When Rick Santorum called President Obama an “elitist snob” for saying “every child in this country should go to college,” I found myself wondering how the Republican presidential candidates themselves stack up, education-wise. The former senator from Pennsylvania noted that he had seven children and, he said, “If one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him.”

    I happen to agree with that sentiment, but for one quibble: Who said being an auto mechanic was incompatible with having some sort of post-secondary education?

    It turns out, according to the Internet, that in the early 1970s, only one-third of the nation’s auto mechanics had high school diplomas. By 2000, however, one-third of all auto mechanics had something more than a high school degree. Maybe this is because automobiles went electronic during that time, requiring mechanics to know a lot more; maybe it’s because more and more Americans, in general, have been getting some sort of higher education over the past few decades.

    More to the point is that, as a leader of the free world, the United States depends on an enlightened citizenry —and voters. I wouldn’t say a college degree offers enlightenment, but it’s a place to start.

    I’m sure a fair percentage of the massive unemployment in this country is due to the advance of technology in the workplace, while training has fallen behind. Promoting higher education, in this context, cannot be wrong.

    The Obama administration, mean­stime, has insisted that the president used the word “college” generically, to include study in community colleges or vocational schools.

    I was ready to write a column in which I indignantly would call Mr. Santorum anti-intellectual, but, before doing so, decided to check outfore doing so, decided to check out his academic record. He has a B.A. in political science, an M.B.A. in business, and a jurisprudence degree from the Dickinson School of Law. Sounds pretty good to me.

    My thoughts next turned to another Rick: James Richard Perry. According to The Huffington Post — which got a hold of what are apparently the actual transcripts of Mr. Perry’s record as an undergraduate at Texas A&M — he earned a lot of Cs. He got Ds in, among other things, Shakespeare, the principles of economics, veterinary anatomy, something called “feeds and feeding,” and something called “writing for professional men.” He failed organic chemistry. He even got a C in public speaking. And gym. I actually didn’t need Internet validation to cross Mr. Perry off my list, because I’ve watched some of the Republican debates in which he openly displayed the vacant shelves in his store of knowledge. And I personally believe that the president of the United States — not to mention everyone elected to Congress — should be a person of excellent intellectual ability. Still curious about how the candidates stack up, intellectually, I went back to the Internet. That may have been a mistake. The Yahoo! Answers site claims that the average I.Q. of the Republican presidential candidates is 87. And, the site says, if Jon Huntsman’s and Mitt Romney’s scores were eliminated, the average would drop to 61. I’m not making this up! Someone with an I.Q. score between 50 and 70 is categorized as being mildly retarded. Of course, one of the most cut-and-dried signs of a high I.Q. is not believing everything you read.    

    Still, once I got started on I.Q. scores, it was hard to stop. Every one of the Democratic presidential candidates in 2008 had scores estimated at over 120 except Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel (remember him?). Hillary Clinton was estimated as having a score of 140, and 140 to 145 indicates genius. The same site put President Obama’s score at between 127 and 137.

    (Again, a sure sign of brains is not believing everything you read.) The highest I.Q. among American presidents — and this one supposedly was based on a genuine test — was a man who, in my opinion, was among the worst, if not the absolute worst, presidents we ever had. His name was Richard Nixon, and he is said to have attained a score of 143 at the age of 15.  

   In recent months, life on the farm has included some activities that I never envisioned myself doing. The trash situation was slightly out of control, and since most of it was mine after a pointless juice fast, I used a wheelbarrow to load the soggy mess into the back of my pickup truck.

    While the exercise would’ve done me good, there was no way I was going to successfully maneuver the wheelbarrow over the blown-out dirt road to the garbage shed. It goes against my urban mentality to drive anywhere for only five city blocks, but it was a pragmatic country moment, and maybe I really am developing a little bit of know-how in that department. Or I was just clever in context.

    Either way, I laughed to myself at the complexities of trash duty, and how different my life has become. Schlepping garbage down from my fourth-floor walk-up was a definite walk in the park compared to this. As I was struggling with the lock on the shed, which is almost as difficult as heaving the bags from the truck ino the trash cans, a close friend of mine from Washington, D.C., called. Since I knew she’d find the whole wheelbarrow situation hilarious, I decided to indulge her. Telling her proved difficult though, as she could hardly hear me with the background competition of “baa-ing” sheep, turkeys, chickens, and roosters.

