In and Out of Our Cages

Get ready. Get set.

The Big Day

 

Leelanau UnCaged! Such a happy day! Weather this year was perfect, too, but even a little drizzle in one or two past years didn’t manage to dampen spirits much. This is a day when everyone comes home to Northport. Or comes out. Or comes up! From wherever you start, our village is the destination on the last Saturday in September. Streets are closed off to traffic, so a little walking is involved. It’s good for you! You’ll notice big smiles on faces. Even the many dogs on leashes seem to be smiling. Note also that these shots were made before the start of the festivities.

12:30 p.m. The drums, the drums! Their hypnotic beat invites dancing and hand-clapping. The sun is shining, and the sky is blue over Northport….

Now it's underway....

…A woman buys a book on learning French, and when I ask if she’s going to France, she says, somewhat sadly, that she doesn’t think she’ll ever get there. I recommend Montreal (“You can drive there!”) and tell her a little about the trip the Artist and I made the year I turned 50, including an unprepossessing little town in the countryside that had the most beautiful Parisian pastries imaginable. She likes the idea and thanks me enthusiastically. 

 

A Canadian visitor … friends from Traverse City … A pair of women in the street on stilts with mushroom hats and bags ….

 

6 p.m. So many old friends, repeat customers, and newer acquaintances. Good conversations and good sales. Happy noises from the street. Now and then someone comes in looking frazzled, needing only to sit down quietly for a few minutes. I slowed down one young woman (not frazzled) long enough to photograph her book bag from NYC. I was at the Strand once!

Sorry for blurry image. I was hurrying.

What started to feel like a brief lull (interrupted several times—no problem) gave me a chance to eat the salad I’d brought from home and rehydrate with some Vernor’s. Have I mentioned that it was a summery day? That it felt like June? I barely got past my bookshop door all day but didn’t feel confined at all; with so many people flowing through the door and so many conversations, I felt very much a part of the day, so happily occupied that it was impossible to keep continuing tabs on the day hour by hour….

 

 

What Came After That?

 

I must admit Saturday was a long day, though. For me it began with a meditative minivacation in the interior of the county, because I knew it would be a long day for Sunny, too. (You can see scenes from one of our three Saturday morning walks here.) The next two days, also summery, were also very busy but more Sunny-focused, with dog park, extensive and relentless raspberry cane pruning, and grass mowing on Sunday, followed by our agility session with Coach Mike on Monday morning, afternoon autumn olive eradication (a never-ending program), and more mowing in the cool of the evening after dinner with a friend at the Happy Hour. Whatever yard work I do, you must understand, is done in spells alternating with tennis ball play, so my dog girl is not neglected.

Do all photos of Sunny look the same?
But cute, right?

We here in Leelanau are enjoying our “second summer” of 2025, this blessed respite—without humidity!—before cooler temperatures arrive and stronger winds strip the trees, preparing the scene for winter—.  Ah, but we have fall color yet to come, so let’s not run ahead of ourselves. 

Indoors

Outdoors

 

Reading It Differently

 

It appears that I have rejoined the old Ulysses Reading Circle after absenting myself from meetings for over three years. Recently we got together to talk about The Stranger, by Albert Camus, and naturally I needed to reread that slim classic, as it had been several years since Meursault and I were last together. Here is what I wrote about the novel nine years ago, as well as what I wrote about another novel springing from the first, the second one imagining the story continuing from an Arab perspective. 

 

The only thing different in how I read The Stranger this year was that I now see it as the work of a young writer. Looking into that, I found that Camus was only 28 when he wrote the novel, 29 when it was published, so perhaps—I really don’t know—he had yet to come to his humanist conclusion, a conclusion based on the premise of absurdity but not resting there. What do you think? I can imagine that. I can imagine a young man deciding that life is absurd and that nothing matters and then, as he matures, realizing that absurdity is not a conclusion but only the first step on the path of affirming the value of life. He was 39 when he published The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Whether or not the author based the character of Meursault on someone he knew, and whether or not that someone had Asperger’s Syndrome is really peripheral to the argument that took Camus, eventually if not right from the start, from absurdity to humanism. If only my friend Hélène were still alive! She knew Camus in North Africa during World War II.

 

 

O, the Irish!

Doesn't this scene look Irish?

 

My literary love affair with Irishman Niall Williams continued through History of the Rain. Can anyone deny that no one does words like the Irish? As for affirming the value of life, all the novels of Niall Williams that I have read so far do that, and what better reason to read fiction in these troubled and troubling days?

