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From the bookshelf: April 2024

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Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in April 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks (2023) by Adam Nicolson looks at the pre-Socratic philosophers from between 800 and 450 BCE who moved us beyond the oppressive world of god-kings and their priests. Focused on the importance of place—and specifically Megale Hellas (Greater Greece)—in shaping how they thought, Nicholson makes the brilliant case that day-to-day existence in the “bustling port cities” of archaic Greece, where there was an emphasis on “fluidity . . . interchange and connectedness,” gave birth to philosophy. Trade, along with the coming and going of peoples and ideas that trade brings, required “new ways of thinking about the world, of configuring our relationships with one another.” It required, Nicholson asserts, a “harbor mind.”

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (2023) by Tracy K. Smith, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, is a “memoir-manifesto” which examines her life and her family history as a microcosm of the Black experience in America. Smith writes of the spirituality of the soul, her move toward sobriety and accountability, and her own growing spiritual practice. She makes the case that the soul is not merely “a private site of respite or transcendence,” but it is also a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions, such as how to bridge the gap between free and freed. It is a powerful and moving prayer for Americans to accept accountability and do the hard but necessary work of living together with others.

Felicity (2015) by Mary Oliver is a work filled with joy and beauty, released a few years before the poet’s death. “Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation,” she asserts in Humility. This is a book where “great happiness abounds,” notes one reviewer. “Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person.” Beginning with Don’t Worry, the work’s very first poem, we begin to understand the notion that love, like time, works in ways mysterious and wonderful.

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019 with a new 2022 Foreword) by Meghan Daum could be summarized as a work about “feeling old, spending too much time online, and getting ornery about the politics of young people.” That quick, somewhat snarky characterization from the New Yorker review could be seen as both accurate and yet somehow incomplete. Yes, there are plenty of times when Daum comes across as that person yelling “get off my lawn” at the kids. But there are also thoughtful questions around outrage vs. empathy. “To deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.”

Willful Behavior (2018) by Donna Leon is the eleventh in what is now a 33-book series featuring the Venetian detective Guido Brunetti. The story begins as Brunetti receives a visit from one of his wife’s students “with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago.” At first the detective dismisses her request, but soon the girl is found stabbed to death and Claudia Leonardo becomes Brunetti’s next case. The plot twists and turns and the detective begins to unlock long buried secrets of Nazi collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during World War II.

What’s on the nightstand for May (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in March of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2023. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

Photo by Tünde from Pixabay.

Dreams interrupted; dreams denied

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The human costs of war are vast and incalculable. Americans as a people came to see this firsthand during the Civil War. In the insightful This Republic of Suffering, historian and former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a massive scale, in an army made up almost entirely of volunteers, and usually occurring without relatives nearby to help with the nursing and grieving, changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. 

In her work, Faust describes “how the survivors managed on a practical level” and how a deeply religious culture of the time “struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God.” She uses the voices of real people—soldiers and their families, statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners—to make it personal and to give the reader a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.

Ukraine is going through a similar catastrophe today. Russia’s unprovoked attack and the unconscionable dithering by House Republicans to provide the support this democracy needs continues to result in great horror, destruction, and unnecessary death.

As in Faust’s book, the stories of those who have died, who have seen their dreams interrupted and then denied, have a power to force us to stop and think of what is at stake. I recently came face-to-face with forty of those stories, told in a most powerful way, at a place devoted to peacemaking.

United States Institute of Peace

The United States Institute of Peace is a national, nonpartisan, independent institute, founded by Congress in 1984. The Institute is:

. . . dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical and essential for U.S. and global security. In conflict zones abroad, the Institute works with local partners to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict. To reduce future crises and the need for costly interventions, USIP works with governments and civil societies to build local capacities to manage conflict peacefully. The Institute pursues its mission by linking research, policy, training, analysis and direct action to support those who are working to build a more peaceful, inclusive world.

Lauren Baille, Katie Ruppert, and Ambassador Bill Taylor (l-r) speak during the USIP Open House

I attended the April monthly open house at USIP, where the focus was on Ukraine. Short presentations were made by Katie Ruppert, Senior Program Officer in USIP’s Europe and Russia Center; Lauren Baillie, Senior Program Officer, Atrocity Prevention; and Ambassador William B. Taylor, Vice President, Europe and Russia at USIP. However, the most moving statements were silent, coming from the displays set up around the great hall.

Unissued Diplomas is a powerful exhibit reminding the world about the ongoing war . . .

