Both Ends of the Chain

In the Wild North, Ivan Shiskin

Around Christmas, I often turn to Chekhov’s stories. His all-penetrating skepticism might seem at odds with the holiday spirit. That’s because it is. As some might feel a need to roast a beast for Christmas dinner, I feel called to roast up a nice juicy pile of sentimentality. It stands in the way of what’s real and worth remembering. And where else could we find a wintery field evoked so sharply than with Chekhov? Here is his description of a spring day turning back into winter:

A woodcock chirred by, and a shot rang our boomingly and merrily in the spring air. But when the forest grew dark, an unwelcome east wind blew up, cold and piercing, and everything fell silent. Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter.

The setting is not Christmas but Good Friday. It’s the first paragraph of the story “The Student,” about a seminarian on his way home. He feels that the contradiction between the season and the weather is a sign of nature’s indifference for him and his wishes, a favorite theme of Chekhov’s. But against this familiar backdrop, the good doctor does something strange: he questions his own skepticism.

Selfishness and Sushi

Yesterday morning a downpour started, so I stepped out to the covered porch and read about sushi. I had Trevor Corson’s book, The Zen of Fish, which uses an American woman’s entry to the California Sushi Academy to explore the history and current state of sushi culture.

“In the mid-1990s, Reiko Yuyama, a Japanese publishing executive, stopped by a famous sushi bar for a meal. She was alone. Most of the other customers were men. The chef chatted amiably with the other customers but ignored Yuyama. She managed to order several pieces of sushi, but after only her fourth piece a cup of green tea appeared in front of her. Since green tea is often served at the end of the meal, she took this as a request that she leave. She stayed for an hour, continuing to order. When she asked for the bill, it was obviously for more than she’d been served.

“Spurred by this incident, Yuyama visited many of the best sushi bars in Tokyo and around Japan, always alone, and described her experiences in a book called One Woman Sushi. Traditional sushi bars are like exclusive clubs, Yuyama found—difficult for single women and the uninitiated to enter, especially since there are no menus.

“The other women Yuyama encountered in the sushi bars were almost always accompanied by men, and the men used the opportunity to impress their dates with ostentatious displays of sushi knowledge. …. When Yuyama ordered sushi herself, the other women glared at her. Yuyama concluded that traditional sushi bars are the last place in Japan where men still feel completely superior to women.”

This came as a surprise to me. Stepping into a fairly Westernized sushi shop in Missouri, I had no idea the role that gender played in this kind of cuisine. I suspected that California rolls weren’t traditionally enjoyed in Japan. Corson confirmed this, but also described how Japanese tourists in America sometimes order the greasier American sushi dishes they can’t get back home. Cultural legacies, adaptations, and power struggles all acted themselves out in the apparently undramatic space of a sushi bar. Reading Corson, as with his previous book, The Secret Life of Lobsters, is a trail of unexpected revelations about apparently commonplace items. So it is too with other nonfiction writers—David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster” and John McPhee’s book Oranges come to mind.

Is it selfish to write about sushi? About fine food in general, when people are starving, no less? Thoughts like this bring me to Doctor Zhivago—the scene in which the narrator, a Bolshevik commissar, comes to warn his brother Yuri, the poet-doctor protagonist, that his apolitical lyric poetry was putting “a noose round his neck,” in the eyes of the revolutionary authorities. Yuri asks his brother, “Do you think it’s ‘personal, petit-bourgeois and self-indulgent?’” The narrator says “I lied” on the voice-over as his past self nods to Yuri. But fine feelings aside, people were and are starving.

The short answer: yes, it’s selfish—in the same sense that it’s selfish to discuss the shortcomings of Western medicine when people go without basic services elsewhere. However we angle it, we are all trapped in a web of privilege and injustice.

However, what allows us to see this web, and therefore, do something about it? For me, it’s books.

The goal of great fiction is not only to give someone an in-depth knowledge of Russian aristocratic drawing-room conventions, the conditions of a Harlem tenement in the Depression, or the legal details of inheritance in southern England, but instead to develop a reader’s ability to think critically about the human motives that created all of these social structures. No, we don’t improve the world at large a whit by knowing who the Thane of Cawdor was, but we might by being able to spot someone like him, willing to murder to become the next King of Scotland.

In The Zen of Fish, Corson follows two chefs, Zoran and Tetsu, from the restaurant Hama Hermosa, in their morning trip to Los Angeles’s biggest fish market, International Marine Products.

“As they walked through a loading door in the warehouse, they felt the chill of the huge refrigerated space. The smell of the ocean assaulted their nostrils. Their shoes squished over a film of frigid water on the plastic floor. Under a high ceiling, long tables were covered with plastic bins and Styrofoam boxes full of ice. Zoran nodded to Tetsu and the two men split up. … Shouts in Spanish and Japanese filled the room. … Zoran eyed the bins. There were sardines, squid, and barracuda from the waters of California. There were butterfish, tilefish, skate, and live Maine lobster from the East Coast. There were amberjack, grouper, and trevally from Australia and New Zealand. From Japan there were Pacific saury, blue snapper, red gurnard, largehead hairtail, chicken grunt, and many other fish that didn’t even have English names.”

Some nigiri and sushi rolls I had recently.

