Writing About Florida's Cattle Industry: Where Cowboys are Indians & Ranchers are Green

By Margo Hammond

     Remember the Wild West when cowboys fought Indians, shooting from the hip and executing fatal shots from 40 yards away?

     Fake history, historians tell us now.  The Westerns films and TV series throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s that depicted those scenes were based on sensational 19th-century dime store novels, written by people who never set foot in the West.  Not only are those shoot outs physically impossible at such a distance, all those fights between cowboys and Native Americans are myths as well.

Below: Representing heritage in Florida ranching that spans 300 years, Seminole Indian cowboys drive cattle into the pens at the Brighton Reservation in Glades County. From left to right, Adam Osceola, Eric Johns, Bobby Yates and Adam Turtle – photo by Carlton Ward Jr. Image from Florida Cowboys: Keepers of the Last Frontier (shown above)  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, November 2009. Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida, shown above.

Between 1866 and 1886 when 20 million cattle were driven north by cowboys on horseback, Native American already had been forced into reservations by the U.S. cavalry. When cowboys wielded revolvers, they were using them against wild animals attacking the cattle they were entrusted to protect, not against people. Cowboys weren’t even exclusively a product of the West.

Cowboys and the cattle industry began in Florida. 
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Journalist Craig Pittman at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art provides an overview of the 500 years of Florida cowboys from early Spanish vaqueros to Jim Strickland of Blackbeard Ranch near Sarasota, shown on the slide behind him – photo by Margo Hammond.

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“In reality, the first cowboys were vaqueros who spoke Spanish and tended cattle outside St. Augustine after its founding in 1565,” writes journalist and author Craig Pittman in an article in Flamingo Magazine – Cattle Country: Keeping up with the Cowboys in Florida. “As the Spanish spread through North Florida, they brought their cattle, establishing ranches and training the local Native Americans to tend the herds, too.”

Five hundred years later the Seminoles are still working as cowboys. They prefer to work on cattle ranches rather than in casinos because cattle link them more to their ancestors, says Pittman. 

And, yes, they’ve heard the jokes about Indians playing cowboy, but, as Alex Johns, the natural resource director for the Seminole Tribe, points out, “they’re not newcomers to the field.”
Johns’ family ranching history, in fact, dates back to the 16th century when his American Indian ancestors “poached their first cow from the Spanish” – so-called cracker cattle who were descendants of the seven Andalusian cattle first brought from Spain to Florida by Ponce de Leon in 1521.   

Until 1957, says Johns, “we were nomadic, free grazing our cattle across Florida.”  Now Johns has inherited the First American Ranch, his family ranch. He also manages a ranch for the Seminole Tribe. 

Pittman often points to another irony of the Florida cattle industry – cattle ranchers may be environmental activists’ last great hope to save Florida’s remaining green spaces. 

In his Flamingo article Pittman quotes Julie Morris, an official at the National Wildlife Refuge Association. “‘When you look at these ranchlands from an ecological perspective, it’s such an eye-opener. That’s why the recently passed law creating the Florida Wildlife Corridor is so important for the future preservation of this type of land.

“Anyone who wants to hang onto habitat for everything from gopher tortoises to panthers knows ‘we’ve got to keep these ranch lands intact somehow. They’re keeping Florida green.’” 
. . .       

At the Museum of Western and Wildlife Art Craig Pittman shows a photo of himself posing in the parking lot of The Shoppes of Boot Ranch in front of the 17-foot concrete boot that once marked the boundary of Al Boyd’s Boot Ranch in northern Pinellas County – photo by Margo Hammond.

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Born in Pensacola, Pittman has been writing with humor and insight about all things Florida for 30 years. In reviewing Pittman’s 2016 book Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, the New York Times called Pittman “a walking museum, the type of wry newshound whose marrow-deep knowledge of place used to be indispensable to America’s major dailies.” On his website Pittman notes that he “has covered a variety of newspaper beats and quite a few natural disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires and the Florida Legislature.” Currently he is the co-host of the Welcome to Florida podcast. 

