NOTABLE

The only end-of-year list that I look forward to is the annual New York Times 100 Notable Books. I look forward to it both for the additions to my reading list that may be gleaned and also as a bit of scorecard by which to judge my own reading year. I am always curious to see if any of the books I have read have made the list.

Click here for the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012.

This year, there are far more titles here that I will be adding to my reading list than I can chalk up to having read. For the ones that I have, though, my favorite book of the year is on the notable list: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. It is difficult to choose just one favorite, of course, but this one stands out even as it was one of the earliest books I read. It is a remarkable work from a very young author and has stayed with me because of the authentic way Ward writes of the stark human suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and also for the way she illuminates the deeper issues of class involved in that tragedy.

Junot Diaz's This is How You Lose Her is on my bedside stack as I write, and I am about a third of the way through it. It is a perfect bookend for my reading year along with Ward's novel, as they both are books about people different in so many ways from me. This is How You Lose Her is also a collection of short stories, a genre I especially enjoy reading and one that I feel like I see more and more of lately.

I am a fan of any and all biographies and books about American presidents and Jodi Kantor's The Obamas was also one that I enjoyed. Of course, many of these kinds of books can be nothing but sheer propaganda, but Kantor's coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign was notable in and of itself and I know her work to be widely respected. In my own opinion, no matter your own views of our president's policies or politics, I think you have to admire his and his wife's approach to parenting and to their obvious value of family. This is a theme of Kantor's book and a starting point for her compelling portrait of the impact of the campaign and the presidency on the Obama family. David Maraniss' Barak Obama: The Story, on the other hand, was one that I could not stomach for long. I am a fan of the details of American government and the stories of its players and important figures, but this one was a bit too detailed for me. Maraniss states in the introduction that he does not even come to the birth of his subject until the seventh chapter and, though I gave it a shot, I could not dig my way first through the life stories of the president's grandparents and so did not even make it through the second chapter, much less all the way to the seventh.

A book that I am pecking away at is Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story. Obviously an exploration of the central human question, the subject matter of this one is meaty to say the least. Nevertheless, it has not yet proven to be headache-inducing, so we will see where it leads. I am finding, though, that it is not a book best suited for bedtime reading. 

As for the books on the list that I will be adding to my reading list, I am most excited about the latest from Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior. It, too, is on the bedside stack, waiting for me to complete the Diaz book and a novel called In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner. I first read Kingsolver in college, beginning with her book of essays called High Tide in Tuscon. While I believe that every book I read changes the way I see things or at least adds to my perspective in imperceptible ways, Kingsolver's Tuscon is one that left a lasting impact on me at a time in my life when I was looking for ways in which to see more clearly through the muddiness of the world. I have read Kingsolver's work from the very beginning of her writing career and have enjoyed watching her writing evolve and become ever sharper and tighter with each book. Her last novel, The Lacuna, was a work of ambitious scope and breadth, I thought, and so I am excited to see what her creativity has wrought forth this time. Her novels stand out among contemporary fiction in the way her stories offer broad avenues of exploration of the large and looming questions.

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash looks promising, if only for its inviting title, as does the Kevin Powers book, The Yellow Birds. The others that will be put on my list are Richard Ford's Canada, NW by Zadie Smith and Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie. From the nonfiction portion, I look forward to Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power as well as David Nasaw's The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

CLUTTER

On Saturday morning, my daughter and I finished our reading of The Hobbit just in time for the opening weekend of the movie, which we then went to see on Sunday afternoon. I have written here about just how much it means to me to share a reading life with her and what it meant to me that she wanted to read this book with her dad. I could not help, then, to have at the very fore of my thoughts as we read the final pages together the parents who on the day before had stolen from them all opportunity to share such a moment ever again with their own children. Let us be grateful for the small moments when we are gifted them.

By nature, I am a quiet person. I find it extraordinarily difficult most of the time to articulate all that I am feeling or thinking about a thing. I can be hindered by thoughts that most anything I might say will fall terribly short of adequate. I find it awfully hard to post here this week for that reason and for others, not the least of which is that a blog about reading books seems all the more self-indulgent in light of what has happened. Not to say, of course, that unimaginable violence does not occur everyday in our world. I am struggling, too, with what it is exactly that I should say here. This is not a blog about news events or social issues or politics. It is a blog about the books I read and the things they prompt me to think about. And that is what I wish for it to remain.

Nevertheless, part of my premise is that being a reader causes one to consider more fully the world and its lingering questions. So, how can I leave unsaid here anything about the terrible events that occurred this week? At the same time, perhaps this is not the best forum to air how very strongly I do feel about this latest tragedy and the reasons I believe events like it continue to happen in what we naively and arrogantly consider to be a culture and society somehow so far ahead of the rest of the world. 

Also, I cannot seem to find the words to truly express the tangle of thoughts cluttering around in my head over the last few days. The world does not seem to present itself to me in stark black and white terms as it seems to for others. There are simply too many things that do not make sense. But, there are a some things that do: that we owe ourselves and our children more than we are giving and that a culture of fear and violence is not a culture that can be sustained. Nor is it a culture that speaks to the kind of community we absolutely can be and should ever strive for.

LANGUAGE

Is not one of the great pleasures of reading the sheer power of language? Read this out loud to yourself:

"And, seeing the train winding behind him, he thought with pride of it, of the onwardness of its people, of their stubborn, unthought-out yondering. It wasn't a thing for reason, this yondering, but for the heart, where secrets lay deep and mixed. Money? Land? New chances? Patriotism? All together they weren't enough. In the beginning, that is, they weren't enough, but as a man went on it came to him how wide and wealthy was his country, and the pride he had talked about at first became so real he lost the words for it."

I cannot help but be astounded by the miracle of such an inconspicuous combination of ordinary words. Taken apart and set aside individually, none of them bring to mind much of any seeming import. But, write about the onwardness of a people, pull out of your hat an earthy word like yondering, and have a man realize how wide and wealthy was his country and your mind begins to formulate whole knots of thought. You likely have no idea from where this passage comes, but reading it--a gathering of a mere handful of words--you sense immediately the emotion of it. You can probably pinpoint the historical context, you almost certainly begin to see in your mind's eye vast, open plains and hear dust crunching under weary feet, sense fatigue mixed with the energy of pride and deep ambition. That is surely a lot to happen in one paragraph. It becomes then a remarkable arrangement of mere words into a sentence that you have never read before and that you can feel deep inside of yourself.

One of the things I most enjoy about reading is stumbling upon a combination of words that fit one another just right or are melded together in a way I have never seen or heard or considered before. It might be a longer passage like the one above that makes larger points or raises more than one question or it could be just a small phrase scattered among the rest that dances upon the ear and causes me to stop and smile a bit and admire the craft of writing.

I am thinking about these things in part because it was Noam Chomsky's birthday this week and I read a very good piece by Gary Marcus in The New Yorker, which you can find here, that discussed the noted linguist and his monumental impact on that field and others. But, I am also thinking of these things because I recently finished Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls--the book he considered his masterwork, but that I had never read before--and because I am still reading and savoring the book from which the above passage comes, A.B. Guthrie's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Way West.

We all know about the Hemingway style, of course, have all likely read the critical introductions to Hills Like White Elephants that tell us about The Lost Generation and his short, declarative sentences, honed during his work as a reporter, that left a permanent imprint upon the face of modern fiction. Perhaps it is because of Ernest Hemingway that I love sparse sentences. I have always preferred writers who can say all they need to say and more with the most efficient use of language possible. I see that as genuine craftsmanship. Language does not have to be dressed up. It need only be pieced together truthfully and honestly.

