Easy to serve, difficult to please

This week I learned that a former department head at a college where I’ve taught adjunct classes off and on for a decade had died.

I first worked for her the semester my eldest was born. A colleague facing some unexpected surgery offered me a Western Civ II course at this other school and put me in touch with the department head there. She gave me the course on the spot, with just a few weeks to go before the spring semester. I had a hard time keeping up—I began that spring with five adjunct classes at two colleges, an ESL tutoring job for a German elementary student at Sarah’s school, and part-time work at a sporting goods store—but I was most grateful because we needed the money and the work was good. As so often, it was exactly what we needed when we needed it.

My department head didn’t have another class for me after that spring but said she would be in touch as the need arose. Lo and behold, as Sarah and I expected our second child two years later, she reached out with another spring class. I gratefully accepted. Again—just enough, when needed.

That summer I found out about a full-time position at Piedmont Tech and that’s where I’ve been ever since. When I let my department head at this other school know, she thanked me and wished me luck, and said to let her know if I ever needed anything. A generous offer, and she meant it. Over the next few years she’d check in regularly on LinkedIn—yes, LinkedIn can actually be helpful!—always encouraging me and letting me know that if I needed work all I had to do was ask.

I asked when Sarah and I found out we were expecting twins, children four and five. And my department head happily set me up with an online class, semester after semester until her retirement.

She will be missed. She not only played a willing role in God’s providential care for our family—something, as a fellow believer, she would have happily acknowledged—but was simply a good boss.

I’m old enough now to have lost several former bosses: my first boss, a family friend who managed the seafood restaurant where I kept the buffet line supplied with clean plates in middle school, and then her husband, an auctioneer and antiques appraiser who employed me for the year between college and grad school and where I learned a lot about old stuff—as well as how to properly load a moving truck. My department head joins them.

As I’ve reflected on this over the last couple days, their authority reminded me of Confucius’s concept of the junzi, the “superior” or “noble man,” a subject I once taught in an adjunct World History course for this department head: the superior man is “easy to serve but difficult to please.” A rare combination. They were gentle but demanding, graciously insisting on high standards of work, encouraging me to live up to my potential. It was never difficult to work for any of them but I always knew I could do better, and improved as I worked for them. I’m glad to say these are not the only such bosses I’ve had.

The internet is full of vindictive, cynical, hostile takes on the relationship between employer and employee, and it’s not hard to understand why so many people assume it must be adversarial. But I’ve been blessed to see a number of genuinely good bosses, including my current and former deans and department heads at my full-time work, and to cherish the memories of these who have passed away. Precisely by being a good boss they proved to be more. RIP.

Worn slap out

One of my favorite moments of serendipity when learning German in college was when our teacher introduced us to the word schlapp. This was a synonym, he said, for müde, “tired,” and unless I’m misremembering he pantomimed dangling limply like a puppet. Ich bin schlapp.

I say this was serendipitous because a common expression where I grew up is “worn slap out.” I have no idea if there’s any actual relation between the words, but the cognate, false or not, leapt out at me. The slap is an intensifying particle—I’m not just worn out, I’m worn slap out. I can take no more wear.

Well, I’m worn slap out.

I and the whole family had the flu over Christmas and, with the new semester, I’ve had a lot of residual exhaustion compounded by insomnia. As a result I’ve missed the last two weeks here, the longest I’ve gone without writing anything on the blog since 2020 or before. I’ve begun a few posts but haven’t gotten anywhere on them. I’m hoping to fix that in the coming weeks.

I saw my doctor earlier this week and I think I’m on track to manage and reverse the tiredness. A lot of it is simply the results of the good things going on in life right now—plenty of work, the kids God has blessed us with. But the flu and the two weekends of bad winter weather have built up a deficit I’m maybe just a bit too old to bounce back from like before.

So I’m still here, but may not achieve my former pace of blogging for a while. I appreciate those of y’all who I know check in regularly. Your readership means a lot.

I doublechecked schlapp this morning, by the way, as it’s been nigh on twenty years since that German class and I wondered if I could be misremembering. It is used as slang for tired but properly means “limp,” “flabby,” or even “nerveless.” All accurate, too. But hopefully not for long.

Elegy for the mass market paperback

Some of my oldest and most cherished mass market paperbacks

It’s been a busy week both recovering from last weekend’s ice-storm and two lost days of school and preparing for this weekend’s snow, but not so busy that I didn’t catch a tempest in the Substack teapot: the apparent extinction of the mass market paperback.

In actual fact, Publisher’s Weekly reported last month that the country’s largest book distributor had decided not to bother shipping mass market paperbacks anymore, citing a steep decline in sales over the last few decades and profit margins that were already thin. This will naturally have an effect on how many of them are available and where, but the news was being misunderstood on Substack as either 1) mass market paperbacks will no longer be produced by publishers at all or, more egregiously, 2) paperbacks in general are being discontinued.

In the middle of his hubbub a not insignificant number of voices were raised crying “Good riddance!” Mass market paperbacks, they said, are cheap, badly designed, have small print and margins so narrow your thumbs cover the words, and their spines fall apart almost immediately. A lot of the same people paired their condemnation of the mass market paperback with praise for the hardback.

