September 2021

A List: St. Augustine--City of God....................................................................636/867

B List: Thomas Bulfinch--Bulfinch's Mythology..............................................306/773

C List: Walter Scott--Rob Roy...........................................................................135/501

It was a busy month, and all of these books are long and dense, though Scott is more of a rolling than a dense writer I suppose. In any case I didn't made much progress. It takes me about a half-hour to get through seven pages of both Augustine and Bulfinch (which have some superficial similarities in the way they are constructed, the way they synopsize the foundational stories with which they are concerned, the overall size and pace, and so on), and most days, thirty minutes is about all I've got. I also went on vacation for a week in August. School started last week for three days, and then there was a covid outbreak, so everyone is home again. I have an excessive number of pictures though.

Bulfinch is the third long book in a row on the B list (following The Brothers Karamazov and Buddenbrooks) my progress on which seems to grow ever slower as somehow the amount of other things I have to do in the course of a day grows ever larger. I fear I am becoming trained not to sit too long at a time reading without becoming agitated that I ought to be doing some work for other people. I hope someday I will be able to slough off this unwelcome reflex and revert back to the way I used to be, but I am worried I will not be able to do this. 

Walter Scott seems to me to be a really good novelist, he should definitely be thought of in the group with Dickens and Jane Austen and Fielding and the Brontes and all of those people, which I feel like he is not regarded as being in by literary people nowadays. He is absolutely first rate at plotting and building an atmosphere, and he has much more humor than I had been led to believe. His characters are perhaps not as adept at critiquing society's and other people's imperfections and probing the psychological sources of their dark motivations as modern readers have become accustomed to, but they at least have personalities and they have great language. All in all, I would say this is not a set of trifling strengths.

I have to pull these pictures off of my phone, which I cannot see very well, especially when I have to try to differentiate between four or five or ten pictures of essentially the same thing. I guess this is an all right (half) family picture. 

My son tried out for a travel baseball team. He didn't make it, though he was not (to me) obviously outclassed by the competition. His not being on it will save me some money, but I was willing to pay for it if he could play since he wants to and he has kind of been robbed of these last two seasons when he was 11 and 12 (there was a season this year but no all-star tournament).  

This same baseball-playing son is very proud of this picture of his hair. He keeps making it the screensaver on my phone. This picture by the way is at Brattleboro Books, which I found open for the first time in several years, though reduced to about half the store space it used to have.

My 19 year old finally had his long delayed Eagle Scout ceremony. Then the next day we left on a trip to go to college. 

The first stop on our little college trip was Cooperstown, New York. I did not take many pictures there, as among other reasons my phone was frequently dead on account of the children's playing games on them. I have no pictures of the Fenimore Art Museum, for example, which we went to, or of Otsego Lake, which I found to be particularly beautiful. My youngest daughter loves dogs. This dog was in a pretty good used book store (meaning that they had a solid stock of the kind of 50+ year old hardcovers that I would be likely to buy) on the Main Street of Cooperstown that also sold baseball memorabilia. 

This was at our hotel in Herkimer, New York, about 30 miles from Cooperstown. Staying in Cooperstown itself was a bit too expensive. We were actually planning to camp there, but there was heavy rain forecasted for the first day and a half of our two day visit, so we scrapped that plan. 

Now we are back at the Eagle Scout celebration. This is my nineteen year old who is going to college now.

The sign for our hotel is Herkimer, which is right next to the New York State Thruway. The hotel has an 80s--early 90s vibe about it. It had a no frills, but clean outdoor swimming pool surrounded by a fence fringed with pine trees and the roar of tractor trailers from the highway, which I found atmospheric, especially at night. We also found a restaurant nearby where we had our best meal of the trip. The food was nice enough, but they had a children's menu AND $2 beers (on Thursdays, though I think there was one other night during the week that they had this offer), which is like a dream come true for me.   

Cooperstown is also the hometown of course of James Fenimore Cooper, so we had to acknowledge some of the memorials to him. I've read some of his books in years past. If you are me, and you live in the northeast and you want to get a sense for the literary history of the country, in which he is an important figure, I think it is worth having some familiarity with his books. The Pioneers, I remember, struck me as halfway decent and engaging, though I do not recall much specific about it now. 

Current standings and daily scores displayed outside the Hall of Fame.

Cooper's grave. This reminds me that I need to record the date of this visit in my "Author's List" posts. Such occasions are few these days. The church which this graveyard belongs to was lovely--Cooperstown and that entire area are famously beautiful, a circumstance always remarked upon by visitors--but my phone hit 0% just as I got this picture, and I could get nothing more. 

From Cooperstown we advanced to Gettysburg and did the obligatory tour of the battlefield and monuments. This is on the rampart of the impressive Pennsylvania Memorial.

This one was from the 30s (75th anniversary of the battle memorial) and overall suggests some Fascist influence, complete with an eternal flame, which still burns as of my visit, on the top. I don't exactly dislike it though. The entire place is a hodgepodge of monuments from different times and places that are for the most part out of sync with the way intelligent people think about history or war in the present. In that sense it is not as out of place as it might otherwise seem.

The view from the famous Little Round Top, a high ground occupied by the northern forces where an assault from the rebs was repelled.

Lincoln is everywhere in Gettysburg, we had to get in one picture of him. 

Monument donated by the New York City Fire Department. I took pictures of a few of the Confederate monuments as well, though I left them out of this post. I think I posted a picture of the Lee monument (along with the warning sign not to vandalize, deface it, etc, or suffer a fine) on my Twitter page.

  

Trying on Civil War hats in the gift shop. Realizing that baseball uniforms are basically modestly evolved Civil War era attire. 

Me painting a church.

Back in Gettysburg. This is Eisenhower's farm where he lived after he was President. It was closed because of covid, but you could still walk around the grounds. It's a nice house with a lot of land, but all in all pretty modest for a major world leader by present standards.

Finally we made to Annapolis to drop my son off at SJC. This is the only picture from the school on my phone (my wife took a lot of pictures). This is a faculty lounge/meeting area behind the pendulum pit that I don't think was there in my era.  

More church painting. This is my second son's Eagle Scout project. Really the parents aren't supposed to be doing this--the Scout is supposed to be leading the project with the other scouts in the troop. But no one showed up and we were up against the deadline, so there we were.

After this day of painting, one of my children who is somewhat on the spectrum informed me that he had wanted to go with me on a hike. I was kind of tired and hungry and it was about to get dark so I was inclined to not do this but I ended up going to make everyone happy and had a late dinner. This is a hill right in Concord with a fire tower on the top of it, about 45 minutes each way. It was mostly light enough to see on the way up, but when I got up there I rested for about 15 minutes, by which time it was completely dark. This is the view from the ground where I was outstretched after the ascent. I did make it back down in the dark, with the aid of my cell phone flashlight (after taking this photo reduced my charge by about ten percentage points). I was very tired. 

One last view of Gettysburg. I probably won't go back there again, and you could say I've seen pretty much everything there is to see there apart from a few of the smaller houses associated with the battle/and or Lincoln (we did see the famous cyclorama painting), but I think I would like to go again sometime, it's pretty there and all of the memorials are rather moving.