books

It’s time for the last installment in My Year of Excellent Essayists.

random notes:

If you’ve been reading here for a year now (and how lucky I am if you have), you’ll remember that it was my thoughts on Adam Gopnik that inspired this project. I started 2009 bemoaning the fact that after years of reading essayists, I hadn’t developed a real sense of which were my favorites and why. I’d read, but I hadn’t studied.

But I had this to say about Gopnik (to understand one reference in this passage, you need to know that earlier in the post I shared one of my Great Talents: to remember nearly every commercial jingle of the 1970’s):

“Well, I did study one essayist. A few years back I became smitten with the work of Adam Gopnik. I read his books with a green highlighter in my hand. I striped his books, you could say. I wrote down lines I liked in my journal, and went so far as to write down why those lines worked, and why they spoke to me.

And guess what? I can tell you a thing or two about Adam Gopnik’s writing. I can tell you that he writes like the valedictorian in your high school class–with smarts that force you to reread sentences, and occasionally make you want to tell him to stop showing off. He writes with a poet’s ear; sometimes his lines sashay and sing. And what I may love most: beneath his considerable brain beats a heart as sappy as a 70’s Kodak commercial (the ones that featured Paul Anka singing “The Times of Your Life.” And yes, I can sing it.) Gopnik wants to impress you with his smarts, but he also wants to knead your heart just a little–and he’ll do it, unfailingly, in the last lines of his last paragraph.”

I spent December rereading particular sections from two of Gopnik’s books: his Christmas journals from Paris to the Moon, and the Thanksgiving essays from Through the Children’s Gate.  My rereading only reinforced what I wrote about him above (although I’m not sure I ever wanted him to stop showing off).

Since these particular essays were Gopnik’s reminiscences of his previous year, they often contain many disparate bits; a single essay might cover French fax machines, French pomposity, Christmas trees, Halloween, the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens, French lunches, fact checkers, rude Americans in Paris, French subtitles, arrogance and courtesy in French commerce, infuriation at the Musée d’Orsay, and a pinball machine at the back of a café. Yet Gopnik manages, somehow, to gather all these bits into a single cohesive mass, and it’s deft and beautiful, like you’re watching a master baker form croissants. The fax machine errors become an analogy for pomposity; the wrapping of an éclair a symbol for pomposity’s opposite. Everything comes together in the essay’s last lines, as I mentioned above, and the result is more stunning than any French pastry.

a few lines to love:

On his second attempt at buying Christmas tree lights. The first time he discovered that French lights come in round garlands, not long strings.

“The trouble now was that the new white lights I got were white lights that were all twinkling ones. I saw the word clignotant on the box, and I knew that it meant blinking, but somehow I didn’t associate the word blinking with the concept “These lights blink off and on.” It was the same thing with the garlands, come to think of it. It said guirlande right on the box, and I knew perfectly well what guirlande meant; but I am not yet able to make the transposition from what things say to what they mean. I saw the word guirlande on the box, but I didn’t quite believe it. In New York I believe everything I read, even if it appears in the New York Post. In France I am always prepared to give words the benefit of a poetic doubt. I see the word guirlande and shrug and think that maybe garland is just the French seasonal Christmas light-specific idiom for a string. The box says, “They blink,” and I think they don’t.”

Gopnik is always fascinated by the odd little idiosyncrasies in daily life, whether in France or at home in New York City.  And he always seems happy to portray himself as hapless. To humorous effect.

After taking his son, Luke, who is three (I think), to see a puppet show of The Three Pigs in the Luxembourg Gardens, the two take a late-night stroll with the stroller:

“Luke, all the while was keeping up a running, troubled commentary on Les Tres Petits Cochons. “Why there were two wolves?” he would spring up, sleepy, from his pousette, to demand. (Actually, there was just one, but he would appear, with sinister effect, on either side of the proscenium.) “Why he wants to eat the pigs?” “Why that man knock him?” “Why that crocodile bite?” Why, why, why…the question the pigs ask the wolf, that the wolf asks the hunter, that the hunter asks God–and the answer, as it comes at midnight, after all the other, patient parental answers (”Well, you see, wolves generally like to eat pigs, though that’s just in the story.” “Well, hunters, a long time ago, would go hunting for wolves with guns when they were a danger to people”), the final exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer, wheeling the pousette down the Quai Voltaire, is the only answer there is, the Bible’s answer to Job: because that’s the way the puppet master chose to do it, bcause that’s the way the guy who works the puppets chose to have it done.”