But, I owe my admiration for this kind of writing as much to the likes of Guthrie and Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry and Ivan Doig and so many others, craftsmen all who write of ordinary things and people and places and who can make you see clearly a thing by talking about it in the same language we ourselves use to talk to one another everyday. They create lyrical prose born of the commonplace.

" . . . but what filled this back part of his mind was the day-after-day roll of wheels, the dust, the heat and wind and rain and mud and chill, and the Turleys turning back and Martin crying for grace. His life before seemed like another life. All he ever had done was poke a team or explore the trail or push cattle along. The only way he ever faced was west."

GRACE

If I were forced to read one thing only for the rest of my life, I would choose the fiction of Wendell Berry. There is no doubt about it. I have traveled around in his made-up world of Port William for a long time now, and I will have no trouble living there in my mind for a longer time to come. It moves me so.

Berry has been writing of the Port William Membership since 1960 with the publication of Nathan Coulter. Fifty-two years later, I found myself wandering around a favorite bookstore in Boone, North Carolina and happening upon his latest collection of stories from Port William, A Place in Time. Wendell Berry is now seventy-eight years old and it stands to reason that this could very well be his last book of the Membership, as the Port William community is known, though the quality of the work is certainly no indicator. In my own amateur opinion, it is some of his best ever. But, it does read as a benediction, particularly the last story, which lends its name to the entire collection. And there were times when I could not help but think I was reading a story that Berry felt he must get down before his time has come and gone, a sort of, Oh, yes, there was this, too, that I must not forget to tell about.

Just last night, while talking with my wife about the richness of this world Berry has brought forth, the long and detailed history of it that he has given us, I professed my amazement at its vastness. From where does such a wellspring come? It is obvious as you come to know these characters that Berry himself seems to see it all mostly through the eyes of Andy Catlett, whose own history resembles Berry's most closely and who is known by all as one of the rememberers in that community. I cannot help but wonder sometimes if Berry draws on his own story and on the stories of his family and neighbors. It really does not matter, of course, because Port William is altogether a real place of its own now. But, the sheer breadth of the tale Berry has for so long been spinning is mightily impressive and even more so to me if it comes solely from within himself. His character of Andy Catlett was born in 1934, which means he comes of age just at the crucial moment upon which Berry's larger story turns: the transition from the agrarian, pre-War economy to the post-War, industrial one. One world was ending and a new one was taking its place. Andy Catlett was born into the old one and lived to see it replaced, though he remains loyal to the old. As he says himself in the title story of this collection, "It is hard to remember one world while living in another."

This is part of what connects me most to fictional Port William. I see myself as an Andy Catlett. A few years ago I stood on a windy, fall day in a churchyard while the last of my grandmother's brothers was put into that ground for his final rest. He had been one of the real characters in my own life and I cannot help but think of him as I do Wendell Berry's Burley Coulter. "That Burley, now, he's in a class by hisself. There's stories about him that nobody's going to tell you . . . or anyhow I ain't, but I wish you could know him." I grieved for my great uncle on that day, of course, but he had lived a life long and full, in pure spite of the wildness of it. His funeral was occasion more to mark his long survival on this earth than his passing away from it. My grief, then, was larger for the passing away of something greater than one person. My grandmother, the youngest of her twelve siblings who were born over the span of more than twenty years at the beginning of the last century, remains now the last living of them. I have watched her stand stoic at many a funeral, but standing beside her as we listened to the preacher on that day, I felt the rattle of her sobbing, felt her lean into me for support. I think she, too, felt what I did. We knew we were witnessing the passing away of a people and a way of living the likes of which will not be known again in this world. It is a world, as Wendell Berry writes, that is "the old life of home farms and frugality and neighborhood and care-taking . . ."

This all begs a certain question, of course. Is it all about nostalgia, some sort of longing for simpler days gone by? I have thought much about this one troubling aspect of Berry's fictional world. Is it romanticized? Too idyllic and pastoral somehow? It is easy to feel this way at times. Everyone in Port William, on the surface at least, seems to be wise and loving and neighborly and calm. Part of this is the way Berry writes it. His words read like an elegy, a kind of prayer. Oh, but in Port William, too, there is certainly suffering and death, feuding and flaring tempers and so many sorrows and unanswered questions. There are drinkers, loners, adulterers, back-sliders and gamblers. And daily life turns around hard, blistering, back-crunching work. In the face of its tranquility, where most people still break open their fields behind a team of mules, it is as difficult a place as is any other. The long, long story of Port William, after all, is about the destruction of a world. There is no other way to put it. Even as Burley Coulter laughs and winks and tells us another story about a time he and Big Ellis and Jayber Crow got drunk, there is a sadness. We feel the impending doom, the slow, seeping loss of something larger than ourselves.

But, there is this: coursing its way through it all is grace.  Strength in the face of hardship, elemental human kindness to match the troubles of this world, blessed reprieve in spite of the wearisome toil. And there is the place. Berry writes of a how a place continually tells the story of itself to itself. The members of the place are admitted freely into its conversation, lifted up and carried on it, but the conversation does not begin on human lips. While they are a part of it, though, all of them, the good and the bad, are members and neighbors among and to one another. Wendell Berry's story of Port William is the story of us. But, I do not think there is a sense of fatalism. I think, in the end, in Port William and in this other world, grace and redemption will somehow prevail. It may not be in a way we can imagine or that even includes us as we know ourselves, but the story will continue to tell itself.

DAUGHTER

I have read to our daughter since before she was born. In the last weeks of my wife's pregnancy, I would lie on the bed, rest my head near her belly and read to our child. I read Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays, High Tide in Tuscon. I read Tony Earley's Somehow Form a Family. My wife told me that the baby inside would quiet down and be still once I had started reading. I did it knowing that the child could even then hear my voice and not for any other reason than to get her used to the sound of it. After she was born, I read to her everyday. I came to know by memory The Big Red Barn and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, could likely still, if I tried, recite passages from them. It became a ritual, something we did after bath and before bed. I remember so many quiet evenings on the couch, the warmth of our daughter beside me, feeling the very shivering tension of her excitement and anticipation, the strength of her concentration.

Over the years we graduated up in our reading. I cannot recall the first chapter book we read, but since then we have literally read hundreds of books together. It has been one of the joys of my life to open up the world of reading to her. I will never forget the look on her face when I first guided her to the juvenile fiction section of our local library. She saw immediately the possibility of it all and grinned up at me. I read books with her that I loved as a child, The Incredible Journey and Where the Red Fern Grows and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. But we also read books together that I had not, books that I came to love as much as she did. Books by Kate DiCamillo became a favorite for us both and we read nearly all of The Boxcar Children. I will forever remember the months we spent reading the entire Chronicles of Narnia, a series our daughter loved so much that when we finally turned the last page of the seventh and final book, I asked her what we should read next and her answer, without hesitation, was to start again at the very beginning.

