Notes on Accepting the Banff Mountain Book Award

 Thanks Amy Jane (Rab Athlete who presented the award) and thanks to Rab for their continuing support of mountain culture and for sponsoring this award.

 

It is very humbling to walk through the reading room and see all the books submitted to this year’s festival.  One also senses the enormous logistical task of the judging process.  Thanks to everyone who participated in that process, from the volunteer readers on the front lines to the members of the jury, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, Kate Harris (gestures toward Kate at the podium) and especially to Tony Whittome for his kind words about my work, which mean the world to me.[1]

 

Thanks to everyone who works so hard to make this festival happen, especially the people I’ve worked with personally: Karolina, Margaret, and Kenna, and of course Jo Croston who makes this whole world spin.

 

I’ve been going to the mountains for over fifty years and I realized that although I’ve roped up with dozens of people, I’ve done most of my climbing with just three partners, John McInerney, Jim Pinter-Lucke, and Charlie Sassara. Very grateful for their good judgment, friendship, and shared laughs.  Also grateful for my friend Ralph Baldwin, who I haven’t been out with a lot, but when it counted, his cool head definitely saved my life when things looked pretty bleak.

 

My wife has the double misfortune to be married to a climber and writer.  The climber lives in the mountains and the writer, this one anyway, spends a lot of time in his own head.  

 

I was born and raised in the American midwest, lots of brothers and sisters. They don’t quite get what I do in the mountains and are generally . . . disinterested about what I have to say in most of my writing.  There’s little evidence they read any of it.

 

One day my wife got a phone call from my adult niece. She said that she had just read my book of climbing essays, Warnings Against Myself.  “Oh my God,” she told my wife, “I had no idea.  I am so sorry.”  So perhaps I owe her an apology myself. I love you, Aisha.

 

There’s a line from the great writer Leonard Cohen that I’ve taken to heart ever since I first encountered it: “I always considered myself a minor writer.  My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.”

 

Of course, he is not a minor writer, just a modest one.  I, however, am a minor writer with a small province.  But I believe that if one pays close attention to the specific, works hard, loves language and loves one’s subject, with a little luck we may approach the universal.

 

Thank you~

 

 

---

[1] “This powerful, exact, and beautifully written article explores the relationship between photograph, subject, and observer in a series of images of climbers who have died in the mountains. Its spare prose and flattened affect at first recalls art criticism, or even the forensics of an autopsy, but this is not the whole story: it soon modulates into something questing, passionate and deeply personal which will remain in the mind of the reader.  In short compass this is an extraordinary literary achievement.”- Tony Whittome, 2023 Book Competition Jury

 

Follow Your Nose: Some Notes on Audience

 I read from my work in a bookstore last week. First “in-person” event since pre-pandemic times.

 Eleven people in the audience.  Five really, once you subtract the bookstore clerk 

(who was wonderful!), the two friends who came with us, two little kids who were soon let loose, 

and my wife. So, five.

 

When I taught composition courses one of the guiding principles we were supposed to imprint on our students was the importance of audience. As in, knowing who your audience was so that you could convince them of whatever it was you were trying to convince them of.

 

I don’t think very much, not at all really, about who my audience is, who might be reading whatever it is I’m writing, or what I’m trying to convince them of, beyond continuing to read. I follow my nose.

 

The one novel I wrote took more years to write than can accurately be counted. Maybe twenty years between when I started and finished.  My son Macklin read it. For many years he was the only one who read it and I considered him my best, and only, reader. Possibly some of the editors sent I it to read some of it, but it was hard to tell. Ten years after I finished it, it was published. Not many people have read it.

 

One anecdote I always take comfort in comes from Terry Tempest Williams.  She told about the time she had a reading in New York City (if I am remembering this correctly) and not one single person showed up.  As she was walking out, down a grand staircase, a man appeared for the reading.  Possibly he was homeless. But he had come for the reading.  She sat down and read to him.

 

Once my climbing partner and I climbed Longs Peak in Colorado but were to descend by a different route, on the trail which we had never been up.  A guy we met near the top told us that there were little spots of paint that looked like fried eggs that marked the trail.  Or not, he said, just follow your nose.

 

Aside: when my wife read my novel, she asked, “Who wrote this?”  Which I took as a compliment.

 

Another aside: The difference between teaching composition and teaching creative writing is that no students want to be in a composition course. In a creative writing class all the students want to be there.

