A House Full of Books

     Nicholas Basbanes' book A Gentle Madness is terrific.  I read it a few years ago.  I enjoyed it so much I hunted down a signed copy.  It's about bibliomania -- or as his subtitle reads, Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.   Eventually I stumbled upon an interview he gave for Book TV on CSPAN.  They interviewed him in his house and he showed off his library.  And most of us, when we picture a home library, we think of a single room, maybe two, full of bookshelves and books.  But no.  Not Mr. Basbanes.  His entire house is full of books, even the bathroom.  It's a long interview, clocking in at around an hour.  But you can scroll through the video to the tour through his house.  

Check it out here.

Fan Mail

     I can't say it enough: write someone your respect and admire. In 2009 I wrote journalist, author, speaker, anti-theist, and wit, Christopher Hitchens. I first heard him on a nationally syndicated radio talk show debating religion. Whether or not you agreed with this position, you quickly realized that he was an extremely intelligent man and a fantastic debater. He was also civil and composed (although there are plenty of interviews where he bares his fangs). He was also a great writer and literary critic. He read voraciously, smoked, drank, and as he once said, "burned the candle at both ends." He died from complications of esophageal cancer in 2011. I miss his great mind and I sometimes wonder what Mr. Hitchens would say about this/that major international or domestic political dustup, election, or personality. 

     Christopher Hitchens wrote prodigiously, published in many periodicals, and was a constant presence on television. So I wasn't expecting anything in response when I mailed a handwritten letter thanking him for an article about Army Lt. Mark Daily. It is an article about Lt. Daily's life and decision to join the military, in large part due to Christopher Hitchens' pro-war writings. Hitchens was that persuasive. He had a moral compass that pointed true north; and evidence of that was the quality and diversity of the friends -- Christian, Jew, Muslim, secular, Republican, Democrat -- that filled his life.  And his quest to defend liberty, equality, and to destroy the Islamic extremists that tried to impose their evil on the world through bloodshed and destruction.

A few days after he received my letter he wrote me a short e-mail:

Dear Lieutenant Nelson,
For the son of Commander Eric Hitchens of the Royal Navy it is impossible to decline an invitation from anyone named Nelson, let alone anyone named Nelson who is writing from Pearl Harbor.
I do not know how you picture the meeting between myself and a "group of young, impressionable officers" but if such a thing could be arranged I would be delighted to form a part of it.
As to Twain, I think his anti-Christian satires - some of which will appear in my Portable Atheist - are to be ranked with his anti-war polemics, most especially the one about the "victory" in the Moro Islands. But to my graduate students I always recommend the after-dinner talk on self-abuse that he gave to a meeting of the Stomach Club in Paris. It used to be hard to find, and available only in a volume called The Unknown Mark Twain or some such, but it can now be reaped from the web as well.
Thank you for your kind words on my little essay on Lt Daily. I have been very happy, on his family's behalf, at the slight success of that piece.
Sincerely
Christopher Hitchens

     I found the Mark Twain "dinner talk" he recommended. It is hilarious. I knew Twain was saucy, I had read a lot of his essays, but his talk on "self-abuse" knocked me out of my chair. You can indeed find it online.

     I was on the moon after I read that e-mail. Later that week I sent him a challenge coin (a small coin that represents a military unit or command) in gratitude. He wrote me back:

Just opened it: most grateful and appreciative. By all means let us consider ourselves in touch. Let me know if you ever come in this direction.

I always wanted to drop by his amazing apartment (it was FULL of books) in D.C. and chat about politics, philosophy, and literature. Unfortunately I never got to.  So don't wait.  Write someone you respect and admire.  They may just write you back and even might ask you over for a drink -- you never know.

I recommend you read his piece about Lt Daily over at Vanity Fair.  Linked Here.

  

What did you do today?

From Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography:

Rapt / Absorbed / Engaged

      I'm reading a slim but excellent book called The Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs.  It comes in at 150 pages.  Even reading it slowly -- which is how he recommends books should be read -- you'll still finish it in two or three days.  I've already underlined and starred and circled numerous paragraphs and sentences.   I'm up to page 107 and I know it will end soon, too soon.  And earlier I said "excellent book," but maybe, at the risk of sounding silly, I'd say it is a nutritious book: each page in this slim book is full of great observations; A lot in a little package.  So much, that I think this will be part 1 of a 2 part post on the book.  

     First, I want to share a fantastic poem by W.H. Auden that Mr. Jacobs uses to remind us that raptness, that being totally absorbed in a book is "deeply satisfying."  And it is this absorption Jacobs says that constitutes a vital part of life.  From W.H. Auden's Horae Canonciae (i.e., the Canonical Hours, or the times referred to as times of prayer):

You need not see what someone is doing

to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:

a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,

a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,

forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,

that eye-on-the-object look.

.....

to the first flaker of flints

who forgot his dinner,

the first collector of sea-shells

to remain celibate.

Where should we be but for them?

Feral still, un-housetrained, still

     I know I've been engrossed in a project or hobby before -- I've been "in the zone," as we like to say, and I remember coming out of it, well, happy.  

     Jacobs, as the title of his books implies, is trying to remind us to step away from life's distractions, away from all the Twitters and Facebook, the cell phones and the multi-tasking (which by the way, did you realize we are terrible at multitasking?  We simply execute each task worse then if we were to execute each task singularly). 

   Jacobs goes on to say that "there is something more beautiful, perhaps, when we achieve this "eye-on-the-object look" not because we have found our vocation but because we have found our avocation -- when the reason for our raptness is sheer and unmotivated delight.  This is what makes "readers," as opposed to "people who read."  To be lost in a book is genuinely addictive: someone who has had it a few times wants it again, and wants it enough, perhaps, to hide the damned BlackBerry for a couple of hours, please." [italics mine]

     First things first -- I'm going to finish this book, but I'm going to do so slowly and without distraction....I hope.