. . . and the price Ukrainians pay daily in their fight for freedom. Unissued Diplomas honors the memory of Ukrainian students who will never graduate because their lives were taken by the Russian invasion. 

Some enlisted and died while fighting the war. Others were civilians trying to go about their daily lives. Current estimates—although difficult to verify—are that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in action, and perhaps as many 10,582 civilians, including 587 children, have died. The Russian—who are employing a “meat grinder” strategy to wear down the country—have suffered heavy losses as well in the process.

The stories we read are utterly heartbreaking, showing what we lose in war. An English teacher, lover of poetry, and guitar player who died in a Russian attack on a residential area of her city. A mother of twins with a dream of being a landscape designer, who lost not only her life but those of her children when Russia bombed her home. A boy who was unbelievably good at waltzing, later enlisted, and lost his life fighting on the front.

And then there are those like Leah Krylova, age 20, who was studying tourism at Mariupol State University. We don’t know her story because she died with her whole family when a Russian shell made a direct hit on her father’s home.

Similar stories can be found around the world in Gaza, Israel, and Palestine; in Sudan; in Bolivia; in Afghanistan; and in many other countries. Not all those affected look like us or think like us, yet we are all intimately connected by our humanity.

Originally drawn by Lorraine Schneider, this poster first appeared in 1966 in reaction to the Vietnam War. Its timeless message is as potent now as it was then.

More to come . . .

DJB

For other posts on the Ukrainian War on MORE TO COME, see:

Photographs by DJB

Celebrating the creators

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The fifteen years our family lived in Staunton, Virginia, remain among our most important and treasured memories. We essentially began our married life in this wonderful Shenandoah Valley community when I took a job as Executive Director of Historic Staunton Foundation that would lead to a four-decade career in the nonprofit world of preservation. The twins were born during our time here, and we made lifelong friends we still see on a regular basis. The town continues to thrive in part because of the dedication of a group of citizens who know that great communities don’t remain that way by chance.

I know—from personal experience—that Staunton is a place where old and new came together . . . where natives welcome and embrace newcomers and their ideas and where new citizens learn about the traditions of the town. Historic Staunton Foundation provided the context where everyone now thinks about historic buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes as tools for the future of the city, but there are many organizations and individuals who are involved in this work.

One of my favorite “new” campaigns in an “old” building in Staunton is The Arcadia Project. A non-profit community cultural center, Arcadia is restoring the historic New Theater building at 125 E. Beverly Street into a sustainable, adaptive mixed-use facility featuring a movie theater; an event space to host conferences, events, and performing arts; digital media classrooms; and a small specialty food café.

Postcard of the Historic New Theatre on Beverly Street in Staunton

After stabilizing the exterior of the building, paying off a loan, and selling the adjacent property, Arcadia received a $1.5M grant from the Industrial Revitalization Fund which provides the core funding to renovate the 1936 theater. The group—led by a dynamic board and director—is currently fundraising to furnish, light, and equip what will become a permanent community cultural center in Staunton.

We’ve come to know Thom and Pam Wagner through our friends Margaret and Oakley Pearson. Thom—an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and composer, and Pam, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker—join us as we play music at the Pearsons on the Friday evening after Thanksgiving. They are part of the “new” contingent that continues to refresh Staunton year-after-year.

Thom places our “marquee message” up for the town to see

One of their innovative fundraising efforts is the Sponsor a Marquee Quote at the theatre. Sponsors can honor a business, birthday, anniversary, or loved one by giving the gift of inspiration: a quote from a famous creator. The selected quote appears on the marquee for one month and the sponsors are recognized in the sidewalk display case. 

Candice and I decided we wanted to help out and sponsor a quote, and Thom placed our inspirational message on the marquee last Wednesday, May 1st! We’re now smiling at the folks in Staunton who walk by the project this month.

And for our quote, we chose the “instructions for life” by one of our favorite poets: Mary Oliver. You’ve seen it here before in MORE TO COME, and now our friends and other visitors to Staunton will be able to be inspired by it for the entire month of May.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

That’s a great way to discover and celebrate the wonder in the world.

Our Marquee Quote with Mary Oliver’s “Instructions for Life”

Thanks to the Wagners and all the supporters who are bringing this great landmark back to life.

UPDATE: Pam sent along this photograph with the message “looks even cooler at night!” Couldn’t agree more!

