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I just finished Charles Shield’s  biography of Kurt Vonnegut: And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut:  A Life  largely on the strength of Christopher Buckley’s  review in a recent New York Times Sunday Book Review.

I’ve read most of Vonnegut’s novels, but wouldn’t necessarily put anything other than Slaughterhouse 5 on a list of must-read literature.  Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater: I read them, enjoyed some, didn’t enjoy others, but would not rank Vonnegut among my favorite authors of the late 20th century’s post-modernist school.

I’m not a big fan of literary biographies because they tend to be so predictable  in their accounts of misfit personas, alcohol consumption, failed marriages, alienated children, ambiguous sexual preferences, and the simple bleak fact that most authors go quietly insane over the course of their lifetimes thanks to sitting alone for hours at a time at their typewriters.  Dysfunction sells books. Normalcy does not. Read enough literary biographies and you’ll come to believe that all authors are miserable human beings, and other than some rubbernecking urge to watch them self-destruct, there is little in their lives that is commendable. Any biography of Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hunter S., Jack Kerouac, Hemingway usually is a catalog of misfit urges and terrible behavior.

Vonnegut smoked too much, drank too much, divorced his wife after 30 years of marriage, and was petulant when reviewers trashed his work.  He fooled around, screwed over his agents and publishers, and preened a little in the 1970s as a modern Mark Twain after Slaughterhouse made him rich and famous. He was also fairly prolific, wrote some good novels, was a hero to the counterculture and very much a man of his time. That he died old and unhappy – well, I would argue happy 84-year olds are fewer than ill and unhappy ones.

Although Shields enjoyed “official” status and access to Vonnegut in the writer’s final months, Mark Vonnegut wrote one reviewer to assassinate Shield’s account as a fabrication:

“I’m happy to reassure you that Kurt did not die a bitter man who kept thinking he was a failure.

Charles Shields spent very little time with a much diminished 84 year old who right up to the end showed more flashes of brilliance and warmth than most. There’s a ton of evidence, including his art and writing that he fought hard and largely succeeded to overcome PTSD from WWII and a quirky, but not altogether unloving childhood to have mostly loving and supportive relationships with his siblings and children and even his allegedly distant father. Shields had to ignore most of what I and other people who knew Kurt and most of what he read in the letters to come up with these shocking truths about a beloved writer.
It’s too good a bit to go away, but Kurt had next to no interest in investments or expensive things and never bought Dow stock.

Why don’t people employ a modicum of critical thinking before buying into the truth of a book whose existence is completely and utterly dependent on a picture that Shields would have made up out of whole cloth if he had to. Not a perfect man or father and I’ll grant you two failed marriages.

My best regards to someone whose affection and respect for my father shines on.”

I met Vonnegut in the late 1990s at a big Forbes event. He was quite avuncular and we sp0ke a few minutes about life in Barnstable Village here on Cape Cod in the 50s through the 70s. Vonnegut moved to Osterville in the early 50′s, rented an office over the Osterville Package Store on Wianno Ave., mentions Cotuit Bay as the place where Eliot Rosewater’s mother died in a boating accident (aboard a Cotuit Skiff I like to imagine), and then moved to the northside, to Scudder Lane in Barnstable Village where his wife Jane raised their three children and his late sister’s four.

Vonnegut owned the first Saab dealership in the U.S. – which failed — but when I drove a 900 purchased from Hyannis Saab I always liked to think it had some psychic connection to Kurt.

Vonnegut bailed on Cape Cod in the 70s, shacked up with the photographer Jill Krementz (whom he eventually married), bought a townhouse on West 48th Street, and then a place in the Hamptons — transforming him from a “Cape Cod Writer” (of which there are very few) to a classic New York Literary Luminary. He made some returns to Barnstable, but never called it home again after leaving.

His books were popular with my parents and their friends in the late 60s and 70s, and I recall the excitement whenever a new Vonnegut novel was published. Again, they didn’t do as much for me as Barth, Pynchon, and Heller. All of whom faded when the new realism emerged in the late 70s with Raymond Carver and his ilk.

