Books and Essays

Yale Univ. Rare Book Library—edited photo by Nick Allen CC BY-SA 3.0

While pursuing my blog, almost from the beginning, I was commenting on writing, books, authors, all the above. In the fourth year of this gig, writing about writing. Who’d have imagined?

When Linda Caroll began the Book Café on Medium, several things occurred to me. Being comfortable with discussing books, as any Irish bloke should be adept at, I expected it to be an easy transition from blogging. Besides, hadn’t I been reading the NY Times Book Review for years? Back when Wapo [1] had their Book World section in the Sunday paper, I read that as well.

1] Washington Post used “@Wapo.com” as part of the email addresses for their writers. Seems they liked the term—at least the IT staff though it was appropriate.

Essay writing at its best invites you in. Reading thoughtfully composed essays gives one a sense of welcome into an interesting community of people smarter than yourself. But you first need to absorb what’s being said in a piece before you can analyze it. And for subjects over my head, I just read them. Some stick.

What I’ve come to realize is that essay writing resembles journalism’s feature writing. Even if it’s not strictly straight news, there are still norms to follow. Truth over conjecture, explaining ‘cause and effect’ whatever isn’t clear. Dancing to avoid cliches. Staying awake.

…

But there are some unstated (if also unenforced) guidelines for reviewing other people’s essays as well.

·         Do your research. Read the book.

·         Be humble whenever possible.

·         Load up the qualifiers like Montaigne advised, if you’re stepping into deep kimchee.

·         Avoid the declarative. “I am not a crook.” Yeah, but what a mug.

·         Be reflective. Be philosophical even.

·         Google the scandals if you’re working on dissing the dude—or defending the misunderstood crazy woman hiking the Pacific Coast Trail by herself.

·         Read about the scandals, pro and con, then go find the tequila. Or reverse that operation.

·         Forget Hemingway—he’s so old school.

·         Steal from the best and wave to the rest.

·         And always give credit to the poor writer.

I have sympathy for those trying to live off practicing the craft. Writers aren’t all wealthy like the Amazonian Bezos—and the newbie Twitter king who will soon be separated from more treasure than we’re about to send to Ukraine.  

Here are a few stragglers to the above agreed upon:

·         Look to lighten the word count. I don’t mean lessen it, just lighten up. “I use myself as a clown figure in the work…” P.J. O’Rourke—see When Conservatives Could Laugh.

·         Work to not misspell the names of people and places, but if you do, make sure they’re obscure. If someone still takes notice, just ignore the SOB.  

When commenting on up-and-coming writers, try not to date yourself, such as saying bad things about an author’s first novel, particularly a well-received one—e.g. Normal People. It's a style thing, I suppose. If Your Novel Involves Others?

Current fashion dictates one shouldn’t actually conclude a story, just let it dribble on out and everyone who’s up on the fashion will think it’s the height of brilliance.

…

One should never quote one’s own work. Especially after encountering a true practitioner of the craft. Joanna Kavenna’s essay on hiking begins:

“Midway through the walk, I was lost. The sun faded and the moon rose, like a fire balloon. I was on a high, windy plateau, dark trees beneath, and then the silent ocean.

“All sorts of crazy things go through your head as you walk. I was here for a break. This was quite a few years ago, and I’d been working in London as a temp. I was very bad at my job. Meanwhile there had been a spate of deaths in my family, lots of calls from pensive doctors bearing grim news. Reality felt quite unreal. People vanished, and this was clearly insane, but I was told it was sane and reasonable. I kept waking in the depths of the night, unable to breathe. I wondered if I was going mad.” from an essay in Lit Hub, Lost: Joanna Kavenna On Walking the Grande Randonnée—Life, Death, and Sheep in the South of France

Right from the start, I was hiking alongside. She was soon describing a story by Jorge Luis Borges about a life size map. It wasn’t what authors she’d read, but how she put her reading to use. Some will tell you this is a natural gift, but I suspected a good deal of sweat and tears behind it.

I can’t prove it, but it seems the only people who go on sustained cross country hikes are down about something.

“When I try to write ‘Grande Randonnée,’ my computer types ‘Grand Randomness’ instead. My walk along the GR4 [900+ mile hiking trail in France] was characterized by great randomness. The path forked, over and over again, and often I took the wrong path. But so many interesting things happened on the wrong paths that I was never sorry I had taken them. My ex-boss and Borges were right. The maps are inadequate. The real journey is imaginary. Gabriel and I were both mired in grief, and yet it was a total coincidence that we ended up in the same part of the queue. Then again, perhaps everyone in the queue was mired in grief, the agony we all carry around with us. Perhaps this is part of the great randomness. Time is a music that numbs the pain, as Gabriel may or may not have said.”

“ ‘Nothing helps,’ said Gabriel. ‘Except time. Time numbs the pain.’ But he said this in a much more elegant way. ‘Le temps,’ he said, ‘c’est une musique sensible qui engourdit la douleur.’ “

from an essay, Lost: Joanna Kavenna On Walking the Grande Randonnée—Life, Death, and Sheep in the South of France, in Lit Hub

I think Kavenna was mourning the death of her father. He’s only mentioned once, like she was getting too personal. Day to day, I keep nosing about, looking for something filling to read. It takes patience, but I’m often rewarded by what fits perfectly.

Time and Place

I plan to read Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, another kind of walkabout tale as wild as Rory Stewart’s vacation in Afghanistan, The Places in Between.