 

Once Macklin told to me not to worry, that after I died, he would take good care of my library of mountaineering books. Predeceased.  What a shitty word that is.

 

I suppose my ideal audience is someone who shares my interests, but is actually a little smarter than I am.  That way I can aim higher.  

 

But a triumph in writing is when you win over the reader with whom you have absolutely nothing in common with.  I don’t know anything about playing video games, much less designing them.  Yet, I absolutely loved Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.  The bottom line is that it was about humans.

 

I have friend who was inviting “friends” on social media to ask, just ask, for a free copy of his recent book.  Which is a really, really fine book. Wonderless, by Shelby Raebeck.

 

One time I agreed to do a reading at The Eagle River Nature Center.  The day of the reading there was a heavy snow.  The center requires a twelve-mile drive down a two-lane that wouldn’t be plowed. I drove out there, a fool’s errand.  My friends Andrea and Ben and their infant child, Uly, showed up, and I read to them, and only them.  After the reading was over it was almost dark–afternoon in Alaska in the winter–and still snowing, but I skied out to the bench that commemorates Macklin and shared some quiet moments with him.

 

Steve Almond once wrote an essay, “Camoin Among the Savages,” about one of my mentors François Camoin, who was giving away his books out of a cardboard box in the trunk of his car.  

 

After he died I went to his apartment to retrieve some of his things.  I found three of my books there:  Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg, Cuchama and Sacred Mountains by Evans-Wentz, and Already Deadby Denis Johnson.  The Johnson book gnawed on by some dog or other.

 

One of the very best literary events I ever attended was a reading by Terry Tempest Williams at the Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake City upon the publication of her masterpiece, Refuge: an Unnatural History of Family and Place.  The Theatre is elegant and historic and seats 1,800.  That night overflowing with adoring fans. There was feeling of shared exhilaration and celebration.  I was happy for her.  I was happy for art.

 

We lost my friend Ben this summer.  I have read three of his novels, all unpublished.  One was contracted to be published, but the publisher folded before it could happen; one was just too bleak.  The last one just too crazy, although may be his best.

 

Steve, we’re all among the savages.  Steve!  We are the savages.

 

Last week I read a great essay about returning to old work. The author had written a novel and he couldn’t get it published; eventually he salvaged a part of it as a short story.  The rest he abandoned and the essay was about living with this choice. I looked up the short story collection in which the salvaged story ended up. The collection was published in 2015.  It had exactly zero Amazon reviews/star ratings. I wanted to weep.  I ordered the book immediately.

 

Following your nose only works if you already pretty much know what you’re doing.  In mountaineering and writing.

 

So, I had a very close friend in grad school who I inexplicably lost track of.  Completely.  No one we might have known in common had any idea where he was. In the acknowledgments at the end of my first book, I thanked him and parenthetically pleaded, Where are you, man?  I was fairly sure he had given up both academia and writing.  Like me, he has generic whitebread name.  I googled him twice a year.  For thirty years.  He has zero on-line presence. Two weeks ago I got a snail mail letter from him. It may as well have come from outer space. We are reunited after thirty years.  

How did you find me? I asked. 

Instead of just entering your name, he said, I added the word “writer,” and there you were.  

I’m admitting to you now how happy this made me.

 

And those five people who came to my reading?  They were lovely.  I am so grateful for them.

 

My Old Man, a work in progress

 If there’s one thing you should know about my father, it’s that he left college when his father 

died, his mother was in the tuberculosis sanitarium and my dad had to support his younger sister 

and brother so they wouldn’t be put in foster care.

 

My father worked at Ford and he had a friend from work, Hal Erickson, who lived in our neighborhood. One time we were visiting their family and the oldest son, Craig, who was at least five years older than me, and who I really admired, showed me a snub-nosed revolver. I was never sure if it was an authentic-looking toy or if it were real. He also showed me a toy model car, a Ford of course, that you blew into through a long flexible tube and it floated on a little layer air. The future.

 

After school there was four a o’clock movie that came on the television and featured classic horror films.  This is how I saw Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. But the movie that really scared me was called The Day the World Ended, which featured an atomic blast that killed almost everybody on earth except a group of people who survived in an isolated box canyon. Radiation poisoning and mutations ensued.  I was in about fifth grade and somehow I knew that radiation and mutations were actual things in the world. I became obsessed by this to the point of losing sleep.  I asked my dad, very adult-like I thought, if “we could please please please dig an underground fallout shelter in the backyard.” I laid out my argument, but to my great disappointment, was unable to convince my father of the imminent danger.  “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said.  But I did.