More and more we told relatives who asked for gift suggestions about books she wanted and, at some point, she came to own The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She longed to read it. I held off for a while, hesitant to bring into her consciousness the serious and weighty issues brought forth by that book. But I had mixed feelings about it, because it is also a penultimate book about the magic and freedom of childhood and I wanted to share with her the fun in reading it. So, I decided to be honest with her, explaining my hesitancy to read this particular book because of a certain word used over and over again, a word full of hate and ignorance that was spoken as part of the ordinary language of the time and not one that we should ever repeat in conversation. She patiently stopped my earnest and sincere lecture to let me know that she was already very well aware of the word. I could rest assured that she understood its gravity and the reasons it was not to be used in our own daily language. So, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became one the more memorable books we have read together and I was proud of the good and critical questions it prompted from her. It opened up for us many conversations about morality and truth and the hard complexities of being human that I do not think we would have otherwise had. She wrestled mightily with the fact that not every question can be answered, that very few choices are ever absolutely clear-cut and that sometimes people we are supposed to obey and respect are just as capable themselves of being wrong and of disappointing us.   

Not very long after we read Huckleberry Finn our daughter became utterly enraptured by some books about a certain hero of the wizarding world, and our regular reading time came quickly to a halt. The Harry Potter series was one she came to own all her own and quite obsessively, though I did watch the movies with her. A somewhat hard and fast rule in our house is that you must read the book before you are allowed to watch the movie, so I did get to share in the anticipation of discovering the next part of the film version of the story after she completed each book. Part of the new state of things was that she was reading now for not only her own personal pleasure, but also because of her school's reading program. And, she had become what I had so wished she would: a reader and a voracious and passionate one at that. Once, noticing the library's display about Banned Books Week, she stood aghast and asked as if the mere thought of such a thing was utterly ridiculous, "Why would anyone ban a book, Dad?" Why indeed. I mourned the loss our reading time, but I also gave thanks each time I caught her curled up with a book in a chair or wrapped in a blanket with one on her bed or, best of all, overcome with sudden laughter, her head bent in that familiar reading pose we all know.

The only downside to this is something I have mentioned here before. To my ever-widening chagrin, she steadfastly avoids any book I recommend she read. How can this be? Especially after all the amazing books we have shared. And, yes, I have even tried the reverse psychology route. "Oh, you wouldn't like this one. It's far above your reading level and probably wouldn't interest you at all." She was on to my ploy immediately, much to the amusement of the library staff who overheard our conversation. But, recently there opened up a small crack in her armor, thrilling me. She and I went to the movies a week or so ago and saw for the first time the preview for a forthcoming version of The Hobbit. Given our daughter's propensity toward grand and sweeping epics of the fantastical sort, her eyes widened at the prospect of seeing it. And, it does look fantastic. I explained to her that The Hobbit is a book, a very famous book in fact, and the first in a very famous series about an entire other-world, much like the worlds of her beloved Harry Potter and of Narnia.

"You know what this means," I asked. Her face broke into a wide smile, "Yep. We have to read that book."

WALKING

Someday I would like to hike the Appalachian Trail. Perhaps that wish is a bit too much, considering the time and money and circumstances that all must align to make it come true. Living as I do very close to where the trail passes through our part of Virginia, I have had a number of friends and acquaintances who have hiked its complete length, and I probably have never expressed to them just how much I admire their feat. I have one friend out there walking as I type this, in fact, and his is a journey that I especially respect.

I imagine that my thoughts of hiking the trail are terribly romanticized and that, given the fact that I have never really hiked at all, I likely have an incomplete sense of the toil involved. Despite this, I think I have it in me. Of course, I also think I have a book or two in me, but I do not see them lying around anywhere nearby. Yet.

I am certain hiking the Appalachian Trail could very well be the hardest thing a person ever does. And, that is precisely what I am after. Somewhere along the way I became a person who seeks out physical and mental challenges. Actually, I suppose it happened when I became a runner. When I realized I could run, then that I could run a 5K, and then that I could run a half-marathon and then that I could run a marathon, a whole world of possibilities began opening up for me. There are now many times when I tell myself, "If you can run 26.2 miles, you can buckle down and do this." Whatever the this may be at the time.

People think that the hard part of running any distance, but especially longer ones, is the actual running itself. That is certainly one part of it, absolutely. After all, if it were not for the exertion involved, it would not be called exercise in the first place. And, of course, it takes much time to build up running muscles and the endurance to run for miles and miles. But the hardest part of distance running is far and away the mental challenge of it. Your brain, in the beginning especially, tries to tell you over and over again that you are doing something wrong. It asks you to stop. It begs you to stop. It tells you in a thousand different ways that you are foolish. And you believe it. But then comes the point when you realize that you do not have to listen to those thoughts. You can go further. You can stand it for another minute, another mile, and even another hour. That is when you realize that you have become a runner. You actually begin to crave the thrill of finding that point when it hurts and then pushing yourself beyond it.

Cheryl Strayed, in her book called Wild, which I finished last week, echoed these same thoughts in writing about what it took for her to keep putting one foot in front of the other each day on her hike from southernmost California to the Washington-Oregon border along the Pacific Crest Trail. Hers was a long walk of around 1,100 miles, putting a mere marathon to shame in some sense. In fact, there were days when she hiked nearly the equivalent in distance of a marathon. Then she got up the next day and walked some more. And then again the next day. On and on. Strayed had romanticized the notion of hiking for months in the wilderness, too, and found that the hardest part was the pure and simple daily grind of it. The fear, the weather, the animals, the blisters, the long list of dangers the trail holds all were no match, it seems, for the difficulty of merely keeping on, pushing herself further than she ever thought she could go. It is an astoundingly powerful thing to reach such a point, to grasp fully your own potential and to feel wash over you the pleasing ache and throbbing mix of exhaustion and accomplishment. The real sense of this was powerfully written by Strayed in her book and was bolstered by her skillful weaving into the narrative the difficult events of her life that led to her decision to begin in the first place. What she accomplished out there on the trail is compelling enough, but the story of what she found inside herself along the way made for a book that I could not help but plow through.

I think something else that draws me to want to hike the trail is the notion of simplicity. To be out and away, to be disconnected from an addiction to information and immediate communication, carrying everything you need on your back, with a singular and clear purpose: to just keep going. Perhaps it is the age I have reached or perhaps it is recent events in my own professional life--likely a combination of those things--but I find myself thinking more and more these days about what can be eliminated from the clutter of my life. It is so difficult in our culture to not be driven by the idea that more is better. More anything. More everything. Do not get me wrong, I myself am surrounded by stuff. I pine for gadgets and clothes and indulgent meals and so many things. But I am coming to see the emptiness in those cravings, the lack of real fulfillment once they are realized, and I am also coming to see how very little I can actually get by on. It is appealing to me to think of boiling it all down to the absolute barest of essentials.

Of course, I am told there are snakes. If I have one reservation about my ability to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, it is definitely the snakes. That might be harder for me than walking for miles and miles day after day with all I have on my back.

MEMORY

While traveling last week I also finished Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces and have been trying to collect my thoughts about it since. For lack of a better way to put it, this is simply a beautiful and stirring book. I am not sure, though, that I made complete sense of it and that is disappointing for me. It is a novel of the Holocaust, but that is far too inadequate a description, for it is about so many things. The plot follows the life of a Polish boy whose family is murdered before his eyes. He is discovered as he is hiding in the woods by a Greek geologist named Athos who then takes him in and raises him. The book charts his life and their relationship, but it focuses mostly on his quest to make sense of the great tragedy of his life and of the world. Michaels' book is really about memory, a favorite subject or ours here, of course, but one that is difficult to sufficiently encapsulate.

There is no doubt that the prose in Michael's work is lyrical and poetic, more so than just about anything else I can name right now, but probably makes this book one that deserves and requires more than just one reading. She piles on one metaphor after another, and while I generally favor this kind of literary writing, I did find it a bit tiresome in spots. Then I would be struck by an absolutely stunning passage and would be pulled in again. One in particular has stayed with me.

