a nuts-and-bolts kind of book than I thought it would be. Yes, the details are there, about how he builds his house by Walden Pond, and what it cost him, and how he earns his living, and what he eats, and who comes to visit. But the life philosophy he espouses is the overarching story. And I love how he describes having lived in a certain way, then he sets that time aside as if to commemorate it, and writes from another place, years into his own future, while looking back toward his earlier courage and innocence.

There are gorgeous thoughtful passages all throughout Walden, and famous snippet after famous snippet, but these few pages about him remembering his own past in his house by the pond - his season of joy - have come to mean a great deal to me, and I even ended up reading this entire section aloud to Ryan one evening, as we were talking anyway about work, and leisure, and the happiness sought and found (or not) therein (pp.123-125):

"I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs.... I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over my usual allowance.... For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.... my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scences and without an end.... Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour."

Go outside! Stay there! Pay attention! Live your daily life as if it is a series of revelations, because it is! His messages feel as relevant today as they ever were. They are certainly helping me get through this trying time. I look out the window after seeing some quick movement from the corner of my eye. A few days ago, it was a flock of robins, and today a pair of cardinals, in the wild rose bushes behind our house, by the edge of the woods. Sometimes I walk into those woods, into the cedar swamp, and look around. Chickadees, crows, places where deer have scraped the ground bare, tracks in the snow: signs of life, everywhere. They keep me focused on the good, and the present.

I could say a lot more about Walden but it feels superfluous, and so much has already been said, by others, better than I could ever say it. The Thoreau biography by Laura Dassow Walls is fantastic, I must say, and reads like an engrossing novel. The ending, about his death, is so moving, and seems to describe some of the grief I've been feeling lately, about the unfinished nature of most of our lives, and the shortness of life in general. After that, I did take a break from all things Thoreau, to read a few other books, but they ended up feeling like more Walden. One was Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides by Adam Nicolson (North Point Press 2001), about the author's inheritance and experience of the Shiants. What a book. About the deep love of place. And about a man, alone, in a small house, writing. I also read a new poetry book, Big Cabin by Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press 2019). Again, about place and the observations one makes about it, and about a man, alone, in a small house, writing. I love his poetry so, so much, and this book might be my favorite of his to date. The cover of the book was designed by Alex Katz:

It really suits my mood right now: inside, looking out; inside, writing, painting, working, wishing, looking out again. Favorite poems include "Truly," "The Ripple Effect," "A Rowboat of Happiness," "Infusion," and the very short "Haiku" on (p.54):

"First, calm down.

Next, stay that way

for the rest of your life."

Big Cabin, Sea Room, and Walden: I'm glad I read all three of these great books after I'd finished writing my own, which is about going to stay on an island, alone, in a small house, to write and paint. As I mentioned before, for better or worse my book is done (!!!), and I 'm now working on some housekeeping chores associated with it, such as requesting permission for all the quotes I hope to use within it. I may not hear back about certain requests for months, but am hoping to print copies of the book in July, after I get my painting shows for the summer squared away, and actually get back outside to paint for a few months too. Spring, spring! Where are you; I miss you. More Thoreau updates to come, as I return to the Journal, and read on, toward the warm seasons. Take care, friends.

the news, of 1854

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 19:40:00 +0000

January progresses, hour by slow hour. We are doing our best to make it through, unscathed or otherwise. The news is harrowing and my spirits sink lower and lower. However, books help, as they always do. And the weather helps, since it is milder than in years past. As Thoreau says of the winter of 1854 (Journal, Volume Six p.128): "It does not take so much fuel to keep us warm of late. I begin to think that my wood will last." I'm counting the remaining rows in our woodpile here, am halfway into Volume Six of Thoreau's Journal, and think we'll make it to spring on both fronts. Soon I'll take a break from the latter, to read Walden. Here's the copy I recently purchased. It arrived last week, and what a pleasure it is to contemplate:

I carry it around the house with me, just for the satisfaction of holding it. Another little green book. This photo makes it look a little brighter than it does in real life, but still. When I saw an image of this copy I knew it was the version I want to read (Visitors' Edition, The Riverside Press, Houghton Mifflin, 1922). That gorgeous cover! Elements of it were borrowed by the unnamed designer from the title page of the first edition of Walden (Thoreau's sister Sophia Thoreau was the artist in that case). I can almost make out some initials, in the clump of grass in the lower right corner, but I may be imagining them (H? A?). Tempting to think that the designer might be hidden there.

But before I attempt Walden, a reasonable question could be: How's it going with the Journal? Dull as ditchwater? That depends on how someone feels about ditches, I think. Most pass them by. Thoreau, however, loved them and found them a rich source of study, full of frogs and toads, plants aquatic and otherwise, lined by trees, home to ducks and muskrats and fish. He speaks for pages and pages (and pages and pages and...) about the beauty of ditches, as well as streams, ponds, swamps, fields, and woods. And weather; the Journal as a whole is a song of praise to weather.

Honestly, I love his writing, and find myself in sympathy with him much more often than not. The close observation he engages in is similar to the kinds of looking I do as a painter. Who sits and stares at, and communes with, a few trees for hours (and sometimes years) on end? Uhh, I do (raises hand). Who wonders about the life energy emanating from a field? That's me. Add to that my love of reading diaries, and this year's winter reading project is a resounding success. I'm halfway in, and already I don't want the Journal to end. Volume Five found me reading about varieties of fall asters, under a quilt, with Hodge wrapped up in one of my old sweaters (cashmere, nothing but the best for this cat, who just turned fifteen), wedged up against my leg:

Notice that roughly cut deckle edge? It means that the previous owner of this set wielded a paper knife with gusto. Since the paper itself is thin and fairly fragile, after I read a while my lap contains a miniature snow flurry, or scatter of seeds, as if the books are emitting more than just thoughts. They are weather themselves, and planting, and the harvest, all in one. I'm so careful, as I go, but still find bits of the book about my person, whenever I get up.

Speaking of this particular set - sad to say it was originally part of a much larger set. I wish the set wasn't broken, but am still grateful to have the eleven volumes I do have, to read. In my convoluted internet wanderings in pursuit of other odd volumes, I came across an excellent article about collecting Thoreau on the ABAA website. The author states that the green cloth sets with the paper spine labels, such as I have, included a handwritten page of random Thoreau manuscript, inside Volume One. Not Volume One of the Journal, but Volume One of the twenty-volume set of Writings, from 1906, of which the Journal comprised the last fourteen volumes. So the rest of my set, out there somewhere... SIGH. I can't think about it for long. Poor old books! Let's move on!

Volume Six gets really good, as Thoreau writes several times about editing his own work. What he's editing is Walden. Little does he know that his book will long outlive him. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Munroe 1849), sold around two hundred copies. He bought the remainders back from the publisher, and I have yet to see even a hint that Thoreau thinks he will ever be well-known as an author. Of course Walden will go on to become one of the greatest-loved works of American literature. The first time he mentions it by name is in this day's entry, at its very end, and when I read it, my skin prickled (p.176):

"March 28. P.M. - To White Pond.

Coldest day for a month or more, - severe as almost any in the winter. Saw this afternoon either a snipe or a woodcock; it appeared rather small for the last. Pond opening on the northeast. A flock of hyemalis drifting from a wood over a field incessantly for four or five minutes, - thousands of them, notwithstanding the cold. The fox-colored sparrow sings sweetly also. Saw a small slate-colored hawk, with wings transversely mottled beneath, - probably the sharp-shinned hawk.

Got first proof of 'Walden.'"

(!!!) Thrilling news, from 1854. I'm going to finish Volume Six, then pause, read Walden, and perhaps another book I currently have on approach, of which more later. I decided that I need some definite small things to look forward to, so I went on a minor book-buying spree last week and this weekend, and now have incoming packages, of all kinds: poetry books, some literature, more Thoreau-related works, and other subjects besides. I don't need much right now, just some sense of the future as a place it might be possible to inhabit, and the hint of a promise of bright days, whenever the current ones, with their fears and menace, fade. I wish this coming week was already in the past; I dread what might happen, even as I hope for the best, as I always do. Here in the welcome quiet of the Maine winter, I'll continue to do my work, lose myself in books, and find myself there too. Take care, until next time.

the most cheerful winter reading

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 19:27:00 +0000

This is a two-cup-of-tea morning. It's January, a new year, and a new day. Hope looms on many fronts. We're still staying safe by staying close to home as much as possible, and will continue to do so for as long as it takes. To help, Santa brought me a box of new jigsaw puzzles, with images from some of my favorite artists. I'll start one soon, because I'm rewarding myself in satisfying small ways for finishing something big. Except for a few very minor nuts-and-bolts issues, which a local editor is helping me resolve, my memoir about painting on Bear Island is done. I feel like it finally says what I want to say, and I think I'll be moving ahead with self-publishing some copies in the spring. Pursuing traditional publishing routes isn't for me, at this time. What I'd really like is to be published by Houghton, Mifflin circa 1905, say, or even 1925. But those days are done, and since I wrote my odd book to gain clarity within myself, I don't know if it would find any kind of wider readership, or if I would even want it to. Besides, what I really want is to continue to devote myself to painting and reading, and move on to other things. That doesn't mean I'm not celebrating, though! Writing this book was the most difficult (creative or otherwise) project I've ever set my mind to, and I'm glad I completed it.

One of the new projects on my horizon is actually an old project: returning to the manuscript I wrote when I still had my open shop. I'm looking forward to revisiting it, and adding to it with the benefit of hindsight. Meanwhile I'm preparing some work in my studio for painting shows for 2021, and reading a lot. In Thoreau-news, Volume Four is nearly complete:

Which means that thus far, I've read nearly two thousand pages of Thoreau's Journal. The other two books pictured are invaluable companions: The Plants of Acadia National Park by Glen H. Mittelhauser, Linda L. Gregory, Sally C. Rooney, and Jill E. Weber (University of Maine Press 2010), and A Field Guide to Coastal Wetland Plants of the Northeastern United States by Ralph W. Tiner, Jr. (University of Massachusetts Press 1987). Because I feel as if I've enrolled in a literary version of a botany graduate program. The amount of scientific attention Thoreau pays, and the level of detail he describes, are aspects of the Journal that I had no inkling of, when I first set out to read it. It helps so much to be able to turn to the field guides and see images of the plants he mentions again and again. They come to life and I recognize them from my own rambles.