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of the Arcadia Project from TheArcadiaProject.org by Adam Rosen

The hard, but necessary work of living together with others

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Many of us are “given the language of the soul” early in our lives. For most, it speaks of something eternal and holy. For Southerners of various races, it can speak of home. But in the hands of a poet, especially one as talented as a former poet laureate, that language—if possible—takes on an even deeper and richer meaning.

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (2023) by Tracy K. Smith, the former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is described as a “memoir-manifesto” which examines her life and her family history as a microcosm of the Black experience in America. It is a powerful and moving prayer for Americans to accept accountability and do the hard but necessary work of living together with others.

She describes To Free the Captives with these words:

“To write a book about Black strength, Black continuance, and the powerful forms of belief and community that have long bolstered the soul of my people, I used the generations of my own patrilineal family to lean backward toward history, to gather a fuller sense of the lives my own ancestors led, the challenges they endured, and the sources of hope and bolstering they counted on. What this process has led me to believe is that all of us, in the here and now, can choose to work alongside the generations that precede us in tending to America’s oldest wounds and meeting the urgencies of our present.”

Look what she did in that first sentence as she speaks of “leaning backward” toward history. Smith reminds us of the importance of memory by calling out “the conundrum of history.” While we think it is behind us, perhaps—because it came first—it should be “up ahead, turning back now and again to see if we are keeping up.”

“Where are we going? Whence have we come? Can we yet train ourselves to admit the past more fully and honestly? If so, what might we learn about this thing we call freedom?”

The story of her father’s family from Sunflower, Alabama, places them squarely within America’s story. This is the place where her grandfather returned after serving in France during World War I, perhaps motivated to enlist because of hope that by helping to defend democracy in Europe he and other Black men might “prove their loyalty” to this nation.

This history is never gone. It’s not even past.

In the difficult summer of 2020, Smith recognizes that she has misunderstood that past. She believed she was “free” and that her “freedom had long ago been won” for her, but she comes to realize that she and other Black Americans are simply “freed.” She understands that she is “a guest in the places—we might just as easily call them institutions—where freedom is professed.” Smith suggests that, somewhere in the space between “free” and “freed,” the soul of America resides.

Throughout the tale of her family’s history, told in exquisite language both ordinary and gripping, the reader comes to see this space. The story of her parents’ honeymoon night, when they are turned away from the hotel her father has been assured will welcome them, is one example of many.

“‘This is no place for negroes,’ they are told. As much as you know about segregation, as many times as it’s touched you, the blow of discrimination doesn’t go away. You talk yourself back up. You put things into perspective. But you’ve been hit nonetheless. It’s no accident. Second-class citizenship does its work over the duration. A large part of this work hinges on the fact that, no matter how much you have been taught by experience to anticipate, the punch still lands, every time. You do and do not ever get used to it. This is part of segregation’s insidious design. My parents go elsewhere to celebrate their first night together as husband and wife.”

This paragraph shows the vigor and energy of Smith’s prose. Short sentences follow one-after-another to make you feel the pain of separation. There is power in “the punch still lands, every time.” Smith tells the reader again and again that “America is a soul-making enterprise.” And for too long we’ve been creating those souls between those who are free and those who are simply freed.

Throughout Smith writes of the spirituality of the soul, her move toward sobriety and accountability, and her own growing spiritual practice. She makes the case that the soul is not merely “a private site of respite or transcendence,” but it is also a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions. She often finds that her family’s history has been erased by institutional insensibility and racism. That history still happened, and it can still be used—in her skillful hands—to call us to bridge the gap between free and freed.

“What if the object each of us is undertaking is no longer an individual life,” she asks, “but a collaborative work massive in scale, which finally we must admit has long spanned lives and times?”

“What might we stand to gain if we were to but adjust our gaze to the scale and the stakes of this other larger undertaking, this colossal enterprise to which each is essential? Not in the hereafter. Not on the other side of the divide between death and life. Perhaps not even Soon. But here, today, where we ache and grieve, and where our best effort is mightly needed.”

In struggling to find the starting point for this journey . . .

“. . .something causes me to understand it is the work of paradox: we approach the large and the far by means of the near and the small.”

This luscious, compelling book reminds us, as one reviewer has noted, that we find the soul “in the warm weight of the actual.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by James Chan on Pixabay.

Observations from . . . April 2024

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A summary of the April posts from the MORE TO COME newsletter.

Our news feeds this month are something of a hot mess. With the continuing fight over providing the funding Ukraine desperately needs to continue to beat back Russian aggression; to attempts to just skip the entire 20th century and roll our laws back to 1864; to trying to keep the multiple trials of the former president straight; to bizarre (at best) oral arguments in the Supreme Court; to the rewriting of history and the abandonment of democracy by the leaders of one of our political parties, it has been quite the month for drama.

