AUDIO

It seems I now have good reason to think of all of those audio books I "read" as more than just a guilty pleasure. I have long considered them as books I have not really read, mostly because I am the type who survives by setting tiny rules for himself. Take a moment to read this from T.M. Luhrmann and published this week in the New York Times. I must not be the only one hobbled by the notion of a marked difference between reading a book and listening to one. As she says, "We tend to regard reading with our eyes as more serious, as more highbrow, than hearing a book read out loud." And yet, I have come to relish my time with audio books. I spend a great deal of time in my car and, other than listening to the Bob Edwards Show, there this no other way I more prefer to spend that time. 

Luhrmann reminds us of our great and long history of storytelling and also that literacy is a relatively new element in our social fabric, a skill not so long ago reserved only for a certain sort. For far longer than they have been read, our stories have been sung and spoken and performed for one another. She points out, too, how a story heard rather than read allows us to experience it in wholly different ways.

"And so listening to a book is a different sensory experience than reading it. The inner imagining of the story becomes commingled with the outer senses -- my hands on the trowel, the scent of tansy in the breeze. The creation of this sensory richness was in fact an explicit goal of the oral reading of the Bible in the medieval European cloister, so that daily tasks would be infused with Scripture, and Scripture would be remembered through ordinary tasks."

For all of my setting apart of my audio book listening from my regular reading life, I remember and enjoy those books just as much as the printed ones. Listening to one very much involves more of me than just my imagination. Countless times I have found myself hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it tightly as the tension in a story stretches toward its pinnacle, miles of road passing beneath me unnoticed. I react to plot twists and to characters physically with gestures or audibly with gasps and I comment aloud and with exasperation, things I hardly ever do while reading a book held in my hand. Or, I am stunned into silence and find myself minutes down the road with my mouth still hanging open. 

I will confess also to sitting in parking lots with the engine running or driving aimlessly around for stretches at a time as I savor a particularly good book. I suppose it is the equivalent of not being able to put one down, but it does seem a little more odd to not be able to get out of my car. There are even some books that I have come to think might be better in their audio book form than in their printed version. I am a fan of Frank Delaney, whose many books about Ireland are among my favorites to read (see especially the novel, Shannon), but to hear them read in an Irish accent seems to make the stories all the more real for me. I have yet to find any audio versions of James Joyce, but I imagine the same might be said for his works, too. 

Some of the best memories of time spent with my daughter have been all the books I have read to her. I have written before of her growing out of having me read to her, but I have found that audio books have given us one more way of enjoying books together. In fact, she has challenged me. When she read, or actually, devoured, the Harry Potter series, I looked forward to watching the movies with her after she finished each volume, and I quickly became a fan myself. That, actually, might be a bit of an understatement. I seriously consider Severus Snape to be one of the best-written, multi-dimensional, complex characters in all of literature. Truly. And so, my daughter has now reversed our deal. At her urging, I am making use of my car time to plow through the audio books of the series while she awaits each one I finish so that we may watch the movie again together. And, as I "read" the Harry Potter books, my own words to her have come back around to me. The book is always better than the movie.

I was just this week given the opportunity to read to her once again. One of my daughter's teachers invited fathers to visit his class to take a turn reading to them a book they are reading together, Pam Munoz Ryan's, Esperanza Rising. It happens to be the case that dads are not always encouraged to be as actively involved at the school. So, not only do I appreciate this teacher's efforts to foster a love of reading among his students, but I was impressed at his obvious attempt to give the dads the kind of volunteer opportunity that might otherwise be directed toward the moms. I took him up on it. I really did not know what to expect. But, as I settled into the pages and looked up and out over that classroom to see them all so quiet, noses stuck in a book, I could see on their faces the same thing I get from my audio books -- the sheer, elemental human pleasure of hearing a story told to you. 