As for the biography, well, if you want to get a little depressed, then by all means, go right ahead. If you’re a writer looking for some profound life’s lesson, then it comes down to this the guy worked his ass off and found success when he figured out how to tell the story of how he survived the fire bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war. Other than that — it’s petty stuff.

Farch: the mythical month invented by Tony Perkins long ago when Red Herring missed a month and he decided to combine February and March — which in New England is the nadir, the pits, the lowest point of the annual cycle when the blizzards roll through, then the  winds follow, the landscape turns grey, and slowly, as St. Pat’s draws nearer, the dog shit starts to surface through the grey snow  banks.

• Red Sox Equipment truck left for Fort Myers — this is good. There are two halves to the year: the baseball half and the non-baseball half.  Truck Day is my personal Groundhog Day and now, with some luck, I’ll be blogging about the blooming of the crocuses, the planting of the sugar peas, and even — dare I tempt the gods — the launching of the boat for some clamming.
• Reading. I’ve been busy on the Kindle and in print.
  • The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain: worth a read, definitely worth a read. How these escaped me is a mystery, but it takes a strong sense of humor to make a reader laugh out loud more than 100 years later.  I’m reading the Modern Library edition edited by Lawrence Berkove.
  • Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk won Turkey’s only Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.  This memoir of growing up in Istanbul introduced me to him. I will definitely visit his novels next. It has been the perfect coda to the recent Turkey expedition.
  • Europe Central, William Vollman. Lyrical history of the Eastern Front in WW II as seen through the eyes of various luminaries from the artist Kathe Kollwitz,  the composer Dmitri Shostakovich to the Wehrmacht General Freidrich Paulus.
  • The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons. I couldn’t finish it, but the beginning is great as he relives the glory dynasties of the Boston Celtics as only a true Masshole of my generation could. The rest of it — especially his “what-if” scenarios are confusing and indulgent.
  • Baseball America: monthly rag out of Durham, NC devoted to inside-baseball and minor league prospects. Feeding the inner baseball geek.
• Watching. Lots of art film. In the past couple weeks ….

• Tropical Malady: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, aka “Joe.”  Beautiful, strange, mystical Thai film.
• Pickpocket: Jia Zhang-Ke. mid-90s film about a doomed pickpocket. Amazing flick. Sino-philes need to see this.
• Crimson Gold, Jafar Panahi. Iranian flick, written by the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.

That’s it. Lots of things happening at work, still engaged with the church thing, thinking about social devices, emerging market internet usage behavior, censorship issues in Iran and China …. the usual and not enough time to blog about it all cogently.

I decided to take the last week of this month off to recharge some batteries and sooth my stressed nerves. Ishmael’s remedy for burn-out applies here:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”

New Boat

This is the first week of full use of the Bald Eagle Too – a 1985 Endeavour 33′ sloop – that I gained use of last fall when my brother’s business partner and childhood friend, David Rowe, decided to sign the boat over to me rather than consign it to a charity auction. The boat had been beloved by his dad, Brian Rowe, a close friend of my late father’s, and when Brian passed away a few years ago the boat began to sit, out of the water, unused. So … one day last November, while I worked in my home office, I heard a commotion out of Main Street, heard the back-up horn of a large truck, and said, “Shit. It must trash day!”

It was John Peck, owner of the boatyard of the same name, and master at yacht haulage, delivering the Bald Eagle to my yard for winter storage next to the garage.

I spent the winter crawling around inside, reading all I could on 12 volt electrical systems, marine diesel engines; the sort of things that I haven’t messed around with since I delivered sailboats up and down the East coast in the early 1980s. An adolescence spent on the water, particularly as a deckhand on the Nantucket ferries, inculcated me with a respect for the maritime version of Murphy’s Law, but I took some comfort in knowing the was well-loved and owned by an engineer.