Surprisingly (or not), I found myself drawn to stories and works of empathy, wonder, and kindness (along with some history) on MORE TO COME during April. Let’s take a look at what tickled my fancy.

TOP READER VIEWS

The lessons history shares to help us understand today’s events piqued the interest of many MTC readers. In Wrapping government and religion together never ends well, I quoted a Quaker pastor who turned to history to show that the current movement to take away our democracy by wrapping together the flag and religion is an old one in America. 

“After John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln and was hiding in the Virginia countryside, he wrote in his journal that Lincoln had been the cause of all of America’s troubles and that ‘God has made me the instrument of his punishment.’ There is nothing so wicked, so fraught with abuse, as when we create cultures of crucifixion, which invariably begin with the marriage of government, violence, and religion.” 

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

Several posts this month looked at the topic of hope in various forms.

  • In a post entitled Citizenship, I write that we each have a role to play in choosing the type of country we want. How we respond to others is part of that choice. We can choose to perpetuate injustice against “the other” or—in our own flawed but unique way—take on the job of choosing to fight it. In FDR’s words, we can “apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
  • The purple iris as the antidote to worry and sorrow is a short piece that features a handmade plaque and a quote from civil and women’s rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune. Her words suggests that a great deal of worry and sorrow can be offset by a purple iris. Or a lark. Or a morning glory.
  • Because it is baseball season, hope spring eternal . . . at least in Baltimore. Read my take on both the Nationals and the Orioles in Opening Day . . . 2024.

TREASURES FROM THE BOOKSHELF

In addition to the book on climate change, I included reviews of several other works in this month’s newsletter.

  • In Places give access to minds, I look at Adam Nicholson’s wonderful new book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks and suggest that his image of the “harbor mind” is an apt metaphor for thinking more expansively about the world.
  • Megham Daum’s book The Problem with Everything has been summarized as a work about “feeling old, spending too much time online, and getting ornery about the politics of young people.” In Contradictions, nuance, and humanity I write that it is a bit more complicated that that, but sometimes our resistance to the resistance is simply generational.
  • Two murders in Venice lead to long buried secrets about collaboration that few want revealed, as I note in the post Just Rewards which examines another work from Donna Leon’s Detective Guido Brunetti series.

EYE-OPENING MUSICAL SELECTIONS

Cataract surgery, Spring, and special celebrations all played a role in this month’s Saturday Soundtrack musical selections.

Andrew takes in the eclipse in Boston
  • Most of what we see is behind our eyes came after my second eye was operated on to have the cataract removed. New eyes are not the only reason to wake up, look around, and be astonished. But they help. And it also gave me a chance to pull up some favorite songs about sight from artists as diverse as Ray Charles, Jackson Browne, The Blind Boys of Alabama, and Aretha Franklin.
  • Welcome Spring was my take on songs about the season from The Beatles, Nina Simone, and Carrie Newcomer, among others.
  • The upcoming celebration of the anniversary of Ella Fitzgerald’s birth prompted me to highlight her amazing musical legacy in A pioneer and a powerhouse.

CONCLUSION

Thanks, as always, for reading. Your support and feedback mean more than I can ever express.

As you travel life’s highways be open to love, thirst for wonder, undertake some mindful walking every day, recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have, and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, and others can feel especially vulnerable . . . because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy as the fight never ends.

Bash into some joy along the way.

And finally, try to be nice. Always be kind.

More to come . . .

DJB

For the March 2024 summary, click here.

You can follow MORE TO COME by going to the small “Follow” box that is on the right-hand column of the site (on the desktop version) or at the bottom right on your mobile device. It is great to hear from readers, and if you like them feel free to share these posts on your own social media platforms.

Photo of child playing in some April showers by Kristin Brown on Unsplash

Places give access to minds

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Places tend to shape us in ways we don’t fully understand. Even in something as universal as our contemplation of the basic ideas around knowledge, truth, right and wrong, religion, and the nature and meaning of life, we focus through the lens of our daily encounter with the world. In a place.

The premise that philosophy has a geography is the driving force of a delightful new book on the dawn of investigative thought.

