If I were able to write a novel, the kind of novel I’d hope to be able to write is the one I just finished reading, The Starboard Sea, by Amber Dermont.

Usually, I read for entertainment–not quite trash, but definitely escapist stuff. The Starboard Sea is none of that. All of us, in our lives, have done things of which we’re deeply ashamed, things that tragically affect another person’s life, things that we can’t take back. (Well, maybe not that dramatically, but at least we’ve hurt other people, even if only unintentionally.) This book deals with this, on many levels and among a number of people. It offers no easy, glib answers, but it provides a perspective that may be a portal to healing our shame. I think it was Camus who said something about philosophy being best written through fiction. This is a book I’ll remember.

I wouldn’t have ever noticed this book had I not been turned on to it by a blog I regularly read, GuysLitWire. I know, I know…that’s a very butch sounding title, but it’s an excellent blog and every book that I’ve read that they’d recommended I’ve enjoyed. This one, the most. Their post on this book is at http://guyslitwire.blogspot.com/2012/04/starboard-sea-by-amber-dermont.html.

I hope you take a chance on The Starboard Sea: A Novel. It’s excellent. Amber Dermont, the author, is a Vassar grad, currently an associate professor at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia.

Ashes of the Earth

Something new out of something old

There are many types of sleuths and mysteries beyond Mrs. Marple in Agatha Christie’s locked-room cozies or the hard-boiled private eye, Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler’s yarns. One of the many types is the police procedural that’s become the tired mainstay of so much television fare. Yet, a master such as Isaac Asimov, in his Robot series, was able to transform that genre into something completely unique by his choice of context. Thus, Asimov created the science-fiction police procedural novel.

The author, Eliot Pattison, has, I believe, created his own mystery niche, mysteries within the context of the collision of cultures. These cultural collisions have taken several forms. What first got me hooked on Pattison, were his Inspector Shan novels (see inkwatu.com/2011/01/01/the-eliot-pattison-inspector-shan-series/). The cultural conflict in those books is the struggle between China and Tibet, a topic of personal significance for me as a Buddhist.

Finishing those, I moved on to his Bone Rattler series. The cultural conflict there is between that of the peoples of the new world (the Native-Americans and the European colonists who are in the process of transforming from Europeans into Americans) and the Europeans who exploit and manipulate the Native-Americans and American colonists.

As Robert Ludlum said in a Writer’s Digest article, “I think arresting fiction is written out of a sense of outrage.” That outrage is certainly there for Pattison in the Chinese/Tibetan conflict, in the pre-Revolutionary War America, and in the post-apocalyptic world of his newest novel, Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America.

However, for Pattison, this outrage is not the “thing” itself; it is merely the context. The “thing” itself is the mystery that must be solved within this context.

Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America

The cultural collision in Ashes of the Earth is on multiple levels. The most obvious is between the memories of the pre-apocalyptic world and the reality of a post-apocalyptic one. Another is between one outpost of survivors and the outcasts from that group. There are other cultural conflicts, but I will leave those for you to discover.

At first, an apocalyptic world novel might seem like a profound departure for such an established author. It’s not. Compare Pattison’s Ashes of the Earth to any of John Christopher’s post-apocalyptic world novels.

(John Christopher is a pseudonym of Samuel Youd. For a great article on his novels see www.colinbrockhurst.co.uk/the-shattered-worlds-of-john-christopher/422/. In the late 60s I read all of Youd’s John Christopher novels. I recommend them highly.)

The stakes are completely different for the two authors. For Christopher, the underlying theme is survival in a world of anarchy–that’s what’s at stake. For Pattison, survival is just the context, the mystery is the game.

Pattison’s Sleuths

Typically, Pattison’s sleuths all have a foot in both sides of the cultural conflict. Often he is a fallen and outcast hero of the culture of oppression who defends the oppressed culture as a side effect of his sleuthing. Here, too, is a feature of Pattison’s novels that set them apart from many mysteries.

Over the course of each series, and to a certain extent within each book, the hero is experiencing his own character arc, a change of perspective, loyalties, belief systems, and sense of purpose. This arc is built into the nature of the character himself. It is a journey of self-discovery for the sleuth. I find this aspect of Pattison’s novels particulary rewarding as a reader. Pattison’s sleuths are not static, two-dimensional characters. This makes for considerable interest and tension. Not only is there a crime to be solved, but the hero himself is a mystery, to us and to himself.