Connected to a piece of nigiri on a plate in California, despite centuries of innovation, is still a deep knowledge of the sea—where fish come from, their diet, their ecology, how these things shape their taste. Studying that plate, tugging on its connections, Carson finds not just into a consideration of sushi culture but an entire world of human labor, knowledge, ambition, and sense of fun that sustains it.

It’s fair to question the motives of a writer who’s writing about something they love—Trevor Corson and his sushi, John McPhee and his rocks—because such a project can be deeply rewarding work. (As well as exhausting.) But it’s not fair to question them and then keep eating sushi unreflectively.

Maybe if we thought deeply enough about our own food we would notice those who don’t have any for longer than a few seconds. Maybe if we considered the energy expended in transporting fresh fish from New Zealand to the U.S., we would think more critically about the possibility of feeding distant nations stricken by famine. At the least, maybe we would appreciate people who make our sushi more completely, with a greater understanding of the training and effort it takes to make something worth eating.

Fly in Your Burger?

"In a typical fast food meal of a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, most of the components required an insect somewhere along the way; although the wheat in the bun is wind-pollinated, the other plants, from the cucumber for the pickle to the feed eaten by the cow, are insect-pollinated. Nicola Gallai from the University of Montpellier in France and her colleagues estimated the world economic value of pollination to be $153 billion, pointing out that this is nearly 10 percent of the value of agricultural production used for human food in 2005."

- Marlene Zuk,  Sex on Six Legs: On Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World

Just one more reason to think twice about that squeeze bottle of Bug-Blaster.

For me, science writers fall into two broad categories: those with scientific backgrounds and PhDs who have entered the realm of journalism, and those with hard-boiled reorting backgrounds who are exploring the realms of science. In practice, you hopefully won't be able to tell, from the text alone, what kind of writer wrote which successful popular science article or book. Dr. Zuk, an entomologist at the University of California-Riverside, falls into the first category. In preparation for my master's program, I'm trying to read a wide swath of authors and steal as many of their tricks as I can. Zuk spins off a new riff on the ever dependable method of putting economic value to overlooked wildlife: she shows us how many dollars worth of insects it took to produce your double cheeseburger with pickles and diced onions.

M is for Memoir

            I have said some rude things about memoirs. In a creative nonfiction workshop at Truman State, I said that while I had respect for memoirists and had no doubt of their works’ literary quality, I simply had no appetite for the genre myself. I couldn’t understand, I questioned my professor and classmates (many of them ardent memoir fans and autobiographers themselves) one why it was that people described the value of a good memoir in terms of the volume of Kleenex used (usually something around a box-worth.) At that time, I had little tolerance for other students’ belief that confession was the supreme form of communication, instead putting my faith in a kind of literary stoicism. There was place for feeling in writing, but it was better put to use in understanding other people’s experiences or in researching a challenging but beloved subject.

            And I was led to my first book-length memoir, Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, on somewhat false pretenses, or at least ignorance. A science writing professor recommended the title to me, and even once I understood it was not merely a dispassionate book about falconry but the story of how a woman copes with her father’s loss, I thought that I would at least meet this story through the comfortable distance of fiction, not of memoir.

            However, once I realized in the first chapter what I was reading, I had been entranced by MacDonald’s narrative voice so completely that genre seemed beside the point. She begins with a trip to the Brecklands (meaning ‘the broken lands’) as an escape from her scholarly work in Cambridge. She comes upon a pond:

 “The pond was a bomb crater, one of a line dropped by a German bomber over Lakenheath in the war. It was a watery anomaly, a pond in dunes, surrounded by thick tussocks of sand sedge many, many miles from the sea. It was odd. But then, it’s very odd here, and walking the forest you come across all sorts of things you don’t expect. Great tracts of reindeer moss, for example: tiny stars and florets and inklings of an ancient flora growing on exhausted land. Crisp underfoot in summer, the stuff is like a patch of the arctic fallen into the world in the wrong place.”

            MacDonald is adept at seeing how human actions and feral forces interact to create wild landscapes. Her hawk is at once domesticated and wild, the most difficult of raptors to train. She also excels in picking apart our romantic and ultimately false-hearted attempts to preserve or recreate ‘pure nature,’ showing how our beliefs about what is authentic and what is not are changeable and often misguided, unhelpful to human or creature. Instead, she favors whatever actions allow natural beauty to persist, whether it be found on the moors or in suburban Britain.

            In addition to exploring her natural landscape, the landscape of grief for her father, and the landscape within the mind of her goshawk, Mabel, MacDonald also takes a compassionate but unsparing look at the English writer T.H. White, perhaps the only other author to write a memoir centered around goshawk training, The Goshawk. White’s struggles with his own demons guide MacDonald away from self-loathing, and tutor her in how to be a more humane hawk-keeper.

            The language of falconry is enticingly archaic, with inputs from medieval English, French, and Turkish.  A goshawk-keeper is an austringer. A hawk struggling against its jesses, hungry for rabbits, is said to be in yarak. While she walks about the south of Britain, wild-eyed goshawk on leather-gloved arm, as if a figure out of its medieval or at least its Georgian past, MacDonald casts a shrewd eye on lazy neo-nationalism that would label her more essentially English than a recently arrived family from Algeria making their way in London or Manchester. After talking companionably with an older couple about some nearby deer, one of the few successful conversations with strangers she has managed in months, MacDonald is horrified to hear the man say, “Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?”