I was ready to launch in April, but mooring regulations and the incredibly impossible situation of getting a new mooring in Cotuit Bay had me stymied. I filed a “change of vessel” request with the town’s mooring officer to upgrade a 75-lb. mooring for a 14′ Cotuit Skiff into a 500-lb. mooring for a 33-foot sloop. The issue wasn’t the permit. It was space. And I had to wait until the mooring field filled in until the mooring officer could find me a spot.

Finally, after the Fourth of July, my polite pressure paid off and I was given permission to launch. I broke out the pressure water, blasted the decks, and John Peck returned to pick her up and launch her at Prince’s Cove in Marstons Mills. Fisher and I used the Tashmoo (my outboard skiff) as a tugboat, and pushed her, unrigged, through the Mills River and North Bay to a temporary mooring in Cotuit. The following week Oyster Harbor Marine, the boatyard in Osterville, took her in tow, stepped the 50-foot mast with a crane, topped off the diesel, re-commissioned the engine, and by the middle of the month I was underway.

The best part was taking David and my brother out for a maiden voyage and getting the insider’s guide to how she sails. That led, of course, to the impulsive decision to quickly take some vacation. Now I take the Cotuit launch out to the mooring field, and spend my day tinkering away, looking at the boat as a triage project. For example. First thing before slipping a mooring is the man-overboard situation. The decks are at least three, maybe four feet above the water. How do you get a person back into the boat? The swim ladder on the transom? A life ring? What if that person is a fat-whale like me and the only person who can haul me back aboard is my poor wife? From there the triage leads to fire extinguishers, radios, life jackets.

All clichés about money and boats can be inserted here.

Baseball:

I was scoring the Cotuit Kettleers-Chatham Anglers game last night at Lowell Park and became confused by a mysterious hit that was showing on the scoreboard but not on my card. The couple sitting behind me were obviously seriously into the game – from what I could overhear – and the woman seemed to be scoring, but freehand, without a card. I asked her to help me clarify the play – she held up her hand, she needed to see the next pitch (an obvious sign of a good scorer is undivided attention) and she told me where the hit came from. I asked her if she was a parent of a player, and indeed, she and her husband were there from Kentucky to see their son, Zach Cox, play. Cox won the MVP in the Cape League all-star game last week at Fenway for his two RBIs and last night he had three hits and an RBI as Cotuit moved into second place in the League’s western division going into the final stretch. Good thing earlier, when Reverend Jeremy came by to tell me about his pilgrimage to Cooperstown for Jim Rice’s induction to the Hall of Fame that I answered “Cox” when he asked me if I had a particular favorite on the team.

Reading:

Vacation is about the reading, and I’ve loaded the Kindle up with some weird stuff. First, I’ve never really worked my way through Dickens, and lo and behold, one can score some massive free stuff from Amazon. So I downloaded the complete works of Dickens and am now working my way through it in chronological order, beginning with the Pickwick Papers.

Having a restless need to jump around, I am immersed in The Economist and New Yorker, and also reading the legendary How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This is one of the original self-help books. The ones our grandfather’s read in the 1930s and 40s along with Rev. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Given that Carnegie was arguably one of the greatest pop cultural influences of the pre-war generation, I figured what the hell. Tedious going, but refreshingly American in its optimism and emphasis on “hail fellow, well met.”

Based on the Willam T. Vollmann profile in this morning’s NYT, I ordered Europe Central for the Kindle. Also waiting in the wings, Paranoia by Yale classmate Joseph Finder, The Baseball Economist by J.C. Bradbury, and The Food of a Younger Land, by Mark Kurlansky (Cod, Salt)

Miscellaneous:

Lance Armstrong is the man. His podium showing and his performance on Mount Ventoux was stunning. He makes me miss the bike in a big way.

WordPress continues to amaze. Chris Murray showed me the site he built using WordPress, and all opensource tools. This is where small media sites are headed. Check out directorship.com

Thanks to Mitch Ratcliffe for suggesting I read Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing, by J.D. Lasica, the result of a roundtable on the topic convened by the Aspen Institute. I strong suggest downloading and reading by anyone who is involved with cloud strategy, Web 2.0, or social media. There are some very strong kernels and insights I’ll share as soon as I finish the piece.