When I look back over the novels of Pattison that I’ve read, I remember many of the characters vividly, not just his heroes. This is not always the case with an author. Just taking the two authors mentioned above, both favorites of mine, Christopher and Ludlum, aside from the main character how many of their other characters do I remember? Not all that many. In Pattison’s novels, I remember quite a few.

A venerable tradition is maintained

Above all, Pattison’s books are mysteries–not political fiction, not intrigue, not thrillers, not sci-fi (although all those elements may be there), but mysteries. There is a crime to be solved. We try to solve it. The sleuth solves it and explains it. What more could a mystery junkie ask?

I highly recommend Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America. Once you read it, I suspect you’ll go back and read more of his novels.

1. The Skull Mantra (1999)
2. Water Touching Stone (2001)
3. Bone Mountain (2002)
4. Beautiful Ghosts (2004)
5. Prayer of the Dragon (2007)
6. The Lord of Death (2009) [Wikipedia]

Just goes to prove “there’s no accountin’ far taste” (to be spoken in the Ozark accent into which I was born; down there, “for” rhymes with “far”).
 
I love the series and highly recommend it. It fits, squarely, within the niche defined in Mystery Series Set in Foreign Lands with one additional quirk: the protagonist is Han Chinese, a disgraced inspector from Beijing who, before he was sent to a labor camp in Tibet, was a highly placed political person in the government.
 
Lest one become too condescending toward China’s Tibetan policy, I think it’s good to remember that…

• our own country’s conquering, killing, subjugation, disenfranchisement, and internment in reservations of the native people of this land has been quite a bit less than humane–nor is there any sign that we intend to make any reparations or amends to them;
• ditto our treatment of the natives of Africa who were enslaved on American soil;
• theocracies of any sort–even Buddhist–are a disaster (even governments too much in the sway of any one religion, such as in Sri Lanka, can become dangerous);
• the media, including fiction but most certainly “news,” is never free from bias, so unless one is actually in the location in question, there is no way to know the real story and most historical theory would say that even then, one cannot know the whole, unbiased story, because one can only view circumstances from a single point in space and time and through a single personal bias;
• and, if one goes back into history to justify a point of view, it is always possible to go back even farther in time and support an opposing point of view–it is best to confront reality solely on the basis of the current situation.

That said…the Tibetan context of Pattison’s novels makes the heart break.
 
Inspector Shan’s heart broke too and he became acculturated to the Tibetan Buddhist sensibility through his contact with lamas in prison camp and, after his release, to the wider Tibetan society.
 
It’s worth taking a look at the Wikipedia article on acculturation. The examples given in the article are of native peoples being exposed to outside culture and gradually adopting and integrating their customs into their own. However, acculturation works both ways.
 
It happened when the Romans brought Greek slaves to teach their young; Greek thought and ideals infiltrated Roman culture. It happened when African slaves were brought to America; “southern cooking” is really African-American cooking and jazz and rock arise from African-American music. It happens time after time throughout history, the “conquering” force always seems to, eventually, absorb and “become” the very thing it conquers.
 
Personified by Inspector Shan, I think that is what Pattison’s books hold out as the eventual solution to the Tibetan future, that the acculturation will eventually go both ways. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that the Qing dynasty became Buddhist with a Tibetan lama as advisor to the Emperor. Might not that be the model for a possible future?

amusements and pastimes

There’s an interesting getaway a leisurely five hour drive from Tampa: Jeckll Island, Georgia (www.jekyllisland.com).

The History of Jeckll Island page of the above website gives an encapsulated account of its history:

“In 1886, Jekyll Island was purchased to become an exclusive winter retreat for America’s most elite families, known as the Jekyll Island Club. For more than half a century, the nation’s leading families, including the Rockefellers, Morgans, Pulitzers, and Goulds, came to Jekyll Island ‘to secure an escape.’”

Jeckll Island Hotel Club exteriors

As with many of the pleasures one discovers in life, a trip to Jeckll Island would never have been something I would have sought out on my own initiative; rather, I went there because of an external event–the wedding of my son!

My son and his fiancé–now his wife–decided to have a small, “destination wedding.”