As a University of Cambridge historian with a Scottish name—a culture which at different times has carried the respect of landed gentry and the indignity of backwoods rebels in the eyes of their English neighbors—MacDonald recognizes the fluidity of identity and the dangers of labelling a skin tone, animal-training hobby or an ancestry as more pure than the rest. Indeed, goshawks were extirpated from England in the 19th century and now exist there only as immigrants from the mainland, where they hunt hares that were similarly introduced. So were the deer.

*           *            *

            My problem with memoirs, I realized as I read H is for Hawk, had to do not with the genre but with my expectations for what a book should do for me. Should it only educate, titillate, and make me chuckle? Or was I willing, as I once was when much younger before I knew I had the choice in the matter, to invite a book into the more private circle of close confidants who share their most difficult experiences, as well as their greatest joys? And not through the angled mirror of fiction, the transparent guise of “I have this friend who did this and that,” but in a simple and direct storytelling tone of catching up with a friend after a long absence, eliminating as many illusions and artifices as possible?

            Even when I did not like memoirs, the notion that autobiography is self-serving cut no ice with me. How much more would we all strive for moral clarity and good service to others, if we knew that we would at some point call ourselves to account in a novel-sized analysis of our greatest choices? How much have we gained, in a mere documentary sense, from the countless diarists of past ages? And in this case, how much damned good nature writing would we lose if we refused to listen to the personal narrative within which it exists, which created it?

            I am grateful for MacDonald for introducing me to the surprising and beautiful world of goshawk training and the craggy English landscape. But most of all, I am grateful that I can believe, at least in some sense, that I have gained a friend through her work—that I have communicated forthrightly with another person and have expanded my circle of confidence with her book.

Mind-Congestion Release-Valve of the Weekend

"All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas."

-Dean Young, "Belief in Magic," Poetry magazine (July/August 2014)

Risking Delight

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

                                                —Jack Gilbert

This Fourth of July, my bike lock fell off my handlebars sometime on a three-mile trip to the grocery store. This is one of those things that instantly reminds me of the feebleness of my body without wheels, and reawakens my dread of losing the ability to travel freely and without the worry that my vehicle will be stolen. I checked every foot of trail between my apartment and the grocery store, under a bright gray headache-inducing sky and steady cold rain. I did not find it, and decided to look for a bike lock at gas stations, the only other places open on this holiday.

The first, nearer one did not have a bike lock, nor did another convenience store. I had been in the rain for almost two hours at this point and was losing courage fast.

But like in an old story, an inner voice told me—Just ride to the top of yon hill, lad. Then ye may return home. This inner voice was apparently from northern England.

And upon reaching the top of the hill, I saw the sharp lights of a gas station, like Jane Eyre seeing the parson’s house across the moor.

I arrived at the convenience store and found an attendant leaning against the outside wall, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” she replied, clearly peeved at being distracted on her smoke break.

“Do you sell gas—er, bike locks here?” The speaking part of my brain was short of oxygen.

“No,” she said, looking back at her phone.

“Okay.” I mounted my bike and turned back to ride through some more oily puddles.

In a moment my story had changed from one of classical Providence to something like Sergey Dovlatov’s tragi-farcical sketches of late Soviet life.

At least I had already bought ibuprofen.

This morning, I had been planning to go to Acadia National Park. However, I woke up to howling winds and driving rain. I knew it would rain, but not this hard. I had already begun composing an essay in my head about my trip. It would parallel Ishmael’s arrival in port during a storm in the opening chapters of Moby Dick. It would celebrate the sights of huge waves driven by (comfortably distant) hurricane winds, and perhaps speculate about unseen whales in the Atlantic, the horrors of modern whaling, and our changing relationship with Leviathan in the days of climate change.

But I won’t be able to write that essay yet, because I was not willing to go to Acadia on a day forecasted to have two inches of rain. Apologies, Ishmael.

Instead, I went into town, bike-less, in the pouring post-hurricane rain, ordered French toast and corned beef hash at a diner, and listened to an audio recording of Patrick O’Brian’s H.M.S. Surprise. All the time hearing, for some reason, David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” in my head. And I had a grand time doing it, especially since I knew I was denying Fate the satisfaction of making me miserable.

It made me think of something I had thought of many times before—what matters is not external events but one’s response to them—which is often a matter of rallying against them. To me, this is a source of happiness: the knowledge that we are making an effort to live well in the world. What draws me to Moby Dick is ultimately not its setting but Ishmael’s narrative voice, delighting in absurdity even in strange and terrible conditions. It's the same reason I admire Lizzy's voice in Pride and Prejudice, delighting in other absurdities, though in surroundings usually reckoned much more pleasant than the 'tween decks of the Pequod.

Compared to the suffering of many people, the kind of problems I have would be relief. And yet I don’t advocate being thankful for the kind of problems we have—an impossible if possibly noble task. Nor yet do I advocate feeling guilty for one’s gifts, an unproductive and merely Puritanical task. I suppose we have to risk delight, wherever we are, as Jack Gilbert encourages us.

Reading in the afternoon of a day that was no longer titled “The Day I Didn’t Go to Acadia” but instead a free day whose meaning I was still uncovering, I arrived at this passage in Moby Dick: describing the Pequod for the first time, Ishmael tells us, “Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.” The wide-traveling experience suggested here instantly delighted me. It led me to consider the degrees of separation between me and the (imaginary) French grenadier. First there were the original, and probably none too enjoyable, experiences of shooting musket-balls at the British in Egypt and the Russians in Siberia. (By the way, Napoleon's army was turned back near Moscow. Poetic license.) Then there was the distance of time, which allowed the grenadier to pick out the meaningful parts of those experiences and craft them into a story which he wore proudly on his weathered cheeks. Then Herman Melville either saw such a person—or, more likely, read about one. One day at the docks, in an imaginative moment, he connected this person with a ship he admired. Finally, he wrote this thought down, and over a century later, I read it.