It gives an excellent set up of what the cloud means, what its implications are, but gets very interesting when it talks about personal definition online, and the extent to which we can control and not control our personal identity. One great anecdote: a guy who made his fortune in online porn hired some PR people to create content about him to bury the porno past deep in the Google results. Ta da — identity management.

Winter is the time of year when my wife and I take back Cape Cod, the only time of year when we can visit the corners of the peninsula that are over-run in the summer months. Traffic is sparse, parking is abundant, and the parking lots at the various town beaches aren’t closed to all but the town’s residents. Spring and fall may find me on the ocean beaches surfcasting for striped bass, but that takes place in the dark, on beaches deserted by everyone but the skunks and foxes rooting in the spindrift for dead fish, and the occasional fellow surf fishermen standing stolidly in the wash, waiting for a tug on the other end of their line. Winter is for beach walking.

The beneficial effects of a stroll on the ocean beach are well known, and have been described as far back as the 1850s by Cape Cod’s first literary tourist, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote in Cape Cod:

“The white breakers were rushing to the shore; the foam ran up the sand, and then ran back as far as we could see (and we imagined how much farther along the Atlantic coast, before and behind us), as regularly, to compare great things with small, as the master of a choir beats time with his white wand; and ever and anon a higher wave caused us hastily to deviate from our path, and we looked back on our tracks filled with water and foam. The breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild horses of Neptune,
rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when, at length, the sun shone for a moment, their manes were rainbow-tinted. Also, the long kelp-weed was tossed up from time to time, like the tails of sea-cows
sporting in the brine. ”

Thoreau’s beach is just as he left it, but at the same time it is completely changed. The dynamics of littoral drift, storm driven waves, erosion, and the absence of any man-made impediments like groins, jetties or seawalls means the outer Cape is a single uninterrupted strand from the southern tip of Monomoy Island (Malabar, to the first explorers) to Race Point, 40 miles north, in Provincetown. Thanks to the protection of the Cape’s forearm by the massive eminent domain creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore during the Kennedy administration, the outer Cape is essentially frozen in terms of development, with no foolish condos or towers daring the Atlantic to wash them away. This is a place of great endings and beginnings. This is the first place in America to see the new day, but also the end of the road. It’s a wild shore, unfriendly and treacherous, and it has its moods – from clement coconut oil scented afternoons in July to terrifying nighttime fogs filled with apparitions, imagined monsters, and auditory hallucinations than can send a spooked surfcaster like me running for his car.

Beach walking exemplifies the verb “to trudge” and the art is finding that exact latitude of berm where the going is firm and movement isn’t wasted sinking into soft sand. The footing of a winter beach walking, especially on bitterly cold days, can be relieved by a band of frozen sand, but for the most part the firm going can be found either at the edge of the wash (where wet footware is always a risk) to the driest reaches above the high tide line near the base of the bluffs and dunes. The beach is not a place for speed walking, a Harry Trumanish pace of 120 paces per minute. It can aggravate and build some sour psychic resentment as the walker bogs down and mires, perpetually slanted by the angle of the sand and shingle and that makes one wish for a shorter leg on the “up-beach” side, or a longer limb towards the sea. Walking backwards from time to time will even out the discrepancy.

Beachcombing is part of the art of the beachwalk, and provides some diversion from the monotony of the trudging. With the wind in one’s face, stolid trudging follows, a head down posture that makes one feel a little abject and pentinent. Walk on the right strip of sand and keep an eye open for nests of monofilament, and sometimes a fishing lure can be unearthed. I see old men with treasure finders sweeping the sand for change or lost jewelry, but they never seem to shout “Eureka!” For me, filling an empty garbage bag is reward in itself, and I can annoy my wife to no end as I roam in the beachgrass looking for plastic water bottles, Mylar birthday balloons, and shreds of commercial fishing flotsam. Grim must have been the findings in the days when shipwrecks cast unidentifiable bodies onto the sand. The graveyards of the Outer Cape bear anonymous testimony on headstones for “Infant – Girl” and “Sailor – Unknown.” Legend has it that body parts washed ashore during the torpedoing of World War II; femurs and such poked up out of the dunes.