AGAIN

I have gotten far more comfortable in recent years with the idea of rereading books. I once took a pretty firm stance that doing so was a waste of time that could be spent working through the infinite list of things I have yet to read. I have come to see the narrowness of that viewpoint, however, and now relish the occasional stirrings I have to binge on the likes of my favorites. I have been in the revisiting mood of late. It started when I discovered an Ivan Doig book I had forgotten I owned and had not yet read, his novel Prairie Nocturne. The main character in that book, a woman named Susan Duff, was a minor character in my favorite Doig book, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, which is the middle volume of what Doig calls his Montana Trilogy. Rascal Fair holds a permanent place on my list of Shipwreck Books. I remember the first time I read it and knowing within just a page or two that it would be a book I would love always. That is a joy, no? To begin reading something and to know nearly right away that you will be off in a world that will stay with you. So, as soon as I placed Prairie Nocturne back in its resting place there on the shelf, my finger automatically stretched just down the row to pull out Dancing at the Rascal Fair.

That got me thinking. What is it about such a book that causes me to be moved by it? It is hard to put a finger on such things, but I came up with a few. The prose itself, obviously. If there is such a thing as magic in the world, I see it when a writer gathers words onto a page in a way that seems as if they carry themselves. They are arranged as a score of music, rhythmically sound and tuned to just the right pitch, making something inside you dance.

Such as the following. Here is what awaits when you crack open the first book in Doig's Montana Trilogy, English Creek:

"That month of June swam into the Two Medicine country. In my life until then I had never seen the sidehills come so green, the coulees stay so spongy with runoff. A right amount of wet evidently could sweeten the universe. Already my father on his first high patrols had encountered cow elk drifting up and across the Continental Divide to their calving grounds on the west side. They, and the grass and the wild hay meadows and the benchland alfalfa, all were a good three weeks ahead of season. Which of course accounted for the fresh mood everywhere across the Two. As is always said, spring rain in range country is as if halves of ten-dollar bills are being handed around, with the other halves promised at shipping time. And so in the English Creek sheepmen, what few cowmen were left along Noon Creek and elsewhere, the out-east farmers, the storekeepers of Gros Ventre, our Forest Service people, in just everyone that start of June, hope was up and would stay strong as long as the grass did."

There you have it. June does not just come as the next page on the calendar. It swims in with an abundance of rain in a place that otherwise aches for it. In that small way he has told you so much about this place and yet allowed you to gather even more about it from what he has not told you. It is not enough rain, but the right amount of wet that does not just make things better, it sweetens the universe. And people are not simply feeling good about it. Hope was up. What a thing of beauty. It is one thing to say something; it is another to be able to tell it in a way that makes people feel it in their bones. 

I have read all of Doig's work. His memoir of growing up in Montana, This House of Sky, is altogether the finest homage to a place as I have ever read. It is my opinion, though, that in a body of work that as a whole is of the highest quality a writer can produce, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is far and away his best. It is for me perhaps the penultimate example of the kind of writing that I wish to savor for a very long time. In it Doig is able to capture the full complexity of human life, both the lovely and the serene -- all that is to be savored -- and the anguish and the terribleness -- all that fills us with dread. What he has crafted with mere words is life shown among all its layers, in all its dimensions, cluttered by all its unanswerable questions, so clearly and so astoundingly rendered through lives not our own, but draped in the possibility that they could be.  

And, of course, there is the way he writes the place. My own memories are both rested upon and bounded by a certain landscape. The shape of terrain, the carving paths of rivers and streams, the weather and wind, these help to tell the stories of places and the people that inhabit them. And how those people live upon the land and amongst one another. I most enjoy writing in which these things figure prominently. 

From Dancing at the Rascal Fair:

"So, the widebrimmed Montana, this was. The Montana of plain arising to foothills ascending to mountains, the continent going through its restless change of mood right exactly here."

Passages like that make me smile. And wear out the pencils I keep nearby for underlining them. I have come to learn that reading a book of this sort once again makes it more and more a part of me. It makes for great pleasure to discover all over again the things that made you love something in the first place.    