And yet all those sequential frames are instantly fused into a single windowpane by the magic of human communication—in this case, by the written word and the power of story. Is telling and listening to stories, however small, our most accessible way of risking happiness?

What's So Funny 'bout Literary Theory?

The next time I try to explain, apologize for, defend, rationalize, criticize, or otherwise talk about literary theory (that often misunderstood boogie man of academia) with someone less familiar with its goals, I plan on repeating more or less word-for-word Louis Menand's introduction to his piece on Paul de Man. At any rate, it's better than mumbling something along the lines of:  "Derrida ... class struggle ... subaltern ... objet petit a! Anyway, it's something we should all care about."

"The idea that there is literature, and then there is something that professors do with literature called “theory,” is a little strange. To think about literature is to think theoretically. If you believe that literature is different from other kinds of writing (like philosophy and self-help books), if you have ideas about what’s relevant and what isn’t for understanding it (which class had ownership of the means of production, whether it gives you goose bumps, what color the author painted his toenails), and if you have standards for judging whether it’s great or not so great (a pleasing style or a displeasing politics), then you have a theory of literature. You can’t make much sense of it without one.

It’s the job of people in literature departments to think about these questions, to debate them, and to disseminate their views. This is not arid academicism. It affects the way students will respond to literature for the rest of their lives. But it’s also part of an inquiry into the role of art in human life, the effort to figure out why we make this stuff, what it means, and why we care so much about it. If this is not the most important thing in the world to understand, it is certainly not the least."

Beaten to the Case

Some time ago I had the idea of writing an essay--like, a real essay--about my fascination with the world of fanfiction. I would talk about its modern flowering, its  lingo (complex as Cockney slang) and the way in which I participated: in it the first story I tried to write, in sixth grade, was an undisguised Sherlock Holmes knockoff. "I'm writing a Sherlock Holmes knockoff," I would explain to classmates proudly. In the essay I would try to connect my love for Holmes' London, seedy, huge, and umanageable, and my appreciation of the overgrown city of fan fiction as a comparably messy but still worthwhile human creation. However, by way of Emily Nussbaum's review of the third season of BBC's TV miniseries Sherlock, my current favorite TV show, I found that the game was on, and I missed it: Anne Jamison's book Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking over the World pointed out that when Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes to escape from the crushing popularity, his readers were so distraught that they wore black armbands and wrote what can be considered the very first fanfiction. It's the connection that would have made my essay make sense. I had the clues in my hands, Watson, and I let them go!

On the other hand, I've found a new book to read, and I can't complain about that. And perhaps I can figure out something a little different that would still work. Anyway, if you are a fan of Sherlock, or perhaps a fan of the books that thinks you will never watch the series, read Nussbaum's excellent review, which includes some insights that get us a little further into the mystery of why we still love these characters and their world enough to write new stories for them a century later.

Staring Down the Rat

In this week's Index column, I take a look at two poems from the Seamus Heaney collections I picked up earlier this semester, and use them to try to come to terms with processes of change and decay around Kirksville. The column does not mention it, but the poems are from Death of a Naturalist.

Finding Walden, Continued

This semester of reading has partly been a search for Thoreau's clarity of vision, mainly through the works of writers who have come after and have felt the same desire. I recently finished two collections of poems by Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and Field Work. Field Work includes the Glanmore Sonnets and other poems from the four years he spent in a country home in Glanmore, Co. Wicklow with his family after leaving Belfast during The Troubles. Death of a Naturalist you will hear more about soon. Or read it before I have time to spoil it for you. Rarely are you able to find an autobiography that could fit on the sides of a paper crane, a crystallized, solid thing. 

Today began my pilgrimage through Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her record of a year in the mountains of Virginia in Walden-like solitude. As energetically as I have seen anyone try, she attempts to see the world as if "just set down here," yet at the same time seeking to synthesize the best of what she has seen, read, and struggled with so far. Strangely, these two intentions, though at first seeming to preclude the other, end up supporting each other, like two halves of an arch. She moves from intensely felt observations of reality to Rilkean wondering and wandering at just the right speed:

"We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, "Come down to the water." It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."

Solving the Oxford Comma Problem: A Platonic Dialogue

After reading an excerpt from Gerard Manley Hopkins' "On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue," I was inspired to write a similar dialogue for the TSU Writing Center's blog on the use of the Oxford Comma. And as Hopkins' dialogue takes place at Oxford, what setting could be more fitting for a discussion of that ever so troublesome comma?

Noli Timere

Seamus Heaney’s last words to his wife, sent in a text message, were the Latin phrase Noli timere: do not be afraid. I hesitate to stamp a meaning on these words, other than their undulating cadence, their peaceful music, their importance in many Bible passages. In some ways it seems almost immoral not to be afraid today, considering the precarious state of the world. But one of our best lights got as close as the living can come to death and had these words for us. Something to carry around and consider every now and then, like his small, solid poems.