    “Where are you?” she asked, in an incredulous tone, “home?” Yes, I told her, I was on the farm and having flashbacks to our Labor Zionist Socialist hippie summer camp, which was modeled on a kibbutz, and where we had actual work jobs. She was silent for a few seconds, and then we busted loose laughing. For amusement purposes, I took a photo of the scene for her from my phone. Ever succinct, her e-mail response was one line, “I can’t believe this is where you live.”

    A few months ago, I thought the same thing. It’s amazing what time can do. The unexpected is my new norm, or is it that routine has set in, and my senses have been dulled. No longer afraid of the dark (okay, not quite), I now take walks at night without a flashlight. When I first moved here, I was too freaked out by the country to walk alone in the dark. Heading home down Avenue C at 3 a.m. doesn’t faze me; however, the absence of streetlights here was disconcerting. Making myself do it was half the battle, but I was prompted by the biggest lifestyle change I’m currently facing: In the city, I probably walked a minimum of four miles daily, and that was just to get around. Living out in the country means driving, and lots of it. Put it together, and the downside of this is painfully obvious. My fear of the dark has been usurped by the need to fit into my pants. Perhaps divulging this in print will be the ultimate motivator.

    What I can’t change is the mud in my driveway. There’s lots of it, and not to sound too much like a city girl, but it’s wrecking my shoes. So, instead of wearing my cowboy boots to the truck (and yes, I did purchase them in Manhattan), I slip on my 14-year-old boy identity-crisis Vans, which are much better suited to the muck.

    While walking to the truck one day, the goose contingent waddled by, and I noticed that one of them looked peculiar. Its feathers were totally disheveled, almost windblown. My housemate laughed when I told her I thought one of the geese was sick with mange or something. Apparently, the just-rolled-out-of-bed look is coveted, and that is one fancy and expensive goose. When a new gang of spotted turkeys ran by not long ago, I wasn’t really surprised. But when the dogs were kept inside to prevent them from eating a recently killed deer, I was floored. While I’m all for outlaw behavior, when it comes to dead animals, I have my limits. And that also applies to hunting. It took me a few seconds to figure it out, but at the start of duck season, I heard gunshots before bed. Fortunately, that didn’t happen on Avenue C.

    There is one major danger on the farm involving me and the fireplace. My housemates are fearless, and although I’ve watched them both start a fire, I’m wary of doing so. A few weeks ago, I was supposed to tend the fire in case some logs fell out while they were gone. Their paranoia seemed unwarranted for about an hour, and then that’s exactly what happened. My attempt to put the log back resulted in me stepping on another ember that somehow also landed on the hardwood floor. When I told my housemate about it later, I was relieved to inform her that my burnt sock was the sole casualty. 

    Leaving me unchaperoned in front of the fire is probably a bad idea, but I took great pride in utilizing my city girl skills to surpass one of the coolest country girls I know at work. This is a woman who can jerry-rig anything, has a very positive can-do attitude, and drove herself home from work while in the beginning throes of labor. This same woman was rendered helpless by a four-inch dead mouse. At first I thought she was joking when she ran away from her desk with a hand over her mouth. When I realized she could not handle it, I swooped in Manhattan-style. Armed with copies of The Star, I picked up the sad, bloated mouse from the floor, and escorted it outside to the trash. City girls can be badass too, just in a different way.

    After a recent weekend in the city, I exited the train in East Hampton to an almost full moon, and an intense stillness. Bright stars filled the sky, I breathed in fresh air, and it was beautiful. Slowly but surely, I’m getting it.

—

    Heather Dubin is a reporter at The Star.

   It being the New Year, I suppose I should make some resolutions — resolutions for the irresolute. My first one is not to write, at least for the moment, about politics or the state of the economy, dreary subjects that have nothing much to do with the hope that should attend a new beginning.

    Instead, I will write about my imminent colonoscopy, and how everyone’s been ingesting flavorsome food here at the office as, drearily, I sip from a bottle of Gatorade whose contents look very much like Pres­tone.