Pittman is especially eloquent when writing and talking about Florida’s fragile ecology. During his years as an environmental journalist at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times), he won the Waldo Proffitt Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida four times, and the top investigative reporting award from the Society of Environmental Journalists twice. His first book, co-written with fellow Times investigative reporter Matthew Waite, addressed Florida’s vanishing wetlands. In 2020 Pittman was dubbed a Florida Literary Legend by the Florida Heritage Book Festival.

All of his books — he’s written six — have been about the state’s wildlife in one form or another, from panthers (Cat Tale), orchids (The Scent of Scandal), and manatees (Manatee Insanity) to Florida’s cowboys. In “Dying Every Night at the Rodeo,” one of the essays in his latest book, The State You’re In: Florida Men, Florida Women and Other Wildlife, he talks about another form of wildlife – the Florida cowboy in post-Civil War Florida described by 19th century visual artist and writer Frederic Remington as “wild-looking individuals, whose hanging hair and drooping hats and generally bedraggled appearance would remind you at once of Spanish moss.”

“A Cracker Cowboy” by artist Frederic Remington who came to Florida to paint “Bone” Mizell, one of Florida’s most colorful cowboys, on his Florida Cracker horse. The painting was published in 1895 in Harper’s Magazine.

. . .
At a recent talk at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg entitled Five Hundred Years of Cattle Ranching in Florida, Pittman returned again to the link between cattle ranching and keeping Florida green, pointing out how valuable the state’s ranchlands were in keeping the state’s natural habitats intact — prairies, maiden cane marshes, live oak hammocks, cabbage islands and longleaf pine savannas that attract the state’s wildlife, some of it rare or endangered. 

Honoring the state’s cowboy tradition may be the best way to save the Florida’s natural environment, he told the crowd which included at least one person sporting a Stetson.

The owners of the Blackbeard’s Ranch near Myakka, for example, take their stewardship of the land very seriously, posting this on their website – “As caretakers of the land we have both the privilege and the obligation to protect the habitat and wildlife on our ranchlands. We manage the ranch to ensure high-quality habitat for wildlife while a running a productive cattle operation.”

Florida Cattle Ranchers, a consortium of ranchlands founded in 2015 which includes Johns’ First American Ranch (he is a founding member), is also dedicated to a Sustainable Florida.  “Our ranchers are natural environmentalists continually working to improve ways to raise our cattle responsibly, even without regulations,” they boast on their website. “They desire to protect our land and natural resources, and to ensure the sustainability of Florida and the longevity of our industry.”

In his museum talk, Pittman, with his characteristic wit, regaled the audience with the history of Florida cowboys then and now – the hard-drinking Napoleon Bonaparte “Bone” Mizelle, “who couldn’t write his own name but was renowned for his ability to recall every brand of every rancher in the region around Arcadia,” ranch owner (and former Hillsborough County sheriff) Capt. John Parker “who died from drinking poisoned liquor at a revival meeting” and Jim Strickland, the current managing partner of Blackbeard Ranch, who once organized a cattle drive through downtown Tampa to promote Florida Cowboys: Keepers of the Last Frontier, a photography book by Carlton Ward Jr. 

That drive, says Pittman, “went terribly wrong”  when the dogs the ranchers had brought along “to lend some historical authenticity got into a fight in the street, causing the cattle to stampede and bolt past their destination.” Strickland called it “the world’s fastest cattle drive.”

These days cowboys no longer drive their cattle hundreds of miles to market. They use smart phones and the internet. But the spirit of the cowboy remains.

In his book, Ward Jr., an eighth-generation Floridian from a pioneering ranching family, documents the vanishing life of the Florida cowboy and their ranches, where bears, panthers and other endangered species can survive and where irreplaceable wetlands that help sustain the state’s diminishing water resources are protected. The book is accompanied by 10 essays, including ones from Dana Ste. Claire (author of The Cracker Culture in Florida History), Joe Akerman (author of the 1976 Florida Cowman: a History of Florida Cattle Raising), Audubon Florida and the Seminole Tribe.

“Without its lush ranchlands, there would be precious little left to see of old Florida, and nowhere for some of our most endangered wildlife to survive,” says author Carl Hiaasen. “Carlton Ward’s colorful tribute to this dwindling frontier is also a call to save what remains of it. The alternative is unthinkable.”
. . .