It makes me sad that it is Heaney’s death that will be the thing that finally leads me to read more of his work. I had read his chart-toppers like “Digging,” and could probably recognize one of his poems if they were put in front of me (look for bogs, damp, and short, musical lines), but had never read a mass of his poems. However, based on the several obituaries and remembrances of Heaney that I have read (probably the most I’ve read about a recently-deceased person ever), it seems that this irony might just make him chuckle. My personal favorite essay on his death is from his friend Tom Sleigh, which gives a rare glimpse into a relationship between two practicing writers.

Something that makes Heaney’s last words ring even stronger is their harmony with the English poet John Keat’s last words, which were reimagined in this poem I’ve recently discovered:

Keats

Christopher Howell

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room

on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

Fountain “filling him like flowers,”

he held his breath like a coin, looked out

into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s

weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”

and there he was, secretly, for the rest

of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

of street vendors, perfect

and affectionate as his soul.

For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”

may enter you.

The Text, the Book, and the iPad

For your consideration: a thoughtful, concise editorial notebook from Verlyn Klinkenborg of the Times trying to parse through the nature of reading books on e-readers, and what may be lost. It's something we have all thought about, but I think it bears further discussion. Like him, I'm divided on the issue, more so than I have been in the past. In my polemic high school journalist days, I would have said that taking away a physical book and replacing it with electronic text is excising one brick from the temple of literacy, and other such wounded, sorrowful expressions.  However, could e-readers make books more affordable? Could they help us share beloved passages more quickly? Could they reduce our use of trees? Could they help create a more democratic, competitive market for writers? Some of the answers are clearer than others.

Yet for my own part, physical books have acted not just as monuments to the achievement of reading a book, but as a concrete way of organizing the landscapes, characters, and stories of a particular reading experience. As Klinkenborg says, the book's physicality is a "constant reminder," peculiarly alive, mysteriously like the presence of a friend. Not to mention that I have great appreciation for the art of typography and layout, the particular makeup--even, if we were to be rather Victorian for a moment, the physiognomy--of a book that make it memorable and contribute to the book's personality along with the author's words. The decision of the layout editors and jacket designers are meaningful, and comparable to the director's arrangement of artwork in a museum or the approach to a piece of music chosen by an orchestra conductor.

If you showed me a page of semi-recycled paper with Garamond typeface and chapter names with dagger-like serifs, I would know without having to read the words that I was looking at a Harry Potter paperback. If I saw a tall glossy page with Caslon body text and wacky Art-Deco headlines, I would know I was seeing a page from the New Yorker. At least in our current culture of literacy, a connection of touch as well as thought that binds the reader to the text. For a dose of literary piety, look up copies of the galleys and proofs passed between Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker to see the amount of work that goes into the typesetting even for a single poem. (I don't provide a link partly because I can't find one, and partly because I want you to engage the blessed difficulty of books and libraries.)

Seeing the Book of Kells this summer in Dublin was a powerful new point in my understanding of books. The library of Trinity College only displays one spread each from the two folios of the Book of Kells, but any page is a calligraphy performance and a display of the miniaturist art of illumination. In addition, the monks that copied the Gospels into these books would sometimes, when visited by a thought, write down a small poem about their lives in the margin, further personalizing the book and creating some of our first examples of written vernacular poetry. Within this highly energized culture of printing from our past, single letters became stained-glass windows.

I have not been awed by or befriended texts I have read online. Indeed, I have struggled to maintain even a mere civil acquaintanceship. Reading Henry James' novella Daisy Miller and Edith Wharton's not-so-short-stories online dried my eyes out and gave me headaches. I was inclined to blame the authors for this suffering, to damn them for their massive paragraphs and lack of pagination, even though the printed copies the authors intended would have solved those problems. I do not have an iPad or e-reader, but I have seen how their darkened screens and attractive typefaces make the experience easier on the eyes. Yet there is no invitation to dog-ear, to bend the spine to favorite passages, to jot colloquies with the author or characters into the margins, to make the book irretrievably yours as a printed book offers. Still and all, maybe we will see the day when the craft of electronic printing matures enough to rival the craft of printed texts.

Sketching

For a while I've been reading Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier's 471-page Siberia-sized, immensely enjoyable record of his trips to that region. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Russia or travel writing--I now prefer him to Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux. Every now and then Frazier drops in one of his pen sketches into the text, like this one on the cover of the book: 

That one was colorized for the cover. Most are unadorned line sketches. Parts of the book were serialized in the New Yorker, whose website has an excellent slideshow of some of Frazier's best sketches. (I hope you can see that without being a subscriber.)

Upon landing on a Russian island not far from Alaska, a woman in the customs office begins to tell Frazier about the island's complicated rules for taking photographs and pulls out paperwork for him.

"I took my sketchbook from my pack and showed it to her and said I preferred to draw. At that she mentally slipped me into the harmless-nut category and sent me on my way." (165)

Another time, upon losing his notebook and sketchbook, he remarks that losing these essential journalists's tools is to him "a shooting offense, like an infantryman losing his rifle." I was inspired by Frazier's sketching habit, among many other things. It is, I think, more than an interest in anachronisms and lost causes, of a wistfulness for the past days when nearly everyone had a sketchbook and had a basic proficiency in sketching, though I certainly have no problem with that kind of nostalgia. As much as I like having pictures as a record of a trip, there is something shallow and unsatisfying about picture-taking for me, similar to clicking the "like" button for a friend's post on Facebook. When I see a landscape that impresses me, that has a strong "inscape," to use Gerard Manley Hopkin's term, pulling out my camera and clicking the button feels almost farcical to the way that the scene has made me feel, like checking a box: Been here. Was good. Perhaps photos are easier for communicating to others what I liked about the view, but for me, I didn't do the work of understanding the features of the landscape, as a sketch allows me to do.

