I May Be Some Time

At the World's End Multiplex

2012-02-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

You should see the films Take Shelter and Melancholia. Just don't make the mistake of seeing them in the same week, as I did. Double downer. These are movies about the apocalypse, each focusing on the human drama, and neither relying (much) on special effects or cgi for their impact. More on these soon; first I will recount my earliest experience with the genre: Roger Corman’s B-movie from 1955, The Day the World Ended. It is not an exaggeration to say that no movie has affected me more. I saw it after school on television—probably third or fourth grade. I wish I could pinpoint the moment and contextualize it among the Kennedy assassination and the Bay of Pigs. In my life they were all of a moment, but the connections among them are lost to me now.

About The Day the Word Ended: the central facts are there had been an atomic war, which I knew was possible; there were mutations caused by radiation, which I also knew was possible. Thus these two “facts” weighed heavy on my mind. I was convinced that our family needed a bomb shelter. One family in our neighborhood had built one. These people were the only sensible folks among us, in my view. I knew that hiding under our desks at school was not going to cut it. And yes, they really had us perform such drills, just as schools will practice fire drills today. In any case, I consulted my father with the issue of a family bomb shelter. I explained my reasons. He said, simply, “Don’t worry about that.” Easy for him to say. He hadn’t seen Roger Corman work his magic, based on true facts! This film occupied my late childhood until replaced by the usual drama of adolescence.

While I’m at it, I think I’ll mention The Day After—early 1980s. This is another film that bummed me out (dude). The actual firestorm was dramatic and the after effects were dramatic, to the point of national conversation. Unfortunately I saw this right before a ski trip to Mammoth, and I remember thinking, bizarrely, that skiing wasn’t that much fun, if outside of the ski area the world was ending. But I couldn’t then, and still can’t now, figure out how skiing depends at all on what is happening off the mountain. One of the whole points o skiing is to live in the moment and let the outside world drift blissfully away. But this film would not permit me this illusion.

This brings me to Take Shelter. At center of the film is the tension created by the main character wondering if he’s going crazy or if something BIG really is about to happen. It’s actually a rather quiet film in most ways, but the sense of impending doom is palpable, if subtle. There’s hint of the coming storm as the result of some kind of human mucking up of the environment—the main character is a miner of some kind. And the literal shelter of the film is the good-old fashioned bomb shelter of my childhood—so it resonated in that way for me. Probably the most effective element of the film for me was its Midwestern setting. In both its exteriors and interior scenes I felt like I was right back in Macomb (it’s set in rural Ohio). And the characters were good working class folks—the apocalypse as brought to us by Raymond Carver. I suppose this film works because, despite Mr. Eastwood’s steely-eyed, firm-jawed hope that “the second half” is upon us and that things will get better, most of us don’t believe it.

I know my son’s generation is scared, as they should be. Currently 85% of college graduates return home to live with their parents. The average debt of college graduates is $27,000. Of course, they’re scared.

If you’re naysayer, your anthem is, well, take your pick), but I was thinking of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall.” That’s the theme of this film.

Melancholia has similar concerns but the sensibilities couldn’t be more different. Foremost: this is film about really wealthy people. They are as isolated on their estate as Corman’s 1950s survivors were in the shack they use as a fallout shelter. The movie is linear but it opens with a collage, a sequence really, of moments from the film that work as staged pieces. Probably most of the frames of this film could stand as single image set pieces of nearly surreal beauty. It’s a hard movie to describe: it opens with a lavish wedding that ends in spectacular failure and moves on to a second part in which the would be bride is nursed back to mental stability by her wealthy sister—this in the fore––in the slowly surging background is the possibility that a newly discovered planet will collide with earth.

Melancholia is radically different from Take Shelter in that is doesn’t pretend to present any kind of mirror to the way “we” live today. At least, I don’t think it does. If Take Shelter was Carveresque in its sensibilities, it’s hard to conjure up a counterpart influence for this one. Breughel perhaps, who is invokes here, if he lived in the 21^st century and had cupboards full of prescription drugs and inexhaustible wealth. It’s beautiful, but hard to know what to take with you when you leave the film. Which of course, is a different sense altogether to most Hollywood films, after which you are not expected to take anything with you. The best you can hope for is not to be bored in the actual moment of viewing.

Denial is a thematic concern in both visions. And sometimes I wonder: if its death that’s being denied, what’s the harm? These films are a reminder just how watered down our popular cinemas today is; both are exponentially better than any of the films nominated by the academy for best picture. (Non sequitur: see Margaret by Kevin Lonergan; what a brilliant mess!).

So Dylan’s been warning us for years, like the ubiquitous bearded guy in the new Yorker cartoons who carries the “the End is Near” sign on a street corner. But let’s not forget Sam Cooke, who foretold “A Change is Gonna Come.” These songs have more in common than their “gonnas.” One is a glass half empty and the other a glass half full. And yet poor Sam Cooke was shot and killed before that song was even released. The change came a bit faster than he had imagined. And old Bob, he just keeps on keeping on. The hard rain hasn’t fall on him, yet.

Cold

2011-12-24T13:24:00.001-08:00

Cold, a seventeen minute film by Anson Fogel and Cory Richards is an amazing evocation of human achievement, self-induced suffering, and, well, cold. Filmed by Richards on his and Simone Moro and Denis Urubko’s winter ascent of Gasherbrum 2, this film lives up to its title. This was the first winter ascent of the peak and the first winter ascent of an 8,000-meter peak by an American, Richards. The thing about climbing films is that almost no one can keep their finger on the shutter when things turn dire. But Richards did, mostly. It won the grand prize at Banff this year and the reason is not far to seek: the film delivers. For some virtual coldness it ranks up there with Cherry Apsley-Garrard’s The Worst Journey on the World. I don’t know when this will become widely available, but keep on the lookout for it. You can have a taste here:

http://coldunited.com/2011/05/cold-documentary-trailer-video-simone-moro-denis-urubko-cory-richards-anson-fogel/

Last winter I red Dan Simmons’ The Terror. Yet another winter sufferfest, here Simmons tells the fictionalized story of the infamous 1848 Franklin Expedition. Necessarily fictional, because no one really knows what happened to them. In Simmons’ version the arctic is so cold that men’s teeth shatter. It is an astounding feat of research, and it’s utterly compelling, and mostly convincing. I mean, something happened to those guys.

Which reminds me of my friend Jon Waterman’s solo arctic venture over two seasons recorded in Arctic Crossing: A Journey Through the Northwest Passage and Inuit Culture. Jon once confided in me that he had probably discovered the graves of some of Franklin’s party. But, for now, he has kept this private. Oh, and by the way the line between the theme of “cold” and the theme of “sufferfest” is blurry indeed, as Jon, perhaps inadvertently, has pointed out. Actually, Jon was probably colder when he did the Cassin on Denali in the winter.

And speaking of “The Terror” (the name of one of Franklin’s ships) Jim Shepherd has also tried his hand with a speculative fiction on the subject, published this fall in Zoetrope’s horror issue. Do you know Shepherd? He is the ultimate in-your-face answer to the old “write what you know” platitude. Every story arises out of a different world, one which the author has not literally lived, yet pulls off as if he had. His list of acknowledgements at the end of his books gives us as many as ten sources per story. His story “Poland Is Watching,” from his new story collection, You Think That’s Bad: Stories, describes a Polish winter Himalayan expedition. It’s hard to believe he hasn’t himself been a Polish Himalayan climber in winter, but, hey, that’s fiction, right? You can actually find a video of Shepherd reading this story aloud here:

http://jimshepard.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/video-jim-shepard-reads-poland-is-watching/

This brings me somewhat full circle to Bernadette McDonald’s story of the actual Polish climbers who pushed the limits of the human achievement in the actual, not literary, Himalayan winter, in her recent book Freedom Climbers. The achievements she recounts are astounding, but equally astounding is the service McDonald does both to the climbers and her non-Polish reading audience. Most of these exploits were for years confined to Polish language reports. To write the book McDonald had to commission translation of several books, and basically conduct first-hand interviews (with the survivors). The result is a testimony to, well, as I said, full circle: suffering, cold, and human achievement. The book has deservedly won the Banff Grand Prize for Mountaineering Literature (which is not too surprising because McDonald was a prime force in the Banff Mountain Center Festivals for many years before she retired [I think this is her fourth book since “retiring”]). She has also won the coveted Boardman-Tasker Award, which is more surprising as the British only rarely bestow the honor to non-Britains. Well-deserved on both counts.

I’ve been cold. And the 7 degrees Fahrenheit outside the door right now here in Anchorage doesn’t even earn a blip on my radar screen. I used to say that the coldest I’ve been in my life was delivering the Detroit Free Press through three Michigan winters. That was cold. But my single coldest moment actually occurred in southern California. I entered myself in a cross-country ski race in the mountains north of Los Angeles, off I-5. The course wound through a hilly forest and I was quickly dropped by the pack and lost in the loops of trails. Knowing how to ski probably would have helped. Then, my ski tip broke. I was wet and colder by the minute, postholing and plunging my cotton-gloved hands into the drifts over and over again. Only blind dumb luck allowed me to get out of there in the fading daylight. By the time I got back to the parking lot, not only was the race over, but everyone was gone. My hands were so cold I couldn’t get them into my pocket to find the car key. Once I found the key I couldn’t hold it in the block-o-ice fingers. After I finally managed to get the key in the lock and open the car, I had to repeat the maneuver with the ignition. Then I sat there screaming as warmth and feeling inched their way back into my hands.

A few weeks later the race results arrived. I had actually finished the race, but since no one knew it, I expected to see my name at the bottom of the list with the inglorious DNF, Did Not Finish, following. But despite the fact that the race organizers had my address, my name did not appear on the list of participants. It was as if I hadn’t been there at all.

Stay warm, my friends!

C-notes, and I don't mean hundred dollar bills

2011-11-09T13:02:00.001-08:00

When I see the subtitle, or mere descriptor, “a memoir of cancer” or “a memoir of survival,” or “addiction” or, and perhaps worst, “recovery,” I figuratively run like hell.

I was not devastated by the news that I had cancer “again.” “Again” is the operative word. To say that my cancer is “back,” would have been wrong. This is, they tell me, completely unrelated to my earlier cancer. Aside from telling my wife about it, and my parents, I think I was pretty calm about it. I tried to adopt a Dylanesque view: “It’s life, and life only.” I heard the words in my head in his voice.

On the second day after my surgery, still two days out from hearing the biopsy results, one of our students, an international caliber runner from Kenya, “went missing.” He was last seen Sunday evening, lightly dressed. He did not have his car keys or cell phone with him. It has snowed almost steadily since then with nighttime temperatures approaching the single digits. His roommates reported him missing on Monday morning. Also: his former roommate, another world-class runner from Kenya, killed himself here in Anchorage last spring. I am thinking about this guy and his long strange trip.

I have alluded, somewhat elliptically, in a couple pieces of writing to my experience (now experiences) with cancer. But even though it has taken up a disproportionate space in my psyche, I tend to prefer to write about the things that have always interested me, namely my love of the literary world and my love for the mountain life, each a deep well that I have yet to exhaust.