 

Or, maybe the one thing you should know is that when he was child his father burned his mother’s heirloom furniture in the furnace to keep the family warm in the winter. You should know he was a true child of the depression and later he would be very careful, tight-fisted really, with his money.

 

My father was going to a funeral. Craig, the son of his friend Hal had killed himself. 

Why? I asked. 

Apparently, my father said, he was involved in some kind of cult.

How? I asked. 

Shot himself. 

What did you say to his dad?  

What could I say? My father asked me.

 

Neither of my parents spoke much of their fathers, both who died young, before I was born. Once, I asked my father what his father died from.  He was just, my father said, worn out.

 

The year I turned sixteen my father gave me two Christmas presents that surprised me: a stopwatch and a three volume, red-leatherbound set of Shakespeare.  Until then I hadn’t been aware he understood me so well.

 

One time I was visiting at Blue Lake where my parents had a cottage and where my mother now lives year round.  Early in the morning I took my coffee down to the dock and dangled my feet in the water as the mist rose off the surface.  My dad wandered down and sat next to me.  

What are we going to do today? I asked him. 

We’re doing it, he said.

 

Or maybe this, maybe, this is the one thing you should know.  At my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I asked my father, Could my earliest memory be right?  My earliest memory being the car spinning on ice, someone’s arms reach in to pull me out.  My mother under the car on her back, her face, looking up at me, smiling, Don’t worry dear.

Yeah, he says, I lifted the car up with one hand and slid her out with the other.  

Why haven’t I heard that story before? I wonder aloud.

I never told anyone. 

            

My father drank too much for a while, late in life.  Vodka, straight, so we thought it was water in the glass. Really cheap vodka, too.  When I turned fifty he bought me a bottle of Glenmorangie, a good single malt Scotch whiskey.  I figured this cost was about four times the amount he would ever spend on his own liquor.  That was exactly twenty years ago.  And he’s been gone eleven, now.

 

My father gave me a pair of very thin silk gloves. He had worn them as a pallbearer for a friend’s father’s funeral. Did he know the man well? I asked.  

Not at all.  

Then how did you end up carrying his casket? 

Most people, he said, don’t have six friends left when they die.

 

He thought the gloves might be useful for mountaineering. But no way, bad juju. The really important things he gave me weren’t things at all.  If it’s not too much a cliché to say so.

 

From the train window I could see my father walking up a stairway toward the platform exposed to the wind and snow.  He looked small and hunched-over, inarguably old.  On the short drive home, he said to me, When you got off the train I didn’t even recognize you.  You looked like a tiny shrunken, old man.

 

One Alaskan morning I was out shoveling the driveway at 5:30 a.m.  Quiet. The snow, which continued to fall, muffling all sound.  I was thinking about my father and what a comfort he had been to me when our son died.  Then I remembered, whoops, he wasn't there, he had already been dead for three years when our son died. And then, I thought, but yeah, he was a comfort to me then.

 

I still have the gloves.  And, everything else.

Some Notes on Descent

 

The descent beckons, as the ascent beckoned~ William Carlos Williams

 

There are only three people I trust to set up rappel anchors, pauses, AND I’M ALL THREE OF THEM.~ Charlie Sassara

 

Descent seems to be very steep and dangerous.  The ascent is always laborious, yet it is on a well-trodden path.  But the downward path is new.  Many have gone down, but they have usually slipped, so it has a slippery surface. One finds wrecked cars, trousers, shoes, and skeletons, perhaps of people gone to smash on that path.  This is the path of danger.~C.G. Jung

 

Outside the hut, clouds roll by at speeds that appear induced by time-lapsed photography with plenty of blue sky between them.  Typically, the day you tag a summit in the Alps is a long one, mostly because it starts so early.  We had spent our first night sleeping (not) under a dining room table in the Tête Rousse hut.  And that was with reservations.  Now, without reservations on the return, we have no choice but to descend all the way to Chamonix.

            We plod downward past the spot where we had met the lightning-struck Brits–“So I says, ‘Wot’s that smell?’ And then I realize it’s me hair!”  Soon we are at the bottom of the ridge where the death couloir must be crossed. On the ascent it had been frozen in the dark; now it is late and sloppy. Here a number of people are bottle-necked, gathering up the necessary courage to sprint across the shooting gallery.  They are clumped in sketchy silence like boys deciding who will be the first to jump off the bridge in the water.  The couloir itself appears like a runway down which large rocks tumble sporadically in huge slow-motioned leaps of space.  So far as we could see there were never two rocks falling at once and though they tumbled mostly in silence, a thrumming in the air usually announced their approach.