The mass market paperback may not, in fact, be extinct quite yet, but I can’t tolerate hatred for it.

Let me start with the crassly material. Cheapness is a feature, not a bug. The hardback aficionados seem to forget the kids who want to read but can’t stomach getting only one book for $30 they worked hard for or saved until the day they could visit a good bookstore. The money is just a facilitator, not the point; How much reading will my $20 get me? is the question I asked over and over as a teenager. I still do paperback math in my head—for most modern hardbacks I could have gotten at least six mass market paperbacks back in the day.

As for flimsiness, that’s just the nature of paper and glue. Even the $20—and more and more often $22 or $25—trade paperbacks dominating bookstores today will eventually fall apart from rough use or shoddy binding. Even hardbacks are not bound like they used to be. In my experience, if one takes even a little care of one’s books—not getting them wet, not just throwing them around, not intentionally breaking the spine like a barbarian—they’ll last a long time, and a mass market paperback from a decent publisher will likely be as sturdy as any other size.

And regarding design, a small book will necessarily have smaller print. Adapt. And just how big are your thumbs?

So much for that. Why do I feel so strongly about this?

My affection for the mass market paperback runs deep. I was a country boy without a lot of spare cash for books, so from quite early on, when I got a book, I got a mass market paperback. Many of the books my parents ordered for me at a discount from the God’s World Book Club in elementary school—Rifles for Watie and Across Five Aprils come to mind, as well as things like World’s Strangest Baseball Stories—were mass market paperbacks. I still have many of these.

The Hallmark store on St Simons Island where my mom shopped for gifts and ornaments every summer had an entire wall of these books. It was here that I first found a copy of The Killer Angels, which I knew as the source of Gettysburg, my favorite movie. My parents bought it for me and I just about wore it out reading it in the condo, by the pool, even at supper while a Japanese hibachi chef lit onion volcanoes on fire. Look at the photo at the top of this post—that’s the same copy. Cheap, yes—$5.99 is printed on the spine—but still serviceable.

When I started reading seriously in high school, the mass market paperback made entire literatures available to me for five or six dollars apiece. Signet Classics, which was repackaging their line in nicely designed matte-finish covers as I finished high school and started college, became my go-to. I’d pick up as many as I could with my birthday money during summer trips to St Simons—by this time blessed with a Books-a-Million, which always had a huge inventory of them—or at the Greenville Barnes & Noble when I didn’t have to be in class and had a little money. Burton Raffel’s Beowulf and Sir Gawain, Ovid, Virgil, Boccaccio, Euripides, Malory, Shakespeare, O Henry, David Copperfield, The Song of Roland—just this partial list is an introduction to a whole civilization for about $50.

The most important of all of these was a Signet Classics mass market paperback of Inferno, translated by John Ciardi, which I got sometime in 2001, a quarter century ago. And I can precisely date another important mass market paperback acquisition thanks to Amazon, where my very first order was a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front—in a metallic bronze cover I can still picture—on February 8, 2000.

Again, these are two books that transformed my life and I got both for about $10. (Amazon records the price of my copy of All Quiet as $4.79.) But much more important than the cost effectiveness is what I got out of these books, and the memories I have of them.

I’ve already mentioned a few of these. I also remember reading Inferno on the bus as a high school junior, canto by canto and reading every one of Ciardi’s notes both to uncover more of this amazing book and to block out the chaos around me. I first read Sir Gawain in a single Sunday afternoon as a college freshman, and plowed through The Bonfire of the Vanities over several weeks of lunch in the campus snack shop the same year. I carried my copy of Raffel’s Beowulf in my jacket pocket as I graduated from Clemson sixteen years ago. It was August and it got sweaty but it’s still here on my shelf. And of course there’s the drive to Atlanta in 2000 that I’ve mentioned before, when I read a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark” and realized I loved The Hobbit (purchased at Walmart) and would forever.

The mass market paperback met an important need for me at a specific time. Maturing as a reader, wanting to read a lot, but not having much money or space, and being limited to what was widely available in big bookstores, mass market paperbacks were an intermediate step between the $1 and $2 books in the Dover Thrift catalog I pored over in high school and the Penguin Classics I began collecting in college. Good books, readily available, in workmanlike binding, inexpensive—anything more strikes me as luxury.

I don’t begrudge anyone their hardback library—far from it—but I hate to see the mass market paperback impugned. It’s done humble and honorable service making entertainment and learning available to millions. I’m one of them.

I hope the mass market paperback’s death has been greatly exaggerated and that it will have many years left. But even if not, I’m grateful, and I’ll still enjoy mine.

In Dilbert memoriam

A childhood favorite. some of my interests have never changed.

I’m late to the game in memorializing Scott Adams, who died a week ago today, and can offer only a personal appreciation. I hadn’t kept up with him consistently for about twenty years and heard of him just often enough to be amused at what he was getting up to. When I heard of his terminal illness last year and his plans to seek assisted suicide, I was grieved.