I’d never heard that term before. But, now that I’ve learned about it, I must say I’m taken with the idea. The couple and those invited to the wedding go to the destination and rent rooms through the night of the wedding. The wedding takes place on the grounds of the destination and included in the price of the event are things like the officiant, the musician, the photographer, the wedding dinner, etc. Then, the day following the wedding, the guests return home and the couple stays at the destination for their honeymoon.

Such a lovely idea. And in this case, this particular destination was such a lovely place, a place I would never have come to otherwise.

The guests and bride and groom stayed at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel (www.jekyllclub.com)–either the main building or one of the “cottages,” which are the former residences of people who used to winter there and who originally bought the island, people such as the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Pulitzers. Humble folk. Just about as humble as their three storey “cottages.”

Jeckll Island Hotel interiors

All the pictures in this post are of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel buildings and grounds.

There are other, quite good, less expensive places to stay on the island, but the Jekyll Island Club Hotel was less expensive than I thought it would be. Actually, it was less than some hotels on St. Pete Beach. So, if you’re only going for a couple nights, as I was, it doesn’t break the bank. For a very nice two days within a short day’s drive from Tampa, I really do recommend Jeckll Island, Georgia, and the other neighboring Golden Isles of Georgia (St. Simons Island, Brunswick, and Sea Island–see Brunswick and the Golden Isles of Georgia).

Jeckll Island Hotel dock

One last suggestion: when you visit the Jeckll Island Club Hotel, take time to visit its bookstore. Allow at least an hour to browse its many rooms, each dedicated to a specific theme related to the Georgia islands. My favorite (you can tell by checking my credit card statement for that visit) was the cookbook room, with many cookbooks relating to the Atlantic barrier islands cooking history.

Jeckll Island bookstore

There are two cookbooks in particular I’d like to mention. One is Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way: Smokin’ Joe Butter Beans, Ol’ ‘Fuskie Fried Crab Rice, Sticky-Bush Blackberry Dumpling, and Other Sea Island Favorites. The other is Cornbread Nation 5: The Best of Southern Food Writing.

Cornbread Nation is the most recent in a series of Best of Southern Food Writing volumes. That title is obviously carefully chosen. It’s the quality of the writing, not just the recipes, that is the appeal of the series.

trees and moss

Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way is, of course, about the cooking of the Gullah region (the coast of South Carolina and Georgia), home to the Gullah who…

” are known for preserving more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African-American community in the United States. They speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and significant influences from African languages in grammar and sentence structure. The Gullah language is related to Jamaican Creole, Barbadian Dialect, and the Krio language of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Gullah storytelling, cuisine, music, folk beliefs, crafts, farming and fishing traditions, all exhibit strong influences from West and Central African cultures.” [ref]

To say more about the Gullah would require another whole post. There is also an incredibly rich and beautiful Gullah musical tradition that would require yet another whole post! So, I’ll leave you with these five links that interested me in a Google search of Gullah.

• Gullah Language & Culture
• The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection
• Hilton Head Island Gullah Celebration
• Gullah Festival
• Gullah Gourmet

Also…all best wishes to my son and daughter-in-law. May you have many, many happy years together!

[Disclaimer: if you buy something, like the books above, through my Amazon.com links, I receive a teeny-weenie commission from Amazon. It really is miniscule. It doesn't increase the price of the item in any way. So, if you'd be willing to buy something through my Amazon links, I might be able to afford a second cup of coffee some morning! I make this disclaimer because we are now required to by law, so please consider things thoroughly disclaimed.]

If you enjoy travel to foreign lands and if you enjoy mystery suspense series with a strong, memorable protagonist, then we share the love of a special niche in escapist fiction.

I’m sure there are more such series, but there are four authors’ series that I know of.

James Church‘s novels, featuring an Inspector O of Pyongyang, North Korea. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely, inhospitable setting for a story and likable protagonist, but Church makes it work, fabulously. I guarantee you’ll be hooked once you start reading these:

• A corpse in the Koryo (2006)
• Hidden moon : an Inspector O novel (2007)
• Bamboo and blood (2008)

Perhaps my favorite among the authors I know in this niche is John Burdett with his Bangkok series, featuring a continuing cast of quite varied characters, including the central one, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. What is so intriguing about this series is how completely the characters’ world view is Thai–not at all Western. I really do love this series.

• Bangkok 8: A Novel (2003)
• Bangkok Tattoo (2006)
• Bangkok Haunts (2007)
• The Godfather of Kathmandu (2010)

An earlier novel of his, not part of the series, is The Last Six Million Seconds (1997), that takes place during the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the People’s Republic of China. Good book!