 

 

Thinking About Thinking

 

One of the privileges of having a bookshop is the opportunity to engage in conversations that go beyond small talk. Early this morning I was thinking about an exchange from last week. In the course of that conversation, a customer-friend whom I greatly respect expressed concern that today’s students don’t know how to think. I forget what led us to the topic, but I took exception to his tentative statement. Admittedly, my example was from a previous decade. Would results be different today?

 

My example: I was teaching a class of university freshmen. The assigned reading, which we discussed over several weeks, was John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which Locke presented in a series of numbered paragraphs. Anyone unaccustomed to 18^th-century writing would find the English of the Treatise somewhat challenging, so when one student asked if they could have it “in translation,” the rest of the class laughed appreciatively. Locke, however, is far from incomprehensible. It is simply that readers of his work have to do more than let their eyes take in a series of printed lines. Recognizing individual words is not sufficient. It is necessary to think along with the writer to understand his words. 

 

When the student asked his humorous question, I was moved to expand the assignment. For each numbered paragraph, I required my students condense its meaning into a single sentence. The shorter and simpler the sentence the better, as long as the one-sentence summary fully expressed the meaning of the paragraph. Each of these written assignments, as I recall, was given credit but not graded. 

 

The results? Excellent. My students could think. They could understand. Most of them would not have bothered if not required to do so, but they had the ability. 

 

No one picks up a musical instrument for the first time and is immediately able to play music. It takes work. It takes practice. Those who can’t be bothered to work will not achieve competence, let alone excellence. Not everyone will become a virtuoso, but anyone can make progress. 

 

The sentences generated by some of my students were elegant. Some were pedestrian. Some were awkward. But for every, say, twenty paragraphs, most students were able to get a pretty good idea of the author’s meaning, and when there was a particularly difficult paragraph, usually several students stumbled over it, and so we worked through it together. 

 

(Will “Artificial Intelligence” do away with the human need to think, in somewhat the way the internal combustion engine has done away with our need for horses, which in their time did away with our need to walk long distances? Already there are “thinkers” who tell us that AI is smarter than we are and that we should hand over the reins. Talk like this makes me happy to be closer to the end of my life than I am to the beginning, and I could digress endlessly on that point, but will resist the temptation….)

 

Yes, a different morning, but not long ago.

So this morning, thinking again about thinking and why we humans so often resist it, I decided that part of the answer could be called laziness, but I think that label puts an unnecessarily negative spin on the matter. As members of the animal kingdom, we are primarily creatures of action. To survive and flourish requires that we provide ourselves with nourishment and shelter, avoid danger, and cooperate on projects that none of us could accomplish alone. (It is that way with other social mammals like wolves and elephants. The longer the gestation period, the longer the dependence of young on adults, the greater the need for cooperation.) In the natural world—forest or plains, jungle or mountains—avoiding danger often means judging and acting quickly, and our brains and what we think of as our 'intellect' developed for those situations. (I wanted to give a link here to Henri Bergson and his explanation of the task of the intellect, but nothing I found online put what I wanted in a nutshell. You just need to read a whole book. I recommend Time and Free Will.) Now, facing the complex situations of advanced societies, it should not be surprising that we resist long trains of argument and want to “cut to the chase” and “get on with our lives.”

 

So without calling it laziness, let’s give as one reason that people—not only young but people of any age—resist deep thinking: They have lives to live. 

But that can’t be the whole story. I think often, especially these days, thinking is not only difficult but can be threatening. Again, our brains evolved to avoid threats, not to embrace them. So if some person or institution gives me simple answers and lays out my role, isn’t it safer for me to accept and follow? Who knows where independent thought might lead? Some of my most cherished beliefs and loyalties could be thrown into question! I could even find myself banished from my tribe!

 

I’d gotten that far in my thinking about thinking this morning when I found, by happenstance, an email message bearing on the very subject I’d been exploring. David Shapiro, in his most recent Substack, has identified another cognitive bias to be added to those put forward by Kahneman and Tversky a few decades ago and expanded on by others since then. Shapiro calls his new addition ‘apprehension bias.’ Put simply, if we don’t understand something, we tend to assume it must be wrong. In his words,

 

Apprehension bias is the mental shortcut where one equates intelligibility with truth and unintelligibility with falsehood. It’s a metacognitive miscalibration: confusing my ability to understand with the actual validity of the claim.

 

Shapiro opens his discussion with an example from the history of science, Alfred Wegener’s 1912 theory of continental drift, the first scientific statement of what later developed as plate tectonics. People, even in the scientific community, could not make sense of continental drift and ridiculed Wegener. They didn’t understand what he was saying, so they concluded, at that time, that he must be wrong.