A shipwreck will occasionally surface from the sands, lazarus-like, and draw a crowd as one did last winter at Cahoon’s Hollow in Wellfleet. I tried to visit the ribs, but so did about 400 other rubbernecking victims of winter cabin fever. The British revolutionary warship, the Somerset, has been known to emerge from the sands of Race Point, and the wreck count, on the Peaked Hill Bars is huge – this beach being the place where the Lifesaving Service was formed in the 19^th century which lead to the formation of the modern US Coast Guard. Those early surfmen – with last names like Snow, Cahoon, and Mayo – were the consummate beach walkers – patrolling the sands every night with an eye to the outer bars for a ship unlucky enough to ground on the lee shore. Thoreau writes of meeting “wreckers,” the legendary mooncussers who salvaged wrecks for their cargoes and timbers, eking out a marginal life on the margins of the country in the 1850s, the days before the railroad joined the remotest ends of the Cape with the rest of the state.

While I am not a birdwatcher, but the winter duck population is amazing and I understand, from my reading, that the Outer Cape is one of the best places in the world to observe warblers, sea birds, and the occasional “erratic” blown off course from Europe and the Arctic. Winter walks are also good for dogs – as there aren’t any nesting birds in the grass who would be badly disturbed – as long as I remember to bring some plastic bags so I can get really up close and personal with their contributions to the shifting sands and leave nothing behind but footprints (dog poo contributes to nitrogen loading in estuaries and is a bad thing aside from being unneighborly).

Here’s a reading list for the inveterate Cape Cod beach walker. Suggestions, as always, are welcome.

• The House on Nauset Marsh, I discovered this collection of essays written in the 40s and 50s by Harvard Medical School professor Wyman Richardson and ordered a used copy. The essays were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly and are a great series of glimpses into life in Eastham during the 1930s through the 50s in an old farm house near the present day site of the Nzational Seashore headquarters. Richardson was a duck hunter, bass fisherman, crabber and clammer. So his point of view is a lot like my hunter-gatherer ethos. He also knows his birds, weather, and natural hstory. Reprinted in the 90s by one of my favorite publishers, Countryman in Woodstock, VT.
• The Outermost House, Harvard graduate Henry Beston, wrote a beloved account of a year living in a dune shack on Coast Guard Beach, the north spit that protects Nauset Marsh. That shack and his account of life on the booming shore is a beloved Cape Cod classic but the shack washed away in the Blizzard of ’78
• Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau. The great Transcendalist wrote the classic work of Cape walks, and while not as spiritual as Walden, it is widely regarded as one of his best works. I need to re-read it soon.
• A Guide to the Common Birds of Cape Cod¸by Peter Trull, is a nice slim volume with good sketches of the birds one is likely to spy on a winter beach walk. I can’t tell a sand piper from a piping plover, a grebe from a loon, but I could if I spent more time with Trull.
• In His Garden, this is a super creepy true story of a Outer Cape serial killer,  Tony Costa, who killed and buried four women in the dunes of Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet in the late 1960s. Read this and those woods walks start to take on some very bad vibes.
• Mourt’s Relation: this is a first-hand account of the Pilgrims’ experiences on the outer Cape in December 1620 when they first made landfall on the backside beach and pulled into Provincetown Harbor. After marching up and down the forearm for a week, stealing the Nauset tribe’s cache of winter corn and robbing the graves, the Pilgrims under military leader Miles Standish fired on the Nauset’s at Eastham’s First Encounter Beach.

Amazon gets ready for second-generation Kindle – USATODAY.com.

Stand by for an announcement in early February.