All that’s left of Al Boyd’s Pinellas County ranchland – a 17-foot concrete boot that marked the boundary of his Boot Ranch now stands in the parking lot of The Shoppes of Boot Ranch.

. . .
Once these ranchlands are paved over, Pittman points out, little will be left to remind us of what once was there. When Al Boyd sold off thousands of acres of northern Pinellas County ranchland, only the 17-foot concrete boot that marked the boundary of his Boot Ranch property remained. Now that land is covered in subdivisions and strip malls.

And the big boot? Chalk up one more irony. The boot, reports Pittman, stands in the parking lot of The Shoppes of Boot Ranch in Palm Harbor.

This article originally was posted on Arts Coast Journal, the online journal of Creative Pinellas.
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From left to right, Tater Porter, Robert Yarborough and Tara Johns steer cattle through the western edge of Lake Kissimmee during the Great Florida Cattle Drive of 2006. Thanks to ranching, most of the land surrounding Lake Kissimmee has remained in its natural state, important because these waters are the headwaters to the Everglades. Much of the lakefront is now protected by conservation easement – photo by Carlton Ward Jr. Image from Florida Cowboys: Keepers of the Last Frontier. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, November 2009. Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida.

 

 

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Public Libraries: What Heaven May Look Like

. . .
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of Library.”
— Jorge Luis Borges

BY MARGO HAMMOND. . .

When I was a kid, libraries were like the nerdy kids in class – admired but not cool. Now, it looks like they’ve joined the popular clique.

Books about libraries, of course, have long been popular. In 1941 Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who himself was a librarian, wrote a short story called “The Library of Babel,” a meditation on a labyrinthine library that contained all the knowledge of the world. In Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose a blind monk (named, in a not-so-subtle homage, Jorge of Burgos) runs a similar library.

My favorite vampire novel, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, begins in a library. And in 2013 the strangest book inspired by a library book hit the bestseller list – S. by Doug Dorst. The brainchild of Star Wars director J.J. Abrams, the book purports to be the final novel of a writer named V.M. Straka called The Ship of Theseus, but it also embeds another “story” – a back-and-forth discussion between two library patrons who check out the book and carry on their conversation about Straka in the book’s margins, each writing in a distinctive handwriting style. It’s a dizzying read. Oh, and the book comes with 22 inserts (purportedly left by the readers) in a sealed slipcase.
. . .

Lately though, interest in library-related books has boomed. In 2018 Susan Orleans’ nonfiction account of a library fire (The Library Book) hit the best-seller list and in 2019 Kim Michele Richardson’s novel about a traveling librarian (The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek) also became a bestseller. In 2020 Matt Haig’s best-selling novel The Midnight Library was the book to read.

Last year three library-related novels were bestsellers. Two were novels, based on true stories –The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles, about the American library in France during the World War II, and The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murphy about Belle da Costa Greene, an African American who was forced to hide her true identity to work as the founding director of J.P. Morgan’s library. The third, The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, was the first to take an in-depth look at the rise and fall of libraries — at least Western libraries.

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. . .
Not only are library-inspired books popular, but libraries themselves are having a moment. In 2020, thanks to the pandemic, e-book lending alone by libraries increased a whopping 50 percent.    

Suddenly libraries matter to people with time on their hands.
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. . .
Libraries, however, are not “a forever thing,” warn the authors of The Library: A Fragile History. The “lost” library of Alexandria “was a library of papyrus scrolls which would have deteriorated anyway if they weren’t constantly re-copied,” but many libraries have been dismantled simply because they were based on personal collections which are no longer of interest to anyone else. “The greatest enemy of libraries is modernity: people want the books of their own times,” historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen pointed out in an online discussion of their book at the New York Public Library.

So what do libraries need to do to stay relevant?

They may have to be brave, throw out some pieties and welcome readers back, say the authors. They may have to redesign their spaces, creating more meeting space. They may have to say goodbye to the cathedral silence of libraries (which dates from medieval times) and return to the Renaissance model – offering a glass of wine and a space for discussion. Placing a coffee shop in the middle of a library — “that was brave when people first did that,” said Pettegree.
. . .