NOTABLE

What a year for reading. There was a lot on my list and, while I did get through most of it, there remains plenty more. Without a doubt, the best and most memorable book of the year for me was one I read just recently, Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. This is one that takes you to a place you may not know much about, Chechnya, specifically over a span of time that includes both wars there since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is Marra's first book and with its quality he sets a high bar for himself. But, he is one from that favorite of places for me, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, so the high caliber of his work is not a surprise at all. He is also a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Two things that stood out were, firstly, the unique way he structured the book, moving back and forth over the course of about twenty years and giving us the points of view of a number of characters, all of whom are so well-constructed that they will make you ache. Instead of feeling as if you are reading a collection flashbacks, though, it is more akin to watching the pieces of a puzzle fall steadily into place in a satisfying kind of way. The second thing to savor was the absolute quality of his prose. It sings. Find this book and read it.

And what of my favorite end-of-year list? Take a moment to peruse the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2013. In the fiction portion, you will find Marra's book as well as our friend, Jhumpa Lahiri, and her novel, The Lowland, which is one that I wholeheartedly recommend, of course. I was also able to read Philipp Meyer's The Son and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis, yet another first time novelist with roots at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I picked up We Need New Names fully expecting to be blown away, but I am getting much better at not wasting my time with books that do not grab me and this was one. Two that I have not gotten to yet but that are lying on the desk beside me as I write are Local Souls by Allan Gurganus and Dirty Love by Andres Dubus III. These two are from the house for which I am honored to work, W.W. Norton. Though I have generally only hinted at my work in publishing here on the blog, I have to take the opportunity to share my good fortune through my job to have gotten to meet and chat with Andre Dubus over the summer. It was a treat, not only for his openness and willingness to talk about his writing, but also for his gracious inquiries about my own and his genuine curiosity about the place I call home.

The year was unusual for me with very little in the way of nonfiction added to my list of reads, though I did read Sonia Sotomayor's My Beloved World and enjoyed it very much. And the NYT list definitely adds to the t0-be-read list, including the new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial, though I am not quite sure I am up for it yet, and Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, which will likely take some serious commitment. The one I really want to read and plan to grab from the library as soon as I see it there is Ari Shavat's My Promised Land, which I actually started in a bookstore but did not plunk down the money to buy. I have heard good things about both Wave from Sonali Deraniyagala and Year Zero by Ian Buruma, so while I am at it, I might as well add them to the list, too.

And just like that, I am already behind. 

    

POWER

I was lucky enough to be directed this week to an interview with novelist Ann Pancake in The Georgia Review that let me build upon the thoughts I discussed in my post from October, entitled POLITICS. That post centered around the political decisions we all make on a daily basis and around questions about writers and their responsibilities as public figures. I read Pancake's novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been, shortly after it was published some years ago and it remains one of the most important books I have ever read. It is far and away one of the better books of and about the Appalachian region. It is also a singularly important exploration through fiction of the devastating impacts of mountaintop-removal mining, not only on the landscape and natural habitat, but on the human beings who live directly in its shadow and on the communities they have built. I have also read no other author who so perfectly captures in her work the Appalachian dialect. It is a difficult thing to write, a way of speaking that is hard to authenticate in printed form. It must be heard and felt and Ann Pancake gets it right.

Take a few minutes to read the interview here and also her essay published in the same issue of The Georgia Review here.

There are a couple of things in Pancake's essay that especially struck me and that also hit upon issues that we have spent much time discussing here before. One, the unique and powerful way that fiction can create empathy. This was an important factor in her decision to approach the issue of mountaintop-removal mining in the form of a novel and not as a work of nonfiction. 

"I started to perceive the unique abilities literature, including fiction, has to educate, move, and transform audiences that are possessed by no other medium, including reportage and documentary . . . It's not easy to actually feel, with our hearts, with our guts, overwhelming abstract problems that don't directly affect us, especially now, with so many catastrophes unfolding around us, and it's tough to sustain compassion for the nameless souls struggling with those catastrophes. But we do have great capacity to empathize with the personal stories of individuals."

