Delivering.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking and loss of all hands aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald.  Kirkus reviews John U. Bacon's latest, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

He opens with an overview of the Great Lakes, whose waves and currents turn out to be as nasty as those in salt water. Between 1875 and 1975, they claimed at least 6,000 ships and 30,000 sailors—averaging one shipwreck a week. As Bacon writes in arresting prose, “These freighters battled waves twenty feet or more, faced eighty-mile-per-hour winds, and crashed into lighthouses, ports, piers, bridges, shoals, jagged shores, and each other. They faced fires and explosions onboard, hundreds of tons of ice weighing their ships down, water flooding into their pilothouses and cargo holds, and fog, the one element that could make even the most seasoned mariner stop in his tracks, praying for luck.” 

Narrowing his focus, Bacon describes the mines of Minnesota and Wisconsin that required massive carriers to transport their ore south to refineries in Chicago and Buffalo and points in between. The carriers were designed primarily for profit (carrying the maximum load) and to pass through narrow locks leading from Lake Superior to Lake Huron. Designers paid less attention to their ability to handle the Great Lakes on bad days. Since no crewman survived, details of the disaster are spotty, but Bacon makes the most of them, delivering biographies of crewmen, their duties, descriptions of the storm, increasingly fraught messages from the Fitzgerald before they ceased, interviews with victims’ families, and a discussion of the lessons learned. The author makes the Fitzgerald the centerpiece of a broad account of Great Lakes shipping, the careers and daily lives of the crews—and the industries, cities, and bars that feed them—and tales of other sinkings.

The book will be released Tuesday, October 7. 

Bacon discusses the book with Dave LewAllen ..

On November 4, Bacon will speak at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.

Be.

Gettysburg.

A 1994 C-SPAN production in which Shelby Foote discusses the Gettysburg Campaign and his book, Stars in Their Courses ...

Old.

Tradition.

[I]n the spiky fall season, days like today with the little chill that makes one feel freshly laundered ...

A Thanksgiving-week-reading tradition.

Thanks for the introduction, Kurt.

Introduction.

My introduction ...

to William F. Buckley Jr. was made by Kurt over Thanksgiving break, 1983.

From Nora Ephron's August 7, 1983 New York Times review ...

What Mr. Buckley has written is a contemporary version of the books written by first-generation Americans who came to this country as poor immigrants during the 19th century and flourished in retailing or whatever. Late in life, many of them wrote reflections that were privately published and that possess the innocent vulgarity and love of country that so often combine to make up the sensibility known as nouveau riche. These books work in their modest way because they are American fables, and that, I think, is what ''Overdrive'' is meant to be. A boy born to a small oil fortune grows up to be a man with three homes, five in help, a wife on the best-dressed list and the secure belief that even his preference in peanut butter will be of interest to his fans. His attitude toward life is so cheerful and good-natured - and what's more, he's right about the peanut butter - that it seems almost churlish to point out that it is possible to spend too much time in a limousine. The English used to say, give an Irishman a horse and he'll vote Tory, but never mind.

I would add that the pictures are interesting as well, and provided my first glimpse into what has, ever since, been my dream garage-study (and chair).

CORRECTION...

... it was Christmas break, 1983.

Enigma.

More than 500 years after it was built, Filippo Brunelleschi's dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy, remains the largest masonry dome ever built. Leaving no plans or sketches behind, some of the secrets of its construction that Brunelleschi pioneered are still an enigma today.

CONNECT

Author and historian Ross King talks about Filippo Brunelleschi and the construction of Santa Maria del Fiore's dome ...

 An excellent book ...

Everything.

He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness.

Charles Dickens, from A Christmas Carol

Good.

Very good, Sir ...

Unbarred.

Begin again where frosts and tests were hard.
Find yourself or founder. Here, imagine
A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,
The books stand open and the gates unbarred.

Seamus Heaney

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Ave.

Meanwhile, over roughly 50 years, I wrote and had many books published.  They were published by prime American houses; many of them had multiple editions; most of them were translated and then published in perhaps more than a dozen languages and countries around the world.  Highly respected historians praised them.  I had chosen a country life, separate and independent from most professional intellectuals.  Still, my own library grew.  At first it contained perhaps a thousand books in a small study in our house.  I bought more and more.  Then we added a large hexagonal library to our house, which I could afford, along with travel, because of the royalties advanced against my books from publishers.  North of our house, I had a few acres of wilderness.  In 1981, I convinced Stephanie to sell our house and build another one on the northern edge of the wilderness, along a small river, the Pickering Creek.  So we did, in three years.  Perhaps this was my most precious achievement: a handsome house, near perfect, at the end of a long driveway, for months surrounded by green and gold, flowers, and books—a large library on its western side, on two floors.  More than saturated with a rich silence, this library is.  It exudes an atmosphere.  In this house and in its library, I have now lived a third of a century, from my early 60’s on.  Each morning, trying to catch my breath, I stumble down from my bedroom to the library.  There shuffling, I sit now at a narrow desk tapping at keys with my trembling fingers.  Sometimes on late afternoons I go out to sit on my terrace, breathing in the view of a greensward; and yes, thanking God for having allowed me this.  Then, soused with a stiff drink, I return to my surroundings until dinner.