Libraries need to allow people to browse. They may have demands on their physical space, but people need to have the freedom to browse as many books as possible. “That is essential to the enjoyment to the library, a random happening on a book,” said der Weduwen. And not every library needs of be an Alexandria, added Pettegree. “Specializing is the future.”

Pinellas County libraries are no strangers to adaptation. Although none of them, as far as I know, has installed a coffee bar, they all have stretched well beyond their original missions. You can, of course, still check books out of all of the Pinellas County libraries – but they also provide e-books, DVDs, CDs, magazines, audiobooks, video games, computer access, streaming services, WiFi hotspots, passes to museums, online tech and job skills courses – even ukulele start-up kits.
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Courtesy of Stranger Things’ Facebook feature,

 “When Librarians Have a Great Sense of Humor”

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Here in Pinellas County, the city of Dunedin was the first municipality to create a free public library. Launched by snowbirds who wintered with their yachts, the Dunedin library began in 1895 with 200 or so books donated by Christopher Bell Bouton of Chicago. It was housed at the Dunedin Yacht and Skating Club in a building in Edgewater Park owned by Bouton’s brother, Nathanial Sherman.

Now the Dunedin branch shares free online access to the New York Times and the Tampa Bay Times, can help you locate 20 city wi-fi hotspots if you don’t have internet at home, and help you access a range of free online resources including exam prep, a database of military records and stories, and the Pinellas Memory Digital Collection of historical documents.

Ironically, 1895 was the year cinema was born, thanks to the Lumière brothers who introduced “moving pictures” in France. Now those of us with a library card in Pinellas County can take out a DVD or stream a movie (in a range of languages) and watch a “moving picture” in the comfort of our own home.
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From the Pinellas County Library Cooperative’s Facebook page

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The history of the Pinellas County’s libraries is peppered with tales of colorful local initiatives, but also, in some cases, with years of shameful support of racial segregation.

The Largo Public Library, among the oldest in the county, began under a camphor tree in the downtown center where residents were urged by the Woman’s Club of Largo to leave books, magazines and furnishings. With the donations left under the “Christmas Giving Tree,” in 1916 the club launched a library with 560 books in the city’s original wood-frame town hall. The first librarian was paid $2 a week.

Now a 90,300-square foot facility in the heart of the city’s Central Park, the Largo library boasts a number of firsts – the first library in Pinellas County to use a barcode, the first to use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to check in and check out patron materials and the first library to institute drive-through service. Right now they’re offering a discussion on human trafficking, citizenship prep classes, training on augmented reality devices, a class on how to use an Android phone and a behind-the-scenes library tour.

The Gulf Beaches Library began in 1949 with a Woman’s Club committee of six collecting books which they eventually housed in a one-room building in Madeira Beach. The library was moved to its present location in 1969. Current offerings include tax help, children’s storytime, free online foreign language learning, curbside pickup – and Ask a Librarian, (“Chat with, text, or email a Florida librarian, because search engines need superheroes!”).
. . .

You can learn 163 different languages online for free,

 through any Pinellas County library

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The Gulfport Public Library traces its origins to the back of a drugstore, where local resident Julia Lucky offered books to the community. When Lucky left town, Gulfport’s mayor and his wife created a library in a one-room building that had been a real estate office. The library was moved to a five-room bungalow before finding its permanent home in 1976. Right now, they’ll help you apply for a passport, attend an outdoor Science Club for grades K-5 and access the LGBTQ Resource Center.

The Gulfport library is nationally lauded for its ground-breaking LGBTQ Resource Center, which has compiled a digital resources collection on LGBTQ matters and is building a physical book collection. In 2018 the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table awarded the library its Newlen-Symons Award for Excellence. The Resource Center awards an annual scholarship to LGBTQ students.
. . .

The story of how Gulfport Public Library’s award-winning
LGBTQ Resource Center came to life

. . .
Such openness to diversity was not always the hallmark of libraries in this area. Consider the story of the two Carnegie libraries — one in Clearwater, the other in St. Petersburg — who for years barred Black residents from using the facilities.