    Come to think of it, perhaps it is a good way to begin the New Year, cleansing, you know, and there is, of course, a certain probity involved.

    Like jury duty, these tests come along every few years, an annoyance that must be borne. One must be stoic. But, speaking of stoicism, back to my resolutions.

    I resolve not to smoke in the coming year. I resolve not to contract any ghastly diseases, and I resolve not to lose my mind, which means, I think, that I must stop playing Scrabble with Georgie, who’s been cleaning my clock lately.

    I resolve further not to play fast and loose with the facts — insofar as they are known to me. I resolve not to eat Cheerios in our coffee cups or to leave them in the sink overnight where they will become impossibly caked.

    I resolve not to speak ill of myself in 2012. I resolve, moreover, not to take Tim Tebow’s name in vain. I resolve not to caress my incredibly soft cashmere sweaters in public, or to use many words of more than five syllables. I resolve not to relish violence overmuch, only in sustainable doses as on Sunday afternoons when the Steelers are playing.

    I resolve not to complain about having to shoulder the coffee-making burden at home.

    I resolve not to eat any flavorsome food, or any food at all, for that matter, today.

    I resolve not to cease wondering what it’s all about.

    And I resolve to order a cosmopolitan and a small Capri pizza for Mary, and a glass of house Chianti and a small Gorgonzola salad for me at Sam’s tomorrow night.

   You can’t even really call it a January thaw, since December was mild, and, save for a 15-degree night a week ago yesterday, 2012 has had above-average temperatures. This has been a very good thing where the Amagansett Rattrays’ gardening, outdoor chores, and playtime are concerned, as we (read: your humble correspondent) let things slide this fall.

    A week or two after Thanksgiving, a guy at the boatyard  in Montauk, where I keep my boat, said, “We dodged a bullet.” And, if you remember what was expected to be in the running for storm-of-the-decade at the end of December 2010, this still seems to be the case. There is still plenty of weather to come, but the break we’ve had so far on this end of the Island has been welcome.

    Saturday was mild enough to let Evvy and Ellis and me spend the morning outside, which was a relief since Ellis, who is not quite 2, has taken a recent interest in painting. Evvy and I laid paper and pots of colored tempera out for him on the brick patio, saving the hassle of cleaning up spills had he gotten in touch with his diminutive muse indoors.

    While the kids were busy, I took on our two small garden plots, hacking back the growing season’s weeds and dead stalks. After that, I pulled the electric hedge trimmer and a pair of loppers out of the basement and attacked the vines along the sides of the raised beds.

    By this time, the kids had become bored with painting and were tearing around in a plastic, battery-operated Barbie Jeep. Ellis had figured out how to get the thing moving, but not how to steer; chaos ensued, but there were no injuries.

    On Sunday, it was a little colder and windier but much the same. The kids played in the lee of the house while I turned the garden soil and thought about putting in a bigger plot this spring and if it were possible to keep the deer at bay.

    According to the National Weather Service, the temperature will fall by the weekend. Saturday and Sunday will see highs only in the mid-30s. This will make for less time in the Barbie Jeep, and the painting sessions will move inside. I’ll still try to get some yardwork in, but it depends on what the kids want to do, which is fine. The garden can wait for another thaw.

   The price of The New Yorker magazine if you buy it on a newsstand is $5.99, so it came as a surprise when I received a notice at the end of December telling me that if I renewed the subscription I get in the mail, I could send a second — free — subscription to anyone I chose.

    Newspapers and magazines are not rolling in money these days, but I didn’t think things were so bad that a well-regarded and venerable journal like The New Yorker would have to resort to such tactics to enlist subscribers. Tut-tutting about the undignified depths to which a publisher might be forced to sink, I took advantage of what seemed a surprisingly generous deal.

    The price of a year’s subscription is $69.99; that’s for 47 editions. I am not so good at simple arithmetic (at least not anymore), but I think that as a subscriber I pay only about $1.54 a copy. The dilemma was who to give the free magazine to.

    My husband and I share the copies of The New Yorker I get without a problem, so it seemed silly to send another subscription to him, even if he does spend part of every week in New York City. On the other hand, I thought, maybe if I had it sent it to him at my own address, I could pop each copy into an envelope and mail it to my daughter in Nova Scotia.

