letters and sodas: booknotes

Leda Meredith, when she talks about eating local food, speaks from experience: in 2007-2008 she embarked on “The 250″: a year of eating, “almost exclusively foods grown or raised within a 250-mile radius” of her apartment (1). I’m impressed. My own six-day attempt at eating foods from within a radius of about 200 miles from home—which Megan and I did back in 2007—was, as I recall it, a week of being frazzled, cranky, and hungry, a recollection borne out by my comments on this photo and other photos in that set. I caved in and started eating non-local bread partway through the week because I was so miserable. And that was even with an exemption to the 200-mile rule for tea at breakfast, so I can’t blame caffeine withdrawal. (Meredith, it should be noted, allowed herself exemptions during her year of eating locally too: she did still have coffee, she let herself eat non-local food twice a month if she was eating out with friends or at friends’ houses, and she cooked with olive oil and salt, though the salt was sea salt from Maine: outside of the 250-mile radius, but still pretty local!)

Reassuringly, part of Meredith’s point in this book is that eating locally doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition: according to a quote from Eating Well Magazine that she includes in the book, “Buying 25% of your groceries from local farmers of a year lowers your carbon footprint by 225 pounds—even more than recycling glass, plastic, and cans” (1). And, as she also points out, eating locally can be a real pleasure: local food tastes good: fruits and veggies from a farmers market, CSA share, or a garden are often more flavorful than their grocery store counterparts, both because they’re fresher and because, unlike supermarket fare, they’re still being bred for taste, not just appearance and shelf life. Eating locally can also make you feel more aware of and connected to the place where you live: I like the way Meredith talks about getting to know local farmers and local geogrpahy, and thinking about the places where her food comes from as she prepares and eats it; I also like the idea of thinking about “what here tastes like,” a phrase Meredith originally wanted to use for this book’s title (6).

Well, I knew all that, but it was good to be reminded. I first heard about this book, I think, through a CSA newsletter—Meredith and I are members of the same CSA. (CSA stands for community-supported agriculture, which is to say: all of us buy shares in the farmer’s crop by giving him money up front, and in exchange, we get local seasonal veggies each week from June to November.) So the idea of eating locally isn’t new to me: I’ve been a CSA member for a few years now, and have been enjoying the farmers market since moving to Brooklyn. But I’ve been having a hard time getting through my CSA vegetables this summer (the fruit is no problem!) so I thought it might be good to have a little inspiration and advice in book form.

This book is quite NYC-centric, which I didn’t mind: I mean, I live here, so Meredith’s local food is my local food too, and when she mentions places like Added Value Farm in Red Hook or the Queens County Farm Museum it’s pleasing because I’ve been to those places, can picture the asphalt lot in Red Hook where there now are raised beds full of rows and rows of greens and peppers and other veggies, or the corn maze and fields and buildings and animals and open space at the Farm Museum in Queens, where I once went on a tractor-drawn hayride and ate a very good deviled egg. (Pictures from the Queens County Museum: here, here and here: it doesn’t look or feel much like NYC, but it is still within the city limits.) And it cracks me up when she writes about the “unofficial Park Slope recycling service” (Books or clothes or stuff you don’t want? Put it outside your building: someone will take it.). But if you’re not in New York, this book would probably be less interesting and less useful to you.

Still, there are some general points that I think Meredith articulates well. Like when she advocates “a reverse approach to recipes,” nothing that “after decades of having everything available all the time at the supermarket, people have gotten used to a recipe-first approach to cooking [...] you decide what you’re having for dinner, make a shopping list based on your chosen menu, and then hit the store to get the ingredients you need. Never mind that those ingredients may not look very good that day” (49). Eating locally requires a shift in meal-planning: you start with the foods at the market or in the CSA share; if you’re eating a semi-local diet, you then figure out what else you might want to buy that will go well with that fennel, or that chard, or whatever it is. This was a really good reminder for me right now. Some of the other sections, like the parts about gardening and preserving and foraging, are less relevant to me but still interesting, although in these sections, as in the book as a whole, Meredith’s writing is sometimes a bit repetitive. Even so, I’m glad to have read this book: it motivated me to organize my fridge and write down all my CSA veggies so I know what I have that needs using up, and it provided me with recipes for refrigerator pickles, lacto-fermented snap beans, and crustless dandelion green quiche. Yes!