But to begin in the proper place. I was a comics-loving kid and while I was aware of Dilbert, which came packaged with all my favorites in my grandparents’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Anderson Independent, I don’t know how often I actually read it. My fundamental sense of what comic strips were came from Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and—for one-panel high strangeness—The Far Side. These are still the three highest peaks in my estimation of the form. Dilbert was of a different world and valence than these, and its subjects and artwork probably didn’t immediately appeal.

But sometime in the mid-90s I got a new classmate at my small Christian school. I already owe one lifelong debt to Clint because he told me about this short story he had read at his previous school, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and accidentally introduced me to Poe, but he was also a huge fan of Dilbert. I remember him bringing a copy of Fugitive from the Cubicle Police—the politically correct title for what in the strip itself is referred to as the Cubicle Gestapo—to read between classes. His enthusiasm and the specific strips he shared with me from this book led me to look closer at Dilbert. It was soon a favorite.

It’s a testament to Adams’s genius that a couple of twelve-year olds could have found Dilbert’s workplace humor so funny. For us Dilbert was essentially fantasy literature, full of strange races and the vocabulary of forbidden tongues. I had no idea what HR was (those were the days) or what a consultant or software engineer did or what any of the office-specific jargon and tech lingo of the mid-90s actually meant, but we floated along on the vibes and characterization, inferring the meaning and import of jokes. Adams was very good at this. His skill with story, characterization, and the crucial timing of written humor meant our lack of experience of this world posed no obstacle to understanding—and laughing. We got the point even when we didn’t get the reference.

The chapter on office pranks was not especially helpful job preparation for a middle-schooler

Soon I had a respectable stack of Dilbert books, including one that worked as a key to Dilbert’s world and appealed to my Aristotelian love of taxonomy: Seven Years of Highly Defective People, a best-of sorted by character with notes by Adams in the margins. These were informative and funny and his personality came through clearly.

I got to know that better by signing up—again, this is still the mid or late 90s—for his e-mail newsletter, which automatically made me part of the DNRC: Dogbert’s New Ruling Class, the intellectual elite of his forthcoming new world order. Here Adams offered updates and commentary and responded to reader e-mails with a brimful serving of his wry snark. It was here, I think, or perhaps in The Joy of Work, one of his non-cartoon books on business culture, that I learned the word cynical.

I was in middle school by then (I remember reading The Dilbert Future on my first trip to Europe in 1998, not quite fourteen) and that’s a heady moment to be introduced to cynicism. Not that it wouldn’t naturally have occurred about that time, but I’m not sure learning that one could adopt a self-aware, sardonic, Olympian aloofness about one’s environment was helpful to me. I’m already bent, in Malacandran terms, in these directions anyway, and Dilbert encouraged me to adopt a more self-conscious and ironic posture strictly because it was funny. This cynicism was, ironically, quite naive.

Perhaps this would have been fine in a Sisyphean office environment, but at fourteen my environments were family, church, and school, fields where earnestness is actually warranted—most of the time. Because I learned cynicism as a way of humor about the same time I learned that, as a true believer, I would often be let down, I learned to use wry humor as a shield. I don’t think Dilbert did me any long-term damage but I’ve had to mature past these attitudes and habits.

Back to Adams himself and the DNRC. The Dilbert newsletter was probably my first experience of a writer opening up his mind to his readers. In addition to cartooning, the business world, and the vast intellectual superiority of his subscribers, Adams unironically flogged his vegetarian taco brand and his thought experiments—another phrase I learned from him. He shared a lot of the ideas he’d eventually package as God’s Debris. I may have been naive but I wasn’t suggestible and wouldn’t follow the funny man into woo-woo agnosticism. I had accidentally learned how to observe proper boundaries with people I liked but couldn’t agree with on the important stuff, a lesson I can take no credit for. It also won’t be the last appearance of grace in this story.

I kept up with Dilbert online through college—it was one of several strips I checked daily—but Adams himself, whom I admired as the off-kilter mind behind the cartoon, fell out of my awareness and I was content simply to read the strip. Somewhere between my undergrad and grad school years I lost the habit even of this, so it was a shock to run across it occasionally and see updates. Dilbert in polo and lanyard? That would have been unthinkable in 1998. (But guess what I wear to work every day.)

I have no opinion on Adams and politics. When he popped up on my radar over the last ten years saying contrarian things to the great consternation of a lot of people, I was unsurprised. Hadn’t y’all met him? He was a contrarian. If he hadn’t been, Dilbert would never have had the edge and absurdity that made it great. It would have been Cathy in a software company.

But to return to where I started, when Adams announced his imminent death from pancreatic cancer and his plans to end his own life, I was grieved. I remembered my mixed feelings about his dorm room-style philosophizing, his know-it-all pandeism, his air of superiority—in a word, his arrogance, a trait that attracts middle schoolers like a whirlpool attracts flotsam—and worried that his gifts would end in a final act of nihilism as dark as anything in Catbert’s HR department. What I did not do was hope or pray for him.