In 1914 steel magnate turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie provided grants to the two cities — $10,000 to Clearwater and $17,500 to St. Petersburg — for libraries that were to be free to all citizens. Both cities matched their grants with local taxes and built “Carnegie” libraries. Although more than 2,500 libraries were built around the world with Carnegie funds, only 10 of them were in Florida. Many segregated Southern towns turned down Carnegie’s offer because they were afraid they would be forced to integrate the facilities.
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When Mirror Lake Library, a “Carnegie” library, opened in 1914 as St. Petersburg’s first free library, the city barred Blacks from its doors

. . .
Despite Carnegie’s stipulation that the library be open to all, when the Clearwater library opened in 1916, Blacks were not allowed inside. In 1917, the Clearwater library board began talking about creating a separate branch for African American residents, but that didn’t happen for more than 30 years when the North Greenwood library, known as “the Negro library,” was opened in 1950.

St. Petersburg also refused Black residents access to its Carnegie library, one of the city’s first Beaux Arts-style buildings and its first free library, when it was opened in 1915. It took an astonishing 29 years — until 1944 — before the city would even allow Blacks into the basement of what then was known as St. Petersburg Public Library (now downtown’s Mirror Lake Library). In 1947, a local Black coalition finally convinced the city to build a separate library for the African American community.

The James Weldon Johnson Library branch, named for the African American writer and activist, originally was relocated in the Gas Plant district but was moved (as were many Black residents in the area) when the city undertook an urban redevelopment project. In 1981, the Johnson Community Library reopened in the Enoch Davis Center until 2002 when the current Johnson Community Library was opened next door.
. . .

Courtesy of Stranger Things’ Facebook feature,

 “When Librarians Have a Great Sense of Humor”

. . .
That was the same year that the library branch I frequent — South Community Library — was moved from the Boyd Hill Nature Preserve to its present location, a bike ride away from my house. I call it “my” library, but actually the books I pick up there on a regular basis come from all the libraries across Pinellas County, linked by the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative.

When “my” library closed its doors during the first year of the pandemic, I gratefully picked up books in an elaborate hands-free exchange at the St. Petersburg Main Library’s entrance. When the South Community Library finally re-opened this year, a plexiglass wall was installed along the check-out counter. Everyone was asked to wear masks and we were instructed to continue to put our return books in the bin outside.

We can now return our books inside the library, but the plexiglass is still up and the librarians are masked. In the library, I’ve never seen a single patron enter the building without a mask — or get into a fight over one.
. . .

The moving celebration held when St. Petersburg’s main library
was renamed the President Barack Obama Library in 2021

. . .
Last year when the Main Library (built back in 1964) was renamed the President Barack Obama Main Library, I thought of Martin Luther King and his promise – “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

This article was first posted at Arts Coast Journal on January 19, 2022. Included in that post was a list of library activities and events offered in the Tampa Bay area, including ukelele lessons. Check your public libraries for fun activities near you.

READING MY AGE: 73 BOOKS in 2022

By MARGO HAMMOND

      For some years now I have been challenging myself to read my age. That is, I've been reading the same number of books as the age I turned that year. Of course, for the past two years in lockdown I had little to do but read. This year may be a little more challenging: I’m on the hook to read 73 books. 

       The books I read last year were a pretty eclectic lot. Sticking close to home, I read Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Notes on a Vanishing by Mark Jerome Walters and a mystery written by someone who in St. Petersburg as I do (Gail Massey’s The Girl From Blind River). Other books teleported me to France (It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris by Patricia Engels) Sweden (Anxious People by Frederik Backman), Korea (The Island of the Sea Women by Lisa See), Antarctica (Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing), England (The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larsen) and Africa (Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi).  

 

      Sometimes, I was transported to the past, as with Lauren Groff’s illuminating Matrix, set in a monastery in 12th century England. In , like with Gary Shteyngart’s “pandemic novel,” Our Country Friends, I was in present-day America: All his characters were in lockdown. Talk about relatable. 

     I began my year’s reading with a non-fiction book — It Was All Lies: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump — written by Stuart Steven who was himself once a Republican. Ominously, I finished it on January 6.

    “Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy,” wrote Steven, lamenting what his former party has morphed into.  “It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron.”

    Steven wrote that before the QAnon Shaman stormed the U.S. Capitol wearing fur and horns, his face painted with the stripes of the American flag. Who says writers are not prophets?