            The actual danger zone may be only forty feet across, though better measured probably by the number of seconds it will take to cross. But if it’s not really dangerous then why do so many people die here? They are slow, thrashed, inexperienced, we rationalize, creatures so very much unlike ourselves.  Unlucky.

            I watch a large flat rock arc downspinning, a stone thrown to skip on water, frozen and tilted. It builds speed as it descends, but it’s hard to believe you couldn’t dodge it, even in crampons on the slope. That’s what we tell ourselves.

            We sprint across and begin the long hike out to the train station, the caveat being that if we don’t catch the 5 o’clock we will have to spend another night out, this time without the arguable benefit of the hut’s dining table to lay under, as we had on the ascent. Without the train and the telecabine–newly-acquired decadent Eurohabits–the walk to Les Houches is unthinkable after the length of our day, now approaching fifteen hours.

            We make our train and not too long after that we’re seated at a sidewalk table at the Café de’ L’M where the placemats match the view of the Aiguilles–the needles–and as our exhaustion sets in, the alpenglow brightens, and fades, leaving the ridge to the Goûter hut, the Dome de Goûter and the distant summit silhouetted against the night sky.  Lucky indeed.

Photo: Charlie Sassara casts off for the glacier below Peak 11,300

In the Clouds with Charles: Random Climbing Notes from My Journals

 

i

“We live by accidents of terrain, you know.  And terrain is what remains in the dreaming part of your mind.” Said Hemingway in Across the River and Into the Trees.

 

ii

Brian Hall (in High Risk: Climbing to Extinction) recalls: “Al [Rouse] would arrive at my doorstep wearing his mother’s disheveled fur coat and [Mike] Geddes in a threadbare army greatcoat.”

This is resonates with my memories of the 1970s.  When our mutual friend Drago Archer passed away during one of the pandemic summers, the poet Pat O’Neill recalled one time that Drago and I randomly arrived at their house at three or four in the morning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  I reminded him that the house was full of people, all of whom were awake and partying.  I really miss Drago being in the world.

 

iii

Hall also tells of his and Al Rouse’s attempt of a climb on the Gogarth sea cliffs in Wales. It was winter and they ended up in the water, had to abandon the rope and now had to climb out, wet, unroped, hypothermic, exhausted and about to become benighted.  They barely made it.  Hall recalls this conversation amid this epic:
           Wish I’d brought a torch, I said.

Did you tell anyone what we were doing?

No.

Did you leave a note on the car windscreen?

No.

This, to me, somehow epitomizes the state of climbing in the 1970s. I don’t think we thought we were immortal, or that we were particularly careless.  We were just naive, and sometimes fatally so.  Drago would call bullshit, claim I am playing word games.

iv

“Climbing and mountaineering have never been sports.  They are adventures with a level of danger and an uncertain outcome.”  So said Reinhold Messner, with which I agree.

v

Sometimes I make notes but don’t provide enough context to recall what the actual point of writing it down was.

This one was written into a book that I was planning to discard and I transferred it into a notebook, hoping the reason for originally noting it would miraculously appear.

As recorded: “Charles [Sassara], shaking my hand, after telling me the story about using stuff sacks filled with snow as rappel anchors on University Peak in the Wrangell St Elias Range (an audacious ascent with Carlos Buhler, that probably has not seen a repeat).”

The shaking of my hand, underlined in the original note, was apparently the key, but whatever the meaning held for me has not miraculously reappeared, although placing your life in the staying power of a bag of snow?  You had to be there.

 

vi

In the 1980s I lived in Southern California and my regular climbing partner, was Jim Pinter-Lucke, ten years my senior. Many of my favorite climbs from the Sierra to the Cordillera Blanca were done with Jim. Although we usually switched leads, he was stronger and most likely the lead-switching was calculated so that he lead the hardest pitches. 

Recently I returned to Joshua Tree, where Jim and I had often climbed, after an absence of over thirty years.  I was mildly surprised to not be able to get off the ground on routes I knew I had easily climbed all those years ago.