That aside, here are a few cancer notes written on the morning after I heard that the biopsy report on my melanoma and lymph nodes has come back negative (which is, of course, positive).

I noted that Steve Jobs’ cancer was discovered in a routine CT scan for kidney stones. Exactly how my kidney cancer was discovered. This would be about the only thing I have in common with Jobs, so far as I can tell.

When I first met Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, a Yu’pik elder, in the summer of 2008 he was walking on crutches and already in his mid-seventies. I asked him about his crutches and he said that it started with kidney cancer, but that he never doubted it would come back at him. At the time of our conversation he had lived about ten more years since his kidney cancer was first diagnosed and he lived three more until his death earlier this year. He knew it would kill him, but we talked mostly of the terrible problem of suicide of young men in the native villages of rural Alaska. He was among a handful of persons I have met in my life who I felt have possessed wisdom.

Last summer I met Richard Rodriguez. Among our many commonalities was a Catholic upbringing in a shared historical moment, a love of books from an early age, and kidney cancer. Richard became aware of his through night sweats and various actual physical problems. I experienced none of these. “Ah,” he said, “you were asymptomatic.”

I don’t much care for the language of cancer or even the word itself. Or even talking about it in a round about way. My cousin Terri said, “Mel is a bad ca.” I know, that’s about all the letters I wish to use too. I never liked Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor.” I always thought that her objection to the metaphors people use to describe cancer was purely personal, as if what she really objected to was other people talking about it at all, as if what she really objected to were people talking about her, as a “victim.” I object to that, too. But it’s hard to object to the aptness of war as a metaphor for cancer. A more timely analogy now might be zombification, the process by which the self is not the self, but is taken over by this other life-force which is a death force. I think I have vowed to never use the word “zombie” in my writing. At least, I meant to do so. So that’s my one and only transgression.

This melanoma that they found a few weeks ago was odd. It had no melanin in it. It was, the surgeon said, “amelanomic.”

My friend Tama, a melanoma survivor herself, said, “You are a two-time cancer survivor (how weird is that?).” Well, it’s pretty damned weird. Because this cancer, too, was without symptoms. My suffering, such as it has been, has been mostly not physical. And weird too because, though aging, I am more active and more fit than ever. The weekend before my surgery I skied to Rabbit Lake, a twelve-mile plus roundtrip on sketchy snow with about 1200 feet in elevation gain. Then, the next day I made my weekly visit to the summit of Flattop in gnarly winter weather. I felt great every minute of those outings.

When the surgeon called Tuesday night, long after office hours, to report the good news of my negative tests, I was flooded with relief, but it is a calm relief. By the time I fell asleep, the runner from Kenya had not been found.

Since my last cancer (2005) I have tried to move forward, keeping in mind that every day is a gift. Last night, when my friends heard my good news, many used the word “celebration.” Oh, I’ll celebrate, (writing this is a celebration, I promise) but the celebration I have in mind is simply to return to my “every day is a gift” philosophy. I am celebrating every day, believe me.

I can return to my work, my writing projects, my skiing life. I can return to training for the Tour of Anchorage and the Alyeska Town League. I can train with Aisha for her triathlons, and keep doing yoga. Hit Alyeska with my sons. Enjoy the holidays. I can return to planning a climbing trip to the Alaska Range in the spring and a trip to the Himalaya in the fall.

“You are alive,” Richard Rodriguez told us, “And you have your pen in your hand.”

The runner from Kenya was found, alive (against all odds, in my opinion). He appeared, severely hypothermic, in the lobby of the hotel on campus at 3:30 a.m. this morning. I am wishing the very best for him, and would love to hear his story (though not entitled to it).

“It’s life, and life only.”

If someone had said to me, six years ago, “”Every day is a gift,” I would have been polite, but inwardly dismissive. But I believe those words today. I hope you hear me.

Airports, the Monkey Egg, Missoula

2011-10-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

For the most art we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an

infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence

are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

––Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When I am on my computer, particularly when I am on-line, where am I? Oh yeah, I’ve already answered that: on my computer. So, this morning I was sitting in the Sea-Tac Airport and where was I, Oh yeah, on my computer. But then I got to thinking, where am I really?

Seattle is a city that has enormous emotional resonance for me. I lived here for three years in my early twenties and these were heady days, intense days somehow disproportionately more formative than any other three-year period n my life. I started a business, made life-long friends, climbed, met my wife (Note: this list is chronological, not otherwise hierarchical), climbed, finished school, and climbed. I launched myself, right here in the Pacific Northwest. But Sea-Tac Airport? I’m not feeling it. The Seattle vibe: it’s not here, even if there is an Ivar’s (keep clam!). There are two problems: first of all, the airport is in neither in Seattle or Tacoma; secondly: it’s an airport. An airport isn’t really a discrete place. It’s like an embassy of the country, Airport. When you’re in an airport, the word airport can easily be interchanged with the word nowhere. You’re in the waiting room for the next non-airport place.

Reading is not dissimilar, except that it’s generally pleasing as opposed to disconcerting, although sometimes reading is disconcerting, but in a good way. You’re in the book, but usually you’re in the world, too. In fact the measure of greatness in writing is the proportion of you it occupies: 90% in the book 10% world is a very good ratio (for the book). A book is good if we are absorbed by it and the time during which we read it we have been transported from our quotidian world. “There is no frigate like a book . . . “

Then there are stories that themselves occupy two worlds. I’m thinking of the Kelly Link story, "House on the Hill," in the new Tin House that I just picked up at the airport. A new Kelly Link story is endorsement enough to pick up a copy of Tin House, even though Tin House is reliably good in general. In this, as in many, Kelly Link story we begin in the real world, that is, a linguistic representation of the everyday world. On the middle of page two: “He held it out on his palm; one of Fran’s old toys, the monkey egg. ‘Now you know I don’t like these. I wish you’d put ‘em away.’”

We don’t have to know what a “monkey egg” is to continue reading. We know it’s a toy that hasn’t been put away, and structurally that works . . . for the moment. We’ll read for six more pages (big Tin House pages of about 500 words) firmly, we think, rooted in Fran’s world, new to us but recognizable, until the monkey egg reappears and Ophelia, an outsider, like the reader, is welcomed into the strange world that makes a Kelly Link story a Kelly Link story. As a reader you occupy two worlds simultaneously within the story. In a Kelly Link story this balancing act is pleasing.

When you’re in an airport—not so pleasing––the environment is so conspicuously manufactured and the air is stale. The best thing you hear in there is the question: “Add a shot to that for three bucks?”

I like small airports, like Missoula’s. When the plane lands, a staircase is wheeled to the airplane door and upon exiting the plane you descend to the ground. You’re in one place. You’re in the world.

"Where Do You Buy Your Books?"

2011-09-16T15:16:00.000-07:00

“Where do you buy your books?” Sweeney was asking this in the context of a longer rant about the state of publishing. This post is accompanied by a photograph of Sweeney taken on “the happiest day of my life,” in June 2010 at the bar at the Land’s End, in Homer, Alaska. Sweeney had just read his story “Over the Mountains” to a highly supportive and enthusiastic crowd at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. By the way I strongly recommend Sweeney’s book, The List, available from the publisher :

http://www.vpdhouse.com/

It will set you back to the amount of about three glasses of Fairweather IPA, and is, actually, more satisfying (which, if you know how much I like Fairweather IPA, is saying a lot).

Anyway, his question is a good one and, though I claim to prefer independent booksellers, is that really how it boils down, in practice? So going back to my last post about summer reading, I am tracking here the scenes of purchase for those titles.

The Atlantic Summer Fiction issue: Barnes & Noble, Anchorage (the only place I could think of to get it).

Jim Harrison, The Farmer’s Daughter: Tidal Wave Books, Anchorage. This is my go-to bookstore. The place I most wish to stay a vibrant business forever.

Dan Simmons, Drood: Mecosta Book Gallery, Mecosta Michigan, about midway between Mt. Pleasant and Big Rapids on M-20. A shockingly awesome used bookstore in the middle of nowhere. I would have bought more books, even had the titles picked-- but would have had to ship them home—too much of hassle.

Fermor, A Time of Gifts: B&N, Grand Rapids, MI. Surprised to see it, had been searching.

Woman In White, Wilkie Collins A generic bargain books joint in a dying Grand Rapids mall. Saw a lot of remaindered books, more than a few I had paid full price for in years past (always the way!).

The Herzog and the Japanese graphic novel came from Amazon, where I had a massive coupon.

The Roskelly and Murch/Ondaatje came from independent booksellers through Amazon.

The first edition Teton Guide by Leigh Ortenburger came from Tidal Wave.

What does all this mean, besides the fact that I have an out-of-control book buying jones?

I’m not sure.

I want all these places to keep doing business—even Barnes and Noble. I actually miss Borders—which happened to be the nearest bookstore to my current home. And I want writers to continue to be able to get their work published, and I want publishers to keep publishing. What’s the best way to operate to ensure all those ends?

Wish I knew.

I don’t think anyone does know the answer to that question.

I’d buy every book I could directly from the author selling it out of the trunk of her Ford LTD, if I could. If the hypothetical she could. But most of us, whether consumer of books or writer, can’t operate this way. Although, now that I think of it, the aforementioned Sweeney has given it one hell of shot.

Next: a couple cases about publishing: BlazeVOX & the curious case of Kiana Davenport and the Big 6.

Photo disclaimer: Sweeney actually looks a lot less goofy in real life than he does in attached photo. Sorry about that , Jim!

Summer Reading: August 2011

2011-09-07T14:41:00.000-07:00

For me summer reading takes place in the month of August. June and July are by most hectic working months and, up here, September is not really summer.

I started with the Atlantic Summer Fiction issue, which I read cover-to-cover. That fact alone is an endorsement. Stuart Dybek was a highlight (when isn’t he?”) back in “Hot Ice” territory with “Vigil,” and a guy named Jonathon Walter, whose bio reads “Jonathon Walter lives in Wisconsin,” does the dust bowl in “the Great Zero.”

Then I read Jim Harrison’s The Farmer’s Daughter, another set of three novellas, one featuring the recurring character, Brown Dog. I never get tired of Harrison. And, am astounded that he seems to be writing a book a year, even though he looks like someone who has come back from the dead (if not from liver failure). He has a new novel coming out soon, and is one of the few writers whose work I buy sight unseen. If he wrote it, I’m reading it.

Then, influenced by Jonathan Rosen’s article in The New Yorker on Wilkie Collins, I picked up a used copy of Dan Simmons’ Drood, about Collins and Dickens. I worshiped Simmons’ The Terror when I read it last winter and I think I’d follow him almost anywhere, so why not to Victorian England, where he already was more or less when he wrote The Terror? But having acquired Drood I remembered (duh!) that I’ve never actually read Collins, so I snagged a copy of The Woman in White. Which was surprising in its rhetorical sophistication. (Note to self: do not lightly dismiss them Victorians.) I loved it and which took up a lot of “lake time” up in Michigan, Labatt’s in hand.

