So Much Talking
It is, perhaps, presumptuous to assume that anyone taking time out of their day to read this newsletter (thank you!) would *also* want to spend a portion of their day listening to me talk. That caveat aside, I will mention that today at 11 AM Eastern I will be a guest on 1A on NPR, talking about pirates.
As if that weren’t enough, over the summer I’ll be offering a four session lunchtime class on pirates through Roundtable, a continuing education program run by the 92nd Street Y in New York. The image they are using for the class signup website is, I think we can all agree, epic.
(A portrait of a Howe before coffee.)
That’s Blackbeard, who probably didn’t *really* put lit matches under his hat, but who was certainly a rapist and all around bad person. Just the sort of guy you want to lecture about through the 92nd Street Y.
But in between those many instances of me talking, I am starting to read. What I’m reading wouldn’t exactly qualify as book recommendations, as one might wish for from a novelist’s newsletter. First, I have never actually read The Last of the Mohicans. I’ve seen the 1992 film (and if you haven’t, you should), but as a foundational text that gave us many recurring tropes in American fiction, it’s barged into my consciousness with an urgency that I can’t ignore. Hawkeye, aka Natty Bumppo, even gave us the “riding into the sunset” ending, with all its connotations of the western imperialist command, and romance, of the frontier.
Though The Last of the Mohicans is nominally an adventure tale, it is a challenging read because of the stilted narrative conventions of its moment in time. Cooper was no Melville, unfortunately - Melville is humorous, dynamic, and introspective, where Cooper is wooden and didactic. I’m listening to it on the drives back from Montessori, a digitized version of a 1980s “Book on Tape.” Tough going. But necessary.
I am also reading some scholarship, including this essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“You sure know how to have fun,” you’re probably saying. Yeah, I know. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pirate William Fly’s exhortation to the hangman as he stood on the scaffold in Boston in 1726.
“Don’t you know your trade?” he scoffed. William Fly untied the noose, retied it more expertly, and placed it around his own neck.
So what’s next?
This weekend I’ll be in Maryland for the Gaithersberg Book Festival.
After that a couple of weeks will pass before I do book events again. But in between I will do something I love - sailing - to support a charity that backs youth sailing programs in Massachusetts, and then I’ll sneak over to Norwich for reasons related to Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper.
Then I’ll be home again in time for the Nantucket Book Festival.
But before reading, talking. So much talking. Too much? We shall see.