Norbert Blei doesn't get angry so much anymore but when he does, he knows what to do. As one of Wisconsin's foremost men of letters, Blei recalls Mark Twain, who said, "When angry, count four; when very angry, swear."

In other words, we all must suffer fools and foolishness in this world, but there comes a time when enough is enough.

Now, thanks to Blei and Minnesota's Ellis Press, discerning readers angered by the noise and mushrooming commercialism in everyday life have an option apart from swearing a blue streak in a primal scream room.

They might instead get themselves a copy of Blei's "Meditations on a Small Lake," a cult classic when first issued in 1987 and now reprinted in a fine new edition that includes three new essays and beautiful illustrations, including one of the author, by the artist Emmett Johns.

"It's a hodgepodge of a book," Blei said Wednesday, when I tracked him down at home in Door County. "But sometimes that can click."

This one clicks. Blei offers a mix of his essays -- alternately evocative and angry -- on his beloved Door County with a selection of magazine and newspaper interviews in which Blei is the subject. Inevitably, the changing face of Door, where Blei moved from Chicago four decades ago, is the subject, too.

Madison-area readers will smile to see included in "Meditations" a piece on Blei written by the late Madison author and radio raconteur George Vukelich. Twin sons of different mothers, those two, sharing a love of literature, the land, and a bedrock belief that humor trumps pomposity every time.

In his piece, originally published in Milwaukee Magazine, Vukelich notes that a mutual acquaintance had warned him about Blei: "He's different. It's like a mixture of Studs Terkel and Henry David Thoreau."

Vukelich could relate because George, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1995, was himself a man of many parts, a political activist, environmentalist, writer and broadcaster. I remember him captaining a stool at the old Fess bar, telling stories. Norb Blei heard many of those same stories when Vukelich took his WIBA radio program "Pages from North Country Notebook" to a statewide audience on Wisconsin Public Radio.

"I miss him so much on the Wisconsin scene," Blei said of Vukelich.

Vukelich's use of the description of Blei as part Terkel, part Thoreau was particularly apt because Blei's life and writing has frequently shifted between Chicago and Door County.

I met Blei for the first time in 2003 when he was in Madison to read at Canterbury from "Chi Town," his collection of pieces on his native Chicago that remains my favorite of all his works. It had just been reissued by the Northwestern University Press so a new generation of readers could get Norb's inimitable take on Chicago institutions like Nelson Algren, Mike Royko and the hot dog.

Blei's favorite Madison place is Nick's on State Street, but that first time we met at the Laurel Tavern on Monroe, because Norb had been meeting down the street with the University of Wisconsin Press about the possibility of their reissuing his Door County trilogy that began with "Door Way." (That collaboration, alas, failed to come to pass.)

He drank Scotch at the Laurel and proved as provocative in person as he is on the page. He signed my copy of "Chi Town." He promised to stay in touch, and he has.

This week, Blei said he is happy to see "Meditations" back in print. It has given him a chance to re-examine his complicated relationship with Door County, which he loves for its beauty and quiet spaces and hates because that same allure may be responsible for its ruin in the form of condos and commercial development. In the book, Blei notes ruefully that a condo developer once called to cheerfully tell the author he'd put a copy of one of Blei's books in all his condos.

Still, there remain places in Door where Blei can find the quiet he seeks. He quotes Melville: "Silence is the only voice of our God." He told me that a former Door resident, returning from Maine for the first time in two decades, recently offered this assessment: "It's not that bad."

The first reading for the new edition of "Meditations on a Small Lake" came about when Blei was talking with a friend of his who is minister of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Juddville, in Door County.

"The proper place to launch this book is a church," Blei said.

"Use mine," the minister said.

The reading is Monday evening. "It's perfect," said Blei, Wisconsin's amiable contrarian. "Nobody knows where Juddville is."

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.