    That turned out to be a mistake. I sent her the first free copy that arrived, but the postage was $2.64. A gift subscription sent to Canada would cost $120 for a year, or about $2.54 cents a copy (without the hassle of going to the post office). So I began hunting for someone else, or some organization, to send the free subscription to.

    Then, this week, opening my mail, I came upon another offer from The New Yorker. As a courtesy to “selected professionals,” the mailing informed me, I could subscribe for $25 for 25 issues. A dollar apiece. Having just plunked down my $69.99, all I could do was sigh.

    It next dawned on me, slowly, that maybe I was coming out on top of this subscription game, after all: I am now getting two subscriptions for that $69.99 . . . and so that works out to, what? Seventy-seven cents per issue?

    Though perhaps the value of doubles arriving at the same time in my very own postal box diminished the true value. . . .

    Of course, this being the digital age, there had to be another solution to sending copies of the magazine to Nova Scotia. Going to its Web site, I found an offer that seemed to say the publisher, Condé Nast, was offering a free four-week trial for an online subscription. I signed her up. But when I tried to find out how much an online subscription would cost once the trial was over, I couldn’t.

    Did The New Yorker not want me to know? That seemed rather below its dignity, too.

    I clicked on the customer-service button, but didn’t find any advice, just an e-mail address for inquiries.

    Back on The New Yorker’s home page I went, to look for a phone number. Naturally, I couldn’t find one.

    I could have pulled down the Manhattan phone book, but I doubt subscriptions are handled by Condé Nast in Times Square these days, anyway. Probably Des Moines, or something, right?

    It was time to consult a member of the younger generation, who might be more skilled at finding answers on the computer. I set my daughter on the case, up in Nova Scotia, and she wrote back quickly to break the news gently: I hadn’t signed her up for a four-week magazine subscription, but for a four-week trial of the magazine’s online digital archive.

    Oh, well. A digital archive sounds interesting. And maybe a $2.64 trip to the post office is easier, after all.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattlelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

    The Italian artist has taken over the center of the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building with almost every hyperrealist sculpture and art piece he has ever conceived. The dozens of works are suspended in a dizzying amalgamation that viewers take in by climbing or descending the spiral.

    Since this is not a review, I won’t touch on the more critical aspects of it from an art historical perspective. I’m not certain that it succeeds on that level. This is, rather, a visual appreciation of a work that I think anyone who has a chance to experience it should.

    The objects include self-portraits, realistic facsimiles, and taxidermy of animals, full-scale painted billboards, perching pigeons, upside-down cops, a praying Hitler, and other odd, irreverent, and punkish visual pranks and jokes sometimes striking a chord, sometimes simply facile and bratty.

    It is the installation that makes the show. Upon entering at ground level the eyes are drawn up to a clotted grouping of things all too detailed and obscured to take in at once. Entering the spiral ramp, the details of each object begin to emerge and the overall piece begins to engage: dangling feet lead to legs, bodies, and heads; an elephant either Klanish, ghostly, or embarrassed, hangs hiding under a sheet; a seemingly full-scale dinosaur’s skeleton and a 20-foot-long foosball table are some of the objects that emerge.

    Students of modern art history will note references to international artists and countrymen such as Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni.

    The objects may refer to other works (the foosball table was actually used for a competition as part of a larger work) or are stand-alone pieces. They may suspend by themselves or sit on pedestals to provide some grounding and better visibility. Without its room-like setting, for example, a squirrel that has committed suicide in its well-appointed kitchen would not be readable, whereas a respectable older woman crammed into a gleaming new stainless-steel refrigerator is a piece that can stand (or hang) on its own.

    At each new level and each new vantage point the objects become more and more fascinating. Even the ones that may be familiar offer new interest and insight. At the same time, the architecture remains in view, forever part of the work. With no art displayed in the bays, the building’s form is its function and an inextricable accomplice in the work. In fact, all of the self-references and cross-references flying back and forth between the works themselves and the building can be as dizzying as the horses, donkeys, dogs, wax figures, and death-masked effigies doing their acrobatics throughout the installation.