Of course, the widely known Millennium Trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson, belongs in this niche as well. These may be the most famous novels of this type.

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)
• The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006)
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007)

To my knowledge, there’s no one who wrote mystery series set in foreign lands earlier, than the granddaddy of them all, Martin Cruz Smith and his Inspector Arkady Renko mysteries set in Russia:

• Gorky Park (1981)
• Polar Star (1989)
• Red Square (1992)
• Havana Bay (1999)
• Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)
• Stalin’s Ghost (2007)
• Three Stations (2010)

I would love to see Church and Burdett become as widely known as Larsson and Smith; they deserve to be.

I would also love to know of other mystery series set abroad so I can indulge myself in more hours of armchair travel and sleuthing.

There are, of course, many mystery series with European locales…England, France. And, I vaguely remember reading a series of mysteries set in Italy featuring a rather dour, Italian police detective, but I can’t recall the author’s name or any of the titles in the series. But, I was thinking, in this post, of more exotic locations.

If you know of any other (exotic locale) foreign mystery series, please comment, below. (No, Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau does not count!)

I’m surprised there’s not a series set in India…or China…or…

All the major e-book dealers provide FREE e-book readers for PCs. (I don’t know about Macs; it maybe be that they do for Macs, also.)

These are the three readers I use on my netbook:

1. Kindle for PC (I’m only buying any new e-books for this now),
2. Barnes & Noble Desktop Reader (but only because I bought one book for it when I had a Nook before I sent it back…I don’t plan on using it after I finish reading that book); and
3. Adobe Digital Editions.

Even though Kindle for PC (which is free and for which there are many, many free e-books) is my main reader, there is a lot of value to Adobe Digital Editions.

I’d bought a couple books for Adobe Digital Editions over the years (a Stephen King and a Wizard of Oz book) but recently I discovered that you can use Adobe Digital Editions to read ANY PDF file (something you can’t do on Kindle).

You could use Adobe Reader, of course, but Adobe Digital Editions (also free) has extra features that Adobe Reader does not, such as being able to organize your books into “bookshelves” and being able to view the actual covers of the books on those bookshelves as you can on Kindle. I find that PDFs get lost to my memory in an endless list of computer file titles! If I see a cover on a bookshelf it makes me aware I’ve even GOT the book.

For instance, as I went about adding PDFs I have to my Adobe Digital Editions this morning, I re-discovered that I have a Barbara Sher e-book that I downloaded (for free, I think). I discovered some other complete e-books as PDFs that I’d forgotten I had, two of which I’d actually bought! They’re beautiful photography technique books.

There are many free PDF books out there on the Internet. Here’s some resources just to get you stared (Google “free ebooks” and you’ll find tons more):

• 35 Websites for free ebooks download
• Manybooks.net
• Buddhanet

So, in addition to Kindle for PC, you might want to download Adobe Digital Editions to organize and read your book-length PDFs with it (reserving Adobe Reader for shorter documents).

Here’s links to those two e-book readers (remember, both are free):

• Kindle for PC
• Adobe Digital Editions

Hilton’s first “song”–age 3

For young (and old) composers, there are no books that really help you understand the process of composing music. I mean that word, “no,” quite literally. There’s not a single book that I know of that really deals with the process.

The books that purport to be about composition are really about music theory, which is the study of the nuts and bolts description of different composers’ music. They are to music composition as a grammar book would be to creative writing. It’s stuff you need to know but it’s definitely stuff to put out of your mind when you’re composing.

Instead of books about composing–since there are none–I’ve found much inspiration and guidance in books about creative writing. There, too, of course, there are books which are more about form than the process, but it seems that some creative writing author/teachers understand well the notion of process.

This post doesn’t really concern the lack of books about the process of composing and it definitely does not concern creative writing. (My only talent, if any, for putting words in a row is simple expository writing such as this blog.) It’s about my hobby: photography.

In middle school, I was in the photography club. I loved all the smells and the darkroom ambiance and the magic of watching a picture come into being in the developing solution (this was way back in Brownie camera days). But, one thing and another and I didn’t keep up with it. Instead I devoted more and more time to music. All my life, I didn’t really have a hobby. Music eclipsed everything.