I took some guff yesterday for remaining a Kindle fan. Then I read this Frost & Sullivan report on consumer electronic in the “economic winter” and this jumped out at me:

“The Amazon Kindle, a wireless reading device was the number one selling item. Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is currently sold out. There is hope for eBook readers (see Inside Mobile, Sept. 8, 2008)”

My compatriot’s beef against the Kindle (other than its semi-plastic crappy design) is its uselessness during takeoff and landing. Hey, I want to crash as much as the guy in the next seat, so I make sure the Whispernet radio is turned off so the pilots’ won’t start reading Grisham on their instruments during the foggy approach.  In four months of frequent flying I have yet once to get told by a maurading flight attendant to turn off the book. Secret is keep it in its leather moleskine-ish cover and act like it is a book and not let the attendant get a good look at it.

Still, with a new model on the way (which I will not buy as I have a year or more before I amortize the hardware cost of V1 through e-book discounts (which generally are 40% off the paper version), I’d say Amazon has finally staked out, with eInk, the elusive electric book. And for that I am glad. Now if they would open up the platform and let other device manufacturers sic their best human factors engineers on the task, we might end with some truly ergonomic advances in reading technology.

Billy Budd

“The hull deliberately recovering from the periodic roll to leeward was just regaining an even keel, when the last signal, a preconcerted dumb one, was given. At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East, was shot thro’ with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.”

Melville is my favorite tragic author (from a personal basis) — Billy Budd — arguably his most accessible work, wasn’t published until well after his death when it was discovered in some papers and brought to the public in the mid-1920s. As a stylist, he could turn a beautiful phrase, and I am especially hit with the force of repetition in emphasizing the tragic execution of the hero with “Billy ascended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.”
Verbal pearls like this put me in awe of great writers.

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

“LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.”

I like LibraryThing. I like it a lot. You catalog your library and it compares it to other libraries. Reviews, tags, 200 books for free. $10 for unlimited. $25 for an unlimited lifetime. The T I will try to do a widget out of it to the sidebar to show what I’m reading.

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, landed under the Christmas Tree (which has been stripped and now lies in the burn pile behind the tin shed), courtesy of my mother-in-law who has excellent taste in literature.

Everyone knows the story. Warrior Beowulf comes to the aid of the Danes who have been getting raided by a nocturnal monster that invades their gilded mead hall and eats everyone up. Beowulf steps off his longboat, tells the Danes to chill, settles down with his men, the Geats, and awaits the evil beast. Beast arrives, chows down on one of Beowulf’s Geats, Beowulf wrestles the beast, one Grendel, and manages to rip its arm out of its socket.

Grendel limps off, to die in the swamps, and the Danes party down and give Beowulf his due and lots of bling. Ah, but Grendel’s mom isn’t pleased with the affair, so she pays a visit and kicks some more butt, taking off with Grendel’s amputated claw and depriving the Danes of their trophy.  Beowulf shrugs it off, puts on his chain mail and helmet, tracks mom down in the bogs, slays a nasty bog monster in a pool of water, and dives into that same pool to sink down and have it out with mother.

Mom dies, loses her head, the blood corrodes the blade, and Beowulf pops back for more a party with the Danes who tell him he ought to be the king of the Geats.

But wait, there’s more ….

Heaney pulls off a magnificent translation — his introduction is worth reading on its own for its discussion of language and the role the legendary story played in the development of Nordic and ultimately Anglo-Saxon literature. This is a creepy campfire story the told around the peat fire to freak out the kids — a Dark Ages version of Three-Fingered Willy — and is well worth a good read. It’s not every day one of the touchstones of modern literature gets translated by a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, so go to it and really bum out your seatmate who is reduced to reading the SkyMall catalogue. If you want to know where Tolkien got his inspiration (Tolkien was the critic who “discovered” Beowulf) then this is the source.