Volume One was difficult to read. Thoreau is in his twenties and the Journal isn't like a traditional diary (I did this, I do that), but more like a collection of intellectual and spiritual treatises, or the frameworks for such things. Fragmented; high flights of spiritual or quasi-religious thought, with poetry alongside. It seems as if he's attempting to come to terms with himself, but not yet succeeding. I persevered, while hoping that the whole thing wouldn't be this way. And it isn't. When I fetched up on one of the first truly run-of-the-mill diary-like entries, in 1842, I just about shouted from joy (Volume One p.335):

"March 17. Thursday. I have been making pencils all day..."

This plain statement of fact, after so many pages of otherwise, gave me good reason to continue. Not that I'd planned to abandon ship, but. In Volumes Two and Three he turns that corner for good. In his early thirties, he seems to be solid in who he is, formed into the nature-lover and questioner of all things societal and political. Some of my favorite moments in the Journal are his accounts of long walks at night (seriously, he gets up in the middle of the night, and walks out to the woods, or to a cliff overlook he often visits, and takes notes by starlight or moonlight), and his descriptions of nature close-up, when he's examining grass at eye-level, from flat on the ground, or similarly prone, bubbles of air trapped in the ice on a frozen pond, over several days. The detail he engages in, regarding plants, trees, birds, mammals, waterways, and even sometimes his human neighbors, is more than a little stunning. The text purls on and on like a freshet.

The set I have is fairly interruption-free. Editor Bradford Torrey makes minimal comments in the footnotes. I mean, there are hardly any, and what Torrey does add is for brief clarification, such as where a passage or paragraph turns up in one of Thoreau's published books. I love seeing the raw footage, as it were, of what will become his great works.

The wealth of natural description is tempered by occasional inroads into other subjects. One of his main recurring themes is the seeking of and being disappointed in human friendships. His many entries regarding this are truly heartbreaking. He looks around and sees himself alone as can be, while his compatriots and peers are, in his view, putting on an act, going along with the rules of society, to their own (and his, and humanity's) detriment. Other more minor themes crop up from time to time: his fascination with the hum of the local telegraph wires, to him a holy kind of music; his current reading, including Darwin and many other books of natural history; the signs of indigenous people in and around Concord; and a few others that make brief appearances, such as aiding an escaped enslaved man in his trip to Canada and freedom (Applause!), and the intellectual inferiority of women (Boo!). The Journal is right up there, though, with the best of the great personal narratives I've ever read.

About Thoreau's writing style: it's romantic. He is an adverb-proponent and a friend to the exclamation point. But his effusion and tendency toward paeans are grounded by his minute careful observation, throughout. And oh, Thoreau is so very quotable. A selection, in the order I encounterd them and copied them into my own diary:

Volume One, the 1840s:

"Certain sounds more than others have found favor with the poets only as foils to silence." (p.66)

"We are constantly invited to be what we are; as to something worthy and noble." (p.191)

"Who hears the rippling of the rivers will not utterly despair of anything." (p.293)

"Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading." (p.305)

"I will sift the sunbeams for the public good." (p.350)

Volume Two, 1850-1851:

"It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is." (p.9)

"If you know of any risk to run, run it. If you don't know of any, enjoy confidence." (p.44)

"My greatest skill has been to want but little." (p.319)

"Cultivate reverence." (p.463)

Volume Three, 1851-1852:

"I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature." (p.86)

"'Says I to myself' should be the motto of my journal." (p.107)

"Nothing stands up more free from blame in this world than a pine tree." (p.145)

"There is a low mist in the woods. It is a good day to study lichens." (p.166)

"Fate will go all lengths to aid her protégés." (p.315)

"If anybody thinks a thought, how sure we are to hear of it!" (p.328)

Volume Four, 1852-1853:

"It is a good day to saunter." (p.62)

"It would be pleasant to write the history of one hillside for one year." (p.127)

"A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy." (p.223)

Whew. And these are just the shortest passages! I copied out many much longer ones too. I had to order some new blank diaries, since I'm filling up my current one so fast. I've also purchased a lovely copy of Walden, and when it comes in the mail, I'll take a break from the Journal to read that instead. The book's arrival will roughly coincide with the date of publication of the first edition of Walden in the Journal, so that will be a perfect time to read a stand-alone book as Thoreau intended. Is it hard to believe I've never read Walden? Well, I haven't. This seems like a fine time to remedy that situation. Onward. Happy New Year!

*An added caveat: In a rare mood of hope and optimism for the future, I wrote the above and posted it before becoming aware of what was unfolding in Washington, D.C. I won't go back and change anything, but want to acknowledge that I'm no longer feeling hopeful or optimistic. Thoreau's words seem unbearable in their idealism and innocence, even while they embody the world in which I wish we lived. Peace, friends.*

solstice light

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 21:40:00 +0000

A brief note to wish us all well for the winter solstice today. The turn of the year, here it is again. One of my very favorite days in the entire calendar, as ancient and holy as it is. And here comes Christmas too, and the New Year. May 2020 fade into history and 2021 ring in with truth and justice.

Speaking of solstices. The book room here at home has one window, partially curtained, facing due north. In June, at the time of the summer solstice, I always see a ray of light that comes in, for only a few days, as the sun reaches around to that side of the house ever so briefly:

Every year I notice it - What's that light doing in there? - it's usually so dark! And then I remember, it's the solstice again. And now, at the winter solstice time, the sunlight slants so low that it finds its way across the south-facing dining room and into the north-facing kitchen (right under the book room). Our own personal Stonehenge, this wonderful old house we are lucky to inhabit.

Winter light: here's a bit more of it, on nearby Mount Desert Island. I took this photo on Saturday, when we packed up the picnic basket and went to Seawall for lunch, for my birthday:

I love the light this time of year (and any time of year, really, but winter especially). It feels like such a gift. In the bleakness of the short cold days, whatever does choose to shine is more welcome than ever. Safe and happy holidays, and may the light find you where you live, now and always.

small green books and a large green tree

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 16:58:00 +0000

Good morning from the snowy wilds. Last night's storm lingers, and flakes chase each other around as the wintery sun attempts to break through the clouds. I have some shoveling to do, but not yet. It's a good indoor time to share some books and hopefully some good cheer. We are doing okay here, overall. Thanksgiving was quiet, just the three of us (Ryan, Hodgie, and yours truly). The day before, I made a batch of cranberry sauce and a casserole of stuffing, and went straight to leftovers, instead of a big celebratory meal, which didn't feel right. Although pie was had, rest assured. This is the beginning of our fourth year of being vegetarian/pescatarian, so my leftovers sandwich was mayo, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and smoked cheddar cheese. Let me say, it was splendid. I also made a vegetarian chili with the three sisters: corn, squash, and beans. And I'm feeling thankful for so many things, in this difficult time: our relative safety and prosperity, and that of our friends and family, and the fact that Ryan can work mostly from home, and me too. Also beyond grateful that Ryan was called for jury service this month, and right before the trial was due to begin, the accused person confessed. This is so not the time to be required to sit in a room for hours each day, with other people, even masked and apart. Now we are planning for the solstice and Christmas at home, by ourselves. The living room is full of greenery; we found a tree yesterday before the storm began. It always feels like bringing the wildness of the woods inside, for company:

Decorations soon, after we enjoy the tree as it is for a day or two. I think we'll leave it up for a long time this year, to lift our spirits in the days and months ahead. We are going to hunker in for the duration. I am doing my best to be positive. Books help. Here's my current stack:

I carried them downstairs and spread them out on the table and Ryan said, "That's a lot of little green books!" Yes, the Thoreau Journal set is green, but the spines have faded to earth-brown, and the spines are reinforced in burnt orange. He might approve. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I get into the Journal (and I am into it, as the bookmark in Volume 2 shows), I want to mention what I read before starting it. This set was edited by Bradford Torrey (Houghton Mifflin 1906), and while I was waiting for it to arrive in mail, after I bought it on eBay, I took a look at the two Bradford Torrey books I have on hand:

I read some of A Florida Sketch-Book (Houghton Mifflin 1894) and meant to start Spring Notes from Tennessee (Houghton Mifflin 1896), but still haven't. But aren't these covers lovely? Neither decoration is signed or initialed, but they sure look like the work of Sarah Wyman Whitman. I've kept these for twenty years, after offering them for sale once at an antiquarian book fair, and not selling them. Both are inscribed and signed by Torrey:

As is evident, I offered this copy for sale for $125, which seems optimistic, even for those days. Be that as it may, when I looked at these books again, I got to wondering about this Joseph Edgar Chamberlin person. Who was he? What was he? A newspaperman, in Boston, that's who. I owned a book of his once, and I think I sold it. I suspect I did, because I ordered another copy of it, and recognized it when it arrived! Nomads and Listeners of Joseph Edgar Chamberlin edited by Samuel M. Waxman (Riverside Press 1937) is a memorial collection of his pieces, short essays on this and that, the very last one being A Booklover's Heaven - a paean to the Boston Athenaeum and bookshops. A taste (p.186): "...there must be thousands of people in Boston that surely never would want to go to heaven unless they had some sort of inward assurance that there are second-hand book shops there."

This is not an expensive book, so I didn't feel any guilt about buying another copy. Not the case for the other two Chamberlin books I decided I also needed! To sit on the shelf with the Torrey books, I bought these:

Chamberlin's two collections, The Listener in the Town and The Listener in the Country (Copeland and Day 1896) are comprised of short essays from the Boston Transcript. The Town contains Humanity Studies, which are fascinating voyeuristic glances at people seen on the streets of town, and wondered about, and Some Vain Notions and Mental Curiosities, which are simply that. The Country contains Birds and Beasts, Looking at Mountains, and Some Aspects of Nature. No wonder he owned Torrey's books. A similar quiet writing style, about birds and rambles, and perhaps a shared love of Thoreau even. Unfortunately also a similar kind of quiet racism, in language if not in intent - they may not have recognized it as such. I had a few problems with Torrey especially, in this regard (as I did with Mark Twain). But why did I buy this little Chamberlin set, other than to read it? Well, it's inscribed and signed too:

I'm hiding the price, in the upper right hand corner, because I'm more than a little embarrassed about spending that amount of money for these diminutive volumes. Ah well, I love them, and they are unique, as inscribed. Here's the second one:

A more interesting inscription than the first, wouldn't you say? "With tender memories... where many of these little papers were written." Hmmm. Who is this Clara Hutchins? The googles tell me - if she is this Clara Hutchins, and indeed she may or may not be, I don't know - that she was a widow and her sons were schoolteachers. Otherwise she has vanished into the ethers of the past. Except, this:

"One of my friends..." Chamberlin writes. There are no other pencil markings or markings of any kind in either of these volumes, and yet here in the Country, someone has carefully indicated in pencil this one passage. Clara? Is this you? Counting the repeating song of the whippoorwill? I hope so. Nomads and Listeners has a nice frontis portrait of Chamberlin, and he looks like a thoughtful soul, and a bookish friend:

I made significant progess with Chamberlin and Torrey both, then the Thoreau set arrived. Eleven volumes, shabby but decent reading copies. The last few volumes of the set are sadly missing. But eleven should see me through the winter, I hope, and I may be able to turn up some odd volumes to complete the set in the coming months. If not, I have other options. I could run out of steam before reaching the end, or I may want to sum up his final few years, if I've had enough by then. There's a nice edited version of the Journal published by nyrb, that I think I'll get a copy of, just in case. And as I mentioned last time, much (if not all?) of the Torrey edition of the Journal is available to read online, if I must. The eleven volumes I do have are around 500 pages each, so I'll have plenty to keep me occupied until the missing volumes become a pressing matter. When the set arrived I looked with interest at the few pencil markings inside the front covers - someone's initials - then deciphered a greeting card tucked inside the front cover of Volume I:

A Thoreau quote on the card, and address for the Thoreau Lyceum, Concord, on the back. And inside:

A nice note from Anne McGrath, Thoreau scholar and curator of the Lyceum from 1968-1994. The initials in each volume in the set belong to Robert Graham (and possibly Robert F. Graham; they are cursive, pencil, and hard to decipher), but who he is I cannot tell, and thus my story of association copies ends. The stack of little green books is going back upstairs to the book room, and Volume II of the Journal back to the bedside table. I'll have lots to say at some point soon about the contents of the Journal itself, since I've been reading and taking copious notes for a few weeks now, but that will have to be on another day. Stay well, friends, and take good care.

little book in the big woods

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:58:00 +0000

Home, I am, after nearly a month away in the woods of northwestern Maine. Truth be told I've been back from the residency for a few weeks now, but time is acting in strange ways, moving too fast and then too slow, as we approach the election, and winter, and the pandemic continues to spread. Ryan and I cast our ballots earlier this week and are now praying for positive change. Yesterday, against the lingering golds and russets of fall, the first snowflakes flew here in an hour-long flurry of white. They felt hopeful and clean, a fresh start. I'm looking forward to winter this year, despite all, I have to say. We are staying put, keeping our heads down, and living each day as if it is a gift, which it is. I'm casting around for a winter reading project to settle in with. Most of all, I'd love to read the Journals of Henry David Thoreau, but the in-print complete edition from Princeton University Press is so expensive, and old and secondhand sets likewise, so for now I hunt around for individual volumes and hope to assemble a set over time, as funds and availability allow. Yes, I know I could read them online, in the 1906 set edited by Bradford Torrey, but as ever, I want actual books in my hands.

I'm on something of a Thoreau journey at the moment, after reading The Maine Woods while I was at the residency. Which was in Monson, Maine, at Monson Arts, and Thoreau stayed in Monson too, before one of his excursions into the woods. I have a lovely little leatherbound copy (Houghton Mifflin 1893, Riverside Pocket Edition), which I bought at a book sale twenty years ago, for two bucks. There are two names written inside the front cover, one from a University of Maine professor I knew when she was in her old age, long-retired. There's a little bookseller's ticket too, from The Old Corner Book Store in Boston. It was a great pleasure to read a few pages or more of the book each night, after being outside painting in landscapes very similar to what Thoreau saw when he was here. In many of my paintings I ignore such things as power lines, telephone poles, buildings, or rather I look past them, to the forms of nature, and the horizon. Everything else seems of the moment, transitory. Nature always wins, is one of my life mottoes. Even though nature is ephemeral as well, but in a more cyclical way. Anyway, here's The Maine Woods, along with the rest of my current reading:

Forest Trees of Maine is the other book I paid close attention to in Monson. This spiral bound version is fantastic, it's the Centennial Edition, 1908-2008, published by the Maine Forest Service. We own two copies at the moment, and I use it to identify the varieties of the trees I've been painting. As far as the other books go, I'm still reading Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail (David Zwirner Books 2017), one section at a time, and just finished Siri Husdvedt's Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press 2005). And yes, here is Longfellow's translation of The Divine Comedy (Houghton, Mifflin 1895, another lovely Riverside Press edition), which I almost conviced myself would in fact be my winter reading project this year - different translations of Dante - appropriately doomy - but once I began I found I couldn't stomach even the lead-ups to hell, which seem bad enough. Scourges, bloodshed, suffering, torment: is this what I want to read about right now? No, it is not, not even couched in the beauty of poetry.

I set Dante aside for now, cast around for something else, and came up with the Herbert R. Mayes set, which I've browsed around in before but never really sat and read cover to cover. Because it's massive. Two volumes, each over a thousand pages: An Editor's Treasury: A Continuing Anthology of Prose, Verse, and Literary Curiosa (Atheneum 1968). A closer view:

It's a very well-made set. I mean solid, with a full cloth cover, strong binding, and excellent paper. Oh for the days when publishers created books such as this. Surely it was a vanity publication, a huge bibelot I thought would be The Practical Cogitator anthology times ten, And it sort of is, but was published about two decades later, has no set arrangement as does the Cogitator, and is more inclusive, although still primarily drawn from the white male canon. But I turn the page and find Martin Luther King, and turn another to read the words of Oscar Wilde, then Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I check the voluminous index of authors at the back of Volume II and see Christopher Morley (as I first noted here in 2006!), and Montaigne, and Jane Austen, Dorothy Parker, Billie Holiday. Edward R. Murrow, P.G. Wodehouse, and Pepys, and hundreds of other names and sources recognized and not. The books contain literary quotes that Mayes noted and saved from other books, and newspaper and magazine sources, about law and government and policy, in no particular order other than how he wanted to arrange them on each page. At the time of publication Mayes had worked as a magazine editor for four decades, and says in his introduction to Volume I (p.vii):

"I have read with pleasure almost anything that came along.... Because of the nature of my work, no small measure of reading, good and bad, was obligatory; yet from the mountains of manuscripts and books that have crossed my various desks, and from the many more I have otherwise known, there has come much contentment and very little ennui."

He continues (pp.vii-viii): "I have read, and continue to read, anything and everything, from books to billboards, from pamphlets and essays and histories and speeches and biographies and plays, to package labels and greeting cards.... If indulgence in literary fare so varied has made for a seeming and perhaps actual deficiency in discrimination, it also has made for a sufficiency of general information about people and places and ideas and things, and provided a nourishment that has gratified me; and this sampling of it may be a source of satisfaction to others."

About the catch-all nature of his anthology (p.viii): "In the arrangement of material, as with the selections, the policy of reasonable judgment - mine - has been used."

He meant these to be the first two volumes in an ongoing series of such anthologies, but though he lived nearly another twenty years, I see no evidence of any others being printed. Perhaps he decided that this set was enough, or perhaps the publishing business changed around him and no longer supported such endeavors. It seems to me that Mayes could have continued if he'd wanted to. Apparently he had an explosive personality. This interesting blog post from When editors were gods has one scoop. Also, a note about Mayes's life in the back of Volume II tells us that TIME magazine called him "brilliant, bellowing and belligerent." If this anthology is any indication, he had a mind hungry for every experience life has to offer.

Thankfully, my scattershot brain can handle this set at this time. Piecemeal works for me. I read for an hour or so, and visit with Bertolt Brecht, Herodotus, and Anita Loos, and feel a little bit better about life with every page. I'll continue on with it while I attempt to assemble a Thoreau set. More on that as the situation develops. Meanwhile, stay well, VOTE, and thanks for reading.

ars longa, vita brevis

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 16:24:00 +0000

A short post today, to say hello, and that yes, I finally finished reading The Diary of Virginia Woolf. The ending was just about as devastating as I thought it would be. I can't say I want to talk it over in any detail right now, so I'll share a few new acquistions instead. First:

What a gorgeous art book this is - John Nash: Artist & Countryman by Andrew Lambirth (Unicorn 2020). It's a reward for selling a lot of paintings over the summer, pandemic notwithstanding. I love Nash's work and it's a treat to have a real monograph about it. My only critcism is that I wish the copious and illuminating text had been a bit smaller (font-wise) and the color plates a bit larger (there are some great full-page plates but most are not). John and Christine Nash left their house to writer Ronald Blythe when they died, and he's lived there ever since. Another recent purchase, speaking of Ronald Blythe:

That's a John Nash painting from 1918 on the cover, The Cornfield, one of my favorites of his, made when he returned home after serving in combat and as a war artist during World War I. The book is a stream-of-consciousness narrative of a rural year in gardens, fields, orchards, and farmyards, just before World War II. It reminds me very much of some of Virginia Woolf's diary entries, and not just because they were both written in the late 1930s. This lovely reprint of the 1939 original Men and the Fields by Adrian Bell has an introduction by Ronald Blythe and illustrations by John Nash (Little Toller Books 2009). Bell and the Nashes were neighbors and friends. Bell's memoir isn't about him, it's about a way of life he lived and witnessed. As a reader, you know next to nothing about Bell himself, except what he values, because he notices and describes so well, with such quiet words. The wind the the trees is of great interest to him, and hence, to us. As Blythe writes in the introduction (p.8): "Adrian Bell is the least sensational and the least dramatic of twentieth century country writers..."

Yes, please. More of this. The dramatic and sensational are overrated. This beautiful edition makes me want to buy more from the publisher. As they say on their website, "Little Toller was started with a singular purpose: to revive forgotten and classic books about nature and rural life in the British Isles." I started looking at their list of reprints and found myself wanting most of them. And if Men and the Fields is a good example, each of the others in the reprint series will also have a thick matte cardstock cover, great cover art, wonderful paper within, and all-around good quality, for a reasonable price. I'll have to order a few, when I get back.

Get back, you ask? Yes, because after being home for months and months, except for day trips here and there, I'm taking off for a while. A local arts residency has asked me to fill in, because someone just cancelled, and they want a replacement at short notice. I applied long ago, pre-pandemic, and was wait-listed. But the good folks there remembered me. At first I thought, I can't possibly go. But I realized I'd have my own house and studio, and take-out food prepared, and weeks of painting alone in the mountains of northwestern Maine, and I knew I had to say yes. So I did. I'm leaving soon and will be back in October, after the leaves turn. Ryan and Hodge are coping, but it's a dire situation. I've promised to stay in touch, and will even be back for a quick visit, halfway through. Wish me luck, and be well, friends. Ars longa!

summer reading?

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 19:23:00 +0000

A midsummer update. July has nearly passed, Virginia Woolf's Diary remains unfinished, and around here we've been getting up in the night to comet-watch. Our rural Maine county has zero active known cases of the virus, and yet we continue to move carefully through our days, and try not to to feel overly judgy about the out-of-state licence plates we see daily, from people vacationing in our "safe" state. Someone in the town where Ryan works has seen cars from 38 other states so far this summer. I can't dwell on it, since there's nothing to be done, except do what we can do ourselves, and continue to take precautions.