    With each new angle and vantage point, from worm’s eye up to bird’s eye, the piece forces you to constantly engage with it and its components. I cannot remember any exhibit that ever saturated me with its imagery in such a way. It is exhaustive and exhausting. Upon reaching the top, I was relieved and a bit elated. It is somewhat like reaching Valhalla, and the delirium from so much engagement certainly plays a factor in the exhilaration.

    That is the show’s strength. Its weaknesses become more apparent on the way down. We decided to take the ramp rather than the elevator. At the time, it seemed there might have been even more to glean from the parts now that they had been taken in whole. That was where the spell began to break. It was not clear if it was the objects themselves or the intensity that had built up over such intimate and repetitive viewing, but seeing them once in this context was certainly enough.

    Those same works that seemed to possess such mystery and present endless revelation had nothing to offer on second glance. Weaknesses already apparent became fatal flaws and strengths became merely amusing tidbits. It seems that the genius of the artist was to understand his own works’ limitations and play against them, by refusing to elevate them in one way while quite literally doing so in another. This may leave you with some disappointment, but only because of what the experience initially offered. That would be my endorsement of this unusual and still compelling juggernaut.

—

    Jennifer Landes is arts editor at The Star.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

    The Italian artist has taken over the center of the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building with almost every hyperrealist sculpture and art piece he has ever conceived. The dozens of works are suspended in a dizzying amalgamation that viewers take in by climbing or descending the spiral.

    Since this is not a review, I won’t touch on the more critical aspects of it from an art historical perspective. I’m not certain that it succeeds on that level. This is, rather, a visual appreciation of a work that I think anyone who has a chance to experience it should.

    The objects include self-portraits, realistic facsimiles and taxidermy of animals, full-scale painted billboards, perching pigeons, upside-down cops, a praying Hitler, and other odd, irreverent, and punkish visual pranks and jokes sometimes striking a chord, sometimes simply facile and bratty.

    It is the installation that makes the show. Upon entering at ground level the eyes are drawn up to a clotted grouping of things all too detailed and obscured to take in at once. Entering the spiral ramp, the details of each object begin to emerge and the overall piece begins to engage: dangling feet lead to legs, bodies, and heads; an elephant either Klanish, ghostly, or embarrassed, hangs hiding under a sheet; a seemingly full-scale dinosaur’s skeleton and a 20-foot-long foosball table are some of the objects that emerge.

    Students of modern art history will note references to international artists or countrymen such as Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni.

    The objects may refer to other works (the foosball table was actually used for a competition as part of a larger work) or are stand-alone pieces. They may suspend by themselves or sit on pedestals to provide some grounding and better visibility. Without its room-like setting, for example, a squirrel that has committed suicide in its well-appointed kitchen would not be readable, whereas a respectable older woman crammed into a gleaming new stainless-steel refrigerator is a piece that can stand (or hang) on its own.

    At each new level and each new vantage point the objects become more and more fascinating. Even the ones that may be familiar offer new interest and insight. At the same time, the architecture remains in view, forever part of the work. With no art displayed in the bays, the building’s form is its function and an inextricable accomplice in the work. In fact, all of the self-references and cross-references flying back and forth between the works themselves and the building can be as dizzying as the horses, donkeys, dogs, wax figures, and death-masked effigies doing their acrobatics throughout the installation.

    With each new angle and vantage point, from worm’s eye up to bird’s eye, the piece forces you to constantly engage with it and its components. I cannot remember any exhibit that ever saturated me with its imagery in such a way. It is exhaustive and exhausting. Upon reaching the top, I was relieved and a bit elated. It is somewhat like reaching Valhalla, and the delirium from so much engagement certainly plays a factor in the exhilaration.

    That is the show’s strength. Its weaknesses become more apparent on the way down. We decided to take the ramp rather than the elevator. At the time, it seemed there might have been even more to glean from the parts now that they had been taken in whole. That was where the spell began to break. It was not clear if it was the objects themselves or the intensity that had built up over such intimate and repetitive viewing, but seeing them once in this context was certainly enough.