I am in no position to weigh the merit of Adams’s announcement of his conversion to Christianity just before he died last week. The various algorithms have tried to feed me a lot of videos—all with thumbnails of frantic, outraged people mugging in front of microphones—arguing yea or nay on his reasons. What I do know is that Adams was facing death, the ultimate argument-ender, and these podcasters are not, and that God is not willing that any should perish. In a history replete with sinners converting in the most miserable of conditions, how is God diminished by saving one more? What I felt when I learned of his decision, a Pascal’s Wager deathbed conversion, was relief and gratitude.

Again, these are my observations as an old fan who, after childhood, held Adams at arm’s length but always appreciated him. Dilbert’s peculiar sense of humor is a key middle-layer of the development of my own sensibilities, and Adams’s genius was the same as that that made Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side great—the ability to heighten the ordinary while keeping it familiar, to people his imaginary landscape with characters we recognize as our friends, family, coworkers, and ourselves, to make this hilarious, and to do it seemingly effortlessly. Also like Schulz, Watterson, and Larson, he was, for better or worse, uncompromising. That his complicated story and difficult personality ended with not just a turn toward grace but a casting of himself on God makes it all the more poignant.

Adams’s story seems to me one of eucatastrophe, of grace snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It is not a story Adams would have written. Is there any better end for the cynic than redemption?

Riddles in the Dark

I’ve previously mentioned here the precise moment I knew I loved The Hobbit—reading “Riddles in the Dark” in the car on the way to the MLB Home Run Derby in Atlanta, July 10, 2000. I had just turned 16 the month before and The Hobbit was my first Tolkien, picked up on a friend’s recommendation and read with uncertainty. That car ride made me a devoted fan.

It’s unusual to be able to date one’s love for a favorite book so precisely. The special event associated with this one helps it stick in the memory, I’m sure, but it’s that chapter specifically that is so powerful. Up to Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum I had enjoyed The Hobbit, but that chapter was a revelation, the moment I became aware that I was reading something great. To this day, rereading that chapter brings back that feeling of breathless anticipation.

The special character of this chapter has been on my mind this week because I just read “Riddles in the Dark” aloud to my kids. I’ve read The Hobbit to them once before, a few years ago. They enjoyed it, but, being much younger, I think what they enjoyed most was simply that I was reading to them.

This time through has been different. From beginning to end of “Riddles in the Dark” they showed the same breathless anticipation I felt as a teenager. They were scared for Bilbo, creeped out by Gollum, wanted to guess the answers to the riddles, and thrilled with suspense as Bilbo finally made his escape, minus his brass buttons. They loved it, and it’s been one of the best bedtime story experiences I’ve had with them. I’ve also enjoyed the excuse to reflect on one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books.

So: Why is “Riddles in the Dark” so good? A few thoughts:

• After several chapters with a crowd of dwarves, Bilbo is alone. The reader can focus on the protagonist again, and because he finds himself alone in a dangerous situation it is up to him to get out. For the first time since Bag End, he cannot simply (and literally) be carried along by the others.

• Kids can identify with Bilbo. Put-upon, scolded, not often understanding what’s going on, ordered around by seemingly everyone, he now finds himself alone in the dark, and it’s a rare child that doesn’t mind that.

• Further, this chapter confirms every child’s fear—there’s something in the dark! And it turns out to be one of Tolkien’s greatest creations.

• Bilbo and Gollum’s encounter, a surprise followed by mutual curiosity, need, and hostility, feels exceptionally real, especially in the way it moves from one mood into another.

• Games are great to read about if they’re well written and used as extensions of character—even games we don’t understand, like all the baccarat in James Bond—and Tolkien makes the riddle game instantly clear, engaging, and reflective of Bilbo and Gollum as characters.

• Often overlooked, I think, is that despite the atmosphere and the threat posed by Gollum, this part of the story is funny. The tone is perfectly balanced.

• Structurally, this chapter is a perfect story within the overall story.

• Narratively, Tolkien uses omniscience with great skill, shifting back and forth between Bilbo and Gollum so that the stakes of the riddle game are raised and the reader feels tension through dramatic irony, knowing before Bilbo does that Gollum means to eat him.

• I’m not usually one to talk psychology in fiction, but Bilbo and Gollum’s personalities are sharply realized and believable. I’m not sure Tolkien gets enough credit for the truthfulness of the people in his books. A line that stood out this time, when Gollum returns to his island and searches with increasing desperation for the ring: “Utterly miserable as Gollum sounded, Bilbo could not find much pity in his heart, and he had a feeling that anything Gollum wanted so much could hardly be something good.” So simple, so much going on.

• I’m also not one to invoke “character arcs” or the dreadful “Hero’s Journey,” but Bilbo’s experience in “Riddles in the Dark” is noticeably transformative. As I noted above, it’s all on him. He has to stick up for himself both through force of arms and his wits (combining the strengths of the warlike dwarves on one hand and the intellect of Gandalf on the other). In the next chapter we learn that he’s earned the respect of the dwarves for the first time and—again, something a child will understand—that Gandalf sees through at least part of his version of the story.

• The whole thing is just brilliantly written, down to the basic level of word choice and sound. Tolkien manipulates both for maximum atmosphere. The darkness of the tunnels, the weight of the stone above, and the cold and damp of Gollum’s cave are tactile.