At this point in the month I shifted from lake country to mountain country and began reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts - On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977). I hadn’t known about Fermor until alerted to him by my long-time climbing patrtner John McInerney, who was also reading Fermor. Fermor had died early this summer at the age of 96; he was widely regarded as England’s greatest travel writer. The book is astounding for two reasons: its erudition and its innocence. The three year journey he writes about took place in the early 1930s, before the Nazi stranglehold on Europe. The book ends mid-journey and I can’t wait to read the next installment, primarily because I did not have a dictionary at hand and the man’s vocabulary is staggering.

I finished Fermor in the airport in Denver and picked up a paperback copy of Charles Wu’s How to Live Safely in Science Fiction Universe. It’s more Calvino-ish than Niffenberger-ish, if that means anything to you. I am reading this now, but was distracted over the Labor Day weekend by 55 ways to the Wilderness in South Central Alaska by Helen Nienhauser and John Wolfe Jr. We spent the weekend in Seward where the steady downpour did not prevent us from exploring no fewer than four of the 55 ways. An awesome time.

In the month of August I formulate my writing plan for the fall, my most productive time. Check. But I tend not to speak of such plans: bad juju. I also find that I am compelled to acquire set of books that for whatever reasons have been swirling around my mind in the weeks prior. Thus, one of my first orders of business upon returning to the real (non-vacation) world is to place a few orders.

The first thing I ordered was The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje. Why? Am I interested in editing film? No. Nor writing it. I am, however, interested in writing scenes. Two different writers at Kachemak Bay recommended this book, which came to me out of the blue. I love Ondaatje, of course. I had known nothing of Murch. Turns out that he edited The English Patient for the film version and also, won an academy award for sound on Apocalypse Now. Sold.

I had an Amazon coupon for $30, so I bit on the third volume of Jiro Taniguchi and Yummajura Baku’s Summit of the Gods. These are graphic novels set in the mountaineering world. I loved the first two volumes and am pre-committed to the next three—can’t wait for the third to arrive. They’re gorgeous books, by the way.

For a long time I have wanted to read Werner Herzog’s Walking in Ice-Paris 23 November to Munich 14 November. Fermor’s story of travel in Europe on foot has pushed me to explore Herzog’s story. I had just read Herzog’s Conquerors of the Useless about the experience of making Fitzcarraldo, which I watched again recently to see if it was as crazy as my memory told me it was. Confirmed. The new book has already arrived. It is an elegant and very simple paperback. Can’t wait.

Dang. While researching a new mountaineering title I noticed that there are at least a dozen climbing books with the word “last” in the title. Why this preoccupation of climbers with “last” things? So I ordered a used copy of Roskelly’s Last Days for further exploration off this topic. I’ll get back to you on this.

Yesterday I found, quite by accident, a mint hardcover copy of Leigh Ortenburger’s Climbers Guide to the Tetons. 1956. I had never seen such an edition (I own three later editions, including the colossal posthumous edition published with Rennie Jackson.) Ortenburger, by the way, survived a life of mountaineering, only to perish fleeing the great Oakland fire, in the late 1990s (I think). They were almost literally giving the book away. Had to have it.

We were warned long ago (Ecclesiastes, I think) that “of the making of books there is no end.” Nor of the reading (or, gulp, acquiring) of them. If you've read this far, you're probably as daft as I am!

Notes on Daumal's Mount Analogue

2011-06-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

If there’s a more often-cited remark or passage about mountaineering than Mallory’s famous “Because it’s there” it may be René Daumal’s

You cannot stay on the summit forever: you have to come down again . . . So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above . . . . One descends, one sees no longer but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

If my opening observation isn’t true, it should be. Daumal’s lines come from his “novel,” Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, a book well known to cultish group of hippie-mountaineers in the early 1970s. Intermittently hard to find over the years, today it’s a few clicks away in a relatively new translation by Carol Cosman in a Tusk Ivories paperback.

If the book retains a cultish following, it’s due to its eminently quotable prose as well as to the cult of personality following Daumal himself. Daumal died of tuberculosis in 1944 at the age of 36 and the story is that he was working on Mount Analogue the day he died. It’s a better excuse than Coleridge had, but one has the sense that it would have been a hard book to finish. The text proper ends in mid-sentence:

“Without them [wasps!], a great many plants that played an important role in stabilizing the shifting earth, . . .”

Undoubtedly here Daumal was to deliver an early lesson in ecology and species interdependence, which is not what one might expect from a tubercular Sanskrit scholar on his deathbed in the waning days of World War II in German occupied Paris.

I used the term “text proper” because many of the memorable lines about mountaineering, including the lines cited above, are from a postscript including an outline that his wife Véra appended to the novel. The reader is left with the sense that if only Daumal could have finished! We would have become so enlightened! Not likely, but isn’t it pretty to think so? Which reminds me that Daumal translated Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon into French—worth another look in his light.

It’s said that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 cult film The Holy Mountain is based of Mount Analogue; maybe so, but tempered with massive quantities of psychedelics. They’re both allegories I suppose, but you’ll have better luck synching up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz.

The premise of the story concerns a group of seekers who believe that there is an unknown mountain on earth that is higher than Everest and which connects earth to heaven, a symbolic mountain like Mt. Olympus, that they must find and ascend. Most of the extant five chapters describe the organization of the expedition and travel to the peak. We never get to the actual, make that symbolically authentic, mountaineering.

The prose is somewhat reminiscent of the great French alpinist Gaston Rébuffat who wrote gorgeous romantic (i.e. purplish) prose extolling the fraternité de la corde–brotherhood of the rope–at about the same historical moment. In fact, structurally, Rébuffat’s Starlight and Storm resembles Mount Analogue in that its appendix lays out the author’s philosophies in more exacting and memorable prose than does what precedes it.

Daumal included a few simple drawings, not unlike yet another great French romantic, Antoine St. Exupery. I’m particularly fond of the cosmos portrayed in chapter two and pictured above.

The last chapter was to be titled “And You Reader, What Do You Seek?” Maybe it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, but I’ve always fallen for these moments of direct address by great artists, such as Melville: “What are you reader but a fast and loose fish too?” or as appended to the famous eponymous Gauguin painting, “Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

Mount Analogue is at once sweet and wise and enigmatic. When I first read it many years ago it appealed to me because I liked to think that mountaineering was in fact a spiritual pursuit. I suppose I still do. But I love more than ever that the story ends in mid-sentence and we are left forever wondering not only how the story might have ended but, as Daumal has asked, what is it that we seek?

A List of 10 Items not even related enough to be called a loose baggy monster

2011-05-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

1. Front page articles from The Northern Light, UAA newspaper, March 29, 2011:

Avalanches bury unprepared thrill seekers

Two top ski coaches set to resign

Pot culture in Alaska reaches a new high

2. Three of my writer friends seem to do more photography that writing, though only one has renounced writing. Curiously, he was the only one of the three to ever make any money on it. Of the three, one shots mostly infra-red and the other two shoot almost exclusively at night. I hope this doesn’t fall under the list suggested by Jessa Crispin’s, “And there are those who might not even bother anymore [to write].”

3. Two photographs of George Mallory’s personal effects contain:

A cheap (by today’s’standards) pair of glacier goggles;

A jack-knife;

A tin of “meat lozenges” (portable nourishment at all times) (yucko);

A box of Swan Vesta matches (they still package them just like this, by the away);

A watch;

An altimeter.

I make note of this because the altitude needle on the altimeter, as well as the hands of the watch, have disappeared completely, turned to powder (?) and vanished. How weirdly insubstantial they must have been from the start. Rust marks, the residue of the watch hands, suggest it stopped at ten minutes after five. 5:10, coincidentally the estimated degree of difficulty of the rock climbing at “the Second Step,” which Mallory and Irvine would have had to climb at 28, 280 feet in order to obtain the summit. A mystery for the ages.

5. Wisdom from hockey coaches during the Stanley Cup Playoffs:” You can’t fix stupid and you can’t teach fast.” Luckily I have tried to reduce contact with the stupid and I’m not in a hurry.

6. My friend, and uaa mfa alum, Don Rearden had to make a trailer for his website to promote his new novel, Raven’s Gift, set in post-apocalyptic Alaska. For this, he just drove around Bethel with the camera running. Bethel didn’t have to de dressed down to suggest the scene of some mass tragedy.

View the trailer here:

http://www.donrearden.com/

7. From Pamela Kearney, author of The Sunflower Wife, a line from writer John Dufresne “If you don’t write today, you will be diminished.” (I don’t think blogging counts; it doesn’t for me, anyway.)

8. From Sam Sacks homage to Pauline Kael:

“Kael’s most memorable writing came during the Nixon years (I think that Deeper into Movies, which collects the New Yorker pieces between 1969 and 1972, is her best book). These were some of the worst years in America’s history, and Kael wrote with a passionate fervor against the national disillusionment that was saturating the culture.”

The point being that the specific years cited coincide with my high school years. And don’t think that our relative innocence shielded us from the disillusionment of which he accurately speaks.

Read the article here:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/second-glance-astonish-us/

9. I heard Carl Zimmer this week on the radio pimping his new book, Brain Cutting (electronic only, oh-oh!). He was talking about “default consciousness,” that is, how your brain continues to work even when you are not concentrating on anything at all. And I wondered if this is like dreaming, or speaking in tongues. I wondered if this is what “automatic writing” is. Or is this what has happened when you wake up in the morning an your writing takes an unpremeditated turn, one you couldn’t have predicted the night before (when you gave up)? Is this what is happening when a writer says that a book “wrote itself”? I suspect my default consciousness—the one I can’t direct—is smarter than I am. What is this “I” of which we speak, anyway?

Musical accompaniment to the last entry:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrqqf_electric-prunes-too-much-to-dream_music

10. Avalanches. I can think of five deaths off the top of my head that occurred in the last two weeks. Two in the Tetons, two in the Sierra, and one on the Root Canal Glacier in the AK Range–all places I have climbed. Sometimes, the only way to have prevented such deaths is simply to have never left the house. Which is unacceptable. Condolences to their loved ones. Be careful out there my friends.

Note: the opening photo of Jewel Lake was taken last night at 10:30 p.m. This morning the ice was gone.

In which I argue with the Bookslut

2011-04-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

When Henry James minted the phrase “loose baggy monsters” he was referring to 19th century Russian novels. Which ironically, are less loose and baggy than most of his own work, The Golden Bowl, for example. But “loose baggy monsters" really best describes some blog entries (my own included), which being not subject to any editorial (or generally renumerative) forces, are free to wander all over the place. Such is the case of Jessa Crispin’s recent column in The Smart Set (she's the book slut, apparently, of Bookslut).

Whole article here: http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article03301101.aspx

Reading a loose baggy monster puts a lot of pressure on the reader to ferret out what’s interesting. But mostly a loose baggy monster will just send a reader to another link, or, optimistically speaking, to a physical text.

