The Library! at Bown Crossing, Boise, Idaho
PORTABLE MAGIC
‘Book Haul’ by Cecil Robin Singalaoa, watercolor on cotton rag paper, 2020, 4×6 inches
This delinquent writing contributor found herself this summer at the Library! at Bown Crossing in Boise, Idaho for my first sale. Yes, that’s how they spell library in the Intermountain West city, with an exclamation point at the end of the word to stress what a fun and discovery place it is.
When we reached the Library! after a 10-12 minute drive from daughter Kimi’s home, so excited were we that we forgot to document the huge room where the sale was in progress. My concern was for my two check-in luggage not to be overweight at the airport when it was time to go home.
Staffed by volunteers, mainly senior citizens, the sale divided the books into fiction, non-fiction, even travel and music. There was a whole vertical shelf of young adult pickings that my granddaughter Kai examined a book at a time. Kimi didn’t give us a budget. After all, who could say “No” to hard-bounds and classical and jazz CDs that cost two dollars or less?
Nora Ephron’s last reflections
I chanced upon screenwriter-director Nora Ephron’s last book of essays, I Remember Nothing, and finished it overnight, laughing in many parts. What was moving was the list she drew up in the last piece What I Will Miss, a foreboding of the fate (death) that awaited her. The list in full runs:
My kids
Nick
Spring
Fall
Waffles
The concept of waffles
Bacon
A walk in the park
The part
Shakespeare in the park
The bed
Reading in bed
Fireworks
Laughs
The view out the window
Twinkle lights
Butter
Dinner at home just the two of us
Dinner with friends
Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives
Paris
Next year in Istanbul
Pride and Prejudice
The Christmas tree
Thanksgiving dinner
One of the table
The dogwood
Taking a math
Coming over the bridge to Manhattan
Pie
If anything, this and the other list, What I Won’t Miss, a mammogram, among others, are touching for reminding the reader how painfully fleeting this life is. If one bothers to draft a list, there is an opportunity for soulful gratitude for the simple joys, even the irritants, of life.
Ode to the Seine
And speaking of Paris, I found The Seine: The River That Made Paris by Elaine Sciolino. The author, former Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, was “seduced by a river.” She declared the Seine as the most romantic river in the world, encouraging visitors “to dream, to linger, to flirt, to fall in love, or at least fantasize that falling in love is possible.”
With the recent opening of the Olympics in Paris, the Seine underwent a billion-dollar cleanup as it served as the waterways for the barges carrying the athletes and flags from participating countries. Nothing could compare to the sight of the blue Seine as thousands of onlookers waved on opposite sides of the river.
Sciolino compared the Seine with other rivers in the world, and nothing comes close. She wrote: “The Ganges, the Mississippi, and the Yangtze? They are muscular workhorses. The Thames? Who can name one famous couple who fell in love on its banks? The Danube? It may be immortalized at the world’s most recognizable waltz, but its history is one of warring nations.”
The text is interspersed with how the Seine appears through the centuries through prints, old photographs and the like. There is even one of 19th-century novelist Emile Zola holding his camera and pointing it at the Seine.
The river, its seasons and changing light inspired artists, too, counting among them Renoir and his famous painting Luncheon of the Boating Party, Matisse’s Studio, Quai Saint-Michel showing an odalisque nude with a window overlooking the Seine.
Next on my purchase list was Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. I was introduced to this West Indian author by poet Luisa A. Igloria and scholar Delfin Tolentino Jr. The book is pre-loved, its pages yellowing and the first page carried the previous owner’s name, “C Patterson.”
Stellar authors on little-known masterpieces
Unknown Masterpieces: Writers Rediscover Literature’s Hidden Classics gathers 13 famous writers introducing “little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books.”
Susan Sontag zeroes in on Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. But first, she contextualizes what were crucially happening in 1926, among them: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 in F Minor was heard for the first time; Catalan architext Antonio Gaudi, who envisioned the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, was hit by a trolley and died; movie star Rudolph Valentino died of endorcarditis and septicemia.
Sontag calls the correspondence as a “correspondence a trois,” not exercise by two persons but by three with poet Marina as an “igniting force, so powerful, so outrageous are her need, her boldness, her emotional nakedness… outgalloping first Pasternak, then Rilke.”
How I wish I could stumble upon this impassioned correspondence on a bargain book bin somewhere!
A collection of short whodunit from Belgium’s master storyteller
If there’s an Inspector Poirot made famous by Agatha Christie, Belgium’s answer is Inspector Maigret, a creation of Georges Simenon. In the Penguin paperback Maigret’s Failure, there are nine short stories. The language is sparse, I don’t know if it is because it comes to us translated, but remains elegant. Perfect for reading in airports or doctor’s clinics while awaiting one’s plane or the medical secretary’s summons.
What sets Maigret apart is, according to the description in The Drunk Woman and the Photographer with the Muffled Tread, is this: “If there was anyone in Paris who had gained first-hand experience of life’s brutal realities, who had learned, day after day, how to discover the truth of appearances, it was him, and yet he has never entirely grown out of certain fantasies from his childhood and adolescence.
“Hadn’t he once said that he would have liked to be a ‘mender of destinies’, such was his desire to restore people to their rightful places, the places they would have occupied if the world were a naïve, picture postcard version of itself?”
I haven’t explored our city libraries yet, but their purpose being what it is, I suppose it has saved many lovers of the word from perdition. There’s nothing like a physical book in the age of the momentary pleasures of gadgets.