• Related: last night, after finishing the chapter with the kids, my wife complimented my voices. I couldn’t take credit: reading Gollum’s dialogue aloud almost creates his voice on its own. Tolkien loads it with sibilants, most obviously, but also lots of breathy, open-throated sounds. And unlike the smooth, respectable Bilbo, Gollum speaks with a jarring, sprung rhythm that reads naturally as disturbed and aggressive.

I should make a more formal study of Tolkien’s work in this chapter here sometime. In the meantime, the short version: This chapter of The Hobbit is the work of a great writer at the peak of his imaginative powers and technical skill. A model worth studying—and enjoying for many years.

Wiley Junction

Near the house where I grew up stood a long, low, thin strip of stores we collectively called “Wiley Junction.” This included a Gulf station—later BP—the old one-room Wiley Post Office, and one shop where you could buy NASCAR trading cards, rent a movie, or lie in a tanning bed. But the store attached to the gas station was always Wiley Junction’s main draw.

The “junction” proper was the awkward joining of Old Highway 441, a two-lane road built to parallel the long-defunct Tallulah Falls Railroad, and New 441, a two-lane highway built in the 1970s with a more aggressive approach to the terrain—cutting through hills and banks and leveling off hollows to drive straighter through our county. In Wiley (unincorporated) Old and New 441 curved toward each other, like dancers bumping rears, and offered a natural location for a connector road. We drove through Wiley Junction literally every day. And most days we stopped at Wiley Junction—the store.

The Wiley Junction store was typical of the now-endangered local country stores throughout the South. Long and narrow, one entered through a glass door in the middle with the cash register at your right elbow, visible through the bunker-like gap between the lottery ticket stands on the counter and the overhanging racks of cigarettes. There was no bulletproof glass but there was a “need a penny, take one” dish. I wondered why I couldn’t take one every time—an informal education in courtesy.

To the left were three narrow aisles of goods: Slim Jims, pork rinds, chocolate bars, Big League Chew, and Lance crackers foremost, with bait, tackle, Styrofoam coolers, and basic hardware necessities hooked to a pegboard wall in back. The aisles led to the coolers, which had a smaller selection than today’s mega gas station chains but were always amply stocked. I bought many, many Cokes and Mello Yellos there, especially during those mid-90s summers when you could win prizes directly from the bottlecap. I never got that Coca-Cola Mustang but it was a great day when I won a second, free 20 oz bottle.

That was one half of Wiley Junction. Turning from the coolers and walking back to the register, you entered a bottleneck between the checkout counter and the short-order kitchen—which is the part of Wiley Junction I miss most.

You can identify this kind of country store not just by its thin, low-slung appearance, but by the smell. Wiley Junction had that smell. Clean, but not sterile. Lived-in. A faint hint of the concrete floor under the brown tile. A suggestion, somehow apparent to your nose, that the place was built by hand. But the kitchen added to that scent and elevated it. Wiley Junction smelled always, richly and warmly, of its signature offering: biscuits.

Even a short trip into the store to pick up one item left you smelling like biscuits the rest of the day. That happened to my sister one morning when she went into the store for perhaps two minutes, and I tormented her for years by calling her “Biscuit.” The thing is, the smell was wonderful. It was a greasy smell, sure, but with a sharp sweetness to it that I struggle to describe. The smell had texture—smooth and floury and warm.

Wiley Junction’s breakfast kept the place hopping in the mornings. Local tradesmen, construction workers, highway crews, state troopers with the odd local businessman thrown in during the week; local families, fishermen, hunters, and vacationers who had gotten wise to a good thing on the weekends. Sometimes it was hard to find parking.

From the narrow space between the kitchen and the cash register one could pass into an open dining area that somehow felt larger than the rest of that skinny building. There were particle board booths with one-piece benches contoured to the country rump and a bay window opening toward New 441. It was good to eat there. You would almost certainly see someone you knew. Often, for me, that was my granddad.

I’ve written about him a lot here. He was a plumber-electrician and frequently picked up biscuits at Wiley Junction on his way to construction sites all over Rabun County. On special occasions, when we had a church car wash or when the whole extended family was setting forth on a fishing trip to Tugalo, he’d pick up a big white sack of biscuits for everyone. But on weekdays, running into him during the few minutes when he’d be sitting in one those booths, eating his biscuit, was a treat—no matter that we saw him almost every day anyway. Something about Wiley Junction and the biscuits made it special.

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of his death, aged just 65, in 1998. A few years later the Georgia DOT bought up Wiley Junction and bulldozed it to widen the New Highway. It’s a four-lane now with a grass median and is safer for the traffic it has to handle between Atlanta and Western North Carolina, little of which stops in Wiley any more. But when I visit home I can’t pass that weedy, angular patch of land without thinking about what was lost.

My granddad has now enjoyed just over a quarter century of the life everlasting, and so I can hope to see him again. Wiley Junction, a happy blip in a fallen world, is not coming back in any form. But if seeing my granddad again proves to be anything like it was to see him in real life, that first moment of recognition and reunion will bear with it, before it fades away forever in light of unimaginably better things, the lingering scent of breakfast in a country store.