It is one thing to say the practices used to extract a resource like coal are simply part of the cost of having the luxury and convenience of electricity, to see the issue in stark black and white or purely pragmatic terms. It is quite another to see and understand the people in those places where it is happening as individuals and as human beings with the same needs and fears that we ourselves carry. Fiction provides a space in which we can be fully immersed in the sufferings of others in a way that lets us imagine clearly our own suffering.

 "Pushing a little deeper into the relationship between literature and the imagination, I want to point out, too, the way literature -- both the reading of it and the writing of it -- can reunite an individual's conscious and unconscious . . . our very business as artists is trafficking between the conscious and the unconscious . . . "

And here is where she really gets me.

" . . . I'll propose that artists are also translators between the visible and invisible worlds, intermediaries between the profane and the sacred. How is this pertinent to the case I'm making for art's ability to create change in the world? Only by desacralizing the world, over centuries, have we given ourselves permission to destroy it. Conversely, to protect and preserve life we must re-recognize its sacredness, and art helps us do that. Literature re-sacralizes by illuminating the profound within the apparently mundane, by restoring reverence and wonder for the everyday, and by heightening our attentiveness and enlarging our compassion." 

I underline that last statement because it encapsulates for me the truth of why all art, but most especially literature, is so important. Later in the piece she refers to writers as the mythmakers of human history. It is and has been the writers among us who tell our stories, the most important ones, the stories that define us and give meaning to our being, the stories that bridge that ghostly gap between our profane physical world and the unknown sacred one.What a way to talk about the work a writer does. And, what a way to make us think of the sheer power of telling stories.

HUMOR

All this time there has been Thomas McGuane. Do you ever discover an author's work and realize in an aching way that how you see the world might have been entirely changed if you had read it earlier? I have known for a long time who McGuane is, of course. I had some sense of his style, of the kind of writing for which he is known and I am a big enough Jimmy Buffett fan to have been familiar with Rancho Deluxe and Captain Berserko. But because I must have seen slapped onto the spine of one of his books somewhere sometime that narrow label, humor, I had dismissed him. You can pretend for my sake that you do not know that I tend to take myself too seriously at times. Which is why I asked such a hyperbolic question. Perhaps reading Thomas McGuane would not have entirely changed the way I see the world, but it surely would have given me a glimpse of other possibilities.

What McGuane is showing me is how a master storyteller operates. Because, when it comes down to it, is that not why we read in the first place? Because we like a good story. It is something all humans share, whether they are readers or not. We relish tales. We wonder how it ends. We live our lives in our heads as a story we are telling to ourselves. It is a thing about our species that stretches itself all the way back across the full history of us. We owe our very survival to telling and listening to stories. Think of that.

It is one thing to tell a story, though, and quite another to craft one as if working in wood or clay or with oils, bringing in all the disparate elements, creating from jumbled bits and pieces a whole thing that is carried up on itself. In writing, I think of it as wordsmithery. It is the way a skilled writer finds the exact places in which to fit the only words that go, maybe a little trimming here and there, but shaping the words into a form that allows them to seem as if they came that way from the very beginning. It is a way of putting something that makes it like nothing anyone else would have said. There are lots of quality writers out there. There are very few true wordsmiths.

I spend time scratching in pencil a line under such a passage as this:

"Visiting my mother's family in Arkansas, they had been passengers on a powerful bass boat that sped through a crowded water baptism on the Ouachita River, scattering and injuring worshippers. Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith. I think their particular kind of Christian longs for punishment, longs to be shriven, the only road to paradise they could picture. In any case, while awaiting trial for criminal endangerment, my mother and father began hitting the bars. Sometimes a Christian will deliberately go down a bad road just to produce eventual suffering. They're crazier than pet coons."

Or finding scattered all through his narrative quick gems like:

"I was in that moronic oblivion that makes the world go round." 