Here’s yet another example of an essayist using a long, complicated line to convey a long, complicated situation. Any parent remembers the whys of a three-year-old, and Gopnik reminds us how those whys go on and on, and even intersperses his (ultimately ineffective) explanations right in the middle of that long line, to complicate it even further. I especially admire how he gets across his that’s just how it is! point at the end: not once, but in two different ways. It gives his “final exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer” the desperate impact it requires. Saying it twice shows how exasperated he is. It also adds to the rhythm of the line.

On Luke at four, noticing his father’s French:

“He recognizes that his parents, his father particularly, speaks with an Accent, and this brings onto him exactly the shame that my grandfather must have felt when his Yiddish-speaking father arrived to talk to his teachers at a Philadelphia public school. I try to have solid, parental discussions with his teachers, but as I do, I realize, uneasily, that in his eyes I am the alter kocker, the comic immigrant.

‘Zo, how the boy does?” he hears me saying in effect. “He is good boy, no? He is feeling out the homeworks, isn’t he?’ I can see his small frame shudder, just perceptibly, at his father’s words.”

I like the drawn-out analogy here, the imagined scene. Zo, how the boy does? perfectly gets across just how cringe-worthy Gopnik’s French must seem to his son. It’s that haplessness, once again.

The first line of Through the Children’s Gate:

“In the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I went downtown and met a man who was making a map of New York.”

I love the rhythm and the sounds of this sentence. All the s words–sounds, streets, singing, ears–then the hard c sounds–codes, courtyards, pockets–and then all those m’s–met, man, making, map. Read it out loud; isn’t it lovely? The poetry lures you right into the book.

From the Thanksgiving essay written after 9/11:

“Children don’t mind if their parents are worried; they expect it–parents are there to worry. But they notice at once if their parents are afraid, for that is what parents are never to be.”

Gopnik does this often–he boils down his observations into a universal statement. His phrasing makes it read like an aphorism. And there’s that wonderful rhythm once again.

After agreeing that Luke and his friend could have a two-night sleepover, but without any screen time:

“Once before, they had used a no-screen weekend imaginatively, to hold a fire sale of old Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. They both have outgrown the game in the past year and now view their beautiful old Rackhamish cards with disdain and the kind of disbelief about their enthusiasms of seven months ago that we have for pictures of ourselves in decades past–the haircut! those clothes! Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster.”

There’s that aphoristic statement at the end. And the exclamatory asides–the haircut! the clothes! Very Gopnikish. I took a particular delight in watching Luke and his friends, over the years and through the essays, become obsessed with almost exactly the same games that H and his buddies went through over the years, although H’s gang favored Pokemon over Yu-Gi-Oh! There were baseball cards, and Major League Baseball Showdown cards and eventually the Lord of the Rings game with painted figures. Gopnik writes this about Yu-Gi-Oh!, but it really applies to any of them:

“The game, when you play it, has mind-numbingly elaborate rules, but you never seem to play it. The goal is to collect the cards and plan to play it someday.”

Precisely. Ha! It baffled me with H and his friends, and it’s baffling me again with Mr. T and his, with their Pokemon collections. West Coast boys and East Coast boys–it’s all the same! Gopnik describes the Lord of the Rings game, which involves the painstaking construction of miniature plastic figures, which are then primed and painted in eye-crossing detail. 

“The game combines, so far as I can see, the joys of being a Malaysian child laborer in a small-goods sweatshop with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.”

Maybe this is only funny if you’ve had a boy that has played this particular game. In which case I’m sure you are nodding and snorting in agreement.