Why isn’t there is great online dictionary? Wikipedia is a great online encyclopedia, but there just isn’t a great dictionary, at least, nothing on the order of the OED in terms of total coverage, but also, most important, that capability to explore randomly and discover cool new stuff. True, there is dictionary.com and ObjectGraph has a nice and convenient Ajax dictionary, but I want something that can quickly find words such as these:

• Propinquity: proximity, nearness
• Facinorous: atrociously wicked
• Saponaceous: having the qualities of soap
• Treuhand: German trust officer
• Obnubliate: to obscure
• Autochthonous: originating where found, indigenous
• Procellous: stormy
• Fisc: the treasury of a kingdom

I’ve subscribed to the Word of the Day email list for ten years, and every so often it delivers a good one, and I’ve long been in the habit of maintaining a list on my Treo or Palm device of words I come across (such as the list above) that deserve a lookup. In prep school, in Mr. Ward’s English class, we played Word of the Day, and everyone was expected to come in armed with a submission that the rest of the class would discuss, consider, and vote to the exalted position of WOTD. I appealed to my classmate’s baser instincts (all 15 year-old’s sense of humors are centered in their groin) and introduced them to such schoolboy classics as smegma, merkin, coprolite, and meconium (cheesy substance found you-know-where; pubic wig; fossilized feces; and an infant’s first bowel movement). The last term was so wildly popular that it became, in shortened form, my nickname for a while: Mec. Classmates who arrived bearing good words such as sedulous (Persevering and constant in effort or application; assiduous) never stood a chance, so Mr. Ward had to ban medical terms and excuse me from further participation. That, and I was caught making up the definition to a word, tampion, which in reality is the plug stuck in the end of a cannon to keep dirt and water out of it, but which I provided a new definition for, being a ball of dirt and spit used by hibernating bears to keep ants and other insects from climbing inside of their bums while they slept. Lacking Google in 1974 to settle the argument, I was unable to prove this variation, and was banned from further participation. Then, this morning, I found the wonderful Uterine Fury Records which is so kind as to provide a cartoon strip of how a bear constructs and deploys a tampion.

But being of the habit of reading with a pen or pencil in my hand, I have a hard and fast rule of never glossing past a word I don’t know. Down it goes, into the flyleaf or the Treo list,to be retrieved later. Never to be used in conversation, but just filed away for future reference and the appropriately pompous sesquipedalian moment (given to the use of overly long words). Now I will never rise to the level of a William F. Buckley, the god of vocabulary, and I wouldn’t dare throw one of these tongue twisters into a conversation, let alone a written sentence, but it was kind of fun to fire off a letter to the editor of the Barnstable Patriot yesterday, the kind of grumpy-old-man screed one writes when someone threatens to erect a brothel next door to a church, and drop in the word eleemosynary (related to charity) just to let them know I had some big punches in my word arsenal.

My current favorite word, and a pretty one, is petrichor, which describes the way the world smells after it rains.

Yes, I read the dictionary cover to cover as a kid. And yes, I ate paste.

I’ve been through a bit of a dry spell on the reading table, but that’s changed with a couple deliveries from Amazon and a recent birthday present or two.

First, one I picked up for the plane ride to Paris, is David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, a recent collection of his non-fiction (there are those who say he is finished with fiction, but I digress). The opening essay, an account of his visit to the Adult Video News Awards — the Oscars of Porn — had me laughing so hard on the flight over that the hostess mistook my laughter for an off-base appreciation of her banter with the person across the aisle over the intricacies of the in-flight entertainment system. Wallace is the master of the footnote — indeed, as readers of Infinite Jest and his other works will attest, the real joy in a Wallace reading lies in the pica-point footnotes. Good stuff, and my son Eliot agrees, Wallace is a true genius.

Bless my wife, she gave me Glass Plates & Wooden Boats: The Yachting Photography of Willard B. Jackson at Marblehead for my birthday a couple weekends ago. A true coffee table book, this one is not only photos of beautiful yachts and working boats of the North Shore of Massachusetts at the turn of the century — the golden age of Corinthian yachting in America — but the accompanying text is great maritime history. One of the most beautiful collections of yacht photography in my collection.