Crispin’s “A Sea of Words” is about a lot of things, among them: a complaint that there are too many books, a snarky review of Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness, as well as various books about writing, a complaint about the MFA degree, a complaint that people don’t read enough, a complaint against the work of writers who have an MFA.

It’s a depressing damned piece of writing. Why do I respond at all? Unfortunately the truth within it compels me to weigh in on her more ludicrous statements.

Her first paragraph is absolutely sobering: she lives in Berlin where she receives 30 books a week, unbidden, for review. Down from 15—30 per day. “Now,” she says, “they have landed here with a clip-art book cover, a cheap binding, and a $12.00 stamp to send it to critic who doesn’t even review fiction anymore.”

I return often to this line from Walden, usually in reference to some undertaking of my own: “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?”

In fact: I myself had been looking at clip art for an idea I had for a cover of one of my own books. When I read that line, I felt that I recognized my own desperation. And I didn't like it. I hereby renounce desperation.

Further on Crispin observes:

“The books disappear as quickly as they are released, unable to cut through all the noise. And there are those that might not even bother anymore. Does one dare to raise one’s voice above the commotion, try to draw some attention away from those taking up the spotlight? Who gets in that rarified space is still determined by the writer’s gender, connections, beauty, nepotism, youth, or “platform.” Not even the most idealistic among the cultural critics bother to argue that the system is merit-based.”

(Well, Prufrock may not have dared, but it's a rhetorical question and the answer is "yes.")

Thinking about it, that’s an interesting, and sort of uneven, list. Gender–we’re given (although some even mess around with that); connections–well, actually you make those yourself; beauty–yeah, it probably helps, I wouldn’t know; nepotism–see connections; youth–arguable; “platform”—completely self-determined. I think her list is not so depressing as she is (to paraphrase Thoreau again).
.
But it is definitely true that the system is not merit-based. Yet by complaining about this she is implying that it was merit-based at some earlier un-debased time. Not. Same as it ever was.

Nonetheless, talk about an example of a bestseller not being merit based: when I learned (i.e. became obsessed with) the Greg Mortenson fiasco, all I could dwell on was the fact that his donation financed non-profit spent 1.75 million in the year 2009 promoting his book Three Cups of Tea. Oh! So that’s how you stay on the NYT bestseller list for over four years. Now I get it. (The pisser is that the profits of the book went to GM himself, not to the non-profit. Oy, what a mess!)

I won’t comment here on what Crispin actually says about the books she purports to be reviewing, except to say, she’s probably right about them.

I am moving to the red cape she has waved in my face. I must charge. “ . . . because everyone is now invited to be a writer we have an industry built up to teach writing to the masses. I’m not alone in thinking of the MFA industry as predatory.”

First, of all: she can’t really be aware of how elitist that first part sounds, can she? Secondly, “predatory?” Please. She seems to base this on unstated assumptions about what an MFA “promises” its students. Her assumptions, whatever they might be, are wrong.

We don’t promise publication, or employment. We only promise to improve a students’ writing as much as it can be improved in whatever amount of time it takes to get the degree. Fuzzy, I know. But that’s the “contract.”

Furthermore, I would like to point out that basically MFA degrees are only predatory in the way that any university humanities program is predatory. Does she really think less literacy is a preferable state of affairs?

She makes me laugh (with her, this time) when she asks, “what could the appeal possibly be? Writers are the social embarrassment in our culture, generally portrayed on television and in movies as sexually hapless, overweight, balding, constipated bores who can’t dress themselves properly.”

That cracked me up, although I have absolutely no idea to what portrayals she refers.

She concludes: “Those taking their money [MFA programs, presumably] probably aren’t going to do much to question their motives, or clue them in on all the other ways to go about things.”

And that’s where I think she exactly does not know of which she speaks. We do exactly what she thinks we don’t.

Dear Jessa, we are sorry you’re depressed. Why don’t you take break from your blog and read a book for pleasure. Or get way from language for a while (even though watching television and movies don’t seem to be working for you either). It’s spring in Berlin, right? Get out of that apartment, take a walk, it might do you some good. Peace--ds

"I am a strange trio": Shields, Hofstadter, and de Chardin

2011-04-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

Secret Practice

from David Shields: The culture disseminates greater and greater access to the technology that creates various forms of media. The “ordinary” person’s cult of celebrity is nurtured by these new modes of communication and presentation and representation. We’re all secretly practicing for when we, too, will join the ranks of the celebrated. There used to be a monopoly on the resources of exposure. The rising sophistication of the nonexpert in combination with the sensory overload of the culture makes reality-based and self-reflexive art appealing now. There are little cracks in the wall, and all of us “ordinary people are pushing through like water or, perhaps, weeds.

Commentary regarding secret practice: When we were seniors in high school, we won our league title in football; actually, I think we “won” the tiebreaker. The prize for this was a game in the Catholic League Playoffs against, a powerhouse school four or five times the size of ours. During the week of preparation for the game, which would be sort of close at halftime, but not for much longer, the coaches devised a plan whereby the team would load up from the locker room into a gigantic Awry’s bread truck and be driven to a secret practice facility. Thereby, eluding Brother Rice’s spies (real? wishfully imagined?) who would be staking out our practices at Ford Field. It was a strange exercise, but it helped us to believe that Brother Rice had something to fear in us (they probably didn’t) and, indeed, for a week, we were oddly “celebrated.” A few days later, our senior year of football would end and we would taper off to June, trying to ignore the likelihood of being drafted to serve in Viet Nam.

Commentary number two, concerning the ordinary person’s cult of celebrity: mountaineering. Ordinary people climb Everest now, which sort of defeats the purpose. If you can pay the $65,000 guide fee, and you are fit, and the weather is okay, and you don’t succumb to edema, pulmonary or cerebral, you can climb Everest, with all the others who are able to manage these criteria. The primary hurdle would seem to be cash, which, back when climbing Everest meant something other than what it means now, was not in and of itself the primary criterion.

Kilimanjaro, is somewhat worse in a way. It is relatively high, over 19,000 feet and must, by local law, be guided. It is often done by non-climbers. Esquire magazine, just this month, has included an article about an everyman’s ascent of Kilimanjaro, editorially forgetting that they published almost the exact same article on the topic about five years ago. I’m not speaking to actual people , friends of mine even who have done, or aspire to do the actual climb. I’m speaking to its symbolic value, which must necessarily shrink, as more people ascend, as, in fact, the fabled snows melt away under the magnifying glass of global warming.

Anyway, I thought the point was to be a climber, not to “have climbed Everest. Or Kilimanjaro, or whatever.

I am a paradoxical level crossing feedback loop

From Douglas Hofstadter: And yet when I say “strange loop,” I have something else in mind—a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by “strange loop” is––and here goes, a first stab, anyway—not a physical circuit, but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.

Commentary on loopiness: Well, T.S. Eliot beat Hofstadter to this concept by about seventy years in the Four Quartets, particularly the oft-quoted lines from "Little Gidding" (although it’s conceptually present from the very first (obscure) lines of "Burnt Norton":

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I was thinking of the strange loop effect last weekend as I topped out on Peak Three for the third time in three weeks—I am strange loop, I thought, and here I am back on top of Peak Three and it’s always new, the experience always fresh. I am never bored. I always enjoy, as Emerson had it, “a perfect exhilaration.” There is this here-I-am-on-the-summit feeling, where I always am.

Everything that Rises Must Converge

From Teilhard de Chardin: Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

Commentary on rising and converging: Flannery O’Connor is amazing, as I was reminded again last week on reading “Everything that Rises Must Converge” for the uncountable-eth time.

Consider her on the sentence level:

The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.

This, I fear is the site of the convergence to which she alludes: may we decline the invitation? Thank you very much all the same.

I can never disentangle her religion, her illness, and her early death from her writing and in fact Everything that Rises Must Converge (the book) was published in 1965, just after her death (the same year Eliot died, though the span of his life was, of course, much greater). I was shocked to learn that O’Connor’s mother died in 1997. Her writing lives in that timeless space occupied by the kind of Truth reserved for classic stature.

Even though she took her title from Teilhard de Chardin and even though he was a Jesuit theologian (although censured) and she a devout Catholic (why is it, by the way, that the word devout is hitched almost exclusively to Catholic?) it is impossible she did not mean her title ironically. For de Chardin it seems a literal joyous vision, for O’ Connor, the rising is more of a “leveling,” the point of convergence, is rather . . . uh, low. O’ Connor’s Catholicism and the subject of her writings have always seemed somewhat perplexing, if not disconnected.

I think de Chardin did not quite take note of (conveniently ignores?) the fact that not everyone rises, a fact which O’Connor can never forget. We recognize, live in, O’Connor’s world, but aspire to the dream world of de Chardin in which mankind is the collective Christ (was he censured for fuzziness?).

Now, in the new electronic leveling, in which everyperson has an equal voice, everyperson a celebrity (and not just in the Warholian 15-minute sense), in which every moment is both the beginning and the end, we most definitely have convergence, but who wants it on the terms it offers itself?

On David Shields' Manifesto

2011-03-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

This is the NYTBR mini-description of the new paperback edition of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: “Comprising 618 numbered fragments–more than half drawn from other sources–Shields’ spirited polemic argues that our deep need for reality is not being met by the old and crumbling models of literature. The book itself is an example of what the author calls “recombinant” art: appropriated, adapted, and remixed to crate new meaning.”

That’s a mostly accurate description. More precisely: he is bored by linearity and plot. Although he eschews fiction in one breath, in another he wishes to acknowledge that once it’s on the page it’s all fiction, and, in fact, though he enjoys playing the curmudgeon, there is much he loves about literature. This list from his website is basically drawn from the book:

http://www.davidshields.com/blog/index.html

Go to the “Very Partial Reading List” link. It’s a terrific list.

I could, I fear, write a long essay concerning the very conflicted feelings that the book engendered in me. I find that I love arguing with it, and true, to my fashion, tend to question my arguments.

Those last two sentences describe exactly how I feel about this book. And yet, these sentences are not mine (but Shields would say they, in fact, are mine). They are Shields’ words, from fragment 586. However I present them exactly as Shields presents the thoughts or works of others, that is: unattributed and lacking quotation marks. At the end of the book, at the insistence of his publishers (he says) is a vague list of sources. (I found myself turning back to it compulsively and often, although Shields claims he really wishes we readers wouldn’t do that).

My only real complaint is that his debt to David Markson is, I think, much much greater than he lets on. Markson deserves better. But I suppose he would say that Markson had his sources, too: Nietzsche, for example.

Despite, as the NYTBR claims, only about half the work is actually fresh to Shields, I have to admit, he holds his own among the luminaries he unattributes. No small thing, believe me.
An example (of the Shields within Shields, from #455):

“The entire play is the Hamlet Show, functioning as a vehicle for Hamlet to give his opinion on everything and anything, as Nietzsche does in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And then, down a few lines, this parenthetical observation: “(Melville’s marginal comment on one of the soliloquies in the play: ‘Here is forcibly shown the great Montaigneness of Hamlet.’)”

