Fall Newsletter 2023
"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird
I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."
― George Eliot
This seasonal cusp is always bittersweet. Lots to look forward to, but also many pangs about the long, slow, lazy days of summer fading out. This, despite the record-breaking global temperatures! It was certainly good to get away to Lewes, Delaware for a beach break and up to a Chautauqua still haunted by the attack on Salmon Rushdie, but offering A Life of Literature for the week we were there. Highlights were NPR’s “Fresh Air” book critic Maureen Corrigan and Newbery-Award-winning Kwame Alexander (who said he felt like Beyoncé as we enthusiastically applauded him.)
The summer was also full of writing as I managed to live up to the Sylvia Plath quote, “Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.” Well, at least part of a novel. I’m eight chapters in to Föben’s story, though I am tending to get distracted by research as the fabulous Enoch Pratt interlibrary loan system keeps delivering invaluable resources.
Benjamin Franklin, Printer,
Philadelphia
Library of Congress
For instance, I learned that Benjamin Franklin published the first three hymnals for the Ephrata Cloister in the 1730s during the early days of his printing business in Philadelphia.
The Deceived Ones will start to become a physical reality next week as I begin working with Apprentice House Press on design and marketing. This week, I sent in the final draft of my manuscript—though I did manage to squeeze in a last-minute piece of location research beforehand. At one point in the novel two of my characters visit an exhibition of historical instruments, and I decided this should be on show at the Evergreen Museum and Library. But I couldn’t quite envision which of the rooms in the Gilded Age mansion would be the most appropriate. The intimate theater that Léon Bakst designed for Alice Warder Garrett? The John Work Garret Library? So we popped down the road for a tour. It turns out that the perfect venue for the fictional exhibition is the Far East Room where John Garret kept his collections of inro and netsuke. So, when the time comes, imagine Vira and Orson here!
Evergreen Museum & Library and Far East Room
It’s starting to look as if every time I take a week off from WBJC, I take the life of the radio station in my hands. When I was over in Delaware, the console—with all the faders and on/off buttons and so on—gave up the ghost, so our redoubtable engineers set up a makeshift broadcast studio in one of the production rooms, where we continue to camp. While I was up in Chautauqua, there was a huge power outage due to a violent storm, and the climate control went seriously on the blink—at the height of summer. The studio clock, by which we count down to the news and such, conked out for a bit, and now, one by one, the microphones are going on the fritz. As the Operations Director says, it’s like Haydn’s Farewell Symphony as one thing after another pops off. So, if you listen to WBJC, either terrestrially at 91.5FM or online at wbjc.com, spare a thought for us as we hold things together with string and chewing gum!
We’re still pumping out the programming, though. On BookNotes in August, it was a pleasure and privilege to speak to Jennifer Homans, prize-winning author, historian, New Yorker dance critic, and winner of the 17th Annual Marfield Prize for her biography, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Altogether, it’s been a rich summer of reading. I’m in the thrall of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (having read its Pulitzer Prize-winning companion, Trust, by Hernan Diaz back in December.) Other high points are How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell (giving me a far better sense of him than I’ve ever had); You Could Make This Place Beautiful, A Memoir by the poet—not the actor—Maggie Smith (loved the structural technique she uses, but the tone not so much); and August Blue, A Novel by South African-born Deborah Levy (I needed a right-brained friend to help me unravel the ending.)
The Goldfinch
Carel Fabritius
Mauritshaus, The Hague
Also, two books about Dutch artists: Van Gogh, A Power Seething by Julian Bell and Thunderclap, A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming. She is the art critic of The Observer,and her latest book is about, inter alia, the gunpowder explosion in Delft in 1654 that killed Carel Fabritius and could have killed Johannes Vermeer.
These last two are sort of by way of prep for a visit to Holland en route to South Africa in October. Since we fly KLM quite often, I’m perhaps more intimately acquainted with Schiphol Airport than I'd care to be—but, this time, we will break the journey and stay in an Airbnb on a canal in Amsterdam to explore the Rijksmuseum, the van Gogh Museum, and, I hope, the Hague.
I hope it’s a good change of season for you—into autumn or into spring—and I’ll be in touch when the seasons change again.
Take care!
Judith