    Cultish: Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell was another book I picked up to try to understand the current conspiracy mania afoot in our land. The book gave was informative, but I still don’t understand why people won’t take the
vaccine to stay alive.

   To cleanse my palate, I would turn to Alexander McCall Smith, the prolific Scottish writer who is the creator of the No. 1
Ladies Detective Agency series, set in Botswana. My favorite was The Peppermint Tea Chronicles from his 44 Scotland Street series which as its review in Kirkus said perfectly was "fragrant, refreshing, and soothing as a cup of - well, you know what."

   In 2020 I had read Autumn, a series of short essays by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knaussgaard that he wrote for his unborn daughter. Last year I continued his seasonal quartet with Winter, Spring and Summer. As the year came to a close, I also read his strange new novel The Morning Star. I can highly recommend the books of essays (although Spring was my least favorite) but I’m still trying to sort out what I think of The Morning Star, which follows the lives of nine characters and their reactions to the sudden appearance of a new star in the sky.

   My favorite book of 2020 was Richard Power’s The Overstory, so in 2021 I eagerly read two more of his: The Echo Maker and Bewilderment. Neither was as satisfying a The Overstory and the latter was, well, bewildering.

   What was my favorite book of 2021? It would be easier to pick out my least favorites because those would be the ones I abandoned. Lately, I have been giving myself permission to bail on books that I find lame. Life is too short — and, there are too many books out there to worry over the duds.

   The shortest book I read last year was the touching (and inspirational) The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, charmingly illustrated by Charlie Mackey, a popular book for those who were tiring of the pandemic. The 128-page gem includes, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard: 

     “Do you have a favourite saying?" asked the boy.

     “Yes" said the Mole.

     “What is it?”

     “If at first you don't succeed, have some cake”

     “I see, does it work?”

     “Every time”

    One of the longest books I read was a Colum McCann’s novel. Apeirogon clocks in at a whopping 480 pages. It’s the story of two fathers — one Palestinian and the other Israeli — who meet while working for an organization called The Parents Circle, comprised of members who have all experienced the unspeakable loss of a child to Mideast violence. They have joined to work for a peaceful solution to the area’s conflicts. It is based on the real-life friendship between between Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan.

 

     The title refers to a geometric shape with an infinite number of sides, a metaphor for the unending spiral the Mideast is caught up in. Apeirogon has 1,001 chapters, some consisting of only one line, echoing A Thousand and One Nights, the famous tale in which Scheherazade tells stories to stay alive. Like that tale, Apeirogon is about the power of storytelling. The fathers tell the stories of their daughters’ lives and horrific deaths over and over again to keep their memories alive and to make sense of their loss. Reading Apeirogon is heartbreaking but oddly hopeful. Can the answer to the world’s woes really be friendship? “You don’t read Apeirogon so much as feel it,” wrote Alex Preston in the Guardian. Exactly.

     I didn't belonged to a book club when the pandemic hit, but in lockdown, I joined several, organized by family, friends, museums and, in one case, a theater. All virtual, of course. Some of the titles we read I would ever have picked on my own — Circe by Madeline Miller and Refugee by Alan Gatz, for example — but I ended up enjoying them. During lively Zoom sessions, someone would inevitably point out some aspect of the book I hadn’t considered.  One of my favorite online discussions was of a play, Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, which I read for a play reading club hosted by Stageworks, a Tampa-based theater. Alas, that club seems to have been disbanded. 

     I read The Age of Light: A Novel by Whitney Scharer for St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts book club, but the discussion at the last minute was cancelled. Still I was glad I read Scharer’s novel, based on the life of photographer Lee Miller and her stormy relationship with the surreal photographer Man Ray. The Age of Light turned out to be the perfect companion to the Dali Museum’s fall exhibit devoted to the exquisitely beautiful and talented Mille whose real-life story reads like a novel. A Vogue model and later a photojournalist covering World War II (she staged of a photo herself in Hitler’s bathtub, washing off the dirt from her trip to Dachau), she eventually abandoned photography, wrote a cookbook and put up with her cheating husband by drinking.

 

      I hope she took the Mole’s advice about eating cake

.