This leads to Shields’ very interesting conjecture that Hamlet is killed to fulfill the needs of the plot, otherwise he could go on talking forever (except, of course, for the plot of Shakepeare’s life which due to his presumed humanness would have to end and thus end the outpouring of words from Hamlet’s mouth). Oh, but wait, “reality” doesn’t have plots, according to DS (the other DS).

But the point that strikes me here is this: what a lovely chain! If we “straighten it out, chronologically (oh no! linearity!):

Montaigne
Shakespeare
Hamlet
Melville
Nietzsche
Zarathustra
Shields
Me (and Shields’ other readers)
You (that’s, like, three people)

(Into this scheme, insert arrows, most downwards etc)

Melville sees Montaigne in Shakespeare; Shields sees Nietzsche in Shakespeare: not chronological, of course. This reminds me of Nietzsche’s reversal of cause and effect: we know the pin has pricked our finger because we feel the pain, thus we move from effect to cause.

In any case, Montaigne is hardly the Big Bang, right? Montaigne has his influences, too.

Thus we are all links in the metonymic chain.

So, these are my thoughts on one of the 618 fragments. And I have one more anecdote (for now) concerning this book. I was reading this interview by Caleb Powell conducted with Shields on The Rumpus:

http://therumpus.net/2011/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-david-shields-paperback-edition/

Shields comes across as a bit prickly, and Powell has an axe to grind with the book, yet the interview did nothing if not convince me that I had to get a hold of the book as soon as possible. I went to Amazon, saw all the books in my “cart” that I haven’t yet been able to convince myself to buy and got depressed. I allowed the “cart” to defeat me.

No less than a half hour later, the mail came to my office and I had to sign for a package. It was an unbidden examination copy of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, sent with compliments of the publisher. As Shields would say, this is a better story for the fact that is true; anyone could have make it up. It’s only interesting because it happened.

AWP 2011, an itemized list

2011-02-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

1. Walking a nearly deserted sidewalk near the Washington Monument a day before the conference starts, a man approaches and asks, “Are you here for AWP?” Wasn’t aware we were attired in AWP uniforms.

2. Lunch at Kramerbooks. I see a man who looks like Maurice, a chef I worked with in Salt Lake City in a former life. So much so that when he leaves I approach and ask, “Are you Maurice?” No, he’s not, he’s Eugene.

3. Reminded, at the Sackler, that I love the books section of museum gift shops, buying a copy of Lena Herzog’s photo essay on pilgrimage to Mt Kailais.

4. Judith Barrington, Nancy Lord, Valerie Miner, Sherry Simpson and friends discuss the narrative stance in memoir, or “the glory of an achieved persona” (Gornick) to a sitting-in-the-aisles crowd of devotees. Once again reminded how lucky we are at UAA to be surrounded by such brilliance.

5. Out of the rain and into happy hour at the Russia House: Baltica # 5 served in clear 20 ounce bottles and a large bowl of borsch served by a beautiful short-skirted over-powdered young Russian woman.

6. At the book fair I’m talking with a guy at the Cutbank table remembering I have had a piece there for a long time, mentioning it to him. When I check my email that night the piece has been rejected.

7. I meet Julie Paegle whose time at Utah did not quite overlap with mine. However, she was briefly married to a good friend of mine who now lives in Fairbanks. Her lovely book of poetry, Torch Song Tango Choir recently published to wide, and well-deserved, acclaim.

8. Do we or do we not teach the books we most love? Brock Clark reminds us that Denis Johnson wept when students did not like the book he most loved: Under the Volcano.

9. The Department of Education has enacted a law making it difficult to “deliver off campus instruction across state lines.” This educational Mann Act comes from the “Office of Integrity.”

10. Michael McGurl, author of a somewhat controversial book of scholarship on the rise of creative writing programs describes himself as a “museless pedant.” Also: the NY Times as “idiots” and acknowledges what we all know: that “there is a sadly limited amount of attention for writing today.”

11. What does it mean that the average age of the persons in the 500 vendor book fair is about 27? Or, more tellingly: what does it mean that almost no one in the room makes an actual living from writing, editing, or publishing?

12. Dana Gioia says that if Rilke wrote a grocery list it would be seraphic. And notes that John Haines writes in that same tradition.

13. I saw three of my former WIU students, two finishing PhD programs this year and one just starting after his MFA. Praying that I played a not-very-large role in their career decisions.

14. When I see at the book fair, other magazines where I have work out: Dzanc and Orion, I don’t mention this fact. And, I re-meet Eugene-not-Maurice, who turns out to be a poet from San Francisco currently exiled to the Midwest.

15. Michael Griffith leads a conversation, asking what sorts of literary ambition leads to awards? Three smart, passionate and generous people speak about the books they love: Brock Clark on Henderson the Rain King, Steve Almond on Mrs. Bridge, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum on Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. What is good about the good? Is there a better question to ask?

16. Sitting at the bar at the Tabard Inn watching the bartender, Chantal Tseung, gracefully mix two different drinks simultaneously. Drinking a glass of Laphroaig. I feel distant from everyday life.

Just Kids: some thoughts on Patti Smith

2010-12-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

I was interested in reading Just Kids when I read the earliest review, then, a little more so after the book won the National Book Award in nonfiction. And then even more so, when the title did not appear on the New York Times list of 50 notable nonfiction books of the year, and a tad more, when it did not appear on Time magazine’s list of the ten best works of nonfiction of 2010.

I wanted to know why one group of judges loved it and others ignored it, or seemed to. Of course, award winners are not always the books that are loved, sometimes they are just hated the least, collectively speaking, by a panel of readers. As William Gass once said of the Pulitzer: “ . . .the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second."

First, I should say that I found the book compelling: I read it over a couple days. But what was compelling about it? I wonder if the answer to that says more about me, or about the book? I like the portrait of the time and place. The time is almost mine, just as Smith herself just missed the times of some of the more glamorous names of the era. The place, New York, was never mine, yet I went West the way others of Smith’s moment flocked eastward.

I liked how utterly nonmaterialistic they (she and Robert Mapplethorpe) were. And how that didn’t really matter because they had their eyes on a higher prize. Where I found it most interesting was how little they knew, either of them, what that higher prize might be (more on this later).

Before I go any farther it occurs to me that I should describe what the book is: a memoir of a friendship between Smith and Mapplethorpe in the sixties in New York, before they became the counter-cultural icons (which basically turns out to be merely cultural [no counter]): Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. The book is supposed to be a tribute to that friendship, a kind of fulfillment of a deathbed promise she made to Mapplethorpe, who died young in 1988. As such, it does not attempt to be a complete memoir—much more a coming of age story.

The odd thing about the book as a memoir of a friendship is that there was a long gap in the story between the time both characters found their fame and when Mapplethorpe dies. I have to say that I somewhat understood this: friendships from that intense era of life, the starting out, retain a vitality and disproportion that seems impervious to time and space. I can buy that.

I have seen Smith accused of name-dropping. Well, sort of. But those were the names of the moment. Some were passing encounters, Hendrix, for example, whom she literally passes in a stairwell. Kind of impersonal. I believe it happened and that it was important to her, but a bit odd, a kind of I-was-in-the-elevator-with-Jerry Garcia kind of moment. But then, she’s “just kids.” Just like you and me. Indeed, she didn’t know Jim Morrison, her moment followed his, shortly. She visited his gravesite at Pere Lachaise. hey, me, too. Just kids.

Her description of her affair with Sam Shepherd was a bit implausible—she didn’t know he was Sam Shepherd, for a long time. Uh, okay, but . . . really?

Drugs. Other people take them, but she doesn’t. Then, after a while, maybe, she does. I almost had the feeling that she was thinking of her children as readers when she wrote the book. There are deaths, but there’s also a form of sanitization in the shape of recall she exercises here. But, why not? All of our memories are selective.

I had a couple more qualms, but these aren’t dealbreakers either. One, as a portrait of an artist it’s a bit thin. The first chapter, the dreamy childhood, the books, the longing to be elsewhere: pretty basic. Familiar. It’s little alarming to me that this desire to be an artist prefigures a genre or any real art-making. In this way artistry and celebrity are merged. She has drive and she achieves both–artistry and celebrity–but she achieves them simultaneously. And there’s something that makes me nervous about that–mostly, I suppose, it's that I see a lot of that, and it usually doesn't work out very well. I trust those who want to make art infinitely more than I trust those who want to become artists. I believe in the difference, though it can, as it did for Smith, even out in the end.

She mentions her devotion to Rimbaud. Repeatedly. But, I have to say, and here I sound like an academic (forgive me!) but there’s no real evidence that she has understood Rimbaud, except as kind of cult figure, the kind she hopes, in fact, to become. But wait! This isn’t a damned academic thesis–does she have to account for Rimbaud? Good question. I’m not sure, but I wish she had. Frankly, I wasn’t convinced she necessarily knew anything of Rimbaud. He had become for her a name, in the way Tennyson’s Ulysses becomes to himself. But then, she isn’t trying to prove that, and why should she? The subtitle of the book could be “Sweetness and Dreamtime in the Chelsea.” And that’s fine.

No memoir is complete, particularly when it has no such intention. She defines her own limits here. Let me put it this way: when she writes another book of prose, I’ll read it. But she may well not write another book of prose. Will this one suffice? Yes.

Seven Summits

2010-12-04T17:55:00.000-08:00

The point of lists is to take them under advisement and then make our own.

Okay, I’m breaking Dr. Schiff’s numero uno rule for a successful blog, by shifting topics, which thus far had been literary. But if the general theme were enlarged only slightly to passions, then, mountaineering is clearly on topic. The traditional Seven Summits list is comprised of the highest points on each of the seven continents. Done many times since first accomplished by Dick Bass, it’s become, well, a tad unimaginative at this point.

I decided to construct my own Seven Summits list, now, as I enter my fortieth year of climbing. Only Kennedy and Alpamayo were givens: top two, hands down. The others had to be culled from hundreds of outings. Hard to do.

The emboldened phrase that follows the entry is the at-a-glance note I made to myself as I put the list together. I’ve enlarged the descriptions to try to articulate why these have somehow become so memorable.

1975 Mt Stuart, North Ridge, North Cascades, Washington, partner John McInerney

An exponential leap forward, an unplanned extra night out, ice cold beer in the stream at the car, a gigantic elk in the middle of the road. Later, Steck & Roper would anoint this one of the Fifty Classic Climbs in North America. (I think I’ve done about ten of them, yet this one, accomplished before their list existed, is the only climb I’ve put on my list).

1977 Mt Kennedy, North Ridge, St Elias Range, partners: Scott Baker, Terry Boley, Jack Lewis, Alan Millar.

Another exponential leap forward (exponentially more exponential than the last entry!) 35 days in the range, in and out on skis, probable first over a pass, great friends, every day a gift. This was the second ascent. The third would wait about 25 years. It’s probably very much due to this trip, so many years ago, that I now live in Alaska.