Seven years on the blog

Today marks the seventh anniversary of this website, which I made public on this day in 2017. The first post here on the blog, a modest—by my present standards—reading year-in-review, appeared at the end of that month. Two years ago I reflected on my decision to start a blog in the first place and how different my life over the half-decade since I’d launched this site. It’s changed even more drastically since that post, and for the better.

As a measure of how the blog is growing, sometime last month I published my 600th post here. That milestone would have seemed unachievable to me when I was typing away about Sword of Honour and News of the World and launching Dark Full of Enemies seven years ago.

Reflection and planning ahead has typically been reserved for the New Year, but I’ve found this anniversary to be a better opportunity for me to do that kind of thinking. And so here, briefly, are a few short-term things as well as some long-term projects I’m either considering or planning:

What to expect soon:

• I have a few essays and book reviews I intend to write with what’s left of the year, including some for other sites.

• I’m outlining my usual year-in-review posts for books and movies. 2024 in books will be very fiction-heavy, as I’ve already noted here in my Spring and Summer reviews, and 2024 in movies will be short. I considered scrapping the latter altogether, given the state of American cinema, but there were a handful of new movies I really enjoyed and a few great new-to-me films that I want to mention.

What I’ll begin soon and you’ll see later:

• It’s time to get The Wanderer, my longest novel, finished and available. I started the rough draft when our third child was a few weeks old. He’s now five and a half and has two baby brothers. The manuscript has been through a couple rounds of marking up, editing, and a whole lot of what I call “cooling on the windowsill,” but it needs to be done whether I ever feel like I’ve done enough research on sub-Roman Wales or not. I plan to start a final read-through over Christmas break.

• I have two more novels in rough outline form and plan to move on one of them in the new year. I’m just having a hard time deciding which one.

• The second installment of The Wælsings’ Revenge is in the works. If you missed part one, you can read it at Illuminations of the Fantastic. Portions of the final third, to be completed who knows when, appear in The Wanderer as foreshadowing.

An in-between project:

• Since creating a Substack account in order to contribute guest posts like my essay on historiography and my review of Homer and His Iliad this summer and fall, I’ve considered using it for a biweekly or monthly newsletter. It would not be a proper blog, since I don’t want it to supersede what I’ve been doing here for seven years (for reasons Alan Jacobs lays out here), but a miscellany of what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been writing here, what I’ve been working on, quotations from whatever books I’m reading at the moment, and other miscellany.

If that’s something you think you’d enjoy or benefit from, please let me know. I’m considering launching this at the end of this month since, as this blog proves, that’s a fortuitous time for new projects.

Of course as helpful as this blog has been to me and as much as I’ve enjoyed it, it would be nothing without readers. Thanks for y’all’s readership, encouragement, and correspondence over the years. I pray we can enjoy that for many more.

GKC and me

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I’ve enjoyed and admired since reading his experimental historical novel The Wake almost a decade ago, posted an appreciation of Chesterton and The Everlasting Man on his Substack. The Everlasting Man vies with Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday as my favorite Chesterton book so I was interested in Kingsnorth’s thoughts, but it’s his introduction, in which he describes how he came to read Chesterton, that I found most arresting.

Briefly, Kingsnorth discovered Chesterton almost by accident as a godless environmental activist, finding in his work—beginning with The Napoleon of Notting Hill—a salve for the “push-and-pull of apparently conflicting tendencies and views” inside himself. He learned to love Chesterton for his localism and rejection of both socialism and capitalism but had no time for Chesterton’s Christianity. Only after his own conversion did he find that it was Chesterton’s Christianity that undergirded and gave shape to the rest.

Though the specifics are different, the trajectory of Kingsnorth’s story resonates with me—as does the feeling that Chesterton was, at first, a private discovery: “I liked G. K. Chesterton before anyone else did.”

My first GKC—The paperback reprint of Orthodoxy that I read in college

My own story with Chesterton begins, like I suspect many people’s does, with CS Lewis. I started reading Lewis as a freshman in college and somehow became aware of Chesterton as an influence on him. When I stumbled onto an Image paperback of Orthodoxy in Barnes and Noble one day as a sophomore or junior, I snapped it up. At some point I bought matching paperbacks of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. I still have all three.

I ended up reading Orthodoxy the same summer I took my deep dive into the Icelandic sagas, the reading of which resulted in No Snakes in Iceland a few years later—that was one formative summer—and read the other two as a burgeoning medievalist sometime before I graduated.

At Clemson I dug into The Everlasting Man, which I even managed to work into my master’s thesis, and from there I read everything else I could get my hands on—What’s Wrong with the World, Heretics, Eugenics and Other Evils, Magic, A Short History of England, Charles Dickens, The Ballad of the White Horse, the Autobiography, Father Brown, and criticism and essays galore. Chesterton’s work startled, amused, confused, and stretched me. I marveled at his range. I collected quotations by the bushel. I remember testing the longsuffering of a friend by texting—in the primordial texting days, with only a ten-digit keypad to type on—a whole paragraph of Eugenics and Other Evils during an argument.