Despite the title, and despite the fact that much of this book tells the story of how the weekend as we know it came into being, Waiting for the Weekend isn’t just about Saturday and Sunday and how they got that way. It also examines larger questions of leisure: what is leisure, anyhow? And how do work and leisure and recreation and play interrelate? To start with an answer: leisure, as Rybczynski defines it, is not “an antidote to work”—that would be recreation, which “carries with it a sense of necessity and purpose” (p 224). Leisure, following the ideas of GK Chesterton, is the freedom to do nothing, but above all the freedom to think and to reflect. So if leisure is the freedom to do nothing, where does leisure fit into the modern weekend, the regularly-scheduled two-day break many of us have, into which we often try to cram as many activities as possible? This is something Rybczynski touches on but doesn’t really answer—the answer being, I guess, that there’s room for leisure if you make room for leisure, though some don’t: “the weekend has imposed a rigid schedule on our free time, which can result in a sense of urgency (“soon it will be Monday”) that is at odds with relaxation” (222). Relatedly, as work becomes less skilled and more service-oriented or clerical, we we end up in a situation where “for many, weekend free time has become not a chance to escape work but a chance to create work that is more meaningful–to work at recreation–in order to realize the personal satisfactions that the workplace no longer offers” (225).

In writing about what leisure is and how free time came to be parceled out into Saturdays and Sundays, Rybczynski writes a lot about the history of the week and the history of the weekend, all of which is really interesting precisely because it’s the sort of thing that many tend to take for granted. As Rybczynski puts it: “Because my free time was personally enjoyed, I imagined that it was personally regulated, but this was not quite so. True, I did what I thought I wanted, but certainly not when I wanted; I dutifully arranged my recreations to fall in step with the regularly scheduled weekend intermissions that were accorded me. Not that I felt this was an imposition. It was done so automatically, it seemed so normal, that I never gave the presence of the weekend a second thought—it was simply the way life was” (10). But this isn’t the way life has always been. For one thing, the seven-day week isn’t the only way that we could divide our time: unlike the year or the month or the day, the week has no astronomical significance. And there were plenty of ancient calendars that had repeating periods of something other than seven days. The ancient Egyptian calendar had ten-day periods related to the fact that the stars the Egyptians used for night-time timekeeping changed at ten-day intervals. The Athenians had ten-day divisions in their calendar as well. The Romans had special days with irregular spacing— the first of the month, the fifth or seventh of the month, and the thirteenth or fifteenth of the month. The Chinese calendar involved a 60-day repeating period, and so on through a number of other times and places. By the time of the Julian calendar, Jews had long used a seven-day calendar, but its origin isn’t known. And the seven-day week wasn’t an original feature of the Julian calendar, but it was adopted not that long after. Because there isn’t any written record of a reason for its adoption (no edict from the Roman emperor, no debate among scholars), the guess is that the seven-day week was adopted as a matter of superstition, because the ancients saw seven moving “planets” in the sky and assigned each one to a day, which resulted in a seven-day cycle.

From the origins of the week, Rybczynski talks about different kinds of special days, days on which certain activities—including but not limited to work—are proscribed: a concept that has recurred in cultures and places from ancient Egypt to Judaism to the South Seas—and then talks about the idea of Sunday as taking something from this sort of “tabooed” day, but also being a celebratory holy day, more or less celebratory in different cultures at different times. So how did the special day of Sunday (for British Christians) turn into the weekend? Partly, it was due to prosperity. Of the 18th century, Rybczynski writes: “For the first time in their lives, many workers earned more than survival wages. Now they had choices: they could buy goods or leisure. They could work more and earn more, or they could forgo the extra wages and enjoy more free time instead. Most chose the latter course. This was especially true for the highly paid skilled workers, who had the most economic freedom, but even general laborers, who were employed at day rates, had a choice in the matter” (112). He goes on to note that “Whenever people had a choice in the matter, however, work was characterized by an irregular mixture of days on and days off” (113). Over time, though, there emerged a pattern of “keeping Saint Monday,” i.e. not working on Mondays (in part to recover from Sunday drinking), a pattern that was stronger in some trades than others. At the same time, railway travel was becoming more widespread, and short getaways by train were being marketed to the public. This, combined with opposition to the “Saint Monday” custom and the Sunday drinking that went with it, led to a push for Saturday to be made a half-holiday in Britain. The Saturday half-holiday familiar in Britain was adopted, later, by the US: a sentence like this was surprising to me because I’d had no idea that office-workers used to work on Saturdays: “By the 1930s, most offices in New York City closed their doors at noon on Saturday” (p 135). And from there, the conceptual jump to a full weekend isn’t long.