That was a good thing because it enabled me to have a career in music, something many people would love to have. But now, retired from being a college prof, I’ve had the time to indulge myself in photography, to rediscover the joy of having a hobby! Thankfully, digital photography makes practicing the act a lot less expensive than film days.

(FINALLY…here’s the point of the whole post!) So it was that recently, I asked some friends who are experts in the commercial and academic aspects of Art (note the upper case “A”) for advise about a specific aspect of pictures I’ve taken, what would probably correspond to “voice” in literature or “style” in composition. Well, the answers I got back weren’t answers to my question (except for one gallery owner, whose comments I do appreciate), but were rather dedicated to how bad my photography was. Sort of along the lines of “who do you think you are?”

Well, I pretty much put the camera away for quite a while. Couldn’t even work up the spit to post anything here.

I’m a silent processor; I don’t easily share what’s going through my head with others. But, I finally worked up the courage to discuss what I was experiencing with a good friend and working artist (not an academician) who designs theater and opera sets. I told him what I’d asked the experts and what their answers were. He said, “Hilton, you should have known better!” I don’t know why I hadn’t asked him for an opinion about my photography, but I hadn’t. I guess because he’s not an “authority”–he’s “just” a working artist.

He was absolutely right. I should have known better. Probably the two most lethal fields when it comes to anything creative are the commercial and the academic fields. (And I say that, as a life-long college professor.) “Experts” have probably stifled more creativity than they have ever fostered.

So, I’ve been repairing my enthusiasm for taking pictures and posting them on this blog by composing. I know how composing works. I know that each time you write a piece you have to remember how to compose all over again. Each piece is as hard to write as the first one you ever finished. And, finishing a piece is just the beginning…you have to plunge back in and take it all apart and make it all over again at least once, maybe more than once…it’s as if you don’t know what the first note should have been until you have written the last one.

I’ve also been reading creative writing books again to help in rekindling my creative muse, professionally as a composer and, as an amateur, as a photographer.

One excellent book on creative writing is the old The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It is 100% process oriented. The author’s advise applies equally to writing, composing, photographing, cooking, embroidering, dancing, singing, and weaving or whatever else is someone’s personal medium of expression.

Right now, I’m reading an even more helpful book, one that is helping me in my composition and photography, immensely. It’s Writing Alone and with Others by Pat Schneider. Here’s a couple sample quotes from it. I think you can see how relevant they are.

“Some critics claim that all truly great works of literature are already recognized. What a cynical and small-minded view of the human spirit! In other times and other cultures, art was made for the family: quilts, hand-carved pieces, lullabies, ballads. The audience of that art was intimate…Writing is making art, and the test of its value cannot be given into the hands of either the commercial world or the academy.”

“[quoting Dorothea Brande] ‘It is well to understand as early as possible in one’s writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us…If you can tell a story as it can appear only to you of all the people on earth, you will inevitably have a piece of work which is original.’”

“[quoting William Stafford] He said the writer’s job is to abandon his or her work, to allow others to make judgment of its worth, and to go on the the next poem, the next story.”

“If you are to write, you must move out of ‘rented rooms’ in your mind, rooms that you have allowed to belong to someone else.”

“It is more important to ask: Have I gone all the way? Have I told all of the truth that my inner eye sees?”

“…fear had frozen her into a habitual rejection of her own work.”

I should have known better. As a composer, most publishers and almost all my academic colleagues hated my music. But, oddly, the musicians who performed it liked it. Even more important, the people who heard it liked it. Perhaps, most important, I liked it and I definitely enjoyed writing it. So, I should have known better than to worry about what the experts say about anything.

One should just do one’s thing, do it the best one can, keep trying to get better, keep doing it and doing it every day, and trust one’s own judgment more than the judgment of others. And–enjoy the doing of it.

• Art Around the Clock,
• Best Books & Rich Treasures,
• A Book Legacy,
• Books To The Ceiling,
• Camelot Books,
• Arthur H. Minters Bookseller,
• Miracle Estate Sales,
• Vivian Moore Bookseller,
• Old Tampa Book Company,
• Griffin Bookbinding, and Griffon’s Medieval Manuscripts, Inc., both of which were part of the Inkwatu post, Wilson’s Bookworld, and of course
• Lighthouse Books, covered in Inkwatu’s Lighthouse Books. I’m not sure of Mr. Michael Slicker’s responsibilities with the St. Pete Antiquarian Book Fair, but I suspect he’s very active in the organization.