Like Gabriel Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday, I had deeply felt but essentially shapeless and purposeless convictions in college, and the chaotic environment of opinion and argument into which I was thrust after a pretty tranquil upbringing as well as personal upheaval in grad school proved difficult for me. Lewis helped over those years, as did Peter Kreeft. Chesterton continued their work and challenged me even more than they did. He tested many of my assumptions, forcing me to rethink or abandon some and affirming and reinforcing others. He helped give my beliefs a consistent shape. It took years for me to recognize just how much he changed me.

Only much, much later did I become aware of the subculture—or, when I’m feeling less charitable, the industry—that has grown up around Chesterton. And by then that world’s Chesterton didn’t feel much like the Chesterton I had sat at the feet of for a decade. Kingsnorth nods unmistakably toward the kind of Chesterton cosplayer I’m thinking of. I’m not knocking those Chesterton fans—I’m glad he still has enough readers to keep his books in print—but I feel like we’re adoring different Chestertons. Theirs is all tweedy whimsy and cigar smoke and strained cheerfulness and the same endlessly repeated decontextualized quotations and really bad attempts to write like Chesterton. (Don’t attempt to write like him, ever.) Their Chesterton strikes me as a cartoon, a simplification, without the thread of darkness and lifelong self-examination running through the real man.

And yet, their Chesterton is present in the real Chesterton. He contains multitudes. Like the undercover detectives in The Man Who Was Thursday, we’re all pursuing the same gigantic, surprising, seemingly unknowable man, and there is healthy unity in that. As Kingsnorth puts it, “I don’t resent their incursion on my turf, though. Indeed, I welcome them into the fold of true believers.”

But that feeling of difference and my natural un-clubbableness has kept Chesterton a somewhat private love. Which has, with a completely appropriate sense of paradox, made it that much better when I discover that a new acquaintance is also a fan. To bring Lewis back in, he wrote that “[t]he typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too?’” That feeling is a joy when shared with anyone who stumbled into Chesterton the way I did, and cherishes his work the way I do.

I greatly enjoyed getting Kingsnorth’s perspective, especially his story. You can read all of his reflections on GKC as well as his takeaways from The Everlasting Man here. You can read his conversion story, which came as a great and welcome surprise to me when I stumbled across it, at First Things here.

Chestertober concludes later this week with The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The subtitle is important. Stay tuned for that.

Saving the world from the reading nook

Writing at Front Porch Republic in response to several recent news stories—like this one—that suggest our civilizational decline is further along than even the pessimists thought, Nadya Williams argues that saving and restoring civilization begins at home:

In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

The right domestic tone is key. So is opportunity. Williams continues:

When books are everywhere, they distract us with their presence in a good way—they demand to be read, shaping the people around them in small but meaningful ways, moment by moment, page by page. They send us on rabbit trails to find yet more books on related topics, to ask friends for recommendations, and sometimes just to sit quietly and reflect, overcome with an emotion sparked by an author who has been dead for centuries but one that expresses the state of our soul in this moment.

This combination—a mood at home that encourages reading and abundant opportunity to do so—reminded me of the early passages of Lewis’s spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy. Here he describes the home his family moved into when he was seven:

The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Lewis’ father, you see, had the same bad habit I do: he “bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.” Feel free to consult my wife for more information on me, but for the young Lewis this was the happy result:

There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

The results speak for themselves.

But of course opportunities have to be seized, and the decline of reading, at least among the American populace, is not for lack of reading material. Books are plentiful and cheap. Where a private library used to be a ruinously expensive luxury, the most precious resource of a monastery or the hobby of an aristocrat, Williams argues that “in this day and age, with periodic public library sales and book giveaways, one doesn’t have to be rich to accumulate an impressive home library.”

But that word accumulate my put off the more Marie Kondo-ish among us. Williams suggests we embrace the stacks:

[S]peaking of luxuries, let’s forget aesthetics at least to some extent. Does my home feature many cheap mismatched bookcases? Yes, it does. Do we have too many books for our little space? Most definitely. Are there too many books piled up on every desk, side table, coffee table, and even hidden under the covers in the five-year-old’s bed? Yes. Is everyone in this home living with the joy of books as their primary companions each day? Yes, and that is the point.

Our home library is several thousand volumes, now. I stopped counting at over 3,000 a long time ago. We have a stuffed home office lined with the IKEA Billy bookcases I recently described, three tall bookcases in the master bedroom and large bookcases in our kids’ rooms, shelves on the landing, baskets of kids’ books in the living room, and you can always find stacks here and there that Sarah valiantly keeps under control. Clutter is the danger, but we’re creating opportunity.

Lewis’s memories of tone and opportunity resonate with me. In the little house where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, my parents had one big white wooden bookcase in the foyer by the front door. It had a 1970s-era set of World Book, a big hardback book on the top shelf mysteriously emblazoned Josephus, and scads and scads of kids’ books: Value Tales, Childcraft, Berenstain Bears, Golden Books, etc. We were free to read any of it, any time. I certainly did.