In addition, I have a wish to someday make illustrations for a written work of mine. This desire approaches Wagner's mania for the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, in its magnitude. 

With this in mind,  I went to Shaw Nature Reserve, south and west of St. Louis in Grays Summit, with both a sketchbook and a camera. Typically at a place like that I might take 100 or more pictures. This time I decided to try Frazier-style pen sketches, only taking a few pictures. However, using pen on the first try felt too risky for me, an out-of-practice former art student, so I roughed out things with a pencil first and then cleaned and emphasized with the pen after that. 

The nature reserve, which is run by the Botanical Garden, reminded me a lot of the large estates in Russia that formerly belonged to nobles but were turned into museums and parks. Which is essentially what Shaw Nature Reserve and the Botanical Garden are: Henry Shaw, a wealthy, slave-owning St. Louis man, created the Garden from his lands in the Tower Grove neighborhood, and the nature reserve on St. Louis's outskirts includes the estate of Joseph Bascom and his large country house.

Shaw is notable for its large replicated prairie habitat, maintained by BG staff with controlled burns and reseeding with prairie plants. It is particularly impressive in late summer and fall, when the grasses are as tall as the true prairie and the wildflowers are blooming. In 2005 the park built a pioneer-style sod house on top of a hill near the prairie area.

I'm fascinated by slapdash dwellings in unlikely, unsheltered places, such as sod houses, bird nests, bird houses, badger holes, prairie dog burrows, and other such nooks. This sod house is now fully integrated into the environment, its roof sprouting tall grasses, and I saw bees, ants, and other insects coming and going from holes between the sod bricks. When I was about done working on this sketch, a mouse burst out of the bottom of the wall in front of me and scrambled around the corner. 

I was happy with what I ended up with, but I could also tell that it would take a while to be able to start right off with permanent pen like Frazier does, and an even longer time to achieve his minimalist, calligraphic strokes, charged with information, with no unnecessary details. My sketches are, well, sketchy--messy, full of squiggles trying to work out the true lines. It also took what felt like a long time, earning me a sunburn on my neck. But I felt like I had really encountered that place in a solid way. However messy, the picture belonged to me, not Fujifilm. 

I went down the hill and wanted to sketch the sod house from a distance--it looked so wayward and daring on top of the hill with massive thunderstorm clouds overhead. I tried to start with pen this time, only using pencil for the clouds, which were a jumbled, quick-moving mess.

 But after a couple sketches I was starting to recall some of my lessons from drawing and watercolor classes in high school, and this sketch of a columbine flower came off pretty quickly. 

The downside to sketching is that it is colorless. Sometimes I make notes to myself on the colors and shading in case I want to add watercolor someday, as above.

I don't know when I'll get to next, but it was a lot of fun rediscovering an interest that I haven't had time for during the school year. One of college's pressures is to specialize, to step away from hobbies and become serious at what  you're good at. I would never be a successful artist, however much I tried, but I don't think that should stop me from using sketching as a way to understand the world around me. Or making plans for an eventual Gesamtkunstwerk.

A Word: Why Do We Call Dollars 'Dollars'?

Happy Spring! It still doesn't feel too much like spring in Kirksville, though we are seeing some early monocot flower buds push blade-like leaves through the topsoil. I've got a few essay-like ideas putting down roots right now. While these are developing secondary xylem and solidifying their grasp on the soil, here's a short linguistic-historical tale I wrote, once again for the Writing Center blog, on the creation of the word 'dollar.' It was the result of a journey through several entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, a voyage only possible with a sturdy magnifying glass.

A Word: Why Do We Call Dollars 'Dollars'?

Ah, the ubiquitous crumpled dollar—that small greenish rectangle of linen that purchases our chewing gum, under-tips the wait staff at restaurants, and refuses to be inserted into vending machines. But where does that word dollar actually come from?

Dollar, just like Dvorák, RENT, Pilsener, a lengthy pseudo-operatic rock song from the 1970s, and Ántonia Shimerda, comes to us from Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. In 1516, in the town of Jáchymov, situated near the German border and called by the nearby Germans Joachimsthal (literally “Joachim’s valley”), a new silver mine opened. Three years later, Count Hieronymus Schlick, a nobleman wishing to extend his coolness even beyond being a Bohemian count named Hieronymous Schlick, decided to start minting his own money from the silver mined in Joachimsthal, and called his large coins Joachimsthalers. (Note that in German, ‘th’ is pronounced as a hard ‘t,’ and that the ‘a’ in Joachimsthalers is pronounced like ‘a’ in English ‘what.’) As this coin gained use throughout Bohemia and Germany, burghers chose to shorten this unwieldy name to just thaler, which became the currency in many German states until German unification under Otto von Bismarck, when the Goldmark became the imperial currency. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 16th century the thaler spread from High and Low German to Dutch, the language of the great sea-traders who spread their dalars all over the world, and from thence at last to England, where it was Anglicized into daler, daller, and finally dollar. Moral: next time you go to buy a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine in the laundry room, thank Count Schlick for not naming his coins Hieronyms or Schlicks.