There's no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it's given a use. Or as Athos might have said: If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.

My own head is cluttered with memories of land, hills mostly, the way the earth seems to roll across itself in the landscape I call home, gathering here and there in bunches. But I also remember the stark and flat, windswept landscapes I have seen and find myself drawn to just as much. There is something for me about terrain, the long history that the world holds for itself beneath our feet and that will outlast us all, the way the earth is continually shaped and molded and sculpted as if our presence here really makes no difference in the end. We are simply swallowed into the strata that make up the memory of the world, sandwiched into the many layers that have already been stacked beneath us.

In spite of that, I still believe in hope, as does Jakob, the main character in the book. It is difficult to imagine trudging over the ground he carries in his own memory, but he must if it is, as Michael's writes, to be given a use. Digging into geological layers to piece together a story of the past is the central metaphor running throughout the book and it is well-crafted for sure. Jakob does make a map of the land he has walked upon, following it slowly to a place where he can discover sense in the senselessness and meaning in the meaninglessness.

MORE

Cross-country flights, for all their mind numbing irritants, are at least good for concentrated reading time. On a business trip last week to Denver, I made the most of all that sitting and tore through two spectacular books, finishing one completely and wrapping up a novel that I had been working on for too long. I was especially grateful for the chance to read all of Tracie McMillan's The American Way of Eating. It was perfect for a long airplane trip, since I could not have put it down if I had tried, and because it was about a topic already much on my mind--see the previous post.

There is always more to the story and the more I read through McMillan's book, the worse I felt for my dismissive and naively worded post about American eating. McMillan researched her book by working alongside immigrant farm laborers in the vegetable fields of California, stocking groceries and produce in a Walmart in Michigan, and prepping meals in an Applebee's kitchen in New York. There were so many well-articulated and intriguing points in this one that the gentleman sitting beside me on the return flight finally gave in and exasperatedly asked me why I kept tearing up small bits of paper strips and sticking them in the pages. I did not have an easy answer for him and, though I generally enjoy the chance to tell people about my blog, I knew doing so would provoke a longer conversation and give me far less time to actually finish the book. A quick,  just a lot of good stuff in here, while not actually turning to look at him did the trick. And there is a lot of good stuff in here.

My previous post, while being critical of the American way of eating in general, failed to address the larger and more important issue of class when it comes to the American diet, and McMillan fully delves into and makes completely clear the absolute centrality of the matter. There is simply far more to American eating than ignorance or a lack of awareness about calories, and I am regretful that I implied otherwise. McMillan made clear for me that food is very much a social activity in our culture. It is shared as a sign of love and hospitality, as a celebration of milestones and important events, as a signal of intimacy, and in ways elemental to who we are as human beings. We all care about food and we all need food--good food and healthy food. Lack of awareness or perspective on how we consume it, while still a large part of the issues at play here, is not all that keeps people from eating well and eating smartly.

McMillan's book is worth the read alone for the opportunity to learn about the astoundingly vast logistical network we have created for cultivating and distributing food in our country. She discusses the evolution of this system and the social and cultural shifts that brought it about. While it is impressive and ingenious, for sure, once you understand a little about how it works and how concentrated is the control of it, you will not in any way be able to think of the food you buy in your grocery store in the same way again.

There is actually nothing natural about this system. To walk through Walmart's cavernous aisles is to walk through a landscape created by a century's worth of decisions America has made about its food. We prized agricultural bounty; we valorized mass marketing; we made transportation and distribution into a science. We've built a massive infrastructure capable of taking whatever we grow and delivering it wherever we choose, on a scale heretofore unseen; this much is true. And yet I'm reminded, in a small way, of what John Steinbeck wrote when he visited migrant labor camps not far from where I picked grapes: There is a failure here that topples all our successes. It is far easier to eat well in America than in most of the world, but we've done little to ensure that fresh and healthy food is available to everyone.
 

I was prompted as well to consider the implications of the added stress and required decision-making that planning and cooking meals entails. Interestingly enough, I have seen and read a bit of late about how we make decisions as humans. Our brains, over the course of a day, actually develop decision-making fatigue, to the point that we eventually give up and guess or make the easier choice as the decisions, even the seemingly smallest ones, pile up and overwhelm us. This is intuitive, sure, but it plays an important role in the decisions we make daily about our health and our eating. Couple that fatigue with the stresses of making ends meet or working long hours or worrying about one's own physical safety and it becomes obvious that eating well is either a choice too wearisome to make or simply not a choice at all for many Americans. Which means, then, that one of the points I made in the previous post still stands: that the nutritional value of public school lunches is incredibly important. If a school lunch is the only real food choice provided in a child's day, it is all the more important that it be a good one.

The key to getting people to eat better isn't that they should spend money, or even that they should spend more time. It's making the actual cooking of a meal into an easy choice, the obvious answer. And that only happens when people are as comfortable and confident in the kitchen as they are taking care of the other endless chores that come with running a modern family--paying bills, cleaning house, washing the car.
Because, really, that's what I'm helping with back here amid the grease and the steam and the clang of tongs on metal: Coordinating a basic household task. There will be days for every person, every family, where it is worth paying four times more for the service. That's fine. But the longer I'm at Applebee's, the more I think everyone should be making that choice from equal footing: with easy access to fresh ingredients, and a solid ability to cook. Our health, as that of our ancestors, depends on it.
 

There are many, many reasons for the woeful state of our nation's eating habits and I glossed over this all too easily last week, but McMillan makes strongly the point that this issue is an economic one at its core.

Geography and the minute variations between the lowest rungs of our economy might change the details, but the healthiest route through the American foodscape is a steep and arduous path most easily ascended by joining its top income bracket. So far as I can tell, changing what's on our plates simply isn't feasible without changing far more. Wages, health care, work hours, and kitchen literacy are just as critical to changing our diets as the agriculture we practice or the places at which we shop.
 

This idea of kitchen literacy struck a chord with me, especially when she linked its importance with another issue that is of utmost importance to this blog, basic literacy in general.

If we managed to incorporate cooking into public education, we'd make sure the next generation could prepare healthy meals . . . leaving those skills to chance strikes me as shortsighted. Just as we have an interest in having kids who can read, we have a very strong public interest in having healthy kids. We recognize that the former is too important a skill to leave to parents alone, and therefore teach it in school; given the links between a healthy diet and knowing how to cook meals from scratch, we might want to try doing the same with cooking.
 

Even if you do not find yourself agreeing with McMillan's conclusions and the solutions she offers, her book is one that digs deeply into things that affect each of us every single day. Having a better sense of where our food comes from, how it is handled and delivered to us, and how this system is controlled is something that should be of interest to every American. These are things that are simply far too important for us to ignore.

 

 

FURTHER

I finished Scott Jurek's book, Eat and Run, last week. Jurek is well-known in the world of distance running, having won the Western States Endurance Run--a one hundred mile race through the mountains and wilderness of California--seven consecutive times. And that is just one of the many pieces of evidence for his ranking as an ultrarunning legend. He has won multiple times and holds records in the world's toughest and most demanding ultrarunning events. Hopefully, you have heard of him. If not, I am nearly certain you have by now heard of a landmark book called Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, which introduced the world to a reclusive tribe of indigenous people who inhabit the remote Copper Canyon in Mexico and are renowned (now) for their ability to run seemingly effortless for long distances. Very long distances. McDougall's book also, of course, sparked much conversation about the concept of barefoot running and may even be credited in part for the latest marketing ploy by shoe companies to develop so-called minimalist footwear. Jurek is featured prominently in McDougall's book and for that reason has come to know an even greater amount of fame in the last few years.