Check out the entire list of participating booksellers at the webpage given above (floridabooksellers.com/bookfair.html) to find small, independent bookstores near you. Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble are fine and have their purpose, but these people need our support for it is they who find, restore, and preserve the gems that we can buy from them. As you look through the list of dealers, you’ll notice the abbreviation, ABAA. That stands for Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (www.abaa.org).

12th to 16th Century Illuminated Manuscripts, 19th & 20th Century English & American Literature, African American, African Diaspora History, Agriculture, American Historical, American Literature, American Revolution, Americana, Americana (South), Lesbian/Gay, Anthropology, Antiquarian Theology, Antique and collectible maps and atlases, Antiques, Appraisals, Architecture and photography, Art and Print Reference, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Art of the South, Art, Autographed books, Autographed Children’s Books, Autographs, Automotive, Aviation, Baseball, Bierce, Big Little Books, Bindings, Biography, Boy & Girl Scouts, Caldecott & Newbery Award Winners, Calligraphy, Canadiana, Cartographic Reference, Catalogues, Chess, Children’s Literature, Children’s Books, Children’s Series, Children’s Illustrated, Church History, Civil War, Civil War & Presidential Autographs & Documents, Classic Fiction, Collectible Paperbacks, Colonial Americas, Cook Books, Counter Culture, Designer Binding, Detective Fiction, Disney and Modern Firsts, Documents & Prints, Early Printed Books, Economics, Engineering, English & American Literature, Ephemera, Exploration & Voyages, Family Bibles Restored, Fantasy and Mysteries, Fine & Leather Bindings, Fine Art Books, Fine Hand Bookbinding, Fine Prints, Firearms, First Editions, Fishing, Florida fiction, Florida History, Florida Non-Fiction, Floridiana, Genealogy, Golf, Graphics, H. L. Mencken, Hemingway, History, Horror, Horse & Dog Sporting, Horticulture, Hunting, Illustrated & Color Plate Books, Judacia, Law, Leather Sets, Literary First Editions, Literature (Modern), Literature in Translation, Literature of the South, Little House Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Maritime History, Mathematics, Medicine, Methodism, Michael Hague, Military History, Miniature Books, Modern Illustrated, Modern Original, Mystery, Native American, Natural History, Natural Science, Nautical, New England History, Out of Print Scholarly, Outlaw, Periodicals on Art, Philosophy, Photographica, Photography, Photo-plays, Poetry, Polar, Pop Ups, Postcards, Press Books, Psychology & Medical, Railroads, Rare & Unusual, Religion, Science Fiction, Science, Sets, Signed & Inscribed Books, Slipcases, Small Press, Southern, Southern Americana, Southern Authors, Southern Fiction, Southern History, Southern Literature, Southern Regional, Sports, Steinbeck, Suspense, Tasha Tudor, Technical, Tennesseana, Tennis, Reformation, Theology, Tolkien, Transportation, Travel and Exploration, Typography, U.S. Coastal History, Visionary, Voyages, Western Americana, Whaling, Women Writers, Yachting, and Zane Grey.

Amazing, isn’t it. My own loves are in there: children’s series (stuff like the Wizard of Oz, The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Doctor Dolittle, and World War II Flying Ace novels) and ephemera. Ephemera, literally, means “things that transient,” in this context, posters, illustrations, postcards, tickets, sheet music…things that are very much a product of their time. The Inkwatu post, Vintage Sheet Music Covers, has images of some in my collection and Music From Another Era has some from my sister’s collection (that link opens to her own website). The Inkwatu post, Vintage Florida Postcards presents part of the postcard collection of a good friend, Fran Sims.

If you have the chance and this kind of thing interests you, take in the last day of the Book Fair on the 14th. If you have to miss it this year, there’ll be another next year about this time of the year. And…be sure and support your local, independent bookseller throughout the year!

St. Petersburg is divided by a major street, Central Avenue, that runs East to West from the bay side all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. “Avenues” in St. Pete run East and West. “Streets,” North and South. Any street or avenue north of Central Avenue is North; any street or avenue south of Central Avenue is South. Very logical. One should never get lost. Unless, of course, you realize that the other city with streets and avenues, New York City, has a plan that is exactly the reverse of St. Pete’s. That can cause some confusion for visitors.