Although Jim had recently suffered a stroke and had various other physical ailments, his wife drove him out to the desert to have lunch.  The sight of Jim, one of the strongest persons I’ve known, struggling to walk, was very sobering.

We sat in camp chairs in the desert sun and summoned our shared past to the surface–we both remembered the guy who fell forty feet to the ground and had to be helicoptered out. In my memory he had died; in Jim’s he survived. Not sure why I believe Jim’s memory was likely more right. In either case, the sight, more like the sounds, of the fallen climber rendered us disinterested in climbing for the rest of that afternoon and we wandered around the desert for a while and called it an early day. That part we agreed on. When Jim left I was worried I wouldn’t ever see him again.

 But, I am happy to report, I have seen him again. He’s holding on.

vii

“Hanging on for dear life to the side of a mountain so you feel alive deserves some questioning.”~Jeremy Jones, The Art of Shralpinism: Lessons from the Mountains.

 viii

Charles and I head up to McHugh Peak and reach the cloud ceiling rather quickly. From then on we are walking in the cloud and sensing that we are not going to rise above it.  We catch and pass a couple of old guys, old, you know, like about ten years younger than ourselves. Chat amiably before moving on.

There’s a high plateau before you reach the cockscomb summit crag of McHugh Peak. It’s a remarkable place, an enormous expanse of nearly flat land. At that point the trail basically ends. We pass a cairn, but after moving on a few steps we can’t even see it. We pull out our compasses, but with visibility at about six feet there are no landmarks to aim for. 

We decide to head down, passing the other two old guys who are soldiering onward, mostly due to the fact they had been shuttled to the trailhead and had a car stashed to which they had to complete the hike to arrive at.

“Read about us in the newspaper,” they laugh as they disappear into the void.

 We sit down to eat our peanut butter sandwiches. Another couple approach. They have enormous handguns strapped to their chests, but are without a compass. After talking with us, they turn around and head down.

 When we pass them on our way down, the couple has stopped and just opened a couple bottle of beer.

We make quick work of the descent, piercing the cloud ceiling only a couple hundred feet above the parking lot.

 

ix

Our last morning in Joshua Tree and Sweeney and I set out to climb The Blob. Here are the reasons we told ourselves as to why that did not happen:

 

1.     Super windy and cold;

2.     Can’t find the start;

3.     Scary down climb from summit that we do not know the location of; 

4.     My fucked-up fingertips;

5.     Sweeney’s anxiety about driving home and his need to get on the road.

 

x

Drago was the one of the smartest, sometimes I think the smartest person I have ever known. He rarely, almost never, left Michigan. He believed that mountain climbing was the stupidest activity humans had ever conceived. He missed very few opportunities to remind me of this.  We agreed to disagree. I really miss that dude.

 

From the Notebooks: a Baker's Dozen

 I fall asleep nightly to the sound of the Pacific crashing into the shore. When the tide is low the sound is distant and soothing; when the tide is coming in, I can hear the individual waves, violent and insistent.

 

“All problems about writing have one solution: you had to, you said you would, it was contract you made with yourself, it was your life.”–– Elizabeth Hardwick, as told by Pinckney Benedict

 

A recurrent dream is of a particular bookstore, in a particular neighborhood, in a particular city. It’s a happy place for me.  But I recently realized that the pace does not exist in “real life.”

 

“Of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”––Wittgenstein

 

I found this note-to-self scribbled into the flysheet of my copy of Midnight’s Children: “What was it that was analogous to the arsonist removing materials that are personal from the building, that he, and only he, knows will burn?” Remains unanswered.

 

Lately I have had an uncanny feeling that there’s third person in the house secretly listening to Aisha and I talk.

 

In 1980 on the summit of the Tour Ronde I took my favorite mountaineering photograph: a French climber sounding his barbaric yawp directly into the statue of the Virgin Mary that adorned the summit. Something about that photo I just loved.  But I lost it over the years.

 

Summer 2022. Stopped at the red light at Tudor exiting Old Seward a tall long-haired kid on a skateboard glides by evoking such a profound memory of our son that I burst into tears, until the car behind me taps its horn, and I make the wet-faced turn.

 

Hardwick, I think, was right.  But Wittgenstein might be exactly wrong about that.

 

Reading The Rings Around Saturn, the book of new friend, poet Maria Maggi. Noting her diction. It’s certainly not elevated, and yet I am conscious of never having used many of her words: isinglass, ingot, paperskin, poultice. Maybe poets are allowed to use more words than mere prose writers. So many ways to say it, as my dear friend Eva once observed.