As if his running accomplishments were not enough, though, he has been for the better part of his career a vegan. Jurek's life and his book are ample evidence to all the naysayers and skeptics and myth followers out there that a finely tuned and highly successful athlete can, in fact, compete at such a level while living on a plant based diet. Yes, plant centered eating can give you all the balanced nutrition you need and--get this--more. Yes, there are ways to get ample amounts of things like protein and iron on such a diet. Imagine this: our planet has been equipped to provide us with plentiful nutrition on which to live and thrive far longer than our completely counter-intuitive American diet has been around. 

I have welcomed over the last few years and have learned a great deal from the widening conversation about food in this country. Three eye-opening books for me have been Joel Fuhrman's Eat to Live, Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. People are beginning to ask questions about what they are putting into their bodies. And for good reason, I believe. I have shaken my head at the recent news stories about the uproar from kids and parents about the new nutritional standards for public school lunches. Do not give me that argument about a so-called "nanny state." If public school lunches are going to be subsidized by tax payer dollars, then we have every right to expect them to be of the highest nutritional quality. We have every obligation as a society to make sure our kids eat balanced, healthful meals. In some of the articles there were high school kids complaining about being hungry and not getting enough to eat from the new school lunches. Do you know what the maximum calorie allowance is for high school lunches under the guidelines? 850 calories. Without even knowing it, I am certain that many of those kids consume that many calories per day on sodas alone. It would not take many twenty ounce bottles to hit that number. And therein lies the crux of this issue. Americans have no perspective about the amount of calories they consume. But, it is not simply about a number of calories. It is about eating things that are fresh, colorful, grown and not processed, not packed full of antibiotics and hormones, and not shipped from one end of the country to the other. At the very least, we should educate ourselves. We are, after all, given only one life and one body in which to live it. If you ask me, it comes down to simple common sense.

I also, of course, enjoyed Jurek's book for the stories of his running exploits. I have a difficult time explaining to non-runners why I am out there nearly everyday, pounding out the miles. They think of running as some sort of punishment and some people are even afraid of it. I cannot begin to tell you how many people have told me I am ruining my knees. I have news for them. My knees and every other joint in my body are stronger than theirs and, I would wager, are certain to last much longer. My heart also works less and pumps more blood and oxygen through veins that are stronger and clearer. I sleep better. I do not get sick as much. And, best of all, I reach a state of pure mental bliss regularly. Without illegal or, for that matter, legal stimulants. I have said it before. We humans were made to run.

More importantly, though, Jurek gave the best explanation I have ever heard or read for why he pushes himself and his body to absolute extremes. You simply have no idea what you are capable of until you ask it of yourself. And that goes for most anything. There is something important to be said about setting for yourself a goal, staying disciplined and focused in your work toward it, and then accomplishing it. And, there is something difficult to put into words about the power of going as far as you think you can physically and then finding that deeper, mysterious thing that takes you a little further. 

POEMS

I do not read enough poetry. I really have no good reason why. It has simply been by default, as I love and relish novels so much. But this week, I was intrigued by an interview with our country's newly named poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, in Garden & Gun Magazine.

First things first, though. You will do well to seek out and read this publication if you have not already. Do not let the name of this periodical fool you; it is about far more than gardens and guns. The title aptly encompasses the magazine's focus on all we can appreciate about living in the South: good food, clean, quiet living, the sporting life, and the outdoors. I never believed it would be possible for me to love a magazine, but this one is a treasure. Everything about it smacks of the highest quality, from the paper it is printed on to the level of writing and the stunning photography found on every page. Just when you think it is getting ready to cross the line into haughty pretentiousness, you will come across something that delves into the complexities of the South in an unadulterated way, while at the same time expressing completely the very deep sense of place that connects people in this part of the country. And they cover it all--arts, books, music, food, travel, even current and weightier issues of conservation and environmentalism. The arrival of each new issue to our mailbox always brings me to the same conundrum. Do I devour it right away or mete it out a little at a time in order to savor it?

You can explore Garden & Gun and read the article about Natasha Trethewey here. What stood out for me were a couple of her responses that spoke to many of the things I have written about here of late regarding the natures of memory and fiction.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
 

Even as I think of myself as a rememberer, I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better. In my new book, Thrall, there is a poem, "Calling," where I am dealing with these ideas. Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? My earliest memory from childhood, I don't know whether it is real or a conglomeration, and I have to challenge the nature of it. And explore why I've kept what I've kept.
 

Some things get rehearsed. Some get revised. What part is something I know myself? And what part has been given to me? It is wise for people to acknowledge that. That what we think we know as fact is probably not. And that's where some of the best writing comes from. You try to convince, but even as you are doing the convincing, you recognize that you are untrustworthy.
 

The same day I read her interview, I went to the library to find as much of Trethewey's work as I could. In reading her collection called Bellocq's Ophelia, in which she imagines the letters and words of a mulatto prostitute in New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century, I was reminded of the gifts poetry gives us. One of those gifts is something I love most about literary fiction--the possibility of stumbling upon a unique marriage of words otherwise unimagined. Things like this from her poem February 1911,

Only my shivering
and the chattering of my teeth
jar me back, my skin gooseflesh,
the Braille text of my future.
 

Or a small phrase like " . . . dredges the silt of my memory . . ." from another, an example of the ability of ordinary words to be molded together to form something entirely new and exceedingly vivid. There is also, of course, the unstructured freedom poetry offers for exploring the unlimited and magical possibilities of rhythm in language. Reading Trethewey's work has allowed me to renew once again my appreciation for the craft of writing--the seemingly simple act of arranging and rearranging letters into words into sentences into a living, breathing whole, something that we could not see before.

 

WEST, part II

What luck. After the post from last week in which I wrote much about Wallace Stegner, I was pointed to a 1990 interview with him in The Paris Review. It seems fitting that my conversation should continue in light of this. Please take some time to read the interview here. Following this post are some of the highlights for me and there is much to enjoy and to learn from in this piece. Stegner talks extensively about the publishing world, how age affects a writer, about the tedious process--the grinding it out, and about some very technical aspects of writing. His gifts as a teacher of writing are apparent.

First and briefly though, having now actually finished Ivan Doig's The Bartender's Tale, I feel that I may have been far too dismissive in my comments about it. I still love his older work first and foremost, but there is little doubt that this book is also a fine example of his outstanding craftsmanship. The last few pages are nothing short of jaw-dropping in the way he brings together his story, tying it all up neatly in that way that Hemingway referred to as the magic that must be performed over and over again at the finish. The ending to this Doig novel will stun you just when you think you have a seemingly simple story all figured out. That seems to be a tool and technique that he has perfected, as his earlier work, Bucking the Sun, is one of the best examples of such that I have ever read. 


From the Stegner interview:

"I am a writer by sheerest accident. . . I sat down one afternoon and wrote a story just because I wanted to write a story. I wrote it in about two hours and sent it off to the Virginia Quarterly, I think, and they published it. Then you know you're hooked."
 

He speaks vividly about creating truthful fiction. Part of the mystery behind good writing is that it feels and seems real--it is truthful in that it convinces the reader of a reality that is another country entirely.