A Most Unworldly Fellow, 'pon My Word

Stephen Maturin as portrayed (quite well, I think) by Paul Bethany. Even if the plot of the movie has essentially nothing to do with the books, it brought the characters and the world of the Aubrey-Maturin series to thrilling life.

The year is 1804: Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., is returning from a near-run victory over a French squadron in the South China Sea, and has anchored at a small island in order to fix his coordinates by planetary observation. His ship’s surgeon and particular friend Dr. Stephen Maturin is recovering from an exceptionally painful time in India that culminated in a pistol duel that nearly killed him; the until-recently raving feverish doctor is deposited under a large shade tree to take some air while Aubrey and his officers set up their instruments. After the sun has set and Venus has been successfully observed, Aubrey looks to collect Maturin, and finds that the doctor has wandered off and returned with company.

“My God, what is that monstrous thing?’ Jack cried out.

‘It is a tortoise, my dear. The great land-tortoise of the world: a new genus. He must weigh a ton. I do not know that I have ever been so happy. I am in such spirits, Jack! How you will ever get him aboard, I cannot tell; but nothing is impossible to the Navy.’

'Must we get him aboard?'

‘Oh, no question about it. He is to immortalize your name. This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the Hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.’

‘Why, I am much obliged, Stephen, I am sure. I suppose we might parbuckle him down the beach. How did you come by him?’

‘I wandered a little way inland, looking for specimens, and there he was in an open space, eating Ficus religiosa. I plucked some high shoots he was straining for, and he followed me down here … See his gleaming eye! He would like another leaf. It does me good to see him. This tortoise has quite recovered me,’ he cried, putting his arm round the enormous carapace.”

Stephen has discovered a fictional tortoise apparently larger than the Galapagos species, winning himself (and of course the creature’s namesake) immortal fame. I searched the Internet for an illustration of the victorious Stephen, his arm round the dear tortoise’s shell: I searched in vain. Nonetheless, this scene, towards the end of H.M.S. Surprise, the third book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, is illustrative of Stephen Maturin’s behavior. His speech is full of praise for unusual plants—“vegetable magnificence!”—unusual creatures—“the tapir, the boa, the peccary! You may find it hard to credit, Jack, but never yet have I beheld a boa”—and disparagements of “vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads” with whom he disagrees, usually regarding his unpopular beliefs on the social contract, the abolition of slavery, the independence of the Irish and the Catalans, and other such hopeless causes near to his heart. Stephen’s wonderfully complex character, and the shocking political and personal messes into which he delivers himself, are some of the chief joys of the books.

Many of my friends know of my obsession, my long-carried love for this series: an affliction that seems no closer to ending than it did four years ago, the first time I picked up Master and Commander and was swept into the world of sun-struck port cities, proud tall-masted ships, an impossibly amusing late-Georgian form of English, and the weather-tested, year-seasoned friendship of  Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin—a friendship that began when Maturin drove an irritated elbow into Aubrey’s ample side when the good captain began to enthusiastically beat the time on his knee to a spirited Locatteli quartet.

What I was first enamored with in Master and Commander was a powerful sense, underneath the winding, globe-trotting plot and democratic sweep of characters, that Deus providebit—that no matter what happens, humor and humanity will carry us through it, and one way or another we will be carried to some kind of safety, be it our intended destination or not. O’Brian, I believe, saw heaven ordinant in the contingencies of history. The most important ship in the book is named Surprise. Friendships begin with blows, battles are won with barely-successful ruses, governments are a hair’s breadth from backing the wrong revolutionaries, squalls are survived by the improbable integrity of a single tiny sail. Though the books portray a time now gone, nothing seems inevitable; the sun brightening their sea is as young as ours. This is largely due to the way O’Brian relentlessly takes advantage of the many contradictions, blind-spots and blips in the historical record and creates whole worlds around them—believable alternate fates, 1800a or b, as he once put it, and always sparkling with intimate details of that time.

I often find myself re-reading favorite books in the series to experience this largely unspoken faith in Providence. But lately, the biggest draw has been the chance to commune with my alter-ego Stephen Maturin. Like me, dear Stephen is barely nine stone (well I am not even nine stone). Stephen plays the ’cello (one of the many things I have learned from these books is that cello is short for violoncello) and Jack the violin (as do I, a bit). A “learned cove,” he is trained as a physician and a Fellow of the Royal Society, with a keen interest in natural history. He has a sharp, often unexpected wit and is a polyglot of immense ability. His official employment is as ship’s surgeon. But his most memorable trait is his unworldliness: his inability, most of the time, to accept the basic tenets of social behavior in his contemporary culture; his shy and reserved nature, though open with a few close friends; his immensely varied academic pursuits.

He is set in sharp contrast to the books’ more widely celebrated hero, Jack. A big, boyish, red-faced lieutenant at the start of the series, Jack is infinitely more worldly than Stephen. He loves the noise and excitement of battles, fox-hunts, the strategy of making a ship go as fast as ever it can. But most importantly he develops a great heart and great affection for his unusual friend.  Somewhat given to whoring in his youth and overeating and drinking all his life, he somehow matures enough in book two to become engaged to Sophie, a wholesome, intelligent woman from a country estate, and has a stable family life all his days (in spite of the occasional quickly forgotten infidelity on the other side of the world.) Stephen, on the other hand, nearly destroys himself again and again in the pursuit of the dashing, capricious socialite Diana Villiers, and family is something that seems forever just over the next horizon.