Book sales are at a near stand-still, however paintings are selling like proverbial hotcakes, perhaps to some of these very visitors. Each time I receive a paycheck from one of the galleries I turn around and buy a book or three to celebrate. Ordering a few books here and there is a lovely way to have something definite to look forward to. Even if the book is something I can't read, like this recent arrival:

It's a catalogue, in French, of an exhibit at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland: Peinture. Alex Katz & Félix Vallotton, with essays by Bernard Fibicher et al (5 Continents 2013). I just wanted to see the color plates, but it was a pleasant surprise to discover that some of the quotes and side notes in the text are in English. So I can sort of read the book. But the pictures are more than enough. I don't love everything by either of these two painters, but what work of theirs I do happen to love, I really love. The Katz painting on the front cover is one of my all-time favorites of his, Lake Light from 1992. And the Vallotton painting on the back cover was new to me, but what a wow, Coucher de soleil, brume jaune et gris from 1913:

Katz is in his early 90s and has spent summers in Maine since the 1950s, in an old house about half an hour from here. Some of his Maine paintings are sublime. And some of his work is nails-on-chalkboard to me, which is irritating yet fascinating. I've had a love-hate relationship with his work since I was an undergraduate art student, and his paintings continue to draw my attention, for one reason or another. So this nearly-unreadable book is a real treat. I have many other books about him, but none quite like this.

As far as books in English go, a few massive (500-600+ page) softcovers are in mid-read:

Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail edited by Phong Bui et al (David Zwirner Books 2017) is just what it says, and also a lush look at some working artists of today, across disciplines and styles. I bought this copy last fall, along with another Zwirner anthology, What It Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics, by Jarrett Earnest (2018). I read the latter right away, albeit slowly, and have finally gotten around to Tell Me Something Good. Each interview is several pages long and I've been reading one or two each night, for days. A few I'd read in The Brooklyn Rail online already, but most are new to me. They reinforce the notion that art is an occupation, I won't say one worthy of being pursued, but it is pursued, by many, in many forms. This alone is heartening news. I love to read about how other people get their work done, and why they make it in the first place.

The second book, Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England, edited by Siobhan Senier (University of Nebraska Press 2014) is more evening reading. This region called Maine is the homeland and territory of four groups: Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi'kmaq (or Micmac). Together they comprise the Wabanaki, which translates as People of the Dawn. Maine is Dawnland, and has been since the glaciers receded over ten thousand years ago. I wish I had learned this in school, but in recent years I've been making up for not doing so, and after many years of searching and buying, Ryan and I have a decent book collection about the known history of pre-European-contact times in the region. This recent anthology gathers historical statements, literature, and poetry from each of the groups, and those from other areas of New England, and it's been illuminating to read across the centuries and up to now. So much is truly haunting. A section about Sopiel Soctomah, Passamaquoddy, seems like a harbinger (p.163), even though that's wishful thinking on my part, I know. The brief introduction tells us he lived from 1755 to 1820, and he was a scout for the Maine Militia during the American Revolution, as well as a wampum reader. His son Sopiel Selmore carried on the tradition, and read this in 1805:

"The first string of wampum beads were read, 'We sent you this to open your eyes.' The second string is read, 'That you may see a great way.' Then the third string is read, 'That your ears may be opened to hear and fix your hearts that you may have a right understanding to what I am going to tell you.'"

Seems like a good way to move forward, with eyes and ears and hearts open, as we investigate how to repair ancient wrongs, and proceed as a world, together. I say we even though all I seem to be able to do is investigate what's in my own heart. Whenever I do, I believe that justice and truth and goodness will prevail. The hopeful optimist in me lives still, even as I plan on wearing a mask to pick up my next order outside the local bookshop, instead of going in. Better days are ahead, surely.

August may be quiet around here, as I get back to work on my book. But I'll share something, even if it's just a picture of my new to-be-read stack, for the dog days ahead. Best wishes and be well, friends.

summer reading

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 16:37:00 +0000

Summer is here, and just think, only about four months until we can VOTE again in this country (we've already mailed in our primary ballots). Counting down the days, hoping for the best, keeping our heads down, trying to be as safe as possible. Meanwhile, July in Maine is upon us. After a hot 4th on a day trip inland, we needed the woodstove back at home yesterday, because of the persistent fog, which has been mostly in, not offshore. I do love it, and how it softens everything, and frankly I can do without the heat we usually have this time of year, a spell of days into the upper 80s and low 90s. This cooler weather has been ideal. I've been out painting a little, and in working on my book a lot. I've reached the stage with it when I'm nearly finished, but I still have just south of 100,000 words and I'd like to cut about 20% of them out, and I can't see clearly how to proceed. A local editor is going to help me do just that, in August, but this month I'm taking a break to get some perspective on the manuscript as a whole, and also to paint while the painting is good. None of my usual summer island painting trips are happening this year (thanks, no thanks, pandemic), but I still live right here on the coast of Maine, with a wealth of beauty at the doorstep and beyond. Everything seems extra-gorgeous this year. We left a huge swath of the lawn unmowed, and up came a meadow of wildflowers - hawkweed, daisies, clover, sheep sorrel, feathery grass - during the day the bees love it and every evening the fireflies light up the entire yard. My crop of summer books is also flourishing, in today's sideways stack:

As the bookmark indicates, like a tiny flag of surrender, I stalled out on finishing Virginia Woolf's Diary. Halfway through Volume Five, the final volume, I set it aside and instead worked on my book for several weeks in early and mid June. And I never picked Woolf back up. I will sometime soon, I can't leave her unfinished for much longer. Honestly, with the stress of Everything, I haven't had the focus to read much at all lately. I tend to glance at a few poems in an anthology before bed, and watch a video or two with Ryan, then fall asleep, and dream of virus-free restaurant visits (I'm so, so tired of my own cooking). However, when I do finally complete the set, I'll write about her descriptions of people, which, besides her descriptions of her writing process, could be the highlights of the entire Diary, for me. She's got a gimlet eye, and says just what she thinks, yet is also generous and loving, especially as her friends age and pass away.

The other books are in various stages of readitude. As I mentioned last time, I did go a little mad ordering books from a local shop recently, and as usual I have zero regrets about doing so. I've wanted to read the Tim Robinson two-volume set for years, Stones of Aran (NYRB reprints), and have only had one volume of it, picked up at a library sale long ago, so I finally bought the second volume. He was already ill and 85 years old this spring when he contracted Covid-19 and died. Honestly, this world. How I wish things were different. Moving on, since they are not in fact different, I'm looking forward to pure escapism in the form of the Dorothy L. Sayers books. They will be a re-read, except I cannot believe this but I've never read Have His Carcase, so that will be a spooky, chilly pleasure, I hope. I want to read the entire Wimsey/Vane romance again so I ordered these HarperCollins reprints of all of them, even though I already own Gaudy Night. I gave away the others I owned, as gifts to someone who'd never read them before. I've never read poet Elizabeth Bishop's nonfiction, and picked up The Collected Prose (Farrar Straus Giroux 1984) the last time I actually entered a bookshop in person (late February or early March, I can't remember). Dear lord I miss bookshops. But I'm just not there yet, about entering buildings if I don't absolutely have to, which right now, I don't. Like our groceries, curbside pick-up for books worked well, and it will again soon.

The only book I've finished recently is The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham (Milkweed 2017). I'd seen several references to it online, and read an essay of his that is now included in this book. Which has it all: the love of knowing a home place deep in your bones, the foundation it gives to everything else, the description of parents, siblings, and elders which is sometimes painfully truthful yet still honors them, and the gorgeously-written extended meditation on race, family and local history, religion, and nature. Lanham's a birder, a poet, a professor of wildlife ecology, and says in his introduction (p.4): "Each of us is so much more than the pigment that orders us into convenient compartments of occupation, avocation, or behavior. It's easy to default to expectation. But nature shows me a better, wilder way. I resist the easy path and claim the implausible, indecipherable, and unconventional."

His book is about making a life for himself, from the places and people he started with. Metaphorically and literally, he builds an intellectual and spiritual home in the world. One reason I love his book so much is that I agree with his pantheistic leanings. Lanham writes (pp.95-96): "Depending on the day I claim different labels spiritually. They run the gamut from atheist to Zen. I'm not sure any of them really matter. What does matter: I've expanded the walls of my spiritual existence beyond the pews and pulpit to include longleaf savannas, salt marshes, cove forests, and tall-grass prairie. The miracles for me are in migratory journeys and moonlit nights. Swan song is sacred. Nature seems worthy of worship." And (p.175): "I've settled into a comfortable place with the idea of nature and god being the same thing." Nature is sacred, I see the clear fact of it in the fireflies and tall grass every evening. And I'm trying to describe it and come to terms with it in my own memoir.

The only sections of his book I had to quickly skim involved learning to hunt, and hunting. They remind me of certain parts in H is for Hawk (Grove 2016), and Helen Macdonald did indeed write a blurb for the cover of Lanham's book. Nature and human nature are not tidy, not especially peaceful, and they are often bloody, if you are a creature who eats meat. Even so, this too is life, and he sees it clearly. A beautiful memoir, highly recommended.

Lastly, in my summer reading stack, is The Lives of Artists by Calvin Tomkins (Phaidon 2019). The boxed set is such a pleasure to look at, I'll share a close-up:

Most of the essays within are from Tomkins's writing for The New Yorker, collected from over six decades. The books are softcover but very sturdy, sewn and glued, printed on wonderful paper, an all-around delight to hold and read. About the contents, I wish more women and artists of color were included, as usual, but as the decades pass, authors and editors are slowly righting - or at least addressing - this initial wrong. I'm not reading the volumes sequentially, rather dipping a toe in and out, depending on the subject of each essay. Speaking of dipping toes in, it's summer! Get to it, I certainly am:

Let's savor the beauty around us, whenever possible. And get those feet in the water, if you're lucky enough to have an ocean nearby! I haven't gone all the way in yet, this year, but will take the plunge soon. Be well, friends - we'll make it through these difficult times together, if we possibly can.

home and away

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 20:48:00 +0000

What a week. I've gotten a clean bill of health from my doctor and am feeling relieved about that, but am deeply disheartened at the same time, about the state this country is in. When I think it can't get worse, it gets much much worse, immediately. There's no escape, no getting away. The only thing I seem to be able to do is watch what's happening, recognize it for what it is, and then keep working on making room for good things in the future. I try to keep faith, in small ways each day, and add to the good, somehow.