"It had to have some forward motion . . . That's a technical problem: by the pure force of the writing to create a sense of involvement in real events . . . In making fiction, one of the things a writer must do is to make absolutely certain that he knows the mind he's dealing through . . . I have to try to become that person as far as possible. If I succeed, I get the tone of voice and the quality of mind that will persuade a reader to see and hear a real and credible human being, not a mouthpiece or a construct.
 

"Every morning you have to read over what you did yesterday, and if it doesn't persuade you, it has to be redone. Sometimes it takes three hours in the morning to get over the feeling that I've been wasting my time for the past week and that everything I've written up to that point is drivel. Until I can convince myself that I am speaking in the plausible, believable voice of the person I have invented, I can't go on. So the first job is to convince yourself, the second is to convince the reader. If you do the first, the second more or less follows."
 

In response to a question about how much of his fiction is autobiographical:

"What does Wallace Stegner have to do with it? The very fact that some of my experience goes into the book is all but inescapable, and true for almost any writer I can name. Which is real and which is invented is a, nobody's business, and  b, a rather silly preoccupation, and c, impossible to answer. By the time I'm through converting my life to fiction, it's half fiction at least and maybe more. People still come to me and say, 'Oh, it's too bad about your son who drowned in that surfing accident." Because some of All the Little Live Things reflects my immediate circumstances, they assume all of it does. People ought to learn to read better than that.
 

"You don't put placards up for the reader saying, This is my meaning. The whole business of writing is an attempt to arrive at truth, insofar as you can see it, as far as your capacity to unearth it permits. Truth is to be handled gingerly. That's an egg with a very thin shell. I'm not writing fables--where the moral is literally part of the form. I'm writing something from which the reader is supposed to deduce or induce any moral that's there. The moral value ought to be hiding in the material.
 

"When I was in my prime, so to speak, I would generally get anywhere from three to five or six pages a day, stuff that might have to be rewritten tomorrow, but that would essentially stay. That doesn't happen now. It takes more combing to do it now."
 

"It's important to get on with the writing, particularly when you're young and you can hardly wait to get down to work because you're boiling with something. But I'm not boiling that hard anymore. The critic is taking charge, and I'm just driving the cab. That's why it takes me so much longer now."
 

Some of what I enjoyed most came in his responses about teaching writing, specifically about what is the most difficult lesson to impart and what is most important in developing a course of study for writers. This in spite of his generalizations about gender, of course.

"Assuming that a student is at a stage where he is still teachable--there is a time when you shouldn't try to teach him, when he is technically proficient and subtle and has his own ways for going about what he wants to say--one of the hardest things to teach him is Revise! Revise! Revise! And they won't revise, often. Many of them would rather write a new book than revise the old one. Revision is what separates the men from the boys. Sooner or later, you've got to learn to revise.
 

"It might be different for every individual. I would ask some questions. I suppose I would ask, Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer . . . Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it." 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

WEST

I dream of Montana. I have since I read for the first time Ivan Doig's memoir of growing up there, This House of Sky. Then, I read his novel Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and I loved a place I have never been all the more. Doig's first three Montana novels, called the McCaskill Trilogy, are English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana. The first two of those, especially, are favorites of mine enough to make it into that category of books that I do not mind to read again and again.

Is not one of the many joys of being a reader the fact that you can come to love and inhabit a place you have never been? Or, a place that does not actually exist? It is one of the miracles of fiction, and it is how I feel about Wendell Berry's Port William. I can walk around that community in my head. I can visualize its citizens and how they would greet me and what we would talk about. I remember its past. This is a place that only exists in words. And in the minds of thousands of people who have read about it. It must also exist, then, in a thousand different ways. Being human, in spite of all its sufferings, can give us so much in the way of profound gifts. Inhabiting places in our minds is one of them, I think.

And so, thanks to Ivan Doig, I can inhabit Montana in my mind as well. I first came to know Doig as a writer because of a nearly offhand recommendation by a friend, and now I consider his prompt to be one of the great gifts of that friendship, which has stood for so many years now. As I mentioned in my hastily and lazily written previous post, Doig is a successor to Wallace Stegner, who many refer to as the "Dean of Western Writers." Stegner studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to found the writing program at Stanford University. His novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and created a stir among the literature community that still reverberates. In spite of that, it is a brilliant work and one you should read. Central also to his legacy is his work and activism related to water conservation in the American West, an issue of a magnitude that we in the eastern part of the country are blissfully ignorant. The Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University is named in honor of his life and work and many on the list of recipients of that award rank among the most prominent of American letters. I tell you all of this because I am fascinated by this lineage of writers, which I might even trace further back to A.B. Guthrie, also a winner of the Pulitzer for his 1950 novel The Way West. Stegner Fellows and those who have studied at Iowa form the largest portion of my list of favorite and beloved writers and these kinds of connections among them are fun for me to discover and explore.

What links Stegner and Berry and Doig and what draws me to their work in particular is the importance of place to their writing. For them, the landscape is as significant as any of their characters. This comes through not only in their description of terrain and in their skill at writing the authentic language of a place, but also in the unspoken implication that the history of the people in their writing only begins after the history of the place itself begins. In other words, our natural and self-centered inclination to think of humanity as the starting point for all else is turned upside down, or more accurately, right side up. When one fully considers the story of a place, and I mean the complete and long, long story of a place, it becomes quickly impossible to ignore the fact that the human beings there are only inhabitants of the temporary sort. And, more to the point, they are but a small blip on the timeline of that history which, if ever fully written, will reduce them to barely a footnote.

I am not sure anything for me will ever top Doig's earlier work. There is simply no other book out there like This House of Sky and Bucking the Sun and The Sea Runners are two of the best stories to have ever been told. And, without question, I could read anytime his first two Montana novels, English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and still feel them as deeply as I did the first time I read them. His latest that I am currently in the middle of is called The Bartender's Tale and returns to the same town of his Montana novels in the middle of the last century. It is enjoyable for me in a sentimental way, taking me back to one of those communities that I inhabit in my mind. I am eternally grateful for such a thing, though, and this is another reason I am drawn to writing that is centered around place. It is a gift writers can give to us, to write a place so well and so true that we can walk around it in our head for a bit.

TRYING

When I started the ToFGT blog, it was my absolute intention to post every week. One of the reasons I had for starting the site, after all, was to give myself a self-imposed writing deadline with no room for excuses for not exercising writing muscles. Alas, my day job has kept me away. Though I offer no excuse, I take a small amount of comfort in the fact that my day job does involve books--reading books, talking about books, being surrounded by books and by people who write and read and teach books. So, at least there is that. Mostly, though, I take comfort in the fact that I have also been kept away by my other writing. I have had a good streak going lately of working the fiction writing muscles in what time I have had available to write at all. It is highly important to me that I make progress on that front. More on that . . . someday.

For now, I do have a couple of things on my mind this week highly relevant to the literary world that I wish to share with you.

One of my favorite books from this year, discussed in a post entitled DAWN, is Amor Towles' Rules of Civility. It is a fine New York novel and a fine gathering of words into sentences from a first-time author who, fascinatingly enough, has a day job that is distinctly unliterary. For this reason, I am amazed as much by the fact that he wrote a book as by the actual book itself. And, I admire him greatly for his commitment and plan for getting a novel written and then for seeing that plan through. What he produced was a pleasure to read. goodreads.com recently hosted a live chat with Towles about his work and it was a tremendous opportunity to hear a writer answer questions about his book and discuss his craft. I hope you will read the book, but definitely take a few moments to watch the chat here.