And this, in an essay on worrying over Luke spending too much time on computers and video games:

“Considering the maze of screens and cards and pages, I ended up at last with a bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion: It is not that we want them free of screens, really. It is that we want them to be screen producers rather than screen consumers. We say that we don’t want them enslaved to screens, but what we really want is for them to enslave other people to them. We want them to be Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg–feudal screen lords rather than mere screen peasants, screen serfs. We do not mind if they play games, so long as they grow up to write software. We will leave them alone for a weekend to write their screenplay, even if they have to huddle over a screen to do it.”

Adam Gopnik, how did you get inside my brain? This is my bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion exactly. (And please explain, if I think like you, why, oh why, can’t I write like you?)

And one more, just because it kills me. This is from the last Thanksgiving essay, when Luke is eleven, and Gopnik asks every day after school, at 3:15, how school was, even though he knows he’ll get only “the high-shouldered shrug of the exasperated” in return. But then, every day at 3:30, Luke sends him an IM, filling in his father on all he hadn’t acknowledged.

“I understood what he was doing. To submit to the parental three-fifteen is to surrender autonomy; to send complete messages from your own computer is to seize control of the means of communication, allowing you to declare both autonomy and your essential goodwill. He was doing what children have to do: He was making me, his strongest tie, into a weaker tie, and then strengthening the tie again, but on his own terms. He is getting ready to go. He is putting his first shirt in the bottom of his eventual suitcase.”

Ah, that last line. Even more poignant when your kid is seventeen, and the suitcase is half-filled. 

It was especially interesting to read these essays in succession, to watch Luke grow from a boy in a stroller to a boy with a shirt in his suitcase. Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster. I just love that Adam Gopnik.

So, what’s next?

Will I begin Another Year of Excellent Essayists? Will I finally get to Virginia Woolf? Will I find time to read some–any, a short story, a page, something please–fiction? Will I take a new direction and embark upon My Year of Excellent Egg Dishes?

Come on back for my next post when I’ll get all mawkish and misty-eyed about what this project has meant to me, and yammer on about what I’ll do in 2010.

If you’re new to this blog, let me give you a heads-up: this is the monthly post in which I bore most of you silly by writing about an essayist that I’ve been reading. I’m calling the project My Year of Excellent Essayists, and you can read more about it here.

random notes:

I have an old, used copy of The Best American Essays 1987. I must have bought it around 1994, when I took a Prose Style Workshop in Portland and switched from writing short stories to writing essays. (Or attempting to write essays.) There’s an essay in that collection called “The Inheritance of Tools” by Scott Russell Sanders, and its lyricism wowed me. The same year I bought the collection The Art of the Personal Essay and found Sanders’ stunning piece “Under the Influence”, about his father’s alcoholism.

I never forgot those essays. It’s been fifteen years since I first read them, which I find rather unbelievable; still I remember their power. I wanted to reread them this month, and to read more Sanders. I chose A Private History of Awe, which is a reminiscence of his life–specifically a recollection of the times he was touched with awe. The book takes you through those charged moments chronologically, starting in Sanders’ childhood, while simultaneously weaving in current-day stories of his time with his mother, who is falling into dementia, and time with his newborn granddaughter. It’s a beautiful book.

According to Phillip Lopate, author of  The Art of the Personal Essay, Sanders is “an accomplished nature writer”, yet I’ve managed to focus on his work on family and relationships. Even in these works, he writes with the watchful awareness of a nature writer. He’s a master of observing details and lingering over them, as I hope you’ll see below. There’s also something almost spiritual about his writing–although in Awe he dismisses the religion of his childhood. He writes of everyday objects, of people, of everyday life with reverence usually reserved for the sacred. His writing is serious and earnest and gracious.

I had no problem finding lines to highlight in Sanders’ work–I’ve nearly ruined his essays with offensive neon-green highlighter stripes. Sanders is also a carpenter–he learned his skills from his father, which is the subject matter for “The Inheritance of Tools”. He crafts his lines as he does his carpentry, with precision and care.

a few lines to love:

The first line from “The Inheritance of Tools”:

“At just about the hour when my father died, soon after dawn one February morning when ice coated the windows like cataracts, I banged my thumb with a hammer.”