1980 Tour Ronde, French Alps, with John McInerney

Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, starts with an illegal bivvy at the top of the Aiguille du Midi, then a night at the sublime Col de Forche hut. An early morning rappel from the hut to the Brenva Glacier, a long retreat, culminating in an esoteric ascent of the Tour Ronde from an obscure hardly-ever-climbed (if ever) ridge, and a dead man’s walk back up to the Aiguille du Midi. Unbelievable.

1984 Alpamayo, Cordillera Blanca, Peru, with Jim Lucke

High, remote, hard, the north ridge, reached from a high camp at the Quitaraju/Alpamayo col and then a long scary traverse under the famous southwest face. Another remote bivvy miles from nowhere at the base of the ridge. The third north ridge on this list, I now notice.

1990 The Snaz, Tetons, with Tom Huckin

Long, sustained, historic. Stands in for a lot of climbs in the Tetons, Wasatch, and even the Wind Rivers. Death Canyon: bear scat and elk herds. A long day, starting and ending in the dark. Midnight steak and a longneck beer at Tom’s sister’s house. First ascent by Chouinard and Hempel. Just before this climb we learned Aisha was pregnant with Dougal and somehow carrying that knowledge weighted the event.

1999 Hobbit Book, Tuolumne Meadows, with Jim Pinter-Lucke

Great, but also carries a huge symbolic weight as the only Sierra/Yosemite climb on list, (out of dozens and dozens of them, many great). Tuolumne is special, the route is just far enough off the beaten path so that it feels alpine and remote, even though it really isn’t. It’s runout, and just . . . cool.