Also, I am excited to have lying on the top of my t0-be-read pile the newest novel from Ivan Doig, called The Bartender's Tale. This one is on loan from our local library, so I am worried about getting it read in time, especially since I am at this point only about a sixth of the way through the big Hemingway biography I am reading. I have discussed Wendell Berry in great depth here as one of my favorite authors. Doig, for me, ranks just as highly. Berry, early in his career, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Doig has been called a successor to Wallace Stegner, whose long life and career were highly influential for not only  subsequent generations of so-called Western writers, but also for writing in general and for land-use policy and environmental issues. I look forward to sharing much more about this latest book and about the Stegner line of authors in a forthcoming post.

AMBITION

I must face it. I cannot possibly read all the books I wish to in my lifetime. There is something a little sad about that--in many ways, I am aware. Nevertheless, I doggedly continue building the reading list. I keep piling the books in my floor and by my bedside. It is almost like a promise to them. I will get to you. I swear. Please do not take it personally. All that said, though, sometimes ambition will overtake me and I will attempt to multitask. You and I have heard plenty by now about the supposed fact that multitasking simply does not work. Our brains, from what we are told by people smarter than I am, are not wired to absolutely focus on more than one thing at a time. Thus, we may think we are paying adequate enough attention to the conversation, the email, the road, when in all actuality one or another of those things is being completely ignored, even if only in bursts of a few seconds.

In spite of the scientific evidence, however, I persist. I will try and read two, perhaps even three, books at a time. Okay, I will tell myself, this is the primary book, to be read during my serious and devoted reading time--before bed. This other one and maybe that one, too, I can carry with me during the day and sneak bits of it down when I have a moment. You know, at lunch, in waiting rooms, while the pasta boils, at red lights. Sometimes it works. Most of the time it does not. One of two things invariably happens. I enjoy both or all of the books immensely and it takes me twice as long to finish them. Or, I key in on my favorite of the bunch and leave the others languishing, giving them not nearly enough of their due, and end up forced to abandon them.

This happened to me recently with a new book that I was genuinely excited about, Ramona Ausubel's No One Is Here Except All of Us. It is a strange book, not quite fantasy, but definitely fantastical in a way that reminds me of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. It is about memory and imagination and so many other things and is the story of an isolated Romanian town which decides to begin the world completely anew when they realize what is coming as World War Two and the Holocaust begin to unfold around them. I expected it to be strange in a good way. And, I really did give it an honest effort, lasting through more than one hundred pages. Which brings me to a troubling question. How much reading is sufficient enough to give a book a fair chance? I was ready to give up all hope on this one after about ten pages, but that did not seem nearly enough. Then, of course, every page turned after that became all the more tedious. In the midst of this internal debate I overheard a staff member in our local library talking with another patron. His opinion as a reader is one that I trust and I heard him say in discussing a book he did not enjoy, "Why waste time on a bad book? There are too many good ones to get to." That remark tipped the scale for me and, after one more valiant effort, I closed the cover without marking the page. I did so with a heavy heart, because I have the smallest inkling of the hard work and sweat that go into creating a story. Ausubel's novel is obviously not a bad book. It just did not appeal to me, but I could not help but feel some guilt for not finishing what she must have given so much of herself to.

What is keeping my attention, on the other hand, is the second book of a five-volume biography of my old friend, Ernest Hemingway, by Michael S. Reynolds. It is utterly fascinating. This second book is Hemingway: The Paris Years. With five volumes, Reynolds is exhaustive to say the least. While not a daily chronicle, it comes close. Yet, Reynolds is one of those gifted biographers who can be meticulous while at the same time writing in a way that is as compelling as good fiction. And, it is this particular volume that follows Hemingway through his 20's as he served what amounted to his apprenticeship as a writer, honing his skill and craft on stories and then working through his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which, of course, changed both the course of his life and the literary world forever. I already have the final two volumes in the stacks. I may be busy for a while.

FICTION

I read the following in a New Yorker blog last week by Keith Ridgway and have been chewing on it since. Here is a link to the complete post.

"And I mean that--everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones--they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor--please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience--with our senses and our nerves--is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos."

"So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn't what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it."

I must say, the first part throws me a bit. If we admit Ridgway's contention as truth, and I really see no escape from doing so, what does that say about our lives? Our relationships? Is part of our deception, rather our storytelling, a false conviction that our lives are and can even possibly be built upon honesty--honesty with ourselves and honesty with those whom we love and call friends? Perhaps he is not positing so spectacular a theory. After all, the post is about writing and the fact that he is not completely sure from where his writing comes. I am sure he did not intend to send me on some sort of metaphysical quest. But, that paragraph in particular leaves me wondering. It is difficult enough to find meaning in the drudgery of the day-to-day. If you stop and ask yourself why am I here, you may actually find yourself paralyzed by the fact that the question cannot truly be answered. After all, is it not the question from which all human endeavor began and for which we still seek an answer? Some among us believe they have answered that question. But, if Ridgway is correct, and I contend he is, then those things upon which our faiths are built are merely creations of our minds, the selves we constantly rewrite in order to suit our needs and desires.

Perhaps, though, there is something to be found in the usage in the preceding sentence of that one little word, merely. For as much as I have been chewing on the first paragraph, I am struck more profoundly by the second. That particular part of the post is in keeping with the spirit and ongoing discussion here on my own blog--intended first and foremost to be a celebration of the literary life. So, maybe the selves we have created are not mere creations in the least. They are, instead, THE creations. All that we know. All that we are. All that we wish to be.

Beacuse his point is absolutely clear to me and voices well what I myself feel about fiction--that it gives us everything. We all know how to do it because it is essential to our own understanding of ourselves, whether we care to admit so or not, and it is absolutely essential to an understanding and insight of others.

NEW YORK

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy."

"A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: 'This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.' If it were to go, all would go -- this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death."

Opening and closing lines from Here is New York, by E.B. White

Last week I got to pretend I was E.B. White. And I learned something about him I did not know: people who knew him called him Andy. I tromped all over and up and down the island of Manhattan for five busy days. I have long been a fan of New York, as I have written here, and this was not my first visit. However, it was for me the best so far. I recently accepted a job offer from a publishing company, a real one of the old ilk, based on Fifth Avenue, and I was in the city for a week to work. Each morning I rose in my midtown hotel, got in a run, and grabbed coffee and a bagel and a Times on my way up 40th Street to the office. Joining the steady stream of moving people going about their business not once failed to energize me. I was living off too little sleep, but I was wide awake each day, especially in the mornings. There is something about being in the city that enlivens me. I savor the sounds and the smells and the heat of the place. It is something like electricity.

Of course, I ran. The first run took me toward downtown on Lexington, through Gramercy Park and a bit past 14th Street, looping over to 1st Avenue and back up past the United Nations building. The second run was in the other direction, up 5th Avenue for a ways, cutting into Central Park around 96th. I am not a big fan of running in the park early in the morning. Everyone runs in the park in the early morning. It is a bit like being in one of those crowded marathon events. People are everywhere and navigating through the foot and bike traffic is worse than dashing through New York intersections in the paths of oncoming cabs. So, I cut through the park to say I had run there and came out on Central Park West and headed back toward midtown, running around Columbus Circle and following 6th Avenue to end the loop. The third and last run of the week took me down 5th Avenue, hanging a right on 14th to follow it over to 10th Avenue where it got a little gritty as I entered the Meatpacking District. I ran under the High Line through Chelsea up 10th and got waylaid by the traffic coming into the city from the Lincoln Tunnel as I tried to head back east on 40th.

