On David Shields' Manifesto

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

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

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

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

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'"

“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

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.