 

Before we moved from Alaska I organized my photographs, slides, for storage.  I go through all the 1980 slides one-by-one. I realize that the “photograph” of “The French Guy Barking at the Virgin Mary at the Summit of the Tour Ronde,” was never a photograph, only a memory.

 

“But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in hard grief, whose mouths  were open like caves with ancient  painting inside them.”–– Patricia Lockwood

 

The sound of freeway traffic awakens me.  So many cars on the road. Sirens, too. But we’re not in Anchorage anymore.  The road here is very far away and mostly empty. It’s my dreaming brain mishearing the Pacific.  I am home.

Writing in Books: Inscriptions and Marginalia

In our house books were sacred objects and our parents taught us to not ever, not ever, write in them.  We didn’t have a lot of books in the house, but we went to the library often and our grandmother, a children’s librarian, brought us a steady flow of “discards,” book that the library had given up on, often, indeed, because they had been written in.

 

In undergrad and grad school this dictum became much relaxed.  These were, after all, our own personal property.  Nonetheless, I tended toward bookmarks, notecards and eventually, sticky notes.  Sometimes I fold a page corner, an imprecise method often leaving me to later wonder why I had done so.

 

I buy a lot of used books now. (Supposedly I am operating under the requirement that for every book I bring into the house, one must exit.)  One of my little pleasures is reading the inscriptions or marginalia of previous owners.

 

I recently reacquired a copy of John D’Agata’s essay collection, The Next American Essay (2003). I don’t know at what point in my various moves I lost my first copy of it; loaned out and never returned probably.  But now I have acquired another, used and very inexpensive.  An obviously unread edition.  And yet it had been inscribed, as a gift, as follows:

 

Dear x, Please write “The Next American Essay”!  I need to read it. Merry Christmas 2017, Love always, y

 

Yet, at sometime during the next six years x had let the book go, without having read it.  Perhaps x and y were in a relationship that ended. Perhaps, it was lost in a move, donated in error, stolen.  Perhaps, x, like myself, wonders for years where that book went and finally rep[aces it with fond memories of y.

 

Interlude: back when I had the best job in the world one of my duties was bringing writers to town.  I had the practice of going to the used bookstores and buying up any used copies of their books, often inscribed, so that the writers would not see them and feel sad.

 

Last week I found an antiquated mountaineering book in a used bookstore in Pasadena. I had not known of the book and passed on acquiring it. George Yeld, Scrambles in Eastern Graians 1878-1897 (published 1900). A couple days later I had been thinking about the book and when my wife called from the same store to ask if I need anything, well, I did. She uncharacteristically bargained with the clerk and we got it for two-thirds the asking price.  The book as an object is beautiful: gilt edges, deckled pages, a tad yellowed and the photographs and maps were printed on a different paper than then text; these pages are in pristine condition. Yeld was an early president of the Alpine Club, which almost guarantees that he writes well, if not with a lot of formality and . . . words.

 

I am very glad to have it.

 

But I didn’t at first realize it was “inscribed by the author,” as follows: “Mifs[?] L.M. Nicholls, with the author’s best wishes. July 1924.” I thought it odd that he did not sign his name. After spending more time with the book, it became evident that the author had made little notations throughout, on the order of “correcting” requiescatto resquiescant.  Which seems really odd as resquiescant is more archaic and far less common, even in 1900.

 

In grad school I was lucky enough to spend a couple days with James Salter, who had written a fictional book, Solo Faces, based somewhat on the life of the climber Gary Hemming, an international legend based on his role on a famous rescue in the Alps.  When I presented my copy of the book for Salter to inscribe, he turned immediately to page 132 and made an emendation: the word “here” abutted the left margin.  He added a t, so that the heinous misprint “here” was restored to the author’s intention: there.”

 

This is how the sentence is supposed to read: “There is something greater that the life of the cities, greater than money and possessions; there is a manhood that can never be taken away.”

 

He then handwrote the sentence in his inscription to me.

 

My friend and mentor, the writer David Kranes wrote about a relationship based on handwritten margin notes in his book Margins from 1972. A premise I am greatly sympathetic to!  His first novel, I think, and a very good one.