How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks (2023) by Adam Nicolson looks at the time in western history where a few individuals decided to move beyond the oppressive world of god-kings and their priests and think more expansively about the nature of things. In this thought-provoking work, Nicholson is focused on “the motley group of mathematicians, moralists and mystics” we know as the pre-Socratic philosophers from between 800 and 450 BCE. What makes it a book wise beyond its self-help-like title is his attention to the importance of place—Megale Hellas (Greater Greece)—in shaping how they thought. He makes the brilliant case that day-to-day existence in the “bustling port cities” of archaic Greece, where there was an emphasis on “fluidity . . . interchange and connectedness,” gave birth to philosophy. Trade, in other words, along with the coming and going of peoples and ideas that trade brings, required “new ways of thinking about the world, of configuring our relationships with one another.”

He calls this approach to life the “harbor mind” and in his skillful hands it becomes an apt metaphor for thinking more expansively about a world that is always expanding before our eyes, in ancient times as well as today. Nicholson is, in effect, arguing that “engagement with the environment is always a philosophical act,” with one reviewer noting that “the close looking of the naturalist is more similar than we might think to the work of the philosopher.” 

Throughout this book, Nicholson travels to the ruins of these ancient port towns on islands and along the coasts of present-day Turkey, Greece, and Italy to try and envision what life was like in the centuries when they were at the hub of new and expanding trade routes. He wants to see “why this eruption of new thinking had happened in this place and at that time.”

Bertrand Russell wrote that in an attempt to “to conceive the world as a whole” the “greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism.” Nicholson continues that philosophy’s stature comes from its attempts “to bridge the transition between the perception of a universal harmony and the daily encounter with the world as it is, in all its difficulty and multiplicity.” To get there, those men and women—the early philosophers—did so not with assertions, but with inquiry. “They lived in a fluid world and thought with a harbor mind.”

Place is so very important to Nicholson. It is in the “meeting of the western limits of Asia, the northern shore of Africa in Egypt and the braided and tasseled fringe of southern Europe” where a new way of thinking about the world took root. He uses a variety of maps and numerous photographs and illustrations to help us understand how the world moved from a time where the texts that survive are “self-centered and repetitious” paeans by autocratic monarchs to works with dialogue, opposing views, and “multilayering of perspective.”

The author sails with us around the islands and into ancient harbors to consider, as another reviewer notes—“the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers—some of whom you may know: Pythagoras, Heraclitus (‘You can’t step into the same river twice’) and Zeno. Others have been more or less forgotten: Anaximenes, Xenophanes and Archilochus.”

Nicolson is an English aristocrat (though he doesn’t use his title) and his father-in-law, John Raven, was “a Cambridge classicist who literally wrote the textbook when it comes to the pre-Socratics.” He uses this background to good effect to help us understand the world of the ancient Greeks and their writings in the context of today’s world. He is also upfront about how slavery is the foundation of this world’s wealth. Multiple times he takes pains to show the reader how the luxury of the those who rule and benefit from this trading in ideas and goods comes by standing on the backs of conquered people who are often interchangeable and ultimately disposable. Like many of the questions he explores, this facet of life in the world—of the wealthy exploiting others to hold on to their wealth—is persistent to the present day.

Each chapter is structured around a specific question—How to Be Me? Does Love Rule the Universe? Can I Live Multiple Realities?—and then ends with a chapter of takeaways, which readers of the self-help genre will find familiar. Yet even that chapter is written with a sparkle and wit that makes it a joy to read. Here he reminds us that the habit of questioning is the foundation of knowing and that because our knowledge is “afloat on a certain liquidity,” it is best not to cling too tightly to what we know. Yet because such liquidity can lead to anarchy in thought, we should work to determine what it is that makes the world whole. We can come to better understand that coherence, Nicholson suggests, when we see that our own individual soul is just the entry point to the “presence of souls throughout all aspects of creation.”

And he ends by pointing to the words of Empedocles. “Neither an intolerant idealism nor the tragic aspects of existence” can be allowed to dominate. They should be held in check by the “power of clear-eyed love, caught in its endless tussle with the forces of strife.” Empedocles considers each of his fellow citizens a harbor, and we take and give in our contact with other humans, accepting wisdom where we find it. “Existence will always carry within it the seeds of its own redemption.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Praise for the independent bookstore

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Today is Independent Bookstore Day . . . that’s cause for celebration!

Regular readers know I love independent bookstores. My go-to bookstores in the Washington area are Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue and the relatively new People’s Books in Takoma Park. Through the years I’ve bought countless works from their shelves; participated in several small book group discussions; and attended a number of their author events, most recently for historian Heather Cox Richardson (P&P) and Robert Jones (People’s).