So I'm here today, with that in mind. I'm clearing off my work table. Among other things, I want to reshelve some books, to make room for the new ones that are currently on approach. I sold some paintings and received a big paycheck, and just went a little nuts ordering books from one of the nearest independent booksellers' shops, a local favorite of mine and many others, Left Bank Books. I'm going to want to have some good new reading material close to hand when I finish up Virginia Woolf's Diary. I have two hundred pages or so left to read in Volume Five, the final volume, so it will be neck in neck to see if the new books arrive before I turn that last page. This seems like a frivolous topic at this terrible time, but here we are anyway.

First on my stack are these Vita Sackville-West items:

They make me happy whenever I pick them up and browse their pages. The first is Some Flowers (Abrams 1993). Vita Sackville-West's 1937 text about her favorite flowers is accompanied by Graham Rust's illustations, one of the best of which is on the front cover, showing the antique striped rose, Rosa Mundi. The second is a lovely little tourist item printed by J. Salmon at Sevenoaks in 1910, a guidebook to Knole, home of the Sackvilles since 1603, now managed by the National Trust. I say home, but the house is the size of a village, truly (it has 365 rooms, I think?). Thomas at Hogglestock took some lovely photographs during his visit to Knole around this time last year. No author for the guidebook is listed, but in the publisher's ad inside both covers, the larger edition, an actual history book, is said to be written by the Right Hon, Lord Sackville (Vita's father, since she still would have been a teenager when this was published). The contents of this thin and most likely excerpted version aren't exactly enthralling, but the soft polished covers and overall feel of it are redolent of a certain age of travel and ease. Here's the title page:

It's merely a bibelot, something I bought on a whim, because I loved it when I saw it. And I still do. This next book I actively sought out, however, after reading Passenger to Teheran by Vita Sackville-West (my copy is the Moyer Bell illustrated reprint from 1991). Once I'd read that, you see, I wanted to read her then much scarcer follow-up. I found a copy locally, and phew I paid for it, but not as much as I thought I might have to at the time. An antiquarian bookseller friend had this copy on his shelf. It's a little battered, but a first U.S. edition:

Twelve Days by Vita Sackville-West (Doubleday 1928); blue paper labels on front cover and spine, hot orange cloth covers. A peek inside:

It's a bit foxed but not bad. Oh this is a wonderful book. She chronicles her travels in the Bakhtiari Mountains in Persia, with copious photographs to boot. It cost me a hundred bucks and I have zero regrets about purchasing it. I bought it when I still had my shop, but even then it was something I considered a real treat, just for myself. Now it has my bookplate it it, for all time.

As does my final book of the day, and almost the last one out of this stack I'm trying to reshelve. I know I've mentioned this before, but it's more than good enough to rise to the top again:

I have such a soft spot for anthologies in general but this one really takes the cake. Another World Than This... compiled by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (Michael Joseph 1945). I think of them putting this together as their ideal commonplace book, during the war years. The war is ending and the aftermath of it is nearly upon them. This gorgeous book of literary oddments is arranged in months like an almanac, and contains quotations and translations from throughout time and literature. It also feels like a stand being taken, on the side of a certain kind of civilization. It well may be the perfect bedside book, for glancing into for fifteen or twenty mintues each night. I treasure it, and the bookmark I found inside it later - this old thin air mail envelope from the Asticou Inn in Northeast Harbor, Maine. I was born in nearby Bar Harbor and the little unused envelope feels like a love letter from the past.

I've got one more photograph to share. It's lilac time here in Maine. One of my favorite fragrances of all time is lilacs wet with rain. The bees are happy in our white ones right now, here at home. Peace, friends - peace, beauty, justice, equality - a beautiful world for us all:

may day

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Thu, 28 May 2020 22:03:00 +0000

As this month ends, I may or may not have had it with everything. I'm still deciding. But lord what a ridiculously terrible time it is. And it looks to be more of the same in the months ahead. I don't know why I talked about balance at the end of my last post, but doing so turned out to be eerily prescient, since I am now suffering from intermittent vertigo. Several episodes have overtaken me in the last week and I have an appointment to see my doctor on Monday. Wish me luck. I've never had anything like this before and am hoping it will simply be a case of an ear infection or misaligned neck or some such thing. Meanwhile daily life continues, in spite of everything, as Ryan returns to his office to work, a few days a week. He's being extremely careful, as am I. Still, anxious days, anxious days, anxious days, one after another. I keep myself very busy to allay the worry. Which is one reason I'm writing right now.

A few days ago I began reading The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Five 1936-1941, but will save any words about or from her for next time. I will mention that Volume Three is utterly splendid, especially her description of her friendship and relationship with Vita Sackville-West, which gives me a jumping-off point for the story I would like to tell today. It involves a short stack of shabby books, the town I grew up in, some old friends, the used book trade, and Vita Sackville-West's influence and reach. Painting, too. This is a long story, so please pull up a chair and stay a while. And don't worry, there are many pictures to ease the way.

I'll begin with the following item, a thin fairly common book around here, Dearest Andrew: Letters from V. Sackville-West to Andrew Reiber 1951-1962 edited by Nancy MacKnight (Charles Scribner's Sons 1979). I picked up this copy in 2010 for four dollars, I think at a library sale, since there's no bookseller's price inside the front cover. I've had other copies over the years, but I keep this one because of what's tucked inside it. It's in decent condition, I'd say very good in a good dust jacket:

The back cover shows the homes of both parties, during their correspondence. Vita's of course is Sissinghurst; Andrew's is called Windslip:

The book is about not much, really, just some gardening, gifts, bits of family and travel news, and this and that. It's an unlikely exchange, but one which both writers obviously treasured as the years passed. This copy once belonged to a Mrs. Hills, whose home address label is pasted inside the front cover. Also inside the front cover is a letter to her from Andrew:

May 8, 1979. Lea Andrew Reiber writes to Mrs. Hills, who lives in a nearby town, to thank her for writing a letter to the editor to point out a mistake in a recent newspaper interview with himself. The error is that Vita is misspelled Veda. Also present is the newspaper clipping of Mrs. Hills's correction, and a comical letter of apology to her from Reiber's interviewer. My bookplate now resides under the front flap of the dust jacket. It's a wonderful copy for its association items, and I particularly treasure Andrew's letterhead from Addison, Maine.

I grew up in Addison. Soon after my parents divorced, circa 1972, my mother and my new stepfather and my two sisters and I moved from Bar Harbor to a little farmhouse in Addison. Our house was a few miles from Cape Split, on the way to the small fishing village of South Addison. Our favorite beach to go, and the closest, was (and still is) there. It's by a causeway of sorts between the sandy beach itself and a tidal mudflat overlooking South Addison. The sandy beach faces a number of islands, and open ocean. Past the beach, a neck of land with a loop road around it is Cape Split itself. But right before you come to the causeway, beach, and neck, is a wide field. In that field there is a tiny cemetery, with only a few headstones and markers. Some spruce trees grow nearby, and an old apple tree. But mostly the field is grass. If you stand on the path by the cemetery and look one way, the view out to the islands and ocean is before you. If you turn and look the other way, up the field, there is Windslip. And in the cemetery, if you look closely at a small plaque on a piece of granite fieldstone, the one with an American flag by it, you may be able to read the name Reiber. It's weathered over the years, but here he is.

Our family lived in Addison for about twelve years, all told. My older sister's first boyfriend lived near Windslip and when he was a teenager he used to caretake for "Old Andrew" or "Lea" as he was sometimes called, too. I don't remember ever meeting Andrew himself. Maybe my mother and stepfather did. I'll have to ask them one of these days. Even though it's not a town, it's just some houses on a road, Cape Split had a reputation as a happening kind of place back then, because the painter John Marin had lived there, and the Marin family carried on the art tradition with their Cape Split Place Gallery for several years. Artists and other creative types were around, as were back-to-the-landers like my parents, in the 1970s and 80s. I do remember attending openings at the Gallery, when I must have been about nine and ten years old. It was quite a place, out there on the leading edge of nowhere.

When we moved away from Addison in 1985, I had to finish up high school in a new place. A boy who befriended me had a mother who was a writer. He told me that she would make the trek to Cape Split to see "Old Andrew" many times over the years, with their whole family in tow. He remembered it well. I told him that he drove right by our house on the way there. Addison and Cape Split are in my memory and heart forever.

Fast forward two decades. I'm a used book fanatic, living in Bangor, Maine. I've worked in bookstores for years, and I may have even just opened my own shop. Ryan and I seek out used books whenever and wherever we can. One trip takes us way downeast, past Addison, to Machias. A man named Jim runs a little secondhand book barn there. He bought it with the adjacent house - lock, stock, and book - either from the previous bookseller or from his heirs, I don't think I ever knew which. Suffice it to say that the previous bookseller was named Charles Hilt, and he was also a professor at the nearby University of Maine at Machias. In one alcove of the book barn, which is really a garage of sorts, is a nook of shelves filled with books about England. Mostly nondescript stuff from the 1950s, about kings and queens. Nothing special, nothing I want, common fare. However, after looking more closely, I do see a few items that are just the kind of things I most like. Oddments. Here are two of them:

Those spines. So dear, so shabby! Such well-loved books! I've had them for twenty years now myself. But obviously they were loved long before that. Something interesting is inside the front cover of John Fothergill's memoir An Inkeeper's Diary (Chatto & Windus 1931):

What's that? Written in fading ink, on the front pastedown?? "Windslip" / Cape Split / Addison, Maine / 1944, in what looks to be Lea Andrew Reiber's handwriting. The front free endpaper also carries some writing:

What a mish-mash! And barely visible with the copious, glorious foxing! From the top down, I think the "Fothergill / Bio-F / 1st Ed" notation must be that of a bookseller, perhaps Charles Hilt. The black ink name is anyone's guess. However, the blue ink name, we do know. W. Sinclair. Who is he? Dearest Andrew, the book, tells us that Walter Sinclair was (pp.21-22) one of the "theatre people (who) found their way to Cape Split.... Walter Sinclair, a producer and director, and his companion Andrew Reiber, an actor.... took houses in Addison or one of the surrounding villages. Then in 1939, they discovered Windslip, a cottage dating back to Revolutionary times. It was nearly past repair, but with careful planning and attention to historical accuracy, the two men had it restored to its original beauty. Overlooking the sea, the cottage stands on a rise, amid ancient apple trees.... When Walter Sinclair retired from the theatre, the two friends took up permanent residence in this beautiful spot. There they could read and write..." They also created a fine garden, and kept poodles. Please, someone, tell me more, about these men and their lives.