 

My favorite marginalia in a used book is in my copy of Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Poems.  All the notes are printed in a youthful hand, occasionally embellished with a hand-drawn flower or  shining sun. In this way it is similar to  the little hand-drawn heart and shining sun in the inscription in The Next American Essays. So . . . endearing. At the end of a long excerpt from one of Pessoa’s favorite heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro. “Consciousness,” the marginalia reads, “is a problem.”  

 

Yeah, it is.  And it was so nice to see evidence of the moment a young mind awakens to the fact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voices in the Dark and Other Misreadings

I have just reread Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, which came out last year.  The first time I read it I was much dazzled.  But the first time it’s really hard for the reader to precisely connect the characters in the individual chapters to characters in another chapter.  This does not detract at all from the reading experience: you hold the individual chapters together as you read but you can’t quite make all their tendrils connect.  But you have confidence that they do connect.  When you read through the second time, more of the connections do connect and the reading experience is even richer.

I was convinced that Egan had incorporated into The Candy House one of Edouard Levé’s ideas from Works:

 

“11. The friend of an artist selects descriptions of artworks from press reviews of exhibitions.  The accompanying photograph is cut out and the text sent to the artist to draw the work based on its description.  The final work is a triptych composed of the drawing, the description of the work, and the photograph accompanying the article. There are four authors, direct or indirect, voluntary of involuntary: the artist who created the referenced work, the writer of the article, the friend who chose it, and the artist who drew it.”

 

I knew that the Levé instructions had a similarity to Robin Kelsey’s exercise in The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture):

"Captions

1.     One student makes four photographs of different subjects.

2.     A second student, knowing nothing of the four photographs, makes four captions.

3.     A third student matches each of the four captions to each of the four photographs.

4.     A fourth student designates one photograph/caption pair a successful work of art and one pair a failure.

5.     The students meet and discuss."

 

I was convinced that Egan had written something similar, but apparently I was wrong.  I couldn’t find it.

 

Possibly I had been thinking about a passage early in Egan’s book in which a character has written a book Van Gogh, Painter of Sound, “which found correlations between Van Gogh’s types of brushstrokes and the proximity of noisemaking creatures like cicadas, bees, crickets, and woodpeckers, whose microscopic traces had been detected in the paint itself.”

 

This may have resonated with an article I had read about how Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” sheds light on the concept of turbulent flow in fluid dynamics.  Basically, scientists figured out how the concept of luminance gives the impression of motion, the swirling effect of Van Gogh’s stars, for example. The scientists digitized, in other words quantified, the painting to undertake the examination. 

 

This is very much one of Egan’s big thoughts in The Candy House: the quantification of all natural phenomena, particularly human beings.

 

Read about Van Gogh in Maria Popov’s article here:

 

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/13/van-gogh-starry-night-fluid-dynamics-animation/

 

Another thing I discovered about The Candy House was that I stole a couple of its sentences.

 

My wife has a habit of remedying her insomnia by having her telephone tell her a story, such as a TED talk, a fiction from the New Yorker, or a book on audible.com.  Usually I am not awakened by this practice as the volume is very low and comes to me as a quiet indecipherable murmuring.

 

One night I woke to a couple of haunting sentences speaking to me out of the void and I wrote them down, in the dark, in my already illegible handwriting.

 

Days later I would discover the sentences, but could not locate their source, knew only that I had written them down in the night when mostly asleep.

 

The sentences resonated with me because of an enigmatic (even to me) character I was writing in a story and I wrote them into her dialogue.

 

This is one of them (in my words): “My work is to be forgotten, but still present.”[1]

 

Later still I was reading The Candy House and I realized that these sentences were from one of the strangest chapters in the book, “Lulu the Spy, 2032.”  This chapter is written in brief aphoristic statements and is unlike any other chapters.

 

I would have mentioned this indebtedness in the Acknowledgements of my book, had I known who to acknowledge. I’m mentioning it now.

 

My favorite chapter in The Candy House is called “The Perimeter: After” and it is narrated by Molly, as a child, and it serves as the introduction of Lulu and their very sweet afternoon with Chris Salazar, an important character, and his friend Colin (who dies young).  The voice is amazing and sweet. This is very much a polyvocal (is that even a word?) work with lots of different speakers.

 

I add (only because I noted it) that Egan uses the word judder (or a form of it) three times.  That seemed like a lot to me, in a 342 page book.  Note to self: use the word judder.

 

Note to you: read The Candy House.

 

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[1]  The story is “High Heaven: A Kind of Love Story,” in the book Points of Astonishment: Alpine Stories.