After focusing mainly on the UK and the US at first, Rybczynski shifts the discussion to the adoption of the two-day weekend elsewhere, including Solidarity-era Poland, Fascist Italy, and Japan. He talks, too, about pastimes and about weekend “retreats,” country campgrounds/trailer parks where working-class families go for the weekend in the summer, and the long heritage of the idea of an escape from the city—from Pliny’s countryside villas to Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon. These last chapters sometimes feel like they’re not so well-connected to the ones that came before, but that’s a small criticism for a book that, on the whole, is pretty pleasing.

(Hey, look, this is the fifth book I’ve finished from my list for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge!)

When I quoted a passage from Proust about the “litanies of the small trades”, Carol mentioned this book of Irving Penn’s photographs of workers in Paris (and also New York and London) from 1950 and 1951. I’d mostly known about Penn’s fashion work or portraits of celebrities and society people (I’m thinking of pictures like this), but clearly he has a broad body of work: fashion photography and portraits, yes, but also pictures like this excellent one of an “on vacation” sign in the window of what I’m guessing is a tailor shop, or this one from the “Underfoot” series.

In the introduction to this book, Virginia A. Heckert and Anne Lacoste write about the background of these pictures, noting that the project was one that Penn had “long envisioned based on his admiration of Eugène Atget’s photographs of workers and the larger, centuries-old tradition of representing the petits-métiers, or “small trades”" (p 10). Penn had two helpers who worked to find potential subjects and bring them to Penn’s studio, dressed in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade. I love this description of it: “Enticed by a token payment, sellers of cheese, cucumbers, newspapers, and balloons climbed the six flights of stairs to the rented studio, as did repairers of ceramics, knives, chair cane, shoes, and windows; mailmen, firemen, and coalmen; butchers, bread makers, and pastry chefs” (ibid.).

The 210 photographs reproduced in this book are a mixture of gelatin silver prints and platinum/palladium prints: as the introduction explains, Penn mastered the platinum/palladium process later in his career, and returned to the negatives from this series, sometimes reprinting the same images he’d already made gelatin silver prints of, and sometimes choosing new images entirely. Both are pleasing, but I think I like the gelatin silver ones more: the platinum/palladium prints are often darker, more atmospheric, but I felt like I could see more in the gelatin silver ones. Speaking of seeing: you can see some of the images online at the Getty Museum’s site (here, but seeing them on the screen isn’t as nice as seeing them on paper, and I’m sure seeing them in a book isn’t as good as seeing them in person.

But even in a book, there is lots to like here. I love the detail and specificity of these images, how they capture a vanished world, how tangible it all is, how seeing these workers makes you imagine the cities in which they worked, the Paris where a glazier carries a wooden frame on his back or the New York where a stevedore carries a great big branch bearing more than fifty bananas. The way the subjects are photographed, standing against a simple paper backdrop, means your eye is drawn to the details of the person or his or her clothes or tools: the quizzical expression of the knife grinder with a cigarette in his mouth, the flour-covered shoes of a pair of pastry chefs. Highlights for me: the grace of a white-haired “lady acrobat” standing there holding a trio of hoops; the street photographer with his camera and his cigar, and the humor of that picture—the mirroredness of it; the chestnut vendor with his sign announcing that chestnuts are “GOOD FOR THE BRAIN” (is that a book tucked under his arm?); the busboy at a Parisian restaurant, facing away from the camera, the V of his big white apron mirroring the V of his feet, the folds of a napkin tucked under his arm; a pair of smiling lorry washers, one holding his brush with the bristles up, the other holding his with the bristles down, both of them in thigh-high waders; a Parisian telegraph messenger—with his bicycle, of course. Sometimes it’s the juxtapositions that are wonderful: a woman news seller in London tilts her head and looks assuredly at the camera; at her waist is a rumpled and partly obscured sheet of paper announcing, in big black type, “FOOTBALL RESULTS” and “EVENING NEWS.” This woman has broad shoulders, a hat with a feather in it, and a wide stance; one hand clutches a newspaper and the other’s in her bag, and the overall effect is that she looks like someone used to moving through busy streets. Opposite is a nurse, a younger woman, standing very straight, ankles close, hands clasped, all narrow shoulders and narrow waist, lipstick and a starched collar: someone who looks like her working hours, at least, are much more decorous.

I don’t know whether to call Bluets poetry or nonfiction: it is a book-length essay, but a poetic one; it’s a series of 240 “propositions,” like Pascal’s Pensées (from which the book takes its epigraph), each ranging from a sentence to a paragraph in length. Whatever you want to call it, I was enchanted by it.

“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” it starts, and then goes on to talk about the many kinds of blue, meanings of blue, shades of blue (lapis, ultramarine, turquoise), blue things and blue people and blue places, blue in the sense of “obscene” and in the sense of “having the blues” and also blue just in the sense of the color, how it looks, how it feels. This book is sometimes yearning, sometimes sad, sometimes sexy, always smart: it reminds me of Anne Carson (in a good way), the way it blends the personal and the scholarly or philosophical or historical, bits about the science of color and Newton’s experiments in vision, bits about about Joseph Cornell and Yves Klein, mixed with bits about fucking, about pleasure, about loss, about sorrow.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for months and months, and am glad I finally got around to it. I first read about it in a blog post by Mark Doty, one of my favorite poets; the passages he excerpted made me want to keep an eye out for it. Then Megan got a copy and read it and said I would indeed like it, so I borrowed it from her. And then it languished on my shelf for months, until I saw a sign at McNally Jackson saying that the author would be reading there, which made me decide that I should a) read the book and b) go to the reading. (Speaking of which, MP3s of Nelson reading some of her work, including some of the propositions from Bluets are online here.) So: the reading was pleasing, I bought my own copy of the book, and now I kind of want to read it again, though the rest of my TBR pile is calling to me too.

Megan mentioned this book back in March, saying she’d read a review of it that made her think she’d like it, and wondering if I’d heard of McPhee. Since he writes for the New Yorker, and I’m one of those New Yorker subscribers who reads every single article, even if it doesn’t immediately seem to be about something I’m interested in, I figured I must have read his work, but still couldn’t place his name. Then I looked in the New Yorker’s digital archive and realized he’d written a 2007 piece called “Season on the Chalk,” about the chalk landscapes of Europe, including bits about geology and wine-making and WWII history, which I’d entirely forgotten about until I saw it there. But once I heard the title I remembered liking it so much I tore the whole thing out of the magazine and kept it for a while, because it was just so good. Here’s the start of that essay, which is included in this book:

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter “R”. (p 9)

I love that so much: the pace of it, the way it sets the scene; I love this whole essay for the way it’s about landscape/place, the way it mingles broad historical fact with personal experience. I love how wonderfully precise McPhee can be, with sentences like this: “An armada of swans, in single file, swims out from near the shore and toward the center of the river—thirty-eight swans” (p 10).

And while others of McPhee’s essays don’t excite me quite as much, I still admire the way he writes, the care and pleasure it seems he takes in it, whether he’s writing about his mother or canoeing or eating unusual meats (puffin, weasel, bear) or lacrosse. The essay on the latter was funny for me to read/re-read—it’s another I first read in the New Yorker—because despite having gone to a high school where almost everyone in my class of 20 played lacrosse, I’ve never even seen a lacrosse game and found myself having to really slow down and try to make sense of what on earth he was talking about. Yes, I sometimes wished that particular essay (which is 58 pages) would hurry up and be done already, but that’s more a comment on my tastes than on McPhee’s writing. And when I did finish the essay on lacrosse, moving on to an essay about antique view cameras/his daughter’s photographic collaborations with Virginia Beahan (really pleasing landscapes, like this and this), I forgot my boredom and was delighted all over again by the McPhee’s particular mix of description and detail and humor. Also really pleasing: an essay about unusual foods, an essay about fact-checking that’s in large part a paean to fact-checkers. I could have done without the essay on golf (are you sensing a theme here?). But the fact-checking essay, so good! It kind of makes me wish I were a fact-checker, except I suspect I’d make a better proofreader or copy editor than fact-checker, or at any rate, would have to work a lot harder to be a good fact-checker than I would to be a good proofreader or copy editor.

As I said in this post, happiness is the life goal that makes the most sense to me, more than success, more than achievement, more than, well, just about anything else. But how do you go about being happy? Some people would say your happiness is determined by external factors, and others would say it’s determined by genetics or personality, both of which are probably true. But there’s also the idea that, though the general circumstances of your life (health or lack of, money or lack of, etc.) certainly influence your happiness, so can your thoughts and actions, all the little daily choices you make. This makes a lot of sense to me, and it seems that striving for happiness within the framework of daily life is really smart.

So, this book: after realizing that she wasn’t as happy as she thought she could be, Gretchen Rubin decided to research happiness, and to embark on a year-long “happiness project” in which she would keep resolutions each month, with the aim of increasing her happiness. She organized her happiness project by theme, with January focused on “vitality,” February focused on marriage, March focused on work, and so on. For each month, she came up with resolutions ranging from the very concrete (“go to sleep earlier” or “launch a blog”) to the slightly more abstract (“enjoy now” or “be a treasure house of happy memories”)—though these latter end up getting more concretely defined as well, e.g. “take steps to help everyone in the family to experience happy times more vividly,” based on the fact that “studies show that recalling happy time helps boost happiness in the present” (101).

The book, in turn, is organized by month and then by resolution within each month, with some why-I-focused-on-this-theme introductory text and some here’s-what-I-learned wrap-up text. That the book is divided into chunks like this is mostly appealing: it’s very readable, both in short stretches of time on the subway or in the laundromat, and in longer stretches, like on a train from New York to Philadelphia. But it also means that you only get a little bit on each subject, and I sometimes wished for a more seamless narrative instead of all these bits and pieces—though I realize that’s probably more a statement about my reading mood at the moment than about the book itself. (I also found myself occasionally conscious, while reading this book, of how hard it is to deal with dialogue in a nonfiction work like this. I seem to feel this way a lot: like something that was probably a perfectly normal conversation becomes, when written down, like an example scene from an English as a Second Language textbook, where you’re just waiting for the summary questions at the end about what person A said and how person B felt.)

Quibbles aside, I am glad I read this book, as it does contain lots to think about in terms of choosing happiness and building happiness, and Rubin is appealing and relate-able as a narrator. Just some of the “oh yes” moments: when she writes about feeling short-tempered and snapping way too much, and wanting to be happier because it’ll make it easier to be kinder; when she writes about how much she loves reading; when she writes about realizing that what’s fun for other people isn’t necessarily fun for her (and how hard it can sometimes be to be true to that kind of self-knowledge); when she writes about her love of lists; when she writes about being “tough to please”/having a “critical streak” that she knows isn’t really serving her well.

I bought this book in a Whole Foods in London a few years ago, but hadn’t gotten around to reading it ’til now. I love Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries for the really vivid and satisfyingly descriptive way he writes about food. This book has some of that, like when, at the very beginning, he describes a French stew “of cubed beef that has simmered since breakfast with shallots, strips of unsmoked bacon, rosemary and mushrooms in an inky-violet red wine” (p 2). Mmm. But there is also a lot of humor/British self-deprecation: this is a book about British food, good and bad: British stew, he says, is honest and simple; it “tastes of nothing but itself,” though the broth “is the colour of washing-up water and smells of old people (p 1, p 3).

Eating for England is a collection of vignettes, and it isn’t organized by theme, which is refreshing. It’s easy to pick up and put down (though I also found myself reading it in longer stretches), and I didn’t mind jumping from black pudding to cake, from “lunch on a bench” to afternoon tea, the latter of which Slater says “may be the only meal we take that is purely and utterly for pleasure,” and is “something that exists purely to make us feel good about life” (p 21). Some of the vignettes are better than others: I could have done without the sections on annoying-types-one-may-find-in-food-related-endeavours (“the kitchen fusspot,” “the naked cook,” which is to say a guy who’s newly taken up cooking and follows all the latest trends, “the economical cook,” “the voucher queen,” etc.) Also, the book could’ve done with some better fact-checking/editing: one section refers to “Frances and Bertha Upton” and their book about “Two Dutch Dolls,” but I believe that should be Florence and Bertha Upton, and there’s a bit of repetition: two sections talk about how the mouthfeel of cheap chocolate is comforting (in almost the same words), and two sections talk about how Brits are messy when eating out of doors, as opposed to sexy.

But it was fun to read about British food-cultural things I didn’t know about (Berni Inn restaurants, the fact that “no one has ever heard of a ‘lunch lady’ looking after school meals”—apparently they are “dinner ladies” (p 193), etc.) And when Slater is really writing about food, about color/texture/taste and not just about whatever a given food or food-related custom culturally signifies, this book is really pleasing. I love his descriptions of vegetables from farmers markets, the color and variety of them. And the way he talks about Welsh Rarebit, which I love, makes me want to go out to Sweet Melissa and order some right this second (or better: to make some at home). To wit: “Welsh rarebit is sometimes thought of as just cheese on toast, which is what people call it when they want to patronise it. The point is that a rarebit contains beer and mustard (you allow the grated cheese to melt into the beer in a saucepan), which makes a layer the texture of silk to sit on top of your toast” (p 206). Also pleasing are the sections that center on Slater’s own life/memories: the time his father bought a coffee percolator that got used once then relegated to a box in the garage, the first time he got taken out to a restaurant by his parents. The good parts of this book make me want to dig out my copy of The Kitchen Diaries again, and also make me want to read Toast.

This book is rambling and fragmented and sometimes repetitive (like when Ackroyd mentions the 5000-year-old yews at Southwark on one page … and then mentions them again on the next page, without a difference of context or the addition of any new information), but it’s full of interesting facts and historical tidbits and images.

One of my favorites: “The custom of erecting religious houses upon bridges was of great antiquity. There were in fact many chapels and shrines designed both to solace the weary traveller and to pay for the new foundation. There were some places where the bridge actually passed through the chapel, so that the congregation was separated from the pulpit and reading desk by a thoroughfare” (p 130).

Another really excellent one: “The Bridgettine convent at Syon and the Charterhouse at Sheen faced each other on opposite banks, and Henry VI declared that ‘immediately upon the cessation of the service at one convent it should commence at the other, and so should continue until the end of time’” (p 13). After a discussion of smuggling on the Thames: “It was rumoured that, in Essex, gin was in such large supply that the inhabitants cleaned their windows with it” (p 155). On the etymology of the town called Shiplake: “the stretch of water where sheep are washed” (p 416).

There are some great lists or list-like sections, too, which always make me happy: there’s a whole paragraph that lists the fourteen main tributaries of the Thames, followed by a number of smaller rivers and streams: it’s like a litany of water-names, an incantation; elsewhere, Ackroyd talks about the different kinds of criminals and smugglers who worked on the river and it’s a whole string of pleasing phrases, “scuffle hunters” and “long apron men” and more (p 155). Also wonderful is the chapter on weather: the fogs and the rains and the floods and the frost fairs, when the whole river froze and winter markets were set up on the ice. When he’s not listing facts and dates, Ackroyd is good at evoking the sensory images of a place and time, whether the lushness of a tropical Thames landscape, in the time before the last ice age, or the cold and wind of a damp winter in more recent times, or the filth and stench of the polluted river in the nineteenth century and before. (The whole chapter on this, called “Filthy River,” was especially vivid.)

The book is loosely organized by theme: chapters are grouped into sections like “The Working River” and “The Natural River” and “The River of Art” and “The Healing Spring”: this last contains one of my favorite chapters, “The Light of The Thames.” In it, Ackroyd talks about light and color, but can’t help moving to the other senses, too. He writes about the green riverbank with its yellow and blue flowers, and about the colors of the water itself: “the deepest green and the palest silver,” the green and brown upriver, the way that “in the reaches of London it can seem black, or sometimes a dark copper colour” (p 301). Reading this, I grinned, thinking of the Thames but also of the Hudson, how it looks from the windows of one of the 18th-floor conference rooms at work, changing with the sky, crisp blue one day and gray the next. I grinned, too, a few pages later, at a paragraph about the sounds of the industrial river: “the bumping of bales and the hissing of steam, the riveting and scraping of keeps, the shouting of orders through the night [...] the boom of fog signals and the muffled roar of motor-cars mixed with the whistle of the trains and the ringing of the bells of the City churches” (p 304). And then there are the smells of the river, or of the river in the past: mud, the smoke of industry, tar, beer being brewed, tobacco, cinnamon, coffee, all the goods coming into and out of a great port.

I first read this book back in 2006, saw it again at the library recently and thought, quite correctly, that it’d be satisfying to re-read. The start of the first essay, “The Docks of London,” made me think a little of Proust: the magic of names, the magic of place names especially. Woolf writes that any ship leaving port “must have heard an irresistible call and come past the North Foreland and the Reculvers, and entered the narrow waters of the Port of London, sailed past the low banks of Gravesend and Northfleet and Tilbury, up Erith Reach and Barking Reach and Gallion’s Reach, past the gas works and the sewage works” to the Docks (p 7), and it’s like an incantation. It was particularly pleasing to read this essay in the morning on the G train, arcing over the Gowanus, looking out at a Brooklyn waterfront/industrial landscape, reading about Woolf’s experience of the London one. And Woolf’s writing about the city itself is perfect, bits like this:

As we come closer to the Tower Bridge the authority of the city begins to assert itself. The buildings thicken and heap themselves higher. The sky seems laden with heavier, purpler clouds. Domes swell; church spires, white with age, mingle with the tapering, pencil-shaped chimneys of factories. One hears the roar and the resonance of London itself. (p 10)

Pleasing, of course, too, to think of London as I read: to think of how Greenwich looks from across the river, how Oxford Street looks now as I read Woolf’s description of it in “Oxford Street Tide”:

But as one saunters towards the sunset—and what with artificial light and mounds of silk and gleaming omnibuses, a perpetual sunset seems to brood over the Marble Arch—the garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. It is like the pebbly bed of a river whose stones are for ever washed by a bright stream. Everything glitters and twinkles. (pp 16-17)

Woolf writes of the heaps of flowers for sale in the springtime, the silk in the shops, the streetcorner magicians with their paper flowers, the man selling tortoises, and it’s all exquisite. There is the everyday, these human details, and then there is the larger view: like the view from Parliament Hill, which Woolf describes like this:

One sees London as a whole—London crowded and ribbed and compact, with its dominant domes, its guardian cathedrals; its chimneys and spires; its cranes and gasometers; and the perpetual smoke which no spring or autumn ever blows away. London has lain there time out of mind scarring that stretch of earth deeper and deeper, making it more uneasy, lumped and tumultuous, branding it for ever with an indelible scar. (pp 28-29)

At the start of this book, Garfield writes very much as a man, or maybe what I mean is that he writes from a certain place of cultural masculinity that is quite foreign to me, a separate spheres sort of world that I don’t normally much think about. I wonder how much of my inability to pay attention, at first, had to do with the jarringness of that, with how stereotyped it all felt, how tied to a particular sex and age and class: male, upper-middle-class, middle age, mid-life crisis. Page 1 starts with this: “Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies. But my wife is about to find out.” Page 2: “When men get together to talk about their passions, we don’t just talk about what we love – our cars, our sports, our romantic yearnings – but also how much these desires have cost us, and what we have lost.” This language is very gendered, and it seems very much on purpose: it’s not “when collectors get together to talk about their passions,” it’s men, and those passions, apparently, are the stereotypical straight-male ones, cars and sports and women, not books or films or art. As things progress, Garfield’s writing gets more nuanced and inclusive, gender-wise, which I appreciated. Of a board game about stamps he had as a kid: “I still have the game, and I am struck by how all the instructions describe the players as ‘he,’ and how three drawings of a dark-haired round-faced boy seemingly spellbound by the game look like me” (28). Of one reason why collectors don’t want to give interviews: “it might upset their wife or husband (usually wife) to read how much they were spending” (75). Of the beginnings of stamp collecting: “Men and women began collecting stamps in 1840, the same year that stamps began” (78).

What’s most pleasing about this book, to me, is either the very personal or the very historical: not the minutia of this stamp or that (though when I looked stamps up online—like the 1965 Post Office Tower stamp—I could sometimes see the appeal). What I liked best were the bits about Garfield’s own Penny Black and why he loves it, or the bits about the invention of the postage stamp and the time when it first went into use, or the part about about the language of stamps, how their placement denotes different things (and how the meanings of a stamp in the same position varied from, say, England to Germany). Also satisfying is some of the stuff about collecting/collectors in general. In one chapter, Garfield talks about learning about people who collect odder things than stamps, and there’s this, about a man who collected light bulbs:

He had about fifteen hundred bulbs and, the nature of this strange and fragile passion aside, seemed to be fairly normal. He did, for instance, often light up his bulbs to admire their beauty; others would regard this as sacrilege, just as collectors of rare records would never dream of actually playing them. But Tye loved the varying glows from the different filaments – the carbonised vegetable material that appeared in Edison’s day at the end of the nineteenth century, the tantalum drawn wire and then tungsten that characterised bulbs from the early twentieth century. Tye wore quite large smoked glasses and had a round balding head, and he looked like he was turning into a light bulb himself, the way owners come to resemble their pets. I’d like to think this was a common trait – the collectors of Bernard Leach pottery soon looking brown and earthy, and collectors of antiquarian books appearing dank and troubled by their spines (105)