    Those same works that seemed to possess such mystery and present endless revelation had nothing to offer on second glance. Weaknesses already apparent became fatal flaws and strengths became merely amusing tidbits. It seems that the genius of the artist was to understand his own works’ limitations and play against them, by refusing to elevate them in one way while quite literally doing so in another. This may leave you with some disappointment, but only because of what the experience initially offered. That would be my endorsement of this unusual and still compelling juggernaut.

—

    Jennifer Landes is arts editor at The Star.

    Who knew that so many homicidal maniacs were running around loose in the Swedish countryside? Before Stieg Larsson’s revelations of murderous Nazi enclaves, before Henning Mankell’s dramatic decapitations, I had viewed Sweden as a liberal template for humanistic advancement. Now, though, it has to be acknowledged that Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is a touch unconventional, and that Mankell’s police inspector, Kurt Wallander, is serially depressed. Can this be chalked up to the effect of Swedish winters on the human psyche?

    The fascination with Scandinavian mystery novels was kick-started by the phenomenal success of Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the first of his Millennium trilogy, originally planned as a 10-book series. The author’s tragic death of a heart attack before he knew of the unprecedented worldwide acclaim for that book and the two sequels — they would have made him a multimillionaire — is a real-life drama beyond even his capabilities to imagine.

    Now Scandinavian writers with names like Jo Nesbo and Lars Kepler are being hailed by the critics. Nesbo is a Norwegian musician and writer of mysteries featuring the burned-out hero Harry Hole, and Lars Kepler is the pen name of a husband-and-wife team, Alexander and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, two impossibly gorgeous Swedes.

    My introduction to Swedish novels was through another his-and-hers team, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Their excellent Martin Beck police procedurals from the 1960s and ’70s are, I’m pleased to see, being reprinted with admiring jacket blurbs from writers like Michael Connelly. They usually open with a bloody murder and concern themselves with painstaking investigative work by a cast of individualistic policemen who become more appealingly familiar as one reads each successive novel. This provides a compelling reason to pick up each book as it becomes available. Larsson was planning the same strategy.

    What makes a successful mystery, beyond, naturally, a plot with suspense and unexpected revelations, is a believable central investigator with a regular cast of supporting characters and an intriguing setting (country or town). I’m a fan of the writers Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri because they amply supply all of these elements in their very different mysteries set in Italy. A passion for Italian cuisine is their one connecting tissue, but Leon’s mysteries are always set in Venice, where the delightful Commissario Guido Brunetti gives the reader a tour of the ancient streets, monuments, and gardens with their fabled history. Camilleri’s amusing, iconoclastic Inspector Montalbano pursues his criminals in Sicily, where the sun and the sea play a large and sometimes lethal part in the crimes he investigates.

    Some of the interest in Swedish mysteries surely has to do with how little we know about the country. Is it a socialist paradise or is it home to a rabid cadre of political operatives and murderous industrialists? Could it be both? Why are most domestic relationships depicted as so tortured? Isn’t anyone happy in paradise?

    And poor Kurt Wallander — is he ever going to get a vacation? Despite the violence that is an essential part of the action, there is pleasure in accompanying him to places like Skane, Malmo, and Ystad, but how on earth does one pronounce Gryt, Fyrudden, or Saltsjobaden? I don’t know, but the dreary weather and unfamiliar territory lend color and authenticity to the novels.

    “Lars Kepler” has had one book published, “The Hypnotist.” It has an original, well-paced story and enough mayhem to satisfy the most bloodthirsty reader. Bodies literally litter Stockholm. More lie scattered, staining the snow, in the upper reaches of the country, and the hero, the hypnotist, while likable, has some truly terrible ideas. Early in his career he decides to gather a group of psychotics and put them and himself under deep hypnosis to release their various original traumas. It is an effort at group bonding that goes seriously wrong, generating a plot the twists and turns of which keep one glued to the page.

    The authors of that book, the Ahndorils, have a second one, “The Paganini Contract,” translated and waiting in the wings, and a third planned, so we can look forward to weeks of gruesome reading when they are finally released to us Swedish crime addicts.

    Jennifer Hartig is a regular contributor of book reviews to The Star. She lives in Noyac.