The “Blessings of Old Age”?  Oh, not at all.  How very soon I shall be dead.  In a year?  In a few months?  In a few weeks?  I hope that I will not be constrained to move from here to a communal nursing home.  I hope; but I cannot know.  What I know is that, after my death, this library, this house, will instantly be changed.  They are my inheritance for my children and my stepson.  My house will be sold at once.  My books will go to the library of the University of Notre Dame, thanks to the excellent Rev. Wilson D. (Bill) Miscamble, C.S.C.  My furniture and the decorations, chests, vitrines, armoires, antique clocks, paintings, and etchings on the walls will be dispersed among my children or sold.  They are still my surroundings, which in this country I assembled from an older America, England, France, Austria, and even one or two pieces from my family in Hungary, miraculously regained almost 70 years ago.  Perhaps I have been not much more than an ephemeral owner of an outdated museum.  I am not a survivor.  I am a crumbling remnant.  A remnant of the very end of the Bourgeois Age and a remnant of the Age of Books.  Ave atque vale.

John Lukacs

CONNECT

Gentle.

Calendars.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure; the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench, without touching while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return home for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the interrupted chapter, all those things which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance at, it has on the contrary engraved in us so sweet a memory of (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and pond which no longer exist.

Marcel Proust

Paddle.

An excellent book ...

An excellent movie ...

Sleighride.

The "Nantucket Sleighride", as depicted in movie adaptations of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick ...

1956



2011

Marvel.

I have often wondered at the extreme fecundity of the press, and how it comes to pass that so many heads, on which Nature seems to have inflicted the curse of barrenness, should teem with voluminous productions. As a man travels on, however, in the journey of life, his objects of wonder daily diminish, and he is continually finding out some very simple cause for some great matter of marvel. Thus have I chanced, in my peregrinations about this great metropolis, to blunder upon a scene which unfolded to me some of the mysteries of the book-making craft, and at once put an end to my astonishment.

I was one summer's day loitering through the great saloons of the British Museum, with that listlessness with which one is apt to saunter about a museum in warm weather; sometimes lolling over the glass cases of minerals, sometimes studying the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian mummy, and some times trying, with nearly equal success, to comprehend the allegorical paintings on the lofty ceilings. Whilst I was gazing about in this idle way, my attention was attracted to a distant door, at the end of a suite of apartments. It was closed, but every now and then it would open, and some strange-favored being, generally clothed in black, would steal forth, and glide through the rooms, without noticing any of the surrounding objects. There was an air of mystery about this that piqued my languid curiosity, and I determined to attempt the passage of that strait, and to explore the unknown regions beyond. The door yielded to my hand, with all that facility with which the portals of enchanted castles yield to the adventurous knight-errant. I found myself in a spacious chamber, surrounded with great cases of venerable books. Above the cases, and just under the cornice, were arranged a great number of black-looking portraits of ancient authors. About the room were placed long tables, with stands for reading and writing, at which sat many pale, studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging among mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents. A hushed stillness reigned through this mysterious apartment, excepting that you might hear the racing of pens over sheets of paper, and occasionally the deep sigh of one of these sages, as he shifted his position to turn over the page of an old folio; doubtless arising from that hollowness and flatulency incident to learned research.

Washington Irving, from "The Art of Book-Making"

Magic.

I tried to give up the way of poetry and stop writing verses.  But each time I did so, a poetic sentiment would tug at my heart and something would flicker in my mind.  Such is the magic spell of the life of poetry.

Basho 

Buddhist teachings and the poetry of Basho train us to search for the essence, the very being, of even the smallest, most common things.  One of the goals of poetry is to penetrate this essence, to grab hold of it in words and pass it on to the reader, so purely that the writer as author disappears.  Only by stepping aside, by relinquishing the importance of being the author, can one capture and transmit the essence -- the very is-ness -- of a thing. 

Jane Reichhold, from BASHO, The Complete Haiku