I don't think anyone will. So, back to Sinclair's inscription. Under his name is written "Compliments not of the / author" which I have to assume is an in-joke of some kind between Sinclair and Reiber, as if the book was a gift to Reiber or something. I wish I knew. I do love the little pinned advertisement, too, for Fothergill's inn, the Three Swans.

As if that isn't enough, there's even more going on in this busy book - I've written in pencil on the front pastedown, that Windslip was the home of Andrew Reiber, and inside the back cover I've tipped my bookplate in, next to a small bookshop ticket from Telecote Bookshop in Santa Barbara. All I have left to do is READ THE BOOK. Which I plan to do! Honestly, it looks great. And the foxing is only on the endpapers.

How about the other book spine, the one showing a book by James Agate - a theatre person's memoir, Ego 7: Even More of the Autobiography of James Agate (Harrap 1945). The book isn't marked up at all, but does contain these loose items inside the front cover:

Here's a closer look at the postcard, from 1975 (I wonder if the Nancy who wrote it is Nancy MacKnight, but that's one more thing I don't know):

And the lists of notes, which I find endearing to no end, partly because I do the same thing as I read - make a list with page numbers and quotes of interest. The notes here look like Reiber's writing, and correspond to the pages in Ego 7. Such as this, on p. 27: "A voice like damson-coloured velvet". I wonder if I could find all the other Egos. There are NINE VOLUMES in all, in this series. And, as with Fothergill, I've read none. So much to look forward to!

The lists of notes, by the way, are written on the backs of some scrap paper, these:

Old blank checks, from a bank in Machias. Machias, about half an hour up the coast from Addison. Back to the book barn again, Jim's book barn, in Machias. After our first visit, Ryan and I returned to make sure we'd seen what there was to see. If there were any other association copies to do with Windslip, Reiber, and Sinclair, we wanted to find them. There wasn't much. Trust me, we really looked. And I couldn't bring myself to buy the English kings and queens stuff without some kind of definite association or provenance. Even though I seem to remember Jim telling me that Charles Hilt got a lot of the books from Windslip, at least the ones the heirs wanted to sell, when Reiber died. HOWEVER...! All was not lost! We did find something great. Just so, so great. At least to me. It's been a long time now, but I'm pretty sure I bought this book there, on our second visit:

I could probably go back into my own diaries and find out, but I can't face the shelf of them just now. Look at this book instead: James Lees-Milne's anthology The Country House (Oxford 1982). Bought for four dollars in 2003, according to my code in pencil inside the back cover. In pen, written inside the front cover, is this:

Jim, otherwise known as James Lees-Milne. Dearest Andrew, and Vita. On the page together. I cannot even TELL you how pleased I was to find this book. Although, honestly, Ryan might have been the one. I can almost see him walking toward me in the book barn, with the book in his hands. It might be my favorite association copy, of all my books. Its story is so tenuous and intricate! How this book about British country house life through the ages came to tiny, remote Addison, Maine, sent from one Vita-admirer to another, and then was rereleased out into the moving, living world of used books, for me to find years later, well, I find it more than slightly amazing. Not to mention, me living a few miles up the road in Addison, age fifteen when the book was inscribed in the first place, interested in boys, mostly, although records and books a close second and third.

But wait, there's more. Stay with me, please. I do have one final book to mention today. One I think we found on the first trip to Jim's book barn, but it also could've been the second. I'm not sure because I didn't pencil my price/date code inside the back cover, Curses!! Moving on... in my last post I showed the stack of Virginia Woolf books I have on hand, and in that stack is her novel based on the life of Vita Sackville-West, and the ancestors in her lineage, Orlando. My copy came from Jim's, and looks like a hardcover first U.S. edition (Harcourt, Brace 1928), but I'm not sure from the copyright page information if it really is or not. There's no dust jacket present, so it's kind of a moot point, value-wise. It's still of great value to me, however, because of this inscription inside the front cover, and the accompanying slip of paper, that was used as a bookmark:

1979, Windslip. I was twelve years old. Not that this is all about me me me, but! It kind of is. Would anyone else care about this book, and its tender inscription "With love / to Charley / my closest friend", and how about the old bank deposit ticket with the name Charles E. Hilt on it, faded with age on its lower end, where it stuck out of the book for years? I don't know, but I sure care, and that's why I'm writing this down today.

Back to Virginia Woolf for a second - inside the front cover of Dearest Andrew is one more paper item, a bookmark with a picture and quote on it:

Betty! I have your book! Were you also known as Mrs. Hills? Nice little picture of the Woolfs' country home, Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex. (Which I've never seen, since each volume of her published Diary has exactly zero photographs in it! I mean. Come on. Whose editorial decision was that? I had to return to Frances Partridge's books to find photographs of the denizens of Bloomsbury instead.) And a pertinent quote about the threads of life and fiction that hold us together. This will help me circle back to Virginia Woolf, next time. I do want to note some of what she writes about Vita Sackville-West, and others in their purview, before the experience of reading her Diary fades from mind. Not that I'm planning on finishing Volume Five any time soon, because I'm not. I know the ending and don't want to hurry to get there.

How I wish that Dearest Andrew also contained Reiber's side of the correspondence! Alas, it does not. I wonder where it is now. Did Vita Sackville-West keep his letters? I have no idea. But OH how I would love to read the entire back-and-forth, between the two households. I find it poignant that Andrew wanted the book to be dedicated to Vita's memory:

I haven't mentioned yet that several of the photographs in the book, including the one of Andrew at the very end, were taken by a documentary filmmaker who lived with his wife and son in South Addison. They were friends of my parents, and when I was a teenager I used to babysit the son. What a small world it is, truly.

Would you like to see the old orchard at Windslip? Here it is. I took some pictures last summer when it was very green. In the fall we see deer under the trees, searching for newly fallen apples:

The house itself is there behind the trees and no longer fully visible from the main road. I miss the old mailbox, that for years still said Windslip. It's long gone now. Although it's probably just in the barn! Things tend to stay in place, downeast. Even though the view to the house itself is obscured, the field between the house and the ocean is still wide open. And the path by the cemetery still leads to the beach. What a place to rest, forever. I hope he's happy there, where he loved to be. I took this photograph on a March day at Cape Split, two years ago, after a very long winter. The grass is the ochre color I particularly love, scrubby and sere. Andrew's stone, with the nearly-illegible plaque on it, is in the lower right corner:

I think the flag is there because among so many other things, Reiber was also a Marine, or was in the Army or Navy. During World War II? The plaque said, I'm almost sure of it, but it's weathered so much that I haven't even read it during my many visits in recent years. When I go back, I'll check and see if I can make it out.

I know I've mentioned my interest in Vita Sackville-West before (here, for one), and I'm glad I've finally explained how far back that interest goes. She's not just the author, the poet, the fascinating personage, the mother too, of other authors, and the character of Orlando. She's also wrapped up by association in a place, for me, Cape Split - a place in books, and a real place I know well. I've painted that field, the cemetery, and beach, many times. In fact when I began to paint from the landscape, over fifteen years ago now, Cape Split was one of the first places I made a beeline for. I painted the apple tree, the spruces, the cemetery, the view up the field toward Windslip, the ledges, and the sand beach. I still head there to paint, when I can. And, two and three years ago I sold so many paintings - I mean we actually had cash on hand - that we bought some land there, Ryan and I. We may build a tiny off-the-grid painting camp at some point, if I ever have that kind of cash again - but if I never do, the land will remain as it is, a spruce forest, a home for hermit thrushes and song sparrows, and chickadees, and that's fine with me.

The land is about a mile from Windslip and the beach, on a little dirt road off the Cape Split Road. If I build anything at all, I might make a memorial bench, as a quiet place to sit and listen to the birds. I'll dedicate it to my older sister's first boyfriend. John, who has since died, the one who once worked for Andrew Reiber. Our family knew his family well. They were our neighbors and best friends, when my sisters and I were little. Their family had been on Cape Split for generations. Whenever I think of the land we bought, which years ago belonged to them, it brings me such satisfaction I can hardly put it into words. It's a full-circle kind of feeling. One of my favorite places on earth, Cape Split, because of childhood days, and because of Marin, and Reiber, and books, and art, and because of my own delight in spending time there now. I love to walk the beach. I love to paint the islands offshore. I loved Cape Split when I was young, and I love it still. It's nowhere special, really, just another place at the end of a road, with a few houses here and there, by the ocean, like so many other places in Maine. But it means the world to me. Thanks for listening to why.

settling in for the long haul

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 15:06:00 +0000

Update from here, before April is gone. We are about six weeks in to the stay-safe-at-home order in Maine, and state leadership just extended the order through the upcoming month of May. Then...? We don't know. Certain kinds of businesses might be able to reopen in June, others won't. Summer festivals and public events are being cancelled left and right. The antiques mall in which I sell my books is closed indefinitely, but the owner, bless him, is charging us dealers zero booth rent. So my inventory sits in darkness for now. And my upcoming painting shows are going to be mostly if not only online, it seems. All of which is fine with me. We've bought groceries by the email-your-list/curbside-pickup method twice, otherwise have only driven anywhere one other time, to park at a local trailhead a few miles away. My hand has healed up. All in all, we're doing fine. And fear is more or less at bay, though still present. A low point was an unexpected mini-blizzard a few weeks ago, with a foot of heavy wet snow and an accompanying power outage which lasted a few days. A high point was walking eight miles around the hill we live on, when the snow was gone and it was much warmer. I painted watercolors along the way. Crocus time has given way to daffodil time. The first dandelions are opening. Lilacs will be along soon enough. So it goes. My mind has settled somewhat and I am working away at my usual slow and steady pace, on all kinds of projects. I made a good painting yesterday, one I have been thinking about for months. Happiness floods in whenever I am able to set worry aside and work. And Ryan is a joy to quarantine with. He keeps busy with his own projects and work. His usual good humor abounds and lifts me up. The days are full, and then they pass by.

I've also started reading again. Like, really reading. I began with a little hardcover reprint of Virginia Woolf's stand-alone essay On Being Ill (Paris Press 2002). Perfect, and perfectly strange, written in its own way, in flowing comprehensible prose. Her sentences run on, sometimes to entire pages, but she never loses her threads. The essay was originally published in 1930 by the Woolfs (although Viriginia Woolf often called herself and her husband Leonard the Woolves) at their Hogarth Press. A brief and perhaps pertinent sample (p.11)

"There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals."