Just north of Central Avenue, in downtown St. Pete, is a large lake that was the first water supply for the city. Here’s a great description of the area by Bob Vila, the home improvement expert in his article on the North Downtown district, also known as the Mirror Lake neighborhood:

“North Downtown Neighborhood is located in central St. Petersburg, just north of downtown and west of Tampa Bay. It is home to Mirror Lake, the city’s first source of drinking water and continued source of recreation. The Carnegie Library or Mirror Lake Branch Library was built in 1914 and sits at the east end of the lake in Mirror Lake Park. The nationally recognized Coliseum Ballroom is also located in North Downtown, as are the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club, the National Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, the Chess Club, and Lawn Bowling Club. The neighborhood offers a mix of residential and commercial buildings built between 1900 and the 1940s, architectural styles that range from Florida Cracker style to Spanish stucco and Mediterranean. Residents of North Downtown have an easy walk to galleries, Tropicana Field, restaurants, and City Hall.”

Eventually, I’ll cover all the historic buildings he mentions. Inkwatu has already had a couple articles on programs in the Shuffleboard Club (St. Pete Shuffle India Night and The St. Pete Shuffle).

Today’s post is about the Mirror Lake Public Library (280 5th St. N., St. Petersburg, FL 33701; 727-893-7268), one of the set of historic buildings that are around the edge of Mirror Lake. According to this Wikipedia article: “The St. Petersburg Public Library (also known as the Mirror Lake Library or Carnegie Library) is a Carnegie library built in 1915 in Beaux-Arts style. It is located in St. Petersburg, Florida (280 Fifth Street North). On June 13, 1986, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.” Another Wikipedia article explains: “Carnegie libraries are libraries which were built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. More than 2,500 Carnegie libraries were built, including some belonging to public and university library systems. Carnegie earned the nickname Patron Saint of Libraries.” Again Wikipedia: “Beaux-Arts architecture denotes the academic neoclassical architectural style that was taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris…The Beaux-Arts style heavily influenced US architecture in the period 1880–1920.”

The State of Florida website, MyFlorida, has an extensive article on Carnegie and libraries in Florida at Florida’s Carnegie Libraries — A Lasting Legacy. One of the interesting sites I stumbled across when researching for this post is this one by R. George & Associates, who apparently provided some of the furniture and interior design for the restoration of the Mirror Lake Library.

The venerable old Mirror Lake Library with its quiet, upstairs reading room is a hushed experience. Sure, it has its Internet computer stations and DVDs and CDs, so it’s a fully modern library; but, the interior design and architectural style make everyone who visits this library feel, and behave, as if they really were in a “real,” old-fashioned library. It’s a joy to visit.

Note: starting with today’s post, Inkwatu is moving to a once a week posting schedule–Saturday mornings.

If you’re reading this blog, the chances are pretty good that you’re reading lots of other blogs, and if you’re doing that, the chances are even better that you’re a Reader (upper case “R” in case you missed it) and you read real books, too, and reading books has been an important part of your life since childhood. I’m a reader, too. Thousands of hours lying on the floor reading in all kinds of bad light, far too closely, and at an extremely bad angle, left me myopic and overweight, but it also left me with a passion for reading and books and the world that can be created between our ears that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

The main character of John Dunning’s Cliff Janeway “Bookman” novels is a former cop turned bookseller/appraiser who, in one of the novels, classifies folks—such as you and I—who have book collections. Cliff Janeway says one of the types are those who collect books just to posses them as a compulsion without regard to their individual significance (almost any books on the shelf would do as long as there were many of them).

If you’ve never read any of the “Bookman” series, you’ve a treat awaiting you. These are mystery novels a cut above most. Publishers Weekly calls them “compulsively readable.” That’s the truth. I suggest buying them all at the same time, because you’ll want to pick up the next one in the series to read, immediately upon finishing the first one.

You and I are definitely not in Cliff Janeway’s indiscriminate collector category. I’m sure you’re like me in which each book in your or my collection has a significance of its own and has not only been read once, but probably many times. That significance can vary, of course. Sometimes it’s the information in the book. Sometimes it’s its commercial value (such as a rare, signed first edition). Sometimes its power to move us (fiction or non-fiction that speaks to our heart). And sometimes it’s nostalgia.

I don’t have many nostalgia books, but I have a few. The story of my discovering the pleasure of owning a book for nostalgia’s sake began while recently living part of a year in New Orleans. Around the corner from the place in the French Quarter where I was staying was a tiny bookshop on a back street, Kaboom Books. As bookworms will do, I wandered around looking at titles, just enjoying myself, with no purpose other than simple exploration.