McGuane writes out of a Montana landscape and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. I have written before of Stegner and of Ivan Doig, his literary successor, and also of my penchant for literature set in the west and in Montana. And Wendell Berry, who we know well here, of course, was also a Stegner Fellow. But McGuane's work is decidedly different from that of Stegner and Doig and Berry. Though place and the land are as much a part of the work as any character for all of them, McGuane's writing might be considered the mirror image of that of the others. His carries a sort of cynicism in the face of Doig's and Berry's continual leaning toward hope, though it is a style not without keen observation and a profound understanding of the world and people around us. McGuane points out through his stories the absurdity of our situation as human beings, the irrationality of most of our endeavors, the seeming pointlessness of our day-to-day existence. Berry and Doig, on the other hand, guide us to something outside ourselves.

What I think, though, is that both approaches provide meaning.

When I was in college I took a memorable class called Appalachian Political Economy. One of our first assignments was to spend some time looking at collections of photography focused on the region and to then write about our reactions to it. Already you can imagine in your mind the sorts of pictures we saw, black and white, certainly, and favoring subjects like hardscrabble farms and weather beaten people and dingy towns mourning the loss of great industry, mixed in among vistas of fog shrouded ridges and rusty fences stretching far into the distance. They told a story that I think needs to be told, without a doubt. But I wrote in my response that, even understanding perfectly why the story needed to be told, it also struck me that while I considered myself a child of the region as much as any of the people in the pictures, no one was coming to photograph me as I relaxed in my apartment after a day full of the grudging toil of discussing things like political economy at a private college. I was well-fed, generally well-groomed and well-provisioned and living also in Appalachia. What I was trying to say is that while the photographs were important in documenting the realities of a geographic region distinct in many ways, they did not give the full reality, nor did they do anything to show that the region was also a lot like most other places in America.

What I am getting at is that McGuane is showing me that both sides of the story are important. He has prompted me to consider that while I love and revere the writing of Berry and Doig to the point of even deriving a certain amount of emotional sustenance from it, maybe the idyllic and the pastoral are not the only ways to show respect for a place. While no expert, I have a fairly solid awareness of the literature that comes out of the Appalachian region and I know of no author currently writing out of it that does not do it in the way of old barns and foggy hollows. I do not know any Appalachian writer who is writing literary fiction that tells the story of human experience here without the semi-worship of ridge tops and wise, old Grandma in her rocker on the porch. Another hyperbolic statement, perhaps, but I hope you get my drift. What McGuane writes of the West, particularly in his more recent work, makes the place and the land central, but it is not necessarily the sweeping frontier peopled by proud and rugged immigrants. And it is not the bucolic landscape of Berry's Port William. But it is still brilliant. And just plain funny.

POLITICS

I hope you will first take the time to watch this interview with Wendell Berry. It will be worth it. If only to hear an old master's gravelly voice and to see his watery eyes as he reads aloud the words he has written.

I believe that nearly every decision we make each day is a political one. I waffle sometimes on this. Maybe it is an overstatement. Maybe not. The fact is, public policies affect everything about our lives whether we are aware of them or not. If we are not aware of such things, then this non-decision is still a political choice -- a choice to not be engaged. I am not just talking about overtly political things like bumper stickers and yard signs and Facebook posts. I am talking about the mundane decisions we make about where we shop, what we eat, what we wear, what we see and what we ignore, and even what we ask of our children. Realizing that each of our decisions are political is to acknowledge that everything we do each day is dependent upon other people and that each of our choices affects other real human beings and other real places in the world.

I can think of no other writer who lives this acknowledgement out through his art as much and as well as Wendell Berry. It begs a question, in fact. What exactly is the responsibility of the writer in the public sphere? Does the art alone speak for itself? Or does the creator of it bear some burden of using her craft and notoriety to further along a more public discourse?  I cannot answer these questions, but they are good thoughts on which to chew sometimes. There are other writers who produce far more overtly political work -- I am thinking here of Berry's fiction; his nonfiction is as straightforwardly political as can be done -- but who largely choose to retreat from the world and to disengage from discussion of the issues raised in their writing, much less to participate in any activism centered around them. I concede that a very large part of the creative process involves a retreat into oneself, a solitude that forces disengagement and that this is both necessary and important. Yet for Wendell Berry, there is no other choice than "to make common cause with [his] place." Which, for him, means that if he sees that something is happening to his place that should not be, he has to do something about it, not only through his words, but also through deliberate action. It is an obligation that stems from his faithfulness to the place and to his neighbors. It is this faithfulness that is expressed so beautifully and in all of its complexity in his stories about the fictional community of Port William. To make such a choice, to live in fidelity with a place, is to take up a certain obligation.