2007 Cima Grande de Lavaredo, Dolomites, with John McInerney

Just freakin’ cool, (use of the word cool is kind of like giving up; translated: I can't really describe it.) One of the justifiably famous three Towers of the Lavaredo. Not a perfect day weather-wise, but wild and adventurous, in a most amazing setting. I suppose that having been weathered off the Eiger (no, not the north face) made our unplanned excursion to the Dolomites just feel like luck had unexpectedly turned our way.

~~~~~~~~

I remember once, in my naiveté, asking the novelist David Kranes what was the favorite of his books. He laughed, very good-naturedly, and said that the answer to that question is always the last one. By that criteria, my last climb of any stature was in 2009—Italy’s Boot just above the Pika Glacier in the Alaska Range with James Chesher (see photo).

Or maybe the seventh position, the last on the list, should be always left blank, in anticipation of the next grand adventure.

List Readers, List Makers

2010-11-27T12:28:00.000-08:00

If you’ve read any of these blog entries you are already aware that I’m a big fan of lists, probably because, like writing on this blog, list-making is a form of writing that’s just another form of not-writing, procrastination, a thing I put between myself and the real work.

I’m writing now in praise of the New York Times list of notable books of the year. In a year in which half the internet articles I read are about the “end of publishing,” which is nearly the same argument as the death of the novel that we’ve been hearing about for about fifty years, which is nearly the same as Nietzche’s famous utterance about God, the point being: Hello? None of these things are dead. The other half of the internet stuff I read, by the way, is devoted to arguing that MFA programs are “ponzi schemes,” or some variation thereof. Tired stuff.

Okay, The Times list: it’s wonderful. Terrific books were published in 2010. The only two of the one hundred listed that I read were The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell and The Same River Twice by Ted Mooney. Both are writers whose work I have always loved and both were completely absorbing. The Mitchell was astonishingly good. Every page was a work of art.

I do plan to read the new Franzen and the list reminds me that I want to read Jennifer Egan’s, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The list also exposes gaps in my review reading; I missed even knowing about Charles Yu’s How to Live in Science Fictional Universe and David Goodwillie’s American Subversive. And, Per Patterson is on the list with a new book, reminding me to read his earlier Out Stealing Horses first. Ditto: Nicole Krauss: read her first one, then this new one, Great House. Anthony Doerr has a new book, too. Antonya Nelson. It’s hard to keep up.

Only two of the books feature Nazis; three are set in the Viet Nam war.

It’s interesting that poetry and fiction are here linked together in the same list, when poetry is often (wrongly) presumed to be a form of nonfiction. I suppose it’s an aesthetic linking, but that’s not right either, is it? That presumes nonfiction is less artful than fiction and that’s not always the case. So, there are among the fifty fiction and poetry selections: three poetry titles. Three. And since two of them are Edward Hirsch and Derek Walcott, both of whom are already institutions unto themselves, I will keep a sharp eye out for the third, Lisa Robertson, of whom I’ve never heard whose book is engagingly titled Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip.

In the nonfiction list: lots to be interested in. I probably won’t read the Rebecca Skloot: it feels so slickly “packaged,” I have the impression, somehow, that “the fix is in.” My loss, probably. I’ve also decided to not read Keith Richards' book, even though I’m curious. I read a terrific review of it in Dan Nadel‘s culture blog in the Paris Review Daily Blog. In a couple sentence summary, he’s convinced me to instead read Jimmy McDonough’s book about Neil Young, Shakey.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/11/23/a-week-in-culture-dan-nadel-publisher/

Nadel, by the way, is completely engaging in these “reports.” And I had never even heard of him before.

It’s a curious omission that in the list of fifty nonfiction books, Patti Smith’s, Just Kids can’t make the cut, even though it won the National Book Award.

For a list of lists. Check out:

http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2010/11/online_best_boo_17.html

The largeheartedboy seems not to identify himself any more specifically on his blog.

Finally, I find the list very heartening, and yet another thing for which I am thankful, even though it omitted Solomon's Oak, by Jo-Ann Mapson, one of the best books I read in 2010.

Literature, books, publishing are all wildly alive. As ever.

(Bonus video for those who scrolled down this far!)

Notes on: "Overnight Sensations and 'You Can’t Hurry Love'"

2010-11-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

“Overnight Sensations and “You Can’t Hurry Love” was the slapdash title of a talk I gave to the Alaska Writers Guild last week. My original intention was to turn the whole talk into a posting here, and perhaps I will do that yet, only it would be about four postings. The title refers first to that feeling we sometimes have (if I may presume a collective we, thank-you) when some unknown person, often young, becomes famous, overnight (as it were). On closer look, I have noticed that almost none of them acquired their fame (fleeting anyway, right?) overnight, but were often extraordinary people , working quietly in the trenches. Sometimes, of course, luck is involved, but luck is usually earned, too. The second half of my title “You Can’t Hurry Love” has simply been a writing mantra of mine for years and it comes to me from my adolescence in Detroit, from Diana Ross and the Supremes. It means a piece of writing is going to take you as long as you need to take to get it right. It will unfold in its own time, if you work steadily at it. Those were the two touchstones of the talk, which was then peppered liberally with historical literary examples in support, such as this line from Jim Harrison's introduction to the paintings of his friend, Russell Chatham: "To be an artist is to be a member of a ten-thousand-year old guild, not a competitor in a horse race." I've always taken that line to heart, notwithstanding that Harrison seems now to be writing a book almost yearly.

I suppose, if the talk had a subtitle it would have been something like, “A rationalization (confession) for why I work so damned slowly.” I’m a little over it now, the talk.

What I wanted to say here was something about the way I was introduced at the talk. Dave Brown, who did the introduction, asked, very reasonably, who are my favorite writers. Why is it that I am always surprised by that most logical of questions? And that I never want to commit an answer to it? I told him I would be likely to answer that question differently every time I was asked.

But when I thought more about it, I decided that the criteria ought to be the same for the answer to this question: “Which writers do I own very book they’ve written? Which ones do I go out and buy immediately? To how many am I thusly devoted?”

And so I answered him: Jim Harrison, David Mitchell, and Kem Nunn. And, without elaboration, now, I can stand by those three. Some time later I realized that, by that criteria, there are at least twenty more writers on the list. Some of the books I have not read, but intend to do so. When W. G. Sebald died, for example, I stopped reading him. I wanted to parcel out his unread works to myself over time, knowing that their number is fixed. I have all of Richard Powers books, and have been “collecting” them from the very beginning of his career. But I confess that I have only read the two most recent, The Echo Maker and Generosity. I loved them as I somehow knew I would. Now, I have only to decide in what order to read the remaining volumes.

What unread book would I most regret not having read, were that to be my last thought as I die? I have to figure that out now and read that book next. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Summer Reading: Yet Another Exercise in Wretched Excess

2010-09-14T12:49:00.000-07:00

In the photograph are the books I returned home with after my very long road trip. By “very long” I mean to be deliberately vague—many days, many miles. The whole question of how many books one should take on a trip is now a little bit complicated by the weight limits at airline baggage counters. Obviously minimalism is a sound practice. However, this trip only started by air; I ended on the road.

There’s also the general question of reading while you travel. It’s a little odd, since traveling and reading shared some commonalities. Reading is already a form of travel, after all. As I have previously admitted here, and as everyone who knows me knows, I have “book issues.” They are central to my life. Here’s what I ended up with on this excursion:

Top shelf: I packed these in my luggage.

1. I’d been waiting all summer to read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet, by David Mitchell. He’s one of that small handful of writers whose books I buy as soon as they are published. Reading it, on the coast of Oregon, local hand-crafted IPA in hand, was a sublime experience.

2. I had to bring Selected Alpine Climbs in the Canadian Rockies, by Sean Dougherty for the last leg of the trip. Also: one of my very favorite dream guidebooks.

3. Banff Area Rock Climbs, Murray Toft is a small paperback that came out in 1981. I find it useful. Also, it’s kind of rare and unknown, so using it I feel like I have secret knowledge.

Next Shelf: I began acquiring these along the way.

4. McMenamin’s Edgefield: a History of the Multnomah County Poor Farm, by Sharon Nesbit. Had to have this. Edgefield is the site of a large McMenamin’s hotel/brewery/distillery/concert grounds, with a heavy Jerry Garcia theme throughout. Once a proverbial poorhouse, we stayed here after our hike at Three Cornered Rock. This is the proverbial poorhouse that my parents warned me about. Now, the poorhouse is no more. Instead we have the homeless.

5. Paris Review. This one has the David Mitchell interview. Most impressive are his drawings and outlinings—a nice companion piece to the novel, as if, the novels themselves are not evidence enough of his genius.

6. Tapping the Source, by Kem Nunn. I bought this, the British paperback edition, for my son Macklin to read, but I read it first even though I’ve already read it two or three times before. Still one of the most amazing first novels ever. Macklin liked it too. Now I can steal my first edition back from him. The British edition, by the way, had a wildly inappropriate cover, yet had thick creamy paper.

7. My friend Bernie Wood, bibliophile and esquire, and who we visited in Astoria (Oregon) gave me a couple climbing books: Terris Moore’s Mt McKinley: The Pioneer Climbs—which is interesting because Moore made the first ascent of Mt Sanford in the Wrangells with Bradford Washburn and I had just begun to be interested in that climb; and 8) My Life of High Adventure by Grant H. Pearson, a little known book about another early McKinley climb. I think at least one other book has that exact same title and it’s the invisible subtitle to a couple hundred others. Bernie watches out for me when he haunts the bookshops and yard sales. Glad to have both books.

Third Shelf (by the way these are arranged roughly chronologically, as I acquired them):

9) In Chicago, Jeff Schiff highly recommended Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, so I picked it up at Union Station buried amid the stacks of Steig Larson. I probably didn’t like it as much as Jeff (a native New Yorker--and that's central here) or as much as the National Book Award Committee who selected it. Lots to admire, though.

Visiting Tama Baldwin and John Mann in Iowa City, I spied a copy of 10) Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link in the Haunted Bookstore—now relocated to Linn St. I loved her Stranger Things Happen and I really love her story “Stone Animals,” collected in this one. It’s a pristine hardcover, inscribed by Link herself. On the downside, the house in which it had been unread was inhabited by heavy smokers.

Tama put two books in my hand as I left: 11) Orphans, by Charles D’Ambrosio. These are essays and they are incredible. Also, a gorgeous book published by a probably short-lived subscription press, Clear- Cut Press. No one writes essays like D’Ambrosio. As it turns out this is a rare book and I’ll have to send Tama a reciprocal tome. Also, she gave me an extra copy of 12) Per Patterson’s Out Stealing Horses. I’m sure it’s fine—many reliable persons have recommended it.

14) Bozeman Rock Climbs, by Bill Dockins. Peter Cole had a copy of this and lent it to me. We used it in Hyalite Canyon on the nicest weather day of the whole road trip, a day of rock climbing in the sun, on which Macklin had carried his guitar up the approach. I left my camera in the car that day. We finished the afternoon at the hot springs and later with bottles of Fat Tire.

So that’s it, 14 books. Unless movies count. Macklin picked up a copy of Snatch on the theory that a man should never travel without a Guy Ritchie movie. I also picked up a map of the Banff area, which cost the same as a book. Oh yeah, and a couple Canadian magazines at Mac’s Fireweed Bookstore in Whitehorse, a great shop. Whew.

And if you have the space you can stop by your old house, 4,500 miles from your new house, to find that the strangers who live there have taken down a cupboard of the wall. So you grab the cupboard, put the books in it and drive it back home to Anchorage.

Of Cranky Lists and Listing Cranks

2010-08-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

When I posted a link on Facebook to Anis Shivani’s Huffington Post piece on the "15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers'" www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-15-most-overrated-con_b_672974.html, I worried a bit about the karmic chain: how would such a reiteration return to bite me in the ass? Let’s remember that the purpose of any such list ought to be to, essentially, for us to disagree, and to make our own lists. Most of us, however, will chose, to make positive lists: favorites, or underrated writers, such as Mr. Shivani himself has promised but not yet released.

Two of Mr. Shivani’s points regarding MFA programs are very easily dismissed. For a wise and more measured dismissal than I will offer here, please see Bill Roorbach’s response here: http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/

Mr. Shivani says that MFA programs produce “cookie-cutter” writing. I’m not sure what this assertion is based on, but I think it’s similar to the argument that crops ups every so often against “New Yorker fiction.” There may have once been such a thing as “New Yorker fiction,” but presently the notion can easily be dispelled by picking up any four issues of the magazine and reading the fiction: much diversity there (oh I forgot, diversity as a value in fiction is not an aesthetic Mr. Shivani appreciates very much). But diversity abounds in MFA programs; I see it every day.

Mr. Shivani believes that imitation is an important pedagogical practice in MFA programs. It isn’t. Perhaps he is really talking about literary influence. In which case, I’m not sure how MFA students could be said to be unduly influenced by what they read. (Note to self: be influenced more by Nabokov.) That is: how are MFA writers more influenced by what they read than other writers? We are all consciously and unconsciously influenced by our reading. Mr. Shivani seems to think that MFA programs conspire to produce imitators. Please.

His other easily dismissed point about MFA programs also seems to suffer from some bizarre, if not paranoid, sense that MFA programs have incestuous ties to the publishing world. I’d love to know more! Where do I sign up? As Bill points out, the publishing world has bigger issues at the moment, mainly that it seems to be disappearing. This is not due to long-time non-existent collusion with MFA programs. More likely due to a long-time collusion with the almighty dollar.

The point that Mr. Shivani makes that I find most interesting, and, I admit, worrisome, is that somehow MFA programs have led to a loss of critical thinking and reading. I worry about how much we can do with a student’s course of study in a two or three year period in a program for which the single most important criteria for admission is writing ability. I have to remind myself that three years is not very long, that an MFA is not a PhD, and that like all hard-earned rewards, critical thinking and reading come from a life-long commitment. While Mr. Shivani claims that MFA programs have somehow contributed to the decline of critical thinking, in actuality this is yet another prong of his argument for which he himself has provided no evidence. And yet his own poor argumentative skills apparently were not learned in an MFA program.

Yet I sympathize with the view that we all really ought to read more and read with a more critical eye. Of course we do.

A few notes on his selections. I haven’t read many of them, so cannot comment. But I did wonder how much of their work Mr. Shivani himself had read. William Vollman's literary crime seems to be that he has written too much. For all his words, I’m not sure Vollman has enough readers to be overrated.

Vendler and Kakutani have too much power. Okay. The power pie probably ought to be sliced up differently. Big deal. Vendler is taken to task for championing Jorie Graham. And the fact that they are both presently at Harvard, Mr. Shivani implies, is . . . conspiratorial. (Note: Mr. Shivani claims some sort of connection to Harvard, but it’s very diplomatically written, so as to be nearly meaningless). But Shivani ought to know—Harvard affiliation or not–that Vendler’s appreciation for Graham’s work began before joined Harvard’s faculty full-time, and that Graham’s appointment there came much later. (Note to Mr. Shivani: this is how the world works. When you apply for a job, someone on the hiring committee must champion your value and convince other member of the committee of it.)

Mr. Shivani thinks Jonathan Safran Foer is overrated, more or less neglecting his brilliant first book, Everything is Illuminated, written when he was practically a teenager. His critique of Denis Johnson seems, again, ignorant of the work, and, okay I admit, I love Johnson’s work, and I guess that Harold Bloom is a moron for loving it also. Antonya Nelson? Hard-working, sharp-eyed, under-read Antonya Nelson? How can someone so undeservingly under-read make an overrated list? I don’t get it. Could it be that she lives in Houston, where Mr. Shivani lives, and deep down (though not too deeply) Mr. Shivani is simply jealous?

So, why did I post this article on my Facebook page? Well, it made me think. It alerted me to possible attacks on the MFA, an institution in which I believe. Work against whatever grain of truth those breathless assertions might contain. It’s good to be reminded there ought to be no sacred literary cows, eh? Surely some writers are indeed overrated, if not these, who? All he’s really said is: I don’t think these writers are as good as other people do. There’s no harm in saying that. He’s stirred the pot a bit, and let’s face it, that’s exactly what he was trying to do.