      Speaking of the Dalí, that museum held the only in-person book club session I attended last year. The Dalí Literary Salon, which I help organize twice a year along with the salon’s founder Peggy Silvergleid and the Dalí’s curator of education Peter Tush, met — under safe COVID protocols — in the Dalí boardroom in November to discuss Francine Prose’s Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern. To decide on our 2022 selection, I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein and Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years 1933-1943 by John Richardson (Richardson’s fourth volume on the artist’s prolific artistic and love life). The latter is highly entertaining, written by someone who knew the artist personally, but I’m voting for discussing the Stein. Although Stein certainly is a name dropper and I still can’t get it around my head how an autobiography can be written by someone other than the narrator, her descriptions of the comings and goings in the art salon on the Rue du Fleurus, as seen through the eyes of Alice, her mate, is mesmerizing.

     Throughout the year I got a lot of book recommendations from friends. Jaye turned me on to a book called Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, written jointly by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, two friends of different races us. After Lynn, a friend in Arizona, wrote that she was reading The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, I, too, read all three: Childhood, Youth and Dependency. When two friends who have never met — Diane who lives in Milwaukee and Mary Lou who lives in Cleveland — both urged me to read The Midnight Library, I put it on my list. I had been put off by its goofy premise (trying out parallel lives?) but the book ended up haunting me. Who among us wouldn’t want to see what our lives would look like if we had zigged instead of zagged?

   

      David, a friend living in New York, encouraged me to read Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone & How We Can Prosper Together. It became  one of many books on race that I devoured last year as race dominated our headlines: Caste: the Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson, Harlem Shuffle by Colin Whitehouse and The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett.

  

    Another topic that appeared again and again on my reading list, not surprisingly, were books about reading (and writing) books: More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers by Jonathan Lethem, The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, Books & Libraries, an anthology of poetry edited by Andrew Scrimgeour and How to Live What To Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature by Josh Cohen. Cohen, a psychoanalyst and professor of literature, argues that fictional characters from Alice in Alice in Wonderland to John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead can teach us lessons for every stage of our lives.

      Some of the books that I read were gifts or loans from friends. Larry passed on his copy of State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, once owned by a mutual friend who died unexpectedly last year after what appeared to be a freak accident. Mary Lou sent me Permission to Feel by Marc Barnett to help me deal with the grief I was experiencing over her loss. Carolyn loaned me her copy of All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny (we are both shameless fans of Inspector Gamache and Three Pines). Early on in the pandemic, she had given me a mask that read: I’m F.I.N.E., which every Penny fans knows stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.

    I had to wait in a while to get a hold of The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, The Promise by Damon Galgut, and Oh William! A Novel by Elizabeth Strout from the library, but some of the books I read this year came right off my own bookshelves, books I had always meant to read, but never had the time, including Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry. Sadly, only a few months after I read McMurtry's reflections on turning sixty, the power of storytelling and the West, McMurtry died. He made it to age 84.

    Another book off my shelf that I read — or more accurately re-read — was my 1930 edition of The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene (who, of course, was a pen name for a number of writers. I read it after I received a request from Sheila Cowley, my editor at Arts Coast Journal, to contribute a piece to Books that Sparked You as a Kid 

 

    I had read the book, the first in the Nancy Drew series, as a 10-year-old, but in the re-reading, I was shocked by the racism and sexism I found. Nancy Drew, it turns out, as feisty as she appeared to me back in the Fifties, was part of a society that wasn’t very enlightened. Here, in part, is what I wrote in my Arts Coast piece:

  How had I accepted all the racial and sexist stereotypes that had been dropped into my 10-year-old unsuspecting brain? In the 1930 edition of The Secret of the Old Clock, for example, a “colored” caretaker who talks in dialect is painted as a buffoon, and at one point is unceremoniously pushed out of car. And in the middle of trying to track down a missing will, Nancy stops to shop for a new frock for an upcoming party because that’s what girls do, don’t they?  If I had read the 1959 version, I would have been spared that racist scene — in the ‘50s versions all mention of Black people was excised — but apparently I would have been subjected to even more robust sexist stereotyping. In the ‘50s and ‘60s versions, the editors urged the various “Carolyn Keenes”  to portray Nancy as more feminine and less combative.

     The lesson I learned? Question everything you read (no matter how many books you read this year).