Yet as different as they are, and as much friction as there sometimes exists between them, each develops deep appreciation for the other’s talents. Aubrey has an indefatigable, even blasphemous belief in Maturin’s medical abilities: “It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.” Stephen, likewise, has a wholly ignorant faith in Jack’s abilities as a sailor, often completely trusting his friend’s skills even as the ship sinks under them (though of course Stephen, a hopeless lubber, would like as not confuse the settling of a dying vessel for the natural movement of a ship at sea).

They both find themselves in need of the other many times; Stephen, in particular, desperately needs the home that Jack’s ships provide, though he is not even entirely aware of it. “Poor dear thing, how very much he is in need of darning—how very much he needs someone to look after him. He really is not fit to wander about the world alone; it is so hard to unworldly people … How little learning does for a man—he knows almost nothing.” So says Sophie of Stephen, her close friend. And she is quite right—though medically, academically, Stephen has few equals, he is much like a child in social matters.

This resonates with me every day of my life, though in less extreme ways. As soon as I think I’m clever, as soon as I think I understand my fellow humans, it all comes down on my head. I am absent-minded and misunderstand direct address many times each day; I ignorantly flout traffic and pedestrian laws and conventions; I attempt to convey something I find interesting, a book (like these), a little-known classical composer, and I am greeted with the familiar polite interest, the dubious promise to look it up someday. But I am not really that disappointed most of the time. I have learned to expect and accept that I am slow to absorb customs of behavior and that my interests are shared by precious few people. It makes finding those people all the more exciting.

Now, Stephen is not entirely my doppleganger. For one thing, he is much smarter than me, cleverer, and braver, and is employed by the Royal Navy as an intelligence agent. I am no polyglot, though I do study Russian, which can sound like Martian to those unfamiliar with it. Stephen was also addicted to laudanum until he took up chewing coca leaves. But he is the dramatization of a type, and we are one in our strangeness, in our peculiar and passionate interests in unloved facets of the world that often seem to draw us away from other people. Few other individuals could study beetles at such length, could nearly die in the pursuit of defecating gulls on a bare rock near the Equator, could adopt a sloth, could take such delight in successful suprapubic cystotomy. Not that I completely have all his same interests, nor do I pretend to know exactly what a suprapubic cystotomy is (except for shockingly painful without modern anesthetics) but I have my own set of strange passions and hobbies that I share with so few others that Dr. Maturin is about as close as I’m going to get in literature to a reflection of the peculiar part of myself.

That’s why I ran for these books towards the end of the second semester of college. At no other time had I felt more unready for the world, unsuited for even the basic, ubiquitous experiences of college students. I do not cope with change well, but often that was not what I was struggling with. Most often, I struggled with basic acceptance of myself. I wanted so strongly at times to just be a different person. The shy, quiet, observant, overly studious person must change, and change utterly, I thought. In hindsight, I do not think that I ever really needed to change in the ways that I thought I had to. Growth and change would come, but they would come from a more subtle engine than passing myself under the harrow again and again because I felt like I did not measure up to how others near and far were “adjusting.” The relentless, self-applied pressure on myself to be different wore me down incredibly; at the end of the year, I slowly began to realize my mistake and began to stumble back to the familiar. I had to read those books again. I had to call on my particular friend Dr. Maturin.

For all his originality, Stephen always finds a place in the ad-hoc family of Jack’s ships. More specifically, Jack and Stephen’s friendship is as close as a sibling relationship, such as ones that neither of them had growing up. Like brothers, with all the squabbles and shared experiences, but also in a sense stronger, because they chose and created their friendship themselves. And through the series, partly due to spending so much time around Jack, the accepting, bright part of Stephen’s nature becomes stronger; he always had a good heart, but before meeting Jack he was something of a cantankerous hermit vagabond philosopher who happened to have a good heart.

I’ve been exponentially more fortunate than Stephen as far as being accepted goes—in my family, first of all, who do not question when I raise a ladder to peer into a robin’s nest; in my high school’s newspaper staff, a group that in many ways resembles the ragtag band that make up H.M.S. Surprise’s company; in my friends in St. Louis and from Truman. I am grateful for these relationships, for all the people that support who I am, either by joyously living their own lovable peculiarities or with their large-hearted, Aubrey-esque appreciation for those different than them. Right now I’m particularly grateful to my new friends from school, who helped me through a rough time, and probably did not realize how much they were helping just with simple friendship and by being amused at my many quirks.

Ultimately, I think the power of Aubrey and Maturin’s friendship lies in the differences in their personalities. They are not the kind of differences that make a friendship impossible, though they seem to threaten to at times; ultimately, the differences bear witness to the truth that worldly and unworldly people can live happily alongside each other, and even be friends—that the paths of asceticism and affirmation are equally valid, that identity is not some sort of necessary evil we must overcome in order to be part of a community, but rather our greatest gift. So ultimately, I do not think it is such a bad thing that I spend much of my time reading peculiar books which have not yet been read by a single living soul among any of my acquaintances; or that the first thing I think of when I step out of the house is to search for peculiar birds in the yard; that I use semicolons (and artless parenthetical asides) too much; or that I remain, even in college, a relatively shy, reserved person. No, not a bad thing at all, to be unworldly: not a bad thing at all, to be myself.