     

Link of the Week

     Author Steven Pressfield is probably best known for his book about the ancient battle of Thermopylae -- The Gates of Fire.

   But before he was a best selling author and writer he struggled.  He lived out of his car, and it took him 17 years before he received his first paycheck for a novel.  A former Marine and son of a sailor, he wrote and wrote until he published his first book, The Legend of Bagger Vance.  (Made into a motion picture starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Matt Damon).  That was 1995.   Now he has many more titles to his name.  Most of them are historical fiction.  I've read The Gates of Fire, I own a first edition, and it deserves a book review of its own.  Maybe it is time to read it again...

  

     Pressfield, however, began a blog to help aspiring writers publish, write, and to write well.  In his own words: 

     "My writing philosophy is a kind of warrior code—internal rather than external—in which the enemy is identified as those forms of self-sabotage that I call "Resistance" with a capital R (in The War of Art). The technique for combating these foes can be described as "turning pro."

     "I believe in previous lives and the Muse—and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration, whom we call artists."

     This is a fantastic blog if you are interested in publishing that first novel.  Or if you simply need just a little motivation to get those stories out and on the page.  Check it out.

And the winner is...

          The Oscars are on tonight.  Daniel Day-Lewis better take Best Actor for Lincoln.  His performance was fantastic.  I  recently discovered DDL's -- as he is sometimes referred to -- father was Cecil Day-Lewis, poet laureate for the U.K. from 1968 until his death in 1972.  I've never read any of Cecil Day-Lewis' work.  But if there is a shred of evidence that proves great artists bread great artists I would put money on that father and son.  I've been impressed with DDL ever since I saw Last of the Mohicans with my father when I was a teenager.  I later learned he was a method actor, and apparently he spent weeks living in the woods preparing for his role as Nathaniel Chingachgook.

     

     So in the spirit of Lincoln, here are three books (in addition to Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which the movie is loosely based on) for anyone who is interested in Lincoln, and particularly his writing:

1.  Lincoln At Gettysburg by Garry Wills

2.  Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan

3.  Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words by Douglas Wilson

     It is hard to only pick three.  There are so many great books about Lincoln, thousands in fact, that you can divide them into their own categories, e.g., Lincoln on law, on writing, on politics, biography, emancipation, and so on.  

     

Courage and Death

     Lieutenant Colonel Mark Weber is dying.  Prior to deployment, he decided to have a doctor look at an ulcer that had given him problems in the past -- just to be safe.  An endoscopy uncovered a lesion in his stomach, and then a CT scan uncovered something worse.  Stage IV Cancer.  Mark Weber -- husband and father of three young sons -- was not even 40.
   
     I first heard about Mark Weber while drinking a cup of coffee in a waiting room, waiting for my car to be fixed.  A television was on, set to the news, and General David Patraeus was asked what has given him strength following the extramarital affair that ended his illustrious career and tarnished his legacy.  I looked up at the television, expecting to hear him say something like prayer or friends, and then maybe he would elaborate a bit about either one.  But no.  He immediately mentioned Lieutenant Colonel Mark Weber's book, Tell My Sons.  He said it had helped him put life into perspective, and that he should be grateful for what he had.  Something like that.  No, it wasn't groundbreaking, but I was interested.  I wanted to read it.   I went home and bought a copy for my Kindle.  I finished it in three days.  

     The "dying man's memoir," if written well, is a good read; and it sells  (e.g., Tuesdays with Morrie).  Randy Pausch, a computer science professor who died from pancreatic cancer in 2008 made a huge splash with the publication of his book The Last Lecture.  Before he died, Mr. Pausch's book (which is about achieving your childhood dreams) had sold thousands of copies, made the NY Times bestseller list, and the lecture that started it all, has -- as of now -- 15 million views on YouTube.   Tell My Sons is cut from similar cloth -- it is written as an open letter to his three children.  He writes about beginnings, dreams realized, leadership aphorisms, significant impressions of people and places; and as a man who spent many years as an army officer, a large part of the book is about his time in service.  He uses all these to paint a picture for his children about what made him the man he is today, the men he hopes his sons become, and the life best lived in the time we all have on this earth.

     Weber's ordeal is horrific. I can't think of a better (or worse for that matter) word for it.  After going through a procedure called a whipple -- in which parts of the cancer are removed but along with it, large parts of vital organs as well (i.e., his liver) -- he battles the constant side effects: leaking puss (into and out of his body), sepsis, fevers, and constant pain -- and that's just a few of them.  But he has the heart of a stoic and a solider.  He names the various abscesses and open wounds.  He finds humor in little things; he remembers to laugh.  And eventually he goes back to work.  As a naval officer and expecting father of a baby boy, If I'm half the man Mark Weber is, then I'll be just fine.
    
     In an interview with the NY Times, the writer George Saunders talked about the time he almost died in a plane crash.  They had hit a flock of geese, smoke was billowing into the plane, but somehow they made it back to Chicago O'hare intact and alive.  He said "for three or four days after that it was the most beautiful world.  To have gotten back in it, you know?  And I thought, if you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it's actually going to end..."
     
     My guess is he's living everyday with that awareness.  His book is a reminder for you to live your life.  We will all go, and maybe not on our own terms.  Mark Weber knows his time is coming, and his ability to face death on his terms, and to talk about it, well, it is a beautiful and courageous thing.

I recommend you read it.

Visit his webpage and view more pictures here.
Finally, here's his "last lecture" -- Army Style.