"We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have the right to ask is, what's the right thing to do? What does the earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it."

The obligation comes also from something else for Berry. He connects clearly here his writing and his activism and the daily choices he makes with a belief in something larger than himself that drives him and drives his work.

"People of religious faith know that the world is maintained everyday by the same force that created it. It's an article of my faith and belief that all creatures live by breathing God's breath and participating in His spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy, the whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places."

He may speak gently and his fiction and poetry oftentimes follow a quiet and soothing rhythm, but as he expresses in this conversation and as his work and life show plainly, he is actually asking us to see the world in a radical way. He explains that he has tried through his writing to "map out the grounds of a legitimate and authentic hope." This is no easy thing. Berry speaks forcefully here of the sheer difficulty of it, the unknowing that comes with it, and the immense patience that is required.

A deliberate choice that Berry made long ago was to come back to a certain place, a rural place. And those of us who live in rural places know what it means to choose to stay in those places. What Wendell Berry says about this explains why that choice is also a political one.

"The fact that we in our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn't make a living there is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn't make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living, is preposterous. And it's the result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, it's to have enough."

Follow that last sentence all the way to its philosophical endpoint, and it changes everything.

BACK

There is my endless backlog of books to be read. It lies in the piles by the chair, on the desk, on the bedside table, in the back seat, on the "official" reading list, and on the "unofficial" reading list that exists in a scattering of scratched out notes to myself that seem to follow me about. It does make me anxious at times, but it also brings some measure of comfort, a guarantee of sorts. There is always another book to be read.

Then there are the surprises. The titles and authors I jot down and keep bypassing for whatever inane reason or other. Every now and then, I come across a book in the library or in a store and remember that it is one that I meant to read. Years ago. And it will turn out to be a book of such merit that I begin to find it auspicious that I saved it for later without ever meaning to. As if there are certain books that come and go and then find their way back to me.

So it was with Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I read Enger's first and only other novel, Peace Like a River, when it was still new and enjoyed it enough to be eager to read So Brave when it published, though it ended up relegated to my own remainder pile. Enger is from Minnesota and he writes with that straightforward Midwestern sensibility and with a sparse richness that might be called elegant in its own way. It is the kind of working in words that I particularly favor.

This novel reads like a song. The best reference I can offer as example that you might recognize is that of Charles Portis with True Grit. You likely remember the movie recently remade and originally starring John Wayne, but you may not know that it first found life as a book, one that you should read, of course. If you have read the book or seen the movie -- in which, thankfully, the original lines of dialogue are salvaged nearly word-for-word -- then you know of the peculiar use of language that sets it apart and makes it so enjoyable. The characters speak in a way that is poetic and earthy, almost Shakespearean. And while you quickly take note of its high-mindedness, it does not seem at all out of the ordinary. You find yourself wondering why we do not all speak this way, because it sure makes for a far more interesting discourse. It also builds a narrative that is tough and sharp and literary and still altogether believable.

And, like True Grit, Enger's book is a bit of a cowboy tale. You know I like those. Though it involves few horses, there is much traveling and outlawing and campfires and a bit of Spanish spoken. But, do not let that steer you away from it if you are not as inclined as I toward such things. There is much to love here -- the plain and the scrubby country that shines in the background always and the characters who are crafted as solidly as woodwork and the dialogue that dances. It is also a melodious story of true friendship and of finding the things we did not know we sought. And it is about writers.

Though I did not mean to save it for later, I am glad that I did. It was worth the wait.