 

Does this return us once again to my students and their desire to be able to read 18th-century Englishman John Locke “in translation,” i.e., simplified? Are we going around and around like squirrels in a cage? “Thinking” the same “thoughts” over and over and making no headway?

 

Postscript:

 

Coincidentally, a followup conversation later this morning with the same customer-friend as last week sparked for me the realization that ‘apprehension’ itself has a useful double meaning, which Shapiro probably intended but did not point out explicitly. In the word 'apprehension' are united ‘comprehension’ (understanding) and ‘fear.’ Can fear block comprehension? Can understanding do away with fear? Or can a person manage to avoid the bias and both understand and fear at the same time? If so, what is the payoff? 

Think about it—if you dare!

In closing, some shop scenes on this sunny Thursday, October 2, 2025:

If It Quacks Like a Duck, Who Is It?

Jingle-decorated safety pin from Romania

You know, I’m sure, the old saw that starts out, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...” Well, I want to tell you that that would not be your local philosopher-bookseller! You’d know that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you be able to tell the difference after over nine years of Books in Northport? If you’re a friend and/or a customer or even if we’ve never met but you follow Books in Northport from afar, don’t you recognize my voice in these lines? And if a strange voice were to break in and take over Books in Northport, wouldn’t you know something was wrong? Wouldn’t your suspicions be aroused?

What the -- ?! Why on earth do I pose these silly rhetorical questions? If curious, please read on.

Insisting on holiday cheer

As a general rule, I am not one for compulsively checking blog stats. While now and then a post getting more than the usual daily attention can boost my spirits, seeing low numbers on things written from my heart can be discouraging, so why give myself the grief? Instead, for the most part, I just say what I have to say, post a link on Facebook, and the pay is the same (zilch!), whether no one reads or hundreds do. Once in a while, though, I get curious. I was curious the other day, and what I found on the stats report was, as Lewis Carroll had Alice say, “curiouser and curiouser,” to say the least. While stats for individual posts were unsurprising – pretty much as usual – total number of blog views had spiked. The spike was sharp and not explainable by a large number of views of any particular post or posts. What was going on?

A look at ‘traffic sources’ did nothing to dispel the mystery, largest numbers of visitors coming from Google or Facebook, as is usually the case. ‘Audience,’ however, showed a different story. There on the world map, with shades of green showing where viewers are located when they visit, the darkest green covered the area of the former USSR. The rest of the world paled in comparison. 

I shared the surprising result with David, who asked why Russians would be reading my blog. Well, I don’t think they are. Ten times as many Russians as Americans? Why would Russians feel a sudden hunger for a northern Michigan bookseller’s take on Hermann Hesse or scenes of our village in winter? I doubt there is anything in my content or CV fascinating to these new “viewers,” but in light of current events their presence is alarming, even if, as seems likely, "they" are machines rather than people.

Think about it. Blogger is a big deal world-wide. As the anniversary of Tienanmen Square approached, the Chinese government blocked Blogger, making it inaccessible to Internet users in China unless they were able to cobble together a circuitous alternate route to the blogs, and the same was true of Google and Tumblr.

(Do a search and read about it if you don’t believe me, but bear in mind that searches are tailored to individual searchers, and your results would not necessarily match mine. In that way, creators of algorithms need to take their share of the blame for Americans reading only news sources with views matching those they already had.)

Moreover, with the new Google Plus service (which I do not use), blogs can be automatically connected to Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress, Gmail, DO Note, Weebly and other sites and services. And now, think of all the bloggers who update using their mobile phones. “We’re all connected” means, among other more positive things, that we are all that much more vulnerable.

For over nine years, I have loved writing Books in Northport and connecting with people around the world -- those who actually connect, that is, not hostile, anonymous individuals, groups, or worms that only hover and stalk, with no interest in what I write, not even anything personal against me as a person or bookseller. Now I wonder how long I and other blogger friends will be able to maintain this precious outlet that has been for so long, for us and our readers, literary as well as social. I don’t know what might happen or when anything at all might come down on us.

“The personal is political.” Do you resist that idea? I’ll tell you, I’m really feeling it today.

Repressive governments are not interested in our fates as individuals, but they are very interested in restricting, in the most general, sweeping sense, our freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and the free exchange of ideas. It’s unlikely that darkness and silence will fall on us tomorrow – more likely we will be overwhelmed, day by day, by blinding metaphorical searchlights and fake news and enemies masquerading as friends.

If another voice breaks in here one day, though – or if your access is mysteriously denied – I'm telling you now, ahead of time, not to take it lying down. In fact, start now to do what you can. Think about it. What can you do? Now do it!

Flowers for freedom!