The sun rises earlier in New York than in southwest Virginia, given its eastward geography, and I took advantage of the extra time on my runs. New York, of course, seems to always be alive and humming, no matter the hour. But, there is a sense around the early dawn hours of an old man stretching and yawning himself awake. Traffic is a little thinner, storefronts are gated, and things are beginning again. There are stacks of newspapers on corners still in twine and here and there men with hoses spraying down the sidewalks and every few minutes another cluster of commuters emerging from the subway stations as if the world were being repopulated.

I was feeling quite literary all week, owing in no small part to the nature of my new job. I also made my first visit to the Algonquin Hotel and had a drink in the bar. And while the room that hosted "The Vicious Circle," a well-known group of writers and critics who luncheoned daily at a round table throughout the 1920's, is no longer there, I did feel some sort of communion with them and took pleasure in sitting back and imagining the likes of Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross and others as they held court. On every visit to New York I carve out an hour or more to jostle my way about the stacks in the Strand Book Store and many times I have ended up frustrated by my visit. There is simply an overwhelming amount of books to be seen there and, of course, a smelly and loud crowd of freaks and hipsters to wade through. I usually have no direction to my roaming, but this time I went in armed with a list and came out with quite the haul. Yes, this from a man who has previously written here that he buys few books. But, we all need to celebrate every now and again, right? I wanted New York books and I wanted them from my favorite New York bookstore. I looked specifically for the E.B. White book, which is actually a reprint of an essay he had published in a magazine in 1949. I urge you to find and read it, no matter your own feelings about the city. His lean and sparse and efficient prose is an education in itself and it is an elegantly simple and timeless homage to a place. Also in my bag were two of Marilynne Robinson's books, which I have decided I should absolutely own, Home and Gilead, Pete Hamill's own tribute to New York, Downtown: My Manhattan, a new collection of pieces about Central Park called, aptly, Central Park: An Anthology, edited by Andrew Blauner, a copy of Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic for my wife and a book for our daughter, Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman. Let us see if she actually reads it.

I was grateful to a very good friend who knows the city better than anyone else for his recommendation of my now new favorite New York bookstore, Book Culture, near Columbia University. I visited there finally on my last and only unencumbered night in the city. As soon as my meetings were over, I raced to the hotel, changed, and headed down to Grand Central where I hopped the shuttle to Times Square and caught the 1 train uptown to 110th. I browsed Book Culture for a long while and then happened upon the the stairs that lead up to the real treasure trove above, where, of course, I browsed even longer and came away with a volume I have long been on the lookout for, Writing New York, an unprecedented anthology of writing about the city that is organized chronologically. It contains hundreds of pieces, beginning with Washington Irving in the earliest days of the 19th century and ending with an excerpt from Don DeLillo's Falling Man,  published in 2007. I then strolled down Amsterdam and over to Broadway and happened on a quiet little sushi place where I sat anonymously in a corner while a storm blew through. As the downpour began to wane, I ambled a few more blocks south and hitched a ride again on the 1 train, this time headed downtown. I took the Staten Island Ferry in the rain, standing on the back and taking in the skyline as it stood aflame over the choppy waters of the harbor. Back on Manhattan, I meandered up and around Wall Street for the hell of it before finally taking the subway back to Grand Central, treating myself to a late night snack of gelato before returning to my hotel.

It was the kind of night to savor in the city, including traversing nearly the entire length of Manhattan, eating a quiet meal, browsing row after row of bookshelves, and simply watching. I feel like a different person there. While sitting in that sushi place I read from the Writing New York anthology Walt Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and was struck, as I had also been while reading the E.B. White essay, by his voicing of the same feelings that being in and among the city stirred up in my own gut. Whitman and White both, even one hundred years removed from one another, write of the connection through the long span of time of the city's existence between all the souls who have been moved by that place. That same electricity shrouded by anonymity that I feel there is something that has been felt countless times before by millions of people drawn to New York for whatever the reason may be. Whitman speaks directly to his readers, asking what distance of time may separate them and anticipating that, no matter what that distance may be, they will know exactly what he has known.

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not--distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk'd the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questions stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me . . . 

THINKING

I had been holding off on reading Marilynne Robinson's When I Was a Child I Read Books because I knew it would require more of me than others. In short, I knew it would be work. I do not say that in a negative way. I mean it in that I knew her writing would require me to bring a little more of myself to it, a little more attention and willingness to fully engage. Robinson assumes her reader is a bit more responsible in this way. I will propose that if there is a preeminent thinker and writer walking among us today, in much the same vein as a Thoreau or a Whitman or an Emerson, it is Marilynne Robinson. Make of that claim whatever you may, but I feel safe in saying that not only is her prose some of the most lyrical and poetic that you may find in the published world, but her words also challenge and push the reader to consider questions of a more literate and scholarly bent than most other writers.

But I need not try and convince you. Despite recent events, trust that her reception of the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her novel, Gilead, is indicative enough of her skill and competence. Having been a fan of her fiction for a long time now, When I Was a Child, is the first of her nonfiction I have delved into, mostly for the reasons above. Within the first paragraph I was questioning my own reading comprehension level and, as with her novels, it was handy to have a dictionary nearby. This is an essay collection of weighty material, covering a wide range of questions, but, like all of Robinson's work, at least for me, most of it seems to return to a central theme of the nature of the Divine and of our relationship to God and to the world. One thing I love about her fiction is that she has a particular artistry when it comes to the making of metaphor and this gift is equally apparent here. Her words read almost like a prayer, with a rhythm and a fluidity that calms, while at the same time challenging some of  your most basic ideas and deeply held beliefs. Her work is rife with passages like the two I will share below that exude the very concept of grace, pointing out all that is wrong about the world and the ways in which we fall short, while at the same time celebrating those things as part of what makes us more fully human.

All of the pieces in the collection are exceptional, but two that particularly stand out for me are the title essay, which discusses her roots in the American West, and one called Imagination and Community, which has much to say about writing itself,  so I feel quite compelled to share from it with you.

"Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life.
I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of -- who knows it better than I? -- people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification."

This passage struck me because it follows lines of thought found in some previous discussion here about fiction and its importance in increasing our ability to empathize with and understand those around and apart from us -- key, as Robinson postulates, to our ability to both define and fully participate in the act of community.

Then there is this, which I believe may serve as the very essence of what I wish for this blog to be, a celebration of reading and of books.  

"I remember once, as a child, walking into a library, looking around at the books, and thinking, I could do that. In fact I didn't do it until I was well into my thirties, but the affinity I felt with books as such preserved in me the secret knowledge that I was a writer when any dispassionate appraisal of my life would have dismissed the notion entirely. So I belong to the community of the written word in several ways. First, books have taught me most of what I know, and they have trained my attention and my imagination. Second, they gave me a sense of the possible, which is the great -- and too often, when it is ungenerous, the great disservice -- a community performs for its members. Third, they embodied richness and refinement of language, and the artful use of language in the service of the imagination. Fourth, they gave me and still give me courage. Sometimes, when I have spent days in my study dreaming a world while the world itself shines outside my windows, forgetting to call my mother because one of my nonbeings has come up with a thought that interests me, I think, this is a very odd way to spend a life. But I have my library all around me, my cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience, who have helped me to my deepest enjoyments of it. Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word: Read. Excellent advice, for a great many reasons, a few of which I have suggested here."