Heather Cox Richardson (left) at a Politics and Prose book event last fall (photo by DJB)

I’ll also visit independent bookstores on my travels, often mentioning them in a review of the book or books I purchased while in town. Just a sampling include:

Frankly, there are many more too numerous to list.

The Red Wheelbarrow in Paris (Photo by Janet Hustrand)

I even find and support independent bookstores when I’m traveling overseas, like The Red Wheelbarrow and Shakespeare and Company (both in Paris), and the Shetland Times Bookshop in Scotland.

Since today is a Saturday—music day here at MTC—I thought it would be fun to share a few songs about books. Let’s begin with a classic (aren’t they all) by the Beatles, Paperback Writer. Here’s the tune’s backstory from Wikipedia:

“Paperback Writer” was largely written by Paul McCartney, who based the lyrics on a challenge made to him by his Aunt Lil. McCartney said in 1966: “Years ago, my Auntie Lil said to me, ‘Why do you always write songs about love all the time? Can’t you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?’ So, I thought, ‘All right, Auntie Lil.'” According to Radio Luxembourg DJ Jimmy Savile’s recollection, the inspiration for the song came backstage at a concert venue when McCartney, mindful of his aunt’s request, saw Ringo Starr reading a book and declared his intention to write a song about a book.

Another Beatles book tune is John Lennon’s I Am the Walrus. The title of the 1967 composition “refers to Lewis Carroll’s poem The Walrus And The Carpenter, which is included in the 1871 book Through The Looking Glass.“

And, if that’s not enough, the end of the track also includes snatches of a BBC radio dramatization of Shakespeare‘s King Lear: “If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body; / And give the letters which thou find’st about me / To Edmund Earl of Gloucester; seek him out / Upon the British party: O, untimely death!”

I Write the Book by the wonderful singer-songwriter Patty Griffin was “one of the six songs from Patty’s first official release”—which was sold on cassette tapes at her early gigs. This song was recorded in 1991 at a small studio in a barn behind the house where she lived in Arlington, MA.

I write the book on loneliness | I write the poem on pain | I’m the obituary in the newspaper | Lying out in the pouring rain

Does it get any better than Dick Clark introducing Newark, New Jersey’s own The Monotones and the classic Who Wrote the Book of Love? Nope.

For those a little younger, here’s Elvis Costello and his hot guitar licks with a live version of Everyday I Write the Book.

Let’s end with the always entertaining John Hiatt singing his composition Book Lovers from 1983.

I heard the news from every fool in town | You got somebody new | And I never hurt so bad | The strangest fiction just came true . . .

Since you turned away | I turned the page on my happiness | We were just book lovers | Once upon a time you were mine | Now I must confess | We were just, we were just book lovers | (Since you turned away I turned the page on my happiness) | Chapter one- having fun (Once upon a time you were mine Now I must confess) | Chapter two- look at me and you | Chapter three- chapter three, baby I was down on my knees . . .

If you are a book lover, go find a great independent bookstore in your community and start reading. Maybe you’ll even be inspired to write a song!

More to come . . .

DJB

The purple iris as the antidote to worry and sorrow

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Yesterday morning I was on a walk through my Silver Spring neighborhood when I came upon a tiny handmade sign among some flowers. Since it is my custom to always read the plaque, I stopped to investigate.

The little plaque reads:

“I have had more than half a century of such happiness. A great deal of worry and sorrow, too, but never a worry or a sorrow that was not offset by a purple iris, a lark, a bluebird, or a dewy morning glory.”

Followed by the name and dates of the author:

Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875-1955

And as I looked up, I noticed that it sat among a stand of beautiful irises in full bloom.

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the old-fashioned iris. They were my mother’s favorite flower, and we always had some in our backyard on East Main Street. So I’m glad to know that I share at least one thing with the great educator and civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune.

Here’s some of her bio from the National Women’s History Museum:

“The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary Jane McLeod Bethune became one of the most important Black educators, civil and women’s rights leaders and government officials of the twentieth century. The college she founded set educational standards for today’s Black colleges, and her role as an advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave African Americans an advocate in government . . .