I don't think I have anything to confess, here or elsewhere. I'm usually an open book. But then, I remain healthy (knock on wood). Although I suppose we could play a game, hopefully brief, called Virus or Menopause? I am 52 and in the throes of the latter. Too much information? Not for an honest diary-writer. Virginia Woolf speaks of nearly everything, in hers. I know that now, because I did start reading The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1977-1984). I have the complete set, in five volumes. These were the last books I ordered online, in pre-pandemic days. I've ordered two others since then, from Canada, but they haven't arrived yet, and are on another subject, so will be a story for different day. My progress in Woolf's Diary is like everything else right now: slow, but full of the essential stuff of life. The savor is present and complete. It's wonderful to be able to visit her world with her as a tour guide, on the page, as life happens. This will sound so obvious, but she is an astonishingly good writer. Her descriptions of friends and acquaintances, her surroundings, and most of all her interior life, including her writing process, are extraordinary. The Diary begins in 1915, when she is in her 30s, married, and the war is well underway. She stops writing after a mental breakdown, then resumes. The war ends. Hogarth Press begins. She writes and publishes. She carries on. The facts and timeline of her life are so well known that I will not recount them here. I will say that her nephew Quentin Bell, who wrote a fine introduction to Volume One and was married to the editor of the Diary, says (p.xiii):

"In calling it a major work I wish to imply not merely that it is a large work of major historical and biographical importance (which it certainly and obviously is) but also that, considered as a whole, it is a masterpiece."

He elaborates (ibid) by saying that, like her best novels, the Diary has:

"...the same accurate beauty of writing but also an immediacy such as one finds only in diaries; it is in fact one of the great diaries of the world."

Here is my set, and On Being Ill, on the footstool in the book room:

I'm half way through Volume Three, as you see from my bookmark. The Diary is full of home truths. Like this one, from Volume One (p.22):

"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think."

For good measure, here is the rest of my Virginia Woolf collection, if I can even call it that. I've had a lot more books of hers, and sold them or at least offered them for sale, after not reading them for decades. That has changed, however, and I'm certainly glad now to still have these on hand:

She lives on the shelf between P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Wordsworth, isn't that a good place to be? Let's take a closer look at the book on the top of the pile: Vanessa Bell designed the dust jacket for her brother-in-law's edited version of her sister's diary:

More on the Diary as I continue with it. Finishing it will take weeks at my current snail's pace, then perhaps I will forge ahead with her early novels. The only novel I've ever finished of hers is Orlando. Which I loved, although I don't usually take to fiction which employs surrealist techniques or otherwise suspends the laws of time and space. However, since these laws seem to be suspended anyway at the moment, why not. I am planning on re-reading Orlando, because it's been years, and one of the highlights of the Diary so far is Woolf's unfolding description of Vita Sackville-West, as a personage-turned-lover, who is of course Orlando in the novel. And I do have a long story to tell about this particular copy, and its history and travels, along with some other Sackville-West books in my possession. Perhaps next time. I think it's a good story. It has many branches, will meander, and take a while to tell.

I want to wrap this up with a few more thoughts about the pandemic. Not from me, though. Virginia Woolf endured difficult times, to put it mildly. The war, the influenza epidemic, scarcity, her own ill health, you name it. A few brief passages stay with me from her Diary, about some of those times. In Volume One (p.56), during the war, Leonard is called up but is found unfit to serve, but:

"...still, if one could wake to find it untrue, it would be a mercy."

And after the war, life returns to something approaching normal, but then a railway strike occurs (ibid p.301):

"We are on war rations, & told to be brave and good.... Yet a state of siege has a certain snugness & self sufficiency about it. No one can interrupt."

And finally, from Volume Two, this devastating statment (p.72):

"Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end."

As we know, she manages to stay on the road for a long time. Until she no longer can, in fact. Don't look down unless you have to! And even then, keep your balance: be safe and walk on, friends. I hope you are well, and remain so. Let's meet back here in May.

plague diary

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 14:29:00 +0000

Week one of isolation is coming to a close in our household. Ryan has been on administrative leave from his job but also remains on call as needed. Same for the week ahead. And the week after that. Maybe longer but who knows, right now. I am trying to work as usual but can't focus on much for very long, so the days feel choppy and lengthy both, in a weird way. I keep forgetting about the pandemic for brief periods of time, then remembering with a jolt akin to seasickness. Turning to books still isn't working for me, but I keep trying. A list of what I've picked up and put back down, in the last two weeks:

Spirit of Place - Laurence Durrell
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Autobiography - Morrissey
Songs of Unreason - Jim Harrison
The Diary of Virginia Woolf (found all five volumes)
The Early Diary of Frances Burney
Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad - Austin Kleon

I got 49 pages in with Durrell, 14 pages in with Marcus Aurelius, 47 pages with Morrissey, skipped around in Harrison before deciding not to continue, made headway in zero pages with Woolf, and started where I left off some months ago on page lxxxvii in the interminable preface of the Fanny Burney set. Austin Kleon's book is the only thing I might actually finish this week (Workman 2019). I'm on page 135 and am finding it most helpful. It is exactly what he says it is, a guide to working on your art, in any form it takes, no matter what. It's not too heavy but at the same time has a terrific big-picture vibe that is appropriately doomy.

Up next I have a copy of art critic Jerry Saltz's brand new book How to Be an Artist (Riverhead 2020), and I'm looking forward to being able to attempt to concentrate on it sometime soon. I could say the same about my own art practice. Oil painting is not happening for me right now. I keep picking things up in my studio and putting them right back down again. The one project I do seem to be able to make headway with is the little gouache illustrated book I started making last winter. I set it aside after a few months and it's been dormant since then. I decided to look at it again and see what I could do. This week so far I've made a number of gouache paintings, written a few pages of possible text - each page only has a few words on it, but hey, I'll take them - and interleaved most of them into my existing manuscript. Here are a few of the paintings, on bristol board. They are quite small:

Making one at a time, in short stints, is working for me, and I feel so grateful! Animals, birds, natural things like leaves and feathers, landscapes real and imagined - these are what show up and they help reaffirm my love of the natural world. Everything goes into mylar page protecters in a big three-ring binder, and the whole thing is starting to feel really good and book-like, when I flip through it. Some places need more illustrations and others need more words, but it's 90% done, I think. About a hundred pages, a gentle manifesto about the seasons and my beliefs. Yay me.

My other book, the long wordy one, sits the way my empty canvases do, waiting for me to settle enough to focus on them for long stretches of time. Time I have, focus I do not. So I will keep on with the small work and let the rest be, for a while. Normal life feels like a wonderful dream. Meanwhile we take it day-to-day and count our blessings, here at home. The routine I have is a good one. Early morning yoga, a shower (still with my hand in a plastic bag because of my finger, which is healing up), breakfast. Morning work inside, and when the sun is warm, morning work outside in the yard and garden. Lunch, then a long walk with Ryan. We are going three to five miles a day. Then afternoon work, and some quiet time outside again before sunset. An evening meal of sorts, keeping it light, then books I pick up and put back down, and videos we watch together. All this is interspersed with news, email, phone calls, and conversations with our neighbors out in the street, from safe distances. Only a few cases of the virus have been documented in our community, but state authorities assure us there are more that haven't been. And many more in nearby cities and towns. We stay apart to protect ourselves and others. Please do the same, whenever possible. Let the storm pass by, while we shelter from it. And protect the helpers, those living and working in the epicenters, who cannot shelter. Good prayers, for every day.

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 14:25:00 +0000

♫ ♪ ♪ Turn and face the strange, ch-ch-changes ♫ ♪ ♫ and make up your own next line, to this familiar song, because everything sure has changed, and fast. Ryan and I were talking last night about the great little library sale we went to almost two weeks ago, where we saw some old friends, browsed around with happy anticipation, purchased four bags of books, bought groceries on the way home, and generally enjoyed life. It seems like months ago, now. I cleaned, coded, and priced most of the books, the day after I bought them, and they still sit in the front hall today. They will be there for a long time, I think. They're not going anywhere. And neither are we. Except for necessities when we absolutely must, and of course to get out into the wild. We are so fortunate here in Maine that the big open spaces of nature are all around us, and remain accessible. Beaches, trails, land preserves, quiet roads we can walk on - as spring arrives they will be saving graces, as they always are. I am lucky in that I usually work on my own, and in solitude. That will continue, I hope. I don't yet know what will happen to my summer painting season, but since there is nothing I can do about that, and it is tiny in the grand scheme of things, I set it on the back burner in my mind and let it cool down. Ryan will be telecommuting after today, as the college he works at transitions to online everything. We have income, health insurance, and some savings, to help us get through, and share with family and friends who will be in need when things get worse, as it seems they will. A lot has shut down. Friends and neighbors are already out of work. We are planning to buy their goods and services when we can. Heartbreaking, all of this. I can hardly get my mind around it.

Books are not helping at the moment, but I think this state of affairs is only temporary, as I struggle to accept the changes. I can't seem to settle on anything. I've started a bunch of books in the last two weeks and each time I pick one up and read a little, I put it back down and think, Nope, that's not it. I don't know what I'm looking for. Peace, perhaps, and a lessening of anxiety, but those are both in short supply. Because of world events, yes, but also, did I mention that I cut my finger by accident last week, in the kitchen, and our local doctor glued it up for me, and wrapped it, and told me not to get it wet? Yeah, that happened. I saw her again this week, and she said the same. So. No full-on hand-washing allowed. I'm using little alcohol and witch hazel pads to swab the bandages down from time to time, and of course washing the rest of my hands and self as best I can, but wow, the latent ocd I usually manage to keep in check is raging right now! Which would be funny, if it wasn't! Anyway, a difficult situation is made more difficult by my own actions. Thanks for visiting, Fate. My finger will be fine, with time. It's on my non-dominant hand and is a worrisome inconvenience at most. I hold it up a lot to keep it out of the way (like now, while writing this) and it looks like I'm pointing all the time: Hey you, and you, and you! Yes, you.

What shall we do in the coming weeks and months to keep ourselves engaged and grateful and community-minded? I am blank on that, at least for now, but glad to see that some of my favorite authors are doing wonderful things. Like Rob Macfarlane, who is hosting a reading club on his twitter feed, and the book this weekend is the quietly magnificent nature memoir The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. I spoke of it after reading it in the summer of 2018. If you haven't yet tracked down a copy, this might be an excellent time to do so. It's in print, so you can call your local independent bookseller and they will ship it to you, or find it secondhand from a used book seller on Biblio, or from Powell's, which has had to close its doors for now but is still selling online. Emily Powell's letter about their shut-down says how we all seem to feel about what is happening in our country and around the world, the unthinkable. History is engulfing us as we speak. And yet I look out the window and see the first crocuses of spring, opening up, and radiating their essential nature. Let's do the same and continue to share the good, no matter what.