I went through a few China books last month. Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan Spence and the excrable Mao: The Unknown Story. Also blew through Hannibal on the flight from Beijing to San Francisco, but airplane novels leave me unhappy in general.

In literary sightings, Jimmy Guterman, former editor in chief of Forrester’s now defunct eponymous quarterly (to which I contributed) Forrester, is contributing to the front of the book for Fortune. He has a piece on telephones and airplanes in the issue with John Lassiter of Pixar on the cover. I can’t find the story on the Fortune (read CNN Money) site, otherwise I’d be linking.

Jonathan Spence’s The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution. I’ve been a China tear for the last three months (for obvious reasons), and having taken Spence’s class on Chinese history at Yale in the 70s, I turned to his account of the lives of several revolutionaries, intellectuals, and artists in China from the 1880s to the 1980s. Excellent, excellent book about a very complex period in world and Chinese history.

Spence writes like a novelist, but is probably the greatest living Western Chinese historian. The first person he profiles, Kang Youwei, is amazing.

I picked up Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea at the bookstore at Logan Airport and finished it before landing in Chicago. Excellent book which tells the story of the whaling ship Essex, which in the 1820s was rammed by a whale some 2000 miles west of the South American coast, sank, and then subjected its crews to a horrific open-sea voyage of 93 days.

Cannibalism was involved. People in the 19th century liked cannibalism in their tabloids the way American’s today like Angelina and Britney and Whitney.

This tale inspired Melville to write Moby Dick, and was the most lurid tale in America in the first half of the 19th century. Philbrick is an excellent writer and historian. I think I enjoyed his descriptions of Nantucket more than the sea story itself. I worked on Nantucket for six years (summers, as a deckhand on the ferry) and while its fishy history has always been in the back of my mind, I had no idea about the social dynamics of the island, the strength of the women who ran the local economy while the men were off on their two to three year voyages, and the immense wealth accumulated by the Quakers.

Nantucket in the 19th and 18th centuries was the Silicon Valley of its day. Ship owners like Obed Macy and the Howlands of New Bedford were the venture capitalists of their time, seeking at least a 25% profit on their ventures — ventures which personified the meaning of risk. The crews and their captains were among the best traveled, culturally aware men of their time, discovering new islands in the south Pacific, as they chased the dwindling whales around the world, up into the Arctic.

Philbrick has me all fired up to turn Chatfield into a book.

I’ve been working my way through Thomas Wolfe’s last novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, for the past few weeks, reserving it for flights to and from North Carolina as a way to while away the time. I just finished it and feel a sadness for having done so, somethingI haven’t felt for some time from a piece of literature.

The old cliché of the “Great American Novel” comes to mind; Wolfe avidly pursued it, as no one has before or since, and in places, actually quite a few places, he manages to write it. His descriptions of New York City during the Great Depression rival, and outrank Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. His Whitmanesque elegies to the vastness of America, the rawness of the countryside, the power of the cities, the perspective an expatriate has of the nation looking homeward from a Europe poised on the brink of war, is a very fine thing indeed.

Time has not treated Wolfe well. Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway held their own through the decades following this Golden Age of American Literature, but Wolfe fell by the wayside, his reputation perhaps diminished by the perception that he was highly edited (by the legendary Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner, then Edward Aswell at Harper), unstructured, and completely autobiographical. The balls of the man, who threw his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina to the world, naming names as it were, in his first novel, Look Homeward Angel, is amazing, the quintessential proof that a novelist makes no friends in mining the stuff of his or her own life and relations in building their masterpieces.

There are so many great passages, so many great lines, it is staggering to consider that Aswell assembled You Can’t Go Home Again from an eight foot packing case of notes and 35 notebooks. The sadness of the conclusion and the foreknowledge of Wolfe in the conclusion, in predicting his own death, is wrenching:

“Something has spoke to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year, something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where.”

And so he died at the age of 38 of tuberculosis.