I came upon two old editions of Horatio Alger novels. Not being particularly valuable editions, they were cheap enough I felt I could indulge myself and buy some books that had shaped my father’s generation. I had heard about them but never read them, so my motivation was probably more curiosity than nostalgia.

Now, old books—and I mean really old books—have been a part of our family’s life for generations since my father, sister, both paternal and maternal grandfathers, and possibly even a few more beyond that were Methodist ministers who all had extensive libraries in their homes which included frighteningly old Bibles and, my favorites, ancient hymnals. So, old books are a comfort “food” for me. But buying the Alger novels kind of sparked a new slant on the meaning for me of old books. I began to see, now that I’m an old “book” myself, how my own life arch intersected old books I discovered.

The next solid step on this path of personal archeology came at a charity silent auction where I bid on two books I remember reading in grade school. I actually remember sitting in the little southern Illinois town’s public library reading them. I remember even the quality of the light from the windows above me while reading, the dust motes in the air, the tactile quality of the wooden chair, the pre-air conditioning air. I was particularly fond of the Indian book and would fantasize for hours about being in the woods with my bow and arrow and loin-cloth. Fortunately, I won the bid at the auction and have been able to read the books again.

(An aside: I think the folks who write fiction and non-fiction for kids deserve a lot more thanks and appreciation than they probably get. They’re the ones who shape generations of readers. Without any Doctor Dolittle, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, or Nancy Drew, chances are there wouldn’t even be anyone primed to read War and Peace.)

Which brings us to the book pictured at the top of this post: Dave Dawson with the Air Corps from the Dave Dawson War Adventure Series. Now, one of the facts of life about being in the family of a rural minister was that you were also poor. You lived in a house provided by the church, called a parsonage, and it wasn’t considered seemly (or necessary) to give the preacher much of a salary. Sometimes, they just gave you leftover foodstuff. Or whatever else it was they wanted to get rid of. So it was that I wound up owning all dozen or so of the Dave Dawson books that were published during WWII. Although they were published a couple years before I was born and I was reading them 10 years after the war, I loved these books. I think it’s because of them that, today, I enjoy suspense and adventure fiction so much.

This past year, the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair was at the Coliseum here in St. Pete. (The next one is March 13, 2009, and you can be sure I’ll be there, camera in hand.) As I wandered up and down the aisles of the 2008 book fair, I happened upon the stall of Lighthouse Books, ABAA – owned by Michael & Cathie Slicker (1735 First Avenue North, St. Petersburg, FL 33713; 727-822-3278; LighthouseBooksABAA@verizon.net). About twenty years ago, I had been in their tiny St. Pete store but had not been back since. So, my curiosity was aroused. I stepped into their book fair stall and discovered one of the reading passions of my youth: Dave Dawson (pictured at top of article). I bought it. Beside the joy of owning it, I found it also prompted me to re-explore Lighthouse Books itself.

I’ve always measured the culture of a town in the ratio of taxidermy
shops to independent bookstores. In this regard, St. Petersburg fairs pretty well. I’ve covered two other St. Pete bookstores that I haunt, Wilson’s Bookworld and Haslam’s Book Store. Lighthouse Books is right up there with them in my personal pantheon of local independent bookstores.

Their copy says they have ” Floridiana, Americana, Caribbean/Latin American History, Southern Literature, Maps, and General Antiquarian books.” That, for sure, and much more. Every wall in this tiny, one or two bedroom cottage where they have been located since 1984 (before that it was farther downtown) has a floor to ceiling bookcase. In front of each bookcase there are books stacked several bookshelves high. You literally have to turn sideways to wiggle through the warrens of Lighthouse Books. Nothing’s haphazard. Everything is quite organized, but there are more books in one space than you might think possible.

There was half of one whole wall devoted to the Civil Way that my Mississippi Cuzn Don would have loved. Another cranny was dedicated to genealogical books among which I noted several for research into the, I’m sure, frustratingly tangled roots of African-American ancestry. And…an entire room of antiquarian children’s literature!

They were all there. Dave Dawson. I treated myself to a $3 one and a $6 one. I’m hooked, aren’t I.

Lighthouse Books is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10.00 am – 5.00 pm.