As a high schooler with a taste for literature, I discovered that classics series were helpful. I started as cheaply as I could with Dover Thrift Editions, which at that time were mostly one or two dollars apiece. You got what you paid for, to an extent (when I took a bunch of these to college a friend started calling them “Dover Homeless Editions”), but they gave this hillbilly kid with little pocket change easy access to lots of great old books for very little money. From there, Signet Classics, mass market paperbacks that ranged from $5-$8 when I was in college, and finally the larger and marginally more expensive but better quality Penguin Classics beckoned. I have hundreds of the latter.

The rest of our library has grown up around these like an artificial reef. And I’m glad to say that our reef is now teeming with little fish, busily reading. It is sweet to see them nestled down somewhere with a book, even when they should be doing something like sleeping. For once, I am not so pessimistic about the future.

Read all of Williams’s essay here and be encouraged—and motivated. Relatedly, read this piece on moving a home library from my podcasting friend Michial Farmer, which posted at Front Porch Republic just a day or two after Williams’s. Cf. his thoughts on collecting and loving cheap paperbacks versus cultivating a perfectly matched room full of leatherbound hardbacks. And you can read more about Lewis’s bookish childhood here.

Hurricane hiatus

I certainly didn’t expect to conclude September like this. After a hectic week at school I had several posts lined up to work on over the weekend, including the start of a new series on Chesterton novels, but Hurricane Helene and a sick baby scuppered that. Not that I’m complaining—both of those things together put my writing projects in perspective.

I actually left school early Thursday after the twins’ daycare let me know that one of them had a fever. By that afternoon, with the hurricane veering unexpectedly east of Macon, Georgia, he had a temperature of over 104°, which has a way of narrowing one’s focus. Sarah and I spent hours working to moderate his fever, which we got down to around 100° a few times though it mostly hovered between 102° and 104° until Sunday. As a result, as bad as the hurricane was—and it was bad—it was not foremost on our minds even after it arrived in the wee hours Friday morning and spent several hours slamming the Upstate.

We lost power at 5:59 AM—I noted this specifically because the twins’ white noise machine, which I think may be more of a benefit to us at this point, switched off—and over the next several hours the wind shook the house and rain pounded down. But we were still focused primarily on the baby’s fever.

The hurricane left us without power or internet. Cell phone coverage was weak, too, but we could get most texts and calls out. Mercifully the water never failed. The only property damage we sustained was a single strip of shingles blown askew on a dormer and the gate of our backyard fence blown inside out, warping the hinges. That was an unnerving thing to notice afterward, a clear demonstration of the storm’s power, but we got off lightly.

I can’t say the same for many in the area, though. After we finally got out and drove around a little, Sarah, who has lived in the area for over thirty years, said she has never seen more downed trees. Even a legendary ice storm from the fall of 2006 didn’t wreck the trees and roads this badly. As of last night hundreds of thousands were still without power where we live and, in the mountains where I’m from, entire towns have been inundated or simply washed away. Even with extensive damage and flooding, it wasn’t quite as bad back home in Rabun County, but I spent my high school years traveling to places like Boone and Asheville for basketball games, so those places feel like a part of home. Keep those folks in your prayers.

And I’m thankful to say that the baby’s fever broke early Sunday—Michaelmas, appropriately, as that’s his name—and our power came back on last night. Since the power went off so early in the morning, only the hallway light was on at the time. When that winked back on last night, I thought at first that one of the older kids was playing with a lantern. It took a moment to register that the light was a different color and intensity, and to tell one of the kids to turn on our ceiling fan. By the time it kicked on, we could hear our neighbors cheering in the streets.

Again—not how I expected September to end. And this isn’t even to get into the car battery, the cold showers, the generator, or the fire ants.

Quick notes on two books I finished by candlelight once we had our feverish baby settled at night:

• Uncommon Danger, by Eric Ambler—A freelance English journalist gets himself in trouble gambling during a Nazi Party conference in Nuremberg and accepts a dangerous commission to repay his debts. As a result, he finds himself embroiled in Eastern European industrial intrigues and Soviet espionage. A fast-paced, greatly enjoyable pure thriller, and also more evidence—if you’re interested in the history of the thriller—that Ambler marks the exact midpoint between Buchan and Fleming. That lineage might make a good post or essay one of these days. At any rate, highly recommended.

• The Wild Robot, written and illustrated by Peter Brown—I read this one on my kids’ recommendation. They’ve listened to the audiobook a couple times and loved it, and are looking forward to the film adaptation that we would have seen this weekend if not for the aforementioned events. A delightful story, simply but movingly told. Looking forward to watching the movie with the kids once the area has recovered a bit more.

Grateful for good reading, protection in the storm, healing for our son, and the generosity of family, friends, and neighbors throughout the ordeal. Stay tuned for the posts I had planned for as things continue to settle down.

Addendum: If any of my students should see this, I plan to give blanket extensions to any and all assignments open during this period as soon as I can get access to our school systems. Don’t worry about due dates. It’s more important to me that y’all are okay. We’ll catch up.