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 . . .