Mary McLeod Bethune (credit: National Women’s History Museum)

A champion of racial and gender equality, Bethune founded many organizations and led voter registration drives after women gained the vote in 1920, risking racist attacks. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and in 1935, she became the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune also played a role in the transition of Black voters from the Republican Party—“the party of Lincoln”—to the Democratic Party during the Great Depression. A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1936, Bethune became the highest ranking African American woman in government when President Franklin Roosevelt named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, where she remained until 1944. She was also a leader of FDR’s unofficial ‘black cabinet.’ In 1937 Bethune organized a conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, and fought to end discrimination and lynching. In 1940, she became vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP), a position she held for the rest of her life. As a member of the advisory board that in 1942 created the Women’s Army Corps, Bethune ensured it was racially integrated. Appointed by President Harry S. Truman, Bethune was the only woman of color at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945. She regularly wrote for the leading African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender.“

In addition to being a civil rights pioneer and educator, Bethune was a businesswoman who has been honored with a memorial statue, a postage stamp, and—in 2022—she became the first African American to be represented with a state statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol.

It gives me great joy to know that such an amazing and transformational leader took the time to stop and admire the iris. And a dewy morning glory.

Irises near Koiner Urban Farm in Silver Spring

More to come . . .

DJB

Contradictions, nuance, and humanity

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When I bought a book on the culture wars last weekend, I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting. I clearly didn’t think through the very real possibility that many of the battles in this modern-day “noisepool” of “one-note outrage” play out on social media and college campuses.

In other words, two places where I’m not exactly an expert.

I was not an early adapter on social media. I had a wife, two children, a job, a guitar and mandolin sitting in the corner, and other interests to fill my days. But I did finally take the plunge into Facebook and initially found it to be intoxicating in its reach. But that initial enthusiasm lasted less than three years and I told MORE TO COME readers in January of 2013 that I was leaving the platform to get a life.

A modicum of self-awareness helped me make the choice to never go on X/Twitter.* And let’s just say that it has been a very long time since I have spent more than a parents’ weekend in a college or academic setting.

Add in the fact that the GenX author is writing primarily about identity politics and feminism—so a generation where I don’t get the cultural references and yet another topic where I’m not exactly a scholar—and we have the potential of a post based on limited or incorrect knowledge and generational bias.

But that’s never stopped me before!**

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019 with a new 2022 Foreword) by Meghan Daum could be summarized as a work about “feeling old, spending too much time online, and getting ornery about the politics of young people.” That quick, somewhat snarky characterization from the New Yorker review could be seen as both accurate and yet somehow incomplete. Yes, there are plenty of times when Daum comes across as that person yelling “get off my lawn” at the kids. And there are very good reasons why you may not want to invest the time it takes to read what one commentator compared to a 222-page Twitter rant. There are also more nuanced reviews that capture what this work is trying to do.

It is complicated.

I read the entire book in one setting (seven-hour train rides are good for that type of immersion) and here are a few hot takes for your consumption.

Three times where I found myself nodding in agreement

  • Having conversations in short, online bursts of outrage misses all the nuance that makes life real for those who have lived in a world that isn’t consumed with technology. Life is seldom so neat as one-word hashtags and expletives would have us believe. “We need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy . . . to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.”
  • There are enough real challenges to life; we don’t need to manufacture problems. “The collective hunger for honest engagement with objective reality is something close to ravenous.”
  • We should not dismiss elders simply because they are old or because they frame issues in a way that seems culturally insensitive in today’s world. History is messy, but it also matters.

Three times where I thought Daum went off the rails

  • You simply cannot write a book-length work on culture wars—even a work about the hypocrisy of liberals—and wait until page 188 to note that conservatives on the right have a great deal to answer for in the coarsening of our civic life and the creation of manufactured problems that dwarf many of the outrages on the left. “Bashing the right, especially in the age of Trumpism, was easy and boring, the conversational equivalent of banging out ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano,” Daum writes. Well, it may be boring, but the age of misinformation and the weaponization of media has a parent who goes totally AWOL in Daum’s analysis.
  • Never write a book that bashes online outrage while admitting that you spend an inordinate time online reading and listening to contrarian conservative voices. Alone.
  • Daum’s personal journey (she was going through a divorce and a cross-country relocation) is touted throughout as something of singular importance to her coming to terms with the failings of feminism. To my mind, it simply set the stage for her falling in love with new internet friends who challenged the status quo. That’s not terribly original or insightful.

Write what you know

A friend suggests Daum “write about feminism, because as a straight, cisgendered, able-bodied (mostly) heteronormative white chick, it’s the only thing available to you anyway.” That’s good advice. I can only respond to this book as a straight, white male Baby Boomer who has spent a lifetime working in the rich stew of our messy, often misunderstood, increasingly weaponized, yet always fascinating history. When she calls up the Freedom Riders of the early Civil Rights movement—dressed in their coats, ties, and Sunday best—as excellent representatives of respectability politics that worked as a strategy, I am on board. However, too often Daum writes as someone who is challenged by change and seems to be certain about the “right way” to approach a problem.