Wild and poignant because the book’s principals, Winn and her husband, Moth, [Yes, Moth.] have started out on a hike along the tame English coast—after losing everything including their house in their very own personal downturn, a perilous leap into the unknown at an age when most would be planning their retirement.

…

Years ago, I sat on the Green in New Haven with a gathering of street people, curious enough to listen to their conversation. My hair was well past my shoulders, and the khaki U.S. Army jacket was faded and frayed sufficiently so I wouldn’t stand out in their crowd. Fashion-wise, it was perfect timing for me to attend Yale. Everyone was thus accoutered, regardless of family trust fund and chalet in Vermont. I don’t recall whether we were sharing a joint on the Green, but that was an accepted custom among hippies and drifters.

I believe I was reading Jack Kerouac at the time, one of the grand old men of the Beat Generation.

The Green was the hole left in the middle of the nine-square blocks laid out early in the New Haven’s history. Old trees and patchy lawn, surrounded by traffic, and framed one side by the oldest Yale colleges. Yale is laid out in a series of undergraduate colleges one attends in total, classes, professors, dining hall all in one, like Oxford.

As the story went, the mayor and irate citizens showed up one day with a cannon aimed at clearing out the Yalees who liked to sit on the fence bordering the Green to harass the local misses. Town and gown at its finest back in the 18th century. New Haven doesn’t possess Oxford’s refinement; it’s one more rundown New England mill town with a tradition of hating the Yalees—or at least their privilege. Who wouldn’t?

So there I sat with the street people, all young men, sharing stories, and I can’t tell you why, except that by this time there was a general merging of hippies and street people, not always but often enough.

The fact I was attending Yale, that bastion of the ruling class, was an amazing thing to me. I came by my street dress honestly—at an Army-Navy store before leaving Sumter. In need of cold weather gear—I was keenly aware of my financial straits such that hanging with the street people wasn’t as extreme an experience as meeting some of my schoolmates.

At one of the Yale-Harvard football games, five highly successful alums arrived in matching blue helicopters—that kind of money.

The point of this is to admit I’ve always had a fear of being homeless—there but for a stroke of luck—and stories such as The Salt Path only remind me of that thin line between comfort and ruin. Times when I made offhand comments to this effect, people reacted surprised, like it would never cross their minds as a possibility for themselves. I don’t begrudge their sense of security—and hope they’ll never face losing their place in line, though it happens.

…

So wilderness hiking with no home to return to after—how would I deal with it? When you’re twenty something, the implication is you’d better skip buying the new Traffic album or pass on the pepperoni pizza. By the time you’re in your fifties, losing your house and farm is a way sadder deal.

…

Back then, if I had met someone who’d lived somewhere for, oh, let’s say going on twenty years in that very same place, I’d have thought, huh, what would that feel like? And in a locale so distinct, distinguished even?

For so many years, I’d never lived in the same place for more than one or two years. I recall being amused, even puzzled, to realize the fact. But once I moved away from my mother’s house, I became a drifter of sorts, starting out with a single metal trunk, then slowly accumulating cardboard boxes of books, legal pad drafts of a fantasy novel and record albums, a second hand stereo. Slowly I built myself a virtual home, even if I kept packing to move from apartment to the next. Leaving graduate school, I’d acquired enough ‘stuff’, mostly second hand, three cats and a traveling companion who became my sons’ mother, and a rental truck became necessary to haul us from New Haven to Miami. I of course drove.

Then returned to New Haven, packed the second hand ’67 VW bug with houseplants and the three rescued cats to repeat the trip south to sunny South Florida. We made it with a stop at my sister’s in Bethesda and another at our mother’s house in South Carolina.

And I can picture most of these abodes clearly. From dorm room, briefly to a small townhouse with four or five roommates, to the basement apartment on Clemson Avenue, to a subdivided Victorian in New Haven where the bathroom was shared, to the apartment complex under the Miami International Airport flight path, to a second apartment after the first one caught fire, to an actually charming second story apartment whose owner lusted for my bride in Coral Gables with so many house plants they lived on the porch—just down Le Jeune Road from a popular strip joint—to a quiet Reston apartment four flights up, to a 50s walkup in Annandale, an 80s townhouse in Burke, to Peter and Pat’s spare bedroom, to a second spare bedroom with Steve, another running buddy, to a ground level Annandale condo again, to a first house in Barcroft just down from the beach, to the 50s place where I sit today.

And after being away for enough time, I remember returning briefly to my once bedroom in my mother’s house, thinking ‘how strange’ that I had grown to a teen in that room. And that house at 817 Mathis St., Sumter, South Carolina. I’ll wait while you google it. See? Nothing special, and all the tall pines are gone, blown away in Hurricane Hugo.

All these moves were nothing too special. Nothing dramatic. Not like living in Katmandu herding goats or in the Italian lake country writing an opus. But it’s going on twenty years since we’ve been planted by this quiet cove loaded with leaning trees, blue herons, a few soaring eagles, the neighborhood racoons and foxes.

I’ve made a practice of shooting photos from the deck—or through the window of the downstairs room where I write, giving me too much time to reflect on what’s passed for a life of rambles. Though I’ve never hiked the South West Coast Path (aka Salt Path) in England nor the Pacific Crest Trail. A bit of the Appalachian Trail is all. I do have a decent pair of hiking boots, and a yellow all weather jacket, so I have no excuse beyond a worn out knee.

Time to walk the husky. She’s been waiting.