Pages of January

Three books with others underway, have helped warm the days of a cold month, completing my 67th circumnavigation of the sun.

First was completing "Atlantic' by Simon Winchester. http://simonwinchester.com/ I'm more impressed than ever with this author, a journalist who was in an Argentine jail during the Falklands war. He's traveled the length and breadth of The Atlantic and the story is long, but compelling. My kind of book..history, but more than that, the story of people.

Other words I had to look up as I moved from December into the last half of the book: cartouches,  paten, ineluctable, godowns, barbicans, cis-altlantic, scutched, envoi, gibbet, execrable, fettle, furze, invidious, demersel, ablating, eiderdowned.

His tales of the horrors of the slave trade, the romanticism of piracy, the way the Atlantic changed naval warfare, the problems of pollution and global warming, and the science of it all, made the long journey--459 pages--worth the trip.

Second book was 122 pages, Mary Oliver "Blue Pastures," a Pulitizer Prize poet I'd never heard of, as a ignorant journalist I guess, writes of writing and studying Edna St. Vincent Millay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Oliver It's like she cleaned out her notebook and put a few things together. It stretches the mind.  If I hadn't visited Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma city one Friday, I'd never have found her.http://www.fullcirclebooks.com/

Oh, Blue pastures refers to the ocean. She lives at Provincetown, on Cape Cod. She also teaches at a college in Vermont. But since she doesn't have a degree--dropped our of Vassar--she couldn't teach at UCO. (No doctorate--so inferior). Words I had to look up: squamation, quahog, tautog. Still she had me with the chapter, "My friend Walt Whitman."

And the thoughts from these essays, like snippets from the notebooks she keeps and jots stuff down in:

• "Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude."
• "Since diction has taken off its fancy dress and gone sauntering through the countryside...."
• "Don't engage in too much fancy footwork before you strike a blow."
• "Hasn't the end of the world been coming absolutely forever?"

Third book, read last night, has been around the house a while. It's Susan's copy of "About Alice" , 2006, by Calvin Trillin, about his late wife.  http://www.thenation.com/authors/calvin-trillinThis 70-some old page book by a star writer for The New Yorker, traces his partnership with his wife and her eventual death from cancer.

One quote: "One of the most negative words she could use in describing someone was 'passive.'"

Words of discovery--pages in December

• bouillon time, rhumb lines, proscenium arch
• invigliationn sodalites, snoods, anoraks
• Mogador, Levantines, thalassocracies, jeremiads, discalced, Clonfert, niggles,  majuscule, bentic
• Monegasque, tautological, loxodrome, gyre, polymath, escapement, aiguilles, epibentic, brio

I spent an hour looking these words up today. I'd underlined them  as I was reading a new book, and I'd completed four chapters148 pages out of 459, not counting index and other stuff.

Oh, the book? "Atlantic" by Simon Winchester, telling the story of the ocean. First saw it two nights ago at Best of Books in Edmond, after dinner. Had to buy it. Winchester is one of my two favorite non-fiction writers. John McPhee is  still the favorite, but Winchester has written 20 of the kind of books I like to read, with travel, far-away places, geology, geography, history mixed together. So far I've read,  Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, and The Professor and the Madman--about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.  It ain't just history--it's journalism, the story of people.

Ironically, I was looking up those words in the OED today. I found one word not in the OED--"bentic." I did have to turn to the Internet for a few of the geographic terms.

How do you tell the story of an ocean? He starts before the beginning, sprinkling his narrative and smooth writing with lots of geology, and coming forward through the ages into explorers, travelers, discovery and mapping, politics and wars and storms and science and trivia (Did you know Hitler tried to buy an island in the St. Lawrence seaway?) to the present.

Winchester first crossed the ocean on a liner in the early 1960s. His storytelling captivates, mingling facts with humanity. I just make sure I have a pen nearby to underline words I'm not sure of. The chapter I'm in now is about the literature that grew up about the Atlantic--from Anglo Saxons to Shakespeare's The Tempest and more.

The only fault of the book is that it needs a much more detailed map, with larger type for these aging eyes, than the few included. I'll have to get out my world map for the rest of the chapters, and will still underline words, to be looked up later.

Avast!~