Perhaps it has always been so, but it struck me last week that so many of the sports stories I wrote in the past year had to do with people who had surprised themselves. In brief, they had not known it — whatever that might be, a faster time, a stronger performance, a more chiseled body — was in them.

    Ed Petrie, the East Hampton High School boys basketball coach who recently retired after a Hall of Fame career, was said to have gotten the best from each of his players, presumably not only surprising themselves but others — perhaps even him!

    The first woman to win outright a triathlon here — and they have been contested in Montauk and Sag Harbor for the past 30 years — said she hadn’t known she had it in her. The high school golf coach would probably have been content with yet another league title, but his team outdid itself, winning Suffolk County and Long Island championships as well. Driving back from the Bethpage golf course with the silver trophy given to the best high school golf team on Long Island had been a mystical experience, he said, and perhaps in all the cases I’m talking about the achievement had been, at least to some extent, a mystical experience.

    I ended the recap of the year in sports with the words of Joe Vetrano, a 51-year-old Pan-Am karate champion, who continues, he told me, to learn more about the sport as he continues to practice. He said he presumed it was the same with writing, with everything. It never ended, he said. One could always work to improve.

    That sounds better to me than Churchill’s injunction never to give up. Well, yes, it’s so: One shouldn’t give up, but more than that one should, rather than just stubbornly hang on, work toward getting better, toward being better at whatever one’s hand findeth to do.

    That’s why it’s good, at least good for me, to hang around athletes. As far as I can tell, they are always upbeat. They are earnest and ever optimistic. I’m sure they have their low moments, but I doubt they last long. There is joy in what they do, in graceful movement, in mastering challenges, in daily practice.

    I would have said in past years, perhaps, that graceful movement and athletic feats were the province of the young, but, as we have seen, that is not so. Aging athletes turn in surprising performances too — all the more surprising because they are older. One has to look no further here than Albert Woods, who in his 80s has become an All-American swimmer. In his 70s, he took up the breaststroke, said to be swimming’s hardest stroke, and has gone on to win many national championships. He has surprised himself.

    My father once, borrowing from Aristotle, advised that I practice the quality or qualities I admired, just as I would baseball, which he knew I liked.

    I would love to say that I have become courageous as a result — it’s a quality I admire. But because I’m a coward I haven’t practiced acting courageously that much!

    But if it’s optimism you want, at least as much optimism as can reasonably be expected — I’m surprised I was hesitant when first offered the sports beat 32 years ago — I’m your man.

There was a morning low tide on the last day of 2011. After tending to my household chores, feeding the dogs and chickens, and before the rest of the family was awake, I slipped out in the truck to go clamming. With little traffic on the roads before 8 a.m., I rolled easily up to East Hampton Village to buy $40 worth of gasoline and grab a clam rake from the barn.

    Saturday’s balmy 50-degree air seems an impossible memory as I write this a few days later with the night’s forecast for the teens. And the water temperature seemed about the same as the air. I clammed barehanded. There was little or no wind.

    I scratched lazily, wandering off the edge of my accustomed sand flat, surprising myself by stumbling onto a productive group of clams. There were a few gulls and ducks to keep me company. After a while, Paul Lester, accompanied by a dog, launched a boat and headed out to go scalloping. When I was done, my heavy and half-filled mesh bag dragged along the path back to the truck.

    Ellis, our 2-year-old, helped me wash the clams in the sink and put them into bags. I explained to him that there were “fish” inside and opened one so he could see. For the next few days, he would open the refrigerator, take out a clam, and declare, “Fis!” demanding that I open another for him to examine.

    Monday was chowder night in our house. Evvy, our middle child, helped with the potatoes, leaving peels all over the kitchen floor. Ellis happily cleaned them up.

    There was no recipe to follow. I sautéed onion and shallots in good olive oil, then threw in a handful of chopped-up smoked bluefish instead of the traditional salt pork. Next went in some white, then broth and water in approximately equal proportions, then a bay leaf and some thyme and diced potatoes.When the potatoes were soft, in went the now-chopped clams.

    Each family member (other than Ellis) added something to cream up their bowls according to their taste. Ellis didn’t care much for it anyway. Adelia had two servings. Evvy had a serving then asked for a second of just the broth. There were no leftovers.