I'm going to take my old turntable up to the studio and listen to records this afternoon, while I gesso canvases. Preparing surfaces to paint on is always a joy, for me, and an act of faith. I anticipate filling the empty canvases with beauty, light, shadow, and life, in the months ahead. I hope with all my heart that we will weather whatever happens. Stay safe and be well, friends.

take the leap

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 13:52:00 +0000

Extra day! I always think it's the strangest thing, leap year, and can't let it go by without marking it here. Even though I don't have much to say except I've been reading some good books, and visiting bookshops, and working on my own book. I'm about to take a break from that for, say, a month, since I am at the point with it when it looks pretty good to me. Meaning I can't see what else it might need. I hope a month away will make that crystal clear when I return to it with fresh eyes. Maybe I will post the foreword here at some point to help me put my intention to make it a public document, a real book, to be read by others, out to the universe. Meanwhile I have a ton of studio work to do - sixty paintings need framing and I've done about ten so far; and the catalogue for my next show needs to be finalized. It's nearly ready, I'm just dithering over a few minor but important details. There is more, much more, but I am working steadily and looking forward to the approach of spring, for real. We've had a few hints about it here and there. Spring fever means I'm out and about, and a few days ago we ended up at Stone Soup Books in Camden:

Ryan caught me browsing in the jam-packed shelves. Stone Soup is two small rooms, full from floor to ceiling as you can see, and nearby storage, so if you don't see what you're looking for, ask the proprietor Paul and he'll check elsewhere. I am assembling a hardcover set of Virginia Woolf's diaries, to read sometime this year, perhaps in the fall, and Paul had volume two tucked away. I also bought that Jennifer Bartlett book I'm holding. She's a painter I've been interested in for a long time but know zero to little about. Glad that's about to change. I also bought a volume of Shelley's verse, and a few other books to read. I didn't find any New York School additions to my collection. Truth be told, I am stalled out in that regard anyway. Ashbery and I are no longer keeping company, and I have nothing to report about the others in the group, having made zero inroads with Koch, or new ones with Schuyler. I've read all the Schuyler books I own at least twice already, over the last decade-plus, and my enthusiasm for writing a post about them after reading them again is low. I prefer to dip into them and revisit old favorites at this point. Here's what I currently have on hand:

These books have brought me hours and hours of joy, even at their most difficult. Something about his poetry gets me right where I live, and always has. I've quoted him often over the years, and even though I know I'm repeating myself I'll say again that this time of year always reminds me of these lines of his, from his long poem The Crystal Lithium, in Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1993, p.117):

"...January, laid out on a bed of ice, disgorging
February, shaped like a flounder, and March with her steel bead pocketbook,
And April, goofy and under-dressed and with a loud laugh, and May
Who will of course be voted Miss Best Liked (she expects it)..."

By nearly all accounts Schuyler was a difficult person at best, with recurring episodes of mental illness, a moochy personality, and a mean streak clearly evident in his diaries and letters to others. And yet. As with all of us, there is another side to him. The gardener, the heirloom rose enthusiast, the reader, the friend, the lover. Not to mention that he turns out exquisite verse, decade after decade, in spite of everything else. I will always honor him for it. His very life goes to show that you can be something of a mess regarding the day-to-day of things, and yet still win the Pulitzer Prize for your work. If I had unlimited funds to collect first editions, I would love to seek out all of his. Friends such as Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, and others I also admire, designed dust jackets for many of his first editions. Alas, most of them are beyond my reach. I have to be content with what I can get my hands on, in reprint.

That's all for now, I am heading out into this extra day to see what I can make of it. On we go.

isn't it romantic

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Faragher) — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 20:01:00 +0000

I have a few quiet hours this afternoon and have already completed today's needful chores, so I will preempt Valentine's Day by writing about what we love, now. I speak of the love of words. You know who loved words? John Ashbery loved words, that's who. I hesitate to say anything as definite as that, at any time, on any topic, about anyone, but I think it's safe to say it in this case. He uses words like so few other writers I've ever encountered. In his prose he is as clear as a bell and easy to follow, while still being as intellectually satisfying as any other brilliant writer I've ever read. But in his poetry, wow, what a different way of communicating he has. His poems are supple and complicated, and seem to speak the way we humans often think - in fits and starts, on tangents, and in circles. Clarity is rare.

There's a lot to love in his poetry but I must say, that after reading hundreds of pages of it, even while knowing that he is essentially a romantic, albeit a surreal one, there are very few poems of his that I love unequivocally from start to finish. Instead, almost always, there is a line, or several lines, or even a string of words - or just one word - that makes me smile, or causes empathy and understanding to rise, or one of many other available and possible emotions. A few: love, confusion, sympathy, envy, and even boredom. It's really hard for me to feel bored when I'm reading, or when I'm not, so it's a true surprise, when it shows up. The surprise of it is such an unaccustomed reaction that in and of itself it interests me.

HOWEVER. I love clarity. And I do want to love what I read, not just be interested by it. I am not getting any younger and a world of books still awaits, thank heavens. Tempus fugit and all that. So I think that Ashbery and I will be parting ways imminently. I made it almost all the way through the Library of America two volume set of his Collected Poems (both edited by Mark Ford, Library of America 2008 and 2017). And I do have a running list of his poems to revisit now and again, to see how they affect me over time and if I am able to grow toward a better understanding of his work. I have hope that they will engage my heart as well as my brain.

Meanwhile I do want to follow up with something I mentioned a few days ago, which is David Lehman's book The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday 1998). Lehman explains Ashbery and the rest in ways that make sense to me and aid me in my attempts to comprehend what Ashbery in particular does in his work. I am not the kind of person to read literary criticism first (although this is both that and cultural history, and biography), before I dive in and read an author's work. And I think I did read some of Ashbery's Selected Prose (University of Michigan 2004) first. Yes, because I was anxious about the poetry, and thus postponing it, but still. Anyway, Lehman is a great exception to my usual rule. He says early on in his fine book (p.30):

"...Ashbery, perhaps even more than his fellows, is at heart a Romantic poet, who conceives of the Imagination as a realm apart from experience, or reality, or time, to which it lends the redemptive enchantment that we seek in art and that may come closer to fulfilling the promise of happiness than any other form of human activity."

Romance is here in his poems, yes, in all senses of the word. Lehman says further (p.113-114):

"Reading Ashbery one felt one was on the edge of comprehension (or of incomprehension, which means the same thing). But the state of uncertainty to which his poetry transported one was as oddly intoxicating as it was perplexing. The bafflement itself produced a mental commotion not unlike that of the uncanny, in which a familiar image is suddenly bathed in a foreign light."

I do not like being intoxicated, however I understand now what he means. Lehman also quotes Kenneth Koch (p.237), who says about Ashbery's poem The Skaters: "'It's not about anything, it's a whole philosphy of life," in response to then-student David Shapiro asking Koch, when he saw the poem in manuscript form, "'What is it about?'"

I cannot stress how helpful I find this passage. It feels like unlocking a stubborn door with a magic key. There's more. Lehman quotes Ashbery himself, speaking in 1995 about his work, after decades of writing (pp.371-372): "'I wanted to stretch, not sever, the relation between language and communication.'" (Lehman pp.371-372)

Again, from Ashbery (p.37): "'I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word 'escapist' ...but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn't going to be enough.'"

Yes to escapism, yes to romanticism! And one more, Ashbery says (p.96): "'Very often people don't listen to you when you speak to them. It's only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.'"

That's it. He is so himself, which is among my criteria for any great writer or artist, and something I strive for in my own work: how to make it the most YOU you can possibly make it. Therein lies uniqueness, even in the midst of our collective humanity and the homogenity of language, art, you name it. Yes, it's all been said and done before, ho hum, but not by YOU, today, in your own way. I get it now, I really get it. And I want to love his poems, but I'm not there yet. I do love his use of words, and as I said, many of his lines, so I am well over halfway.

Shall I mention some of his words? They are remarkable in their context and I keep noting them down, as I encounter them. They seem to make up a self-portrait in the way his house in Hudson, New York does, the one that you can visit online. Some of his adjectives are: measly, miasmal, wacko, plangent, glabrous. And nouns: aviary, bougainvillea, morass, swansdown, glop, permeation, ventilation, occlusion, saraband. One poem that I did warm to is entitled Hoboken (A collage made from Roget's Thesaurus), in the Library of America set (Collected Poems 1991-2000 p.741-745). It is just what the title says, a built-up city of collaged phrases lifted from Roget, and is equal parts infuriating and delightful. Similarly, I often love his poem titles, which are amazing, but then the poems themselves... well. I must find myself at fault when they don't break my heart. Here's what I mean:

Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are
Operaters Are Standing By
Nobody is Going Anywhere
Poem on Several Occasions
The Songs We Know Best
Gentle Reader
Not Now But In Forty-Five Minutes
Baked Alaska
From Palookaville
The Garden of False Civility
Amid Mounting Evidence
But What Is the Reader To Make of This?
The Romantic Entanglement
Winter Weather Advisory

What fantastic poem titles; what great phrases. I suppose I now know to love them for their words, and the posssible meaning I bring them, not necessarily for what Ashbery may have intended, if anything. All that and I haven't even quoted a line of his poetry yet. Lord. Here's a passage that addresses this day as it looks to me at the moment. It's gray out, snowflakes are wisping around, and the flock of robins I saw in the yard this morning are long gone. Ashbery says in his (prose-)poem Haibun (Collected Poems 1956-1987 p.765):

"Isn't the point of pain the possibility it brings of being able to get along without pain, for awhile.... Unprofitable shifts of light and dark in the winter sky address this dilemma very directly."

More, the opening lines of his poem Vaucanson (ibid p.830):

"It was snowing as he wrote.
In the darkened room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods."

How about this one-line poem, which is just a title and its single line, and certainly feels appropriate for our times as they now stand (ibid p.676):

"I Had Thought That Things Were Going Along Well
But I was mistaken."

Another, the opening lines of his poem A Lot of Catching Up To Do (Collected Poems 1991-2000 p.766):

"Dark days, lit by a falling flame
from time to time. A door stands open
or not. It's much the same."

Mmm, how wonderful. I'll leave on that slightly higher note. Other Ashbery-thoughts will have to wait, for another day, if ever. Here is picture of a stack of books, as a reward of sorts for anyone who actually read what I just wrote (Thanks):

Five of these books I have already read (one I re-read), and three I am planning to read, whenever my New York School winter reading project winds down. I have miles to go before I sleep, however: two Kenneth Koch books I've had for years and barely ever looked into, another Frank O'Hara book I'm only halfway through, et cetera. Good problems to have. Happy Valentine's Day early, romantics and word lovers.