“Trumpism has made us feel that the world is out of control. In turn, we’ve forgotten how to control ourselves,” Daum suggests. I don’t disagree. I want to hear her voice, but I also want to hear those of older and younger activists with backgrounds that aren’t so close to mine.

Those who find outrage over what may be overblown problems, and those who quickly criticize because that approach is different than their generation’s perspective may still need to move further down the path to discover that life is hard because mystery is hard. Age—with all its problems—does help us undertake that move from certainty to mystery.

More to come . . .

DJB

*For MORE TO COME posts on digital clutter, check out:

**These paragraphs could be shared as an example of why I never went into marketing.

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable

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Many of us are grappling with anxiety and worry at this moment in time. We see troubles in every part of the world. Our own political divisions threaten to destroy the best—however imperfect—form of government humans have every devised. Some are at a stage in life where what’s next in this journey is much closer than how we began. As I was reminded at yet another funeral last week, we don’t get to make that choice. It almost always comes in unexpected ways.

And even though we knew it was coming, the eclipse was eerie enough to bring on its own special type of anxiety.

In a 2023 On Being podcast with Krista Tippett, the best-selling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor describes the tumultuous times in her past. She called upon something John Claypool once said that helped her sort through the challenges. He simply asked her, “What is saving your life right now?”

“I love the right-now-ness of it . . . I think that’s the answer. What’s saving my life right now in my early 70s, married to a man who turns 86 next month, going to more funerals than baptisms, with all that we’ve talked about that there is to lament. ‘Right now’ has become a place where I can find, every day, great joy if I don’t get too ahead of myself. If I get way ahead of myself, I’ll need to take more drugs or something.

But if I can stay right now, there is something every single day that is worth staying alive for and worth increasing the life available to everything and everyone about me within a local radius. So what’s saving my life right now is this locality I’ve been talking about. I am at this moment a better grandmother, aunt, sister, spouse than I’ve ever been by my own measure because I’m attending in ways I have not attended . . . staying in the present as best I can and being amazed that life, as it unrolls every single day, is more than scenery as I rush from here to there. That it’s the real deal.“

Every single day “is more than scenery.” I love that thought. Life brings a continuous stream of unimaginable wonders. Our job is to pay attention, focusing on the wonder of what’s around us and acting in the locality of where we are. Our local actions—as Isabel Wilkerson reminds us—are one way we participate in the great dramas of our day. How we interact with those in our immediate presence, how we talk about those present and those not in the room, how we seek to grow in knowledge—these are among the ways we save ourselves on this journey.

Rigidity in mind and spirit can be a challenge. We’ve all seen examples of people who fear what’s next and want to hang on to what they have and what they wish to be true. Yet it is with an open spirit that we best see the wholeness and love that is around us. Among Taylor’s work is an essay on physics called “The Luminous Web.” In it she writes of the evolution of science and then of physics in particular. Krista Tippett spoke of it in their interview.

“’The deeper revelation’ of physics in our time . . . is one of undivided wholeness, in which the observer is not separable from what is observed. Or, in Heisenberg’s words, ‘The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate.’”

“Is this physics or theology, science or religion?” Taylor asked. “At the very least, it is poetry.” Which seems appropriate to consider here on Earth Day 2024.

Poetry comes in all different forms. “Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation,” writes Mary Oliver in Humility.

Felicity (2015) by Mary Oliver is a wonderful work, released a few years before the poet’s death, with poems that help save me in this moment. “Here, great happiness abounds,” writes one reviewer. “Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person.”

And she begins with the very first poem and the notion that love, like time, works in ways mysterious and wonderful.

Don’t Worry

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?

She reminds us in Storage that the things we accumulate over a lifetime are, in the end, unimportant. Burn those things that clutter so you can, “Make room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.”

Perhaps we need to throw caution to the wind.

Moments

“There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.

Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?

There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.“

There is a strangeness and wonder of human connection, and with Felicity Oliver “honors love, life, and beauty.” And in the spirit of Taylor’s focus on presence and locality, nothing is too small.

Nothing Is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About

The cricket doesn’t wonder
if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.

It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.

He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.

This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.

Oliver provides useful instructions for life:

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

When we do so, we may also find it wise to follow another of her suggestions and keep some room in our heart for the unimaginable.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by pine watt on Unsplash