Read more. Think critically. Be better conversant in the literary conversation.

Welcome to the Dreamtime

2010-07-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

(A reconstruction of my welcome notes to the UAA MFA Summer Residency 2010, July 10, 2010)

Although I know that Jessica Graves (third-year nonfiction student) likes to refer to the residency as the “geekfest,” I tend to see it a tad differently. I’ve been thinking a lot about this residency and how the time spent here seems to operate according to a different set of rules than non-residency time, or ordinary life.

We are entering a kind of dreamtime.

Peter Weir’s 1977 film, The Last Wave, opens with these words of contextualization:
"Aboriginals believe in two forms of time; two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the 'dreamtime', more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. It was believed that some people of unusual spiritual powers had contact with the dreamtime."

Here we are in the dreamtime.

Robert Schumann, the 19th century German composer, made music that creates for its listeners a sense of delirious time. It is said that Schuman wrote all his music in a trance.

Writers and the peculiar kind of double life we live: the oft-repeated theory that story is always greater than the writer. Let me try to explain how that works.

You probably know persons who have been consumed by reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the other two extant books in the series. Or, more likely, you are such person yourself. I loved Charles McGrath’s article on Steig Larsson a few months ago in the Sunday NY Times magazine. As is now fairly well known, Larsson was a first time novelist who had stockpiled the three books before submitting them to a publisher. Before the first one came out Larsson died at the age of 52, without having learned what a worldwide publishing phenomenon his work was about to become.

What struck me most about the article was the disbelief a number of his friends possessed as to whether he actually wrote the books. They simply couldn’t believe that this guy, never a prose stylist, who had devoted his working life to writing about working class causes, was capable of such a tour de force as the books had become.

But something in me said that these people were exactly wrong. That, in fact, what Larsson had done is what the artist must do: he had transcended himself.

Throughout his work, Thoreau makes many observations about the doubled self, such as: “However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.” One way I have of making sense of this doubling is that one of these lives is the writing life. Even if the work is “mean,” i.e. average, it’s still better than we are.

My friend Dan Mancilla was teaching the great Stuart Dybek story “Hot Ice,” when a student, a freshman, observed that water in its liquid, frozen and gaseous states in “Hot Ice” represents the Holy Trinity. According to Dan she said it was so obvious that she was almost too embarrassed to voice it. Was she right? Of course, it’s obvious onceit's been pointed out (note: it’s not obvious). Did Dybek intend it? Doubtful. Dan will ask him soon, if he hasn’t already. But it works brilliantly with the story’s thematic concerns. What can we know, anyway, of writers’ intentions when they don’t voice them, when we don’t have them to ask? It’s art, it’s better than the writer.

Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse comes up with a somewhat puzzling diagram of the participants in “a narrative communication situation.” In between the “real author” and the narrator is the mysterious “implied author.” Of this implied author, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan say: “its relation to the real author is admitted to be of great psychological complexity and has rarely been analyzed except to suggest that implied authors are often far superior in intelligence and moral standards to the actual men and women who are real authors.”

I was reading a blog entry that Heather Lende (third-year fiction student) wrote describing a public reading of from her new book Take Care of the Garden and the Dogs. She describes this incredible moment of being moved by her own work in a way that she hadn’t been when she wrote the piece. Events had happened between writing the book and that reading that made her see her words in a new light. “Writing,” Heather said, “has a way of happening.”

Probably the most famous literary exercise on this is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Borges and I.” It begins: “It’s to the other man, to Borges, that things happen.” And in about 400 words, concludes, thusly: “Which of us is writing this page I don’t know.”

Now, as we enter the residency, the dreamtime, the trance, I am wishing for you the kind of happiness Henry James spoke of in Roderick Hudson:

“True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.”

And if true happiness must remain outside our grasp, I am at least, confident that we have set before us an absorbing errand.

(Illustration from René Daumal’s Mt. Analogue)

The Olivetti lettera 32

2010-06-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

Yet another material burden I relieved myself of when we moved was typewriters. I had two: an electric Brother, which was state-of the art on the eve of computer world-dominance. and even had a clumsy little memory. I also had a garage sale portable that I thought of as an objet-d’art.

I had previously jettisoned my rebuilt Remington on which I typed some of my undergraduate essays. It had a big dent in the carriage that I covered with an epigraph from Dylan’s Idiot Wind “Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts.” (Had I to do over I might choose from the same song: “You’re an idiot, babe, It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”) I plucked the letters off the keys with a pair of pliers before I let it go.

Last week I plucked an Olivetti lettera 32 out of the trash. Oh man, I always wanted one of these. (Would now be a good time to confess that I can’t even actually type? I can process words with two fingers, which is fine because I can do that about as fast as I think (in other words not very fast) and then revise the heck out of it).

An Olivetti lettera 32 is a beautiful machine. Cormac McCarthy typed every one of his novels on one and then auctioned his off for the startling price of $254,000. Then he bought another one, but in better condition. I read that he paid a little over 300 for it.

When I needed Eddie, the main character in my novel, to buy a typewriter in Mexico City 1974, he bought himself an Olivetti lettera 32. Thus, he owned one before I did. He could also type better than I can, though I don't think I mentioned this in the book.

Last week I was watching the film version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. And sure enough, when Tom forges letters on Dickie’s typewriter to provide a paper trail suggesting Dickie is alive (and not dead, at Tom’s hands) he types them on Dickie’s lettera 32. However, the lettera 32 was not produced until 1963 and The Talented Mr. Ripley is set in the late fifties. Thus the movie was sloppy and totally unrealistic. Just kidding, it’s a terrific film.

But 1963 was an auspicious year: it’s said that every war correspondent writing from Viet Nam did so on an Olivetti lettera 32.

I’m going to order some ribbons for it. Then, after the apocalypse, when the grid has collapsed and word processors can’t be powered up because everyone only has a tiny bit of power that they have to save so they can blend up a pitcher of margaritas, I’ll sit on an orange crate in the market typing up letters and legal documents for hire. I’ll do yours for free, so long as you’re not in a hurry.

Report from Kachemak Bay Writers Conference 1

2010-06-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

First: hats off to Carol Swartz and all, particularly the splendid Michael Cunningham, who set the tone, for three great days. I put the number one after my title to blackmail myself to write up more on the conference later. Meanwhile:

Why I Am Who I Am* (and also ***)

An exercise** prompted by Dinty W. Moore

My grandmother’s hands were strong; she needed them to be so to wrangle 50 pound sacks of flour in her bakery. When I think of the phrase “work your fingers to the bone,” I think of her hands.

And, then, of course, as I grew and she began to shrink, so did her hands. Her knuckles swelled and her veins rose to the surface. Liver spots.

She ended her days bedridden in a nursing home. There, my aunt painted her fingernails almost daily, a luxury she had not known in her working life.

By the time I was born, the Rouge had been polluted by a hundred years of sewage and industrial waste. Some days its odor rose up out of the woods like an invisible fog, a distinct odor, but of what? Sulphur, rotten gas, vague chemicals, dead fish, the bodies of carp rotting in evaporating pools where earlier in the spring the river had spilled over its banks. None of this quite captures the river’s peculiar foulness, which to us was natural: it was just the Rouge.

Rouge River
Asian Carp
Approaching thunderstorms
Felician nuns
Pagan babies
Humidity
Sputnik
Red peril
Bomb shelters
Homemade popsicles
Tornado warnings
Fire drills.

The modesty of my childhood might be measured by the relative tameness of the phrases we were forbidden by our parents to speak.

Considering them now, I see that they are really both saying the same thing:

“So what?”
and
“I don’t care.”

Ironically, “I don’t care” often meant something like “yes, but you decide,” or “yes, but I don’t wish to appear greedy.”

“So what?” was pure insolence, and was understood as if intended to make my father’s head explode.

In our house, where there wasn’t much of anything, everything mattered.

†††††

* The four prompts for this exercise were given to us by Dinty, then we shuffled them into a random order, and only then were we told the title to the piece we had just composed.

** This was a great exercise, from a pedagogical point-of-view. I’d put it into my can‘t-miss-magic-hat-of-exercises, for sure. That is, students write very well for twenty minutes. Meaning: students were happy with what they wrote. Meaning: what the students wrote was pretty damned good . . . for an exercise. Mine was about average and wouldn’t have distinguished itself from the students who read theirs aloud. An odd thing I noticed was that all the people who read who were about my age (most of them!) read an exercise that had a lot of common elements, as if we shared some national collective childhood. So, we were tapped into something. But, what I couldn’t help noticing was that exercises (in general, even at their best) have a glass-ceiling: the writing has a long way to go to rise out of the stature of exercise to the status of something aspiring to the condition of literature. Many of us can do a nice push-up, but that ain’t playing the game.

*** A note on the title: jeez, I think my childhood was a lot happier than what follows the title! But of course (great deconstructive move, Dinty) the title follows the text, in its composition, at least. And yet, as Borges has noted: great writing (not mine) is often about darker subjects: happiness is its own reward! Look: I've used exclamation points: I am becoming retarded.

Lost and Found

2010-06-07T17:27:00.000-07:00

My current living situation is this: about three fourths of the books I own are stored in boxes in my garage. This is due, mostly, to having moved from a very large house in the rural midwest to a very modest-sized house in Anchorage.

I went out to the garage the other day searching for an anthology in which appears Michael Cunningham’s terrific story “White Angel.” This shouldn’t be so much a needle-in-the-haystack affair: there should be a whole box of anthologies. But I have not seen the box since we arrived here in Anchorage.

What I found instead was my collection of Canadian Alpine Journals, Dougal Haston and Peter Gillman’s, Direttisima, which I forgot I even owned, and which would have been invaluable a few months back when I was writing an essay on Haston. I also found one copy of my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1970). I really like the 1970 edition because that’s the year I started paying attention to words. I actually have another copy of the same edition, so I can have one at my office and one at home. Thus: the other copy of the dictionary is missing. However, on the plus side, I located the third edition of the same dictionary, from 1992. This is my second favorite dictionary. Comparing definitions from these two dictionaries, published 22 years apart, is the best evidence I know to demonstrate that language is fluid, evolving (or, as some would have it, devolving). However, the largest book I own, or once owned, the Oxford English Dictionary, remains missing. I have the magnifying glass, though. I am trusting that it, and the duplicate American Heritage, are out there, along with my vintage Icelandic to English dictionary, which I love purely as an object in the world.

On the plus side I retrieved my mostly unread copy of Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, as well as the 20th anniversary edition of Boulevard, which belongs at the office with the rest of the Boulevards. Finally, here is the long-lost Illustrated Guide to Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue by Tyson and Cleland which has the best drawings for making and attaching prussic slings, a task which for me never seems to become second nature and which I will be needing very soon for a Byron Peak attempt.

The only books I know for certain are lost were mailed here: one box arrived opened and half-empty. It had been filled with American Alpine Journals and now my collection has holes. The rest of the missing books aren’t really missing, I have faith in their presence out there among the rest of the human detritus for which there is no room indoors: bicycles, skis, wicker furniture, plastic tubs filled with random household goods, studded winter tires, including a set of four for a car we don’t even own. It’s a sad state of affairs, but temporary.

Oh, and I never found my “White Angel.” I found (miraculously) a copy in the library, but what I didn’t find in the library is another story, longer and sadder.

Memorial

2010-06-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

My mother’s father, Jack Flynn, is the only veteran I know of in my family history. And the only Memorial Day in my childhood that I can remember being celebrated in a traditional way was a singular visit to the cemetery outside of Capac, Michigan where he was laid to rest. I can’t say that I know too much about him, except for the fact that after returning from World War I he finished studies at Detroit College of Law , but never practiced. In fact, never worked, at all. My mother, and her sister, rarely spoke of him—a fact they don’t quite acknowledge, even now. Every year I find out another fact, or two, about him, for example, this year I learned he wore spatz every day. Spatz.

In an early Jules Verne story, space travelers expel a dead dog from their “rocket ship,” only to find that the dog, named “Satellite,” remains with the ship as it hurtles toward the moon through empty space. In this way, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us, in his book, The Dominion of the Dead, the dead “like to stay close to the living.” I, too, feel that they are never far from us.

So Memorial Day, I think no more nor less of the dead that any other day. I do however think of the past. It’s really the first day of summer. The smell of mown lawn and motor oil. Ernie Harwell’s voice (Godpseed, Ernie!) describing Al Kaline fouling off pitch after pitch until he finds just the one to line into the gap. Strohs, fire brewed for flavor, preferably in long-necked bottles, recapped so many times that they’re gone grey around the edges. Or Faygo Rock and Rye. Vernors. The last days of grade school, the promise of summer upon us exactly like . . . the promise of summer.

Biting the Hand That Doesn’t Feed You

2010-05-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure if it’s the word itself: blog (which is graceless) or the concept that I find so unappealing. The unappealing aspect of the concept, I suppose, is its not so subtle apparent aim of self-promotion. But one does not want to look too closely at this, since ultimately, you can arrive at the question of what makes blogging different from other forms of writing? In which case, we find self-promotion lurking always somewhere beneath the surface. I suppose one of the criteria for good writing is subtlety, ¬the self-promoting angle must appear to be non-existent.

Further, what could be more obvious than that I was not made to blog? Blogging is about speed and the appearance of spontaneity. I don’t even consider myself a writer; more accurately, I am a re-writer. I revise grocery lists. My first drafts are ugly; with work I can make them serviceable, and with some more work, and luck, occasionally elegant. Thoreau said, “It goes too fast.” I love how he, and Emerson too, seemed to get away with using pronouns for which there is no discoverable referent. “It” here, I concluded means “life.” But the internet moves even faster.

The other objectionable aspect of the internet writing is that anyone can do it. Why does that “scare” me? Ahhh, it must be related to that same ego which doesn’t wish to appear self-promoting, but is nonetheless. If anyone can do it, why would I bother? The trick, of course, is to do it well. You set your own bar, as always.

Still, I tend to believe as shitmydadsays: “YOU, a published writer? Internet don’t count. Anyone can throw shit up there.” By the way shitmydadsays will soon be a television program. The book is advertised as “The memoir that came from twitter.” I check in on facebook and it’s one funny line after another. The lines are funny enough that they make me wonder, how exactly, they find a narrative line that magically turns them into a memoir. But, I can’t say I’m curious enough that I’ll buy the book.

I remember the old (now) metaphor to describe deconstruction: a person is sitting on a tree limb sawing the branch on which he sits. The idea, I think it was Jonathan Culler’s image, is that those theorists used language to describe how meaning derived from language is arbitrary or, unknowable. They were chopping down the tree of language with an axe made of language. A little like the person who announces,” I am a liar.” Or not. Anyway, I am using a blog to interrogate blogging. Now I am finished and vow to never use the word blog again.

2010-05-24T16:59:00.001-07:00

The title of this blog is random. I looked up at my book shelf with an eye for a title to steal and came up with this one by Francis Spufford. I feel all right about stealing Spufford's title as he himself stole it from Lawrence Oates, a member of Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition. "I may be some time," were Lawrence's' last words as he left the tent and walked out into a blizzard never to return. It was thought by his expedition mates that he sacrificed his life for the good of the others. Nonetheless, they all died. Lawrence's body was never found. The only possible meaning it may have for me personally is that I hope to be . . . sometime. The sooner the better.