Sanders always starts his essays with a strong, compelling line.

Here’s the start to “Under the Influence”:

“My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food-compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he quit drinking but because he quit living.”

The first line is as simple and frank as can be, conveying the essay’s tone right off. Then he hits the reader with the two similes, taking his father’s drinking from an abstract idea to a physical experience that the reader can understand.

More from “Tools’:

“As the saw teeth bit down, the wood released its smell, each kind with its own fragrance, oak or walnut or cherry or pine–usually pine because it was the softest, easiest for a child to work. No matter how weathered and grey the board, no matter how warped and cracked, inside there was this smell waiting, as of something freshly baked.”

I love the idea of the wood’s smell waiting like something baked. So true.

“I was taught early on that a saw is not to be used apart from a square: ‘If you’re going to cut a piece of wood,’ my father insisted, ‘you owe it to the tree to cut it straight.’”

Sanders conveys so much about the people in his essays through dialogue. It’s hard to imagine that he remembers all those lines verbatim, but the dialogue is convincing enough to make it seem that he has. His father’s charismatic personality, especially, comes across in what he says.

After hearing the news of his father’s death:

“For several hours I paced around inside my house, upstairs and down, in and out of every room, looking for the right door to open and knowing there was no such door. My wife and children followed me and wrapped me in arms and backed away again, circling and staring as if I were on fire.”

The notion of looking for a nonexistent door is such an interesting, accurate analogy for the frantic first feelings of grief. And then the image of his family looking at him as if he were on fire: I see it.

A longer passage on his father. This follows a paragraph of synonyms for drunkenness, and a description of how drunks are often portrayed as humorous characters in our culture:

“My father, when drunk was neither funny nor honest; he was pathetic, frightening, deceitful. There seemed to be a leak in him somewhere, and he poured in booze to keep from draining dry. Like a torture victim who refuses to squeal, he would never admit that he had touched a drop, not even in his last year, when he seemed to be dissolving in alcohol before our very eyes. I never knew him to lie about anything, ever, except for this one ruinous fact. Drowsy, clumsy, unable to fix a bicycle tire, throw a baseball, balance a grocery sack, or walk across the room, he was stripped of his true self by drink. In a matter of minutes, the contents of a bottle could transform a brave man into a coward, a buddy into a bully, a gifted athlete and skilled carpenter and shrewd businessman into a bumbler. No dictionary synonyms for drunk would soften the anguish of watching our prince turn into a frog.”

Wow. That’s a single paragraph that conveys a lifetime of heartbreak.

And then this short line:

“Mother watched him go with arms crossed over her chest, her face closed like the lid on a box of snakes.”

Aren’t his analogies stunning?

And a few from A Private History of Awe:

“On the threshold of sixty, I am no beginner. My mind churns with memories, notions, plans, like froth in a riffle on a creek. But occasionally the waves simmer down, the water clears, and I see pebbles gleaming on the bottom of the stream. Or rather, in these clear moments, the fretful I vanishes, and there is only the pure gleaming.”

Isn’t that lovely? The metaphor, and also the rhythm of the lines. (That rhythm is there in nearly all of Sanders’ lines.) Plus, I love that word, riffle.

On his father, as a young man–note that this is a single line:

“At twenty, after his only year of college, on a whim one Friday night he boarded a Greyhound bus in Memphis and rode to Chicago and got a job slicing cheese in a delicatessen, where, in his butter-melting southern drawl, he asked a pretty auburn-haired customer to write down her name and phone number on the wrapping paper, and she primly declined, but the following day she returned for more cheese and wrote beside the phone number all three parts of her name, Eva Mary Solomon, which became in the mouth of this Mississippi charmer the refrain of a song he often crooned to her when they danced–a song, for all I know, he sang to her when they made the love that blossomed into Sandra, Glenn, and me.”

If you’ve been reading along on this project, you know I’m a sucker for long, long lines, well-wrought. This is a good one.

For five years, Sanders wrote love letters to his wife, whom he met at summer science camp while in high school.

“By the time Ruth and I exchanged our solemn vows, we had exchanged well over a thousand letters, all of which are stored in the attic above the room where I write these lines. That I am writing these lines at all owes as much to my apprenticeship in love letters as to any formal training.”

I love the notion of an “apprenticeship in love letters”.

And this:

“Outside my window, the red oak we planted a year ago to celebrate Elizabeth’s birth swells at every bud, thrusting out new leaves to lick the sun.”

I’ve never thought of new leaves as licking the sun. So good.

And lastly, a paragraph–and yet another long, single line– that shows how Sanders weaves together the stories of spending time with his aging mother, and his newborn granddaughter:

“Some days I would take baby Elizabeth for a ride in the stroller, telling her the names of the flowers we saw in the park, and then I would take Mother for a ride in her wheelchair, stopping to admire white impatiens, red geraniums, violet petunias, golden coreopsis, or purple asters, rehearsing names that Mother had taught me in my childhood, but that she herself could no longer recall.”

It really is a beautiful book.

the plan for november:

I’ve already started reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son. I couldn’t resist, after hearing him read from it at my local bookstore. I feel a little guilty, since I was planning to read Virginia Woolf this month. I’ll be reading Adam Gopnik next month, so I probably won’t fit Virginia into my excellent year. Oh well. There’s always 2010.

random notes:

This has been a tough month for my essayist project. I’ve told you how I got distracted reading Spunk & Bite. I also have a seventeen-year-old applying to college this fall, so I’m suddenly busy with that, and reading books with ridiculous titles like How to Get Into the Top Colleges. 

I seemed to get around to Fisher just as I was going to bed each night. And then fell asleep soon after. Which prompts the ageless conundrum: Did I fall asleep because the book was boring? Or was the book boring because I was falling asleep?

Part of the problem was that I stubbornly stuck with Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me.  Philip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay and my unknowing mentor through this project, calls that book Fisher’s “best”. I’m going to respectfully disagree (and hope he doesn’t show up in the comments to argue). Turns out The Gastronomical Me was one of Fisher’s first books, and I found the writing uneven. There’s some fantastic stuff there (as you’ll see in the quotes below), but much of the book rambles, like stream-of-consciousness memory rather than shaped essays.

As October rolled around, I got desperate and picked up my sun-bleached copy of As They Were. I only had to reread the essay “Two Kitchens in Provence” to remember what I’ve long loved about Fisher. I suppose that’s sort of sappy and predictable. It reminds me of the time I told a landscape architect that I wanted to plant our front hillside all in lavender and he said, full of snot, “People are so sentimental about lavender.” Well, yeah. I’ll take my lavender hillside and I’ll take Fisher’s memories of food and Provence, no matter how cliche they may seem.

Lopate writes, “Stylistically, Fisher had a taste for aphorisms, sentences of compressed wit that boldly cut through any dithering.” I’d say, to use a word from my recent readings, that she wrote with spunk. Her writing voice was opinionated and direct, refreshing for a woman of her time. And while she’s known for her food writing, it’s her mastery of details that makes her writing memorable. Yes, she could reconstruct a meal from decades before, course by course, but she could also convey the feel of a village in winter, or the driver of a traveling grocery cart: “The man who jolted it around that rocky country had a good face, like a tired village doctor or lawyer.”

Fisher’s insight into people is one of my favorite qualities in her writing, as much as those recollections of meals and time spent in France. She was perceptive, in what seems to me a very female way. And she’d surely make the ultimate dining companion.

a few lines to love:

On recollecting food, from “Once a Tramp, Always…”

“It is said that a few connoisseurs, such as old George Saintsbury, can recall physically the bouquet of certain great vintages a half century after tasting them. I am a mouse among elephants now, but I can say just as surely that this minute, in a northern California valley, I can taste-smell-hear-see and then feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace. They were uneven in both thickness and color, probably made by a new apprentice in the hotel kitchen, and almost surely they smelled faintly of either chicken or fish, for that was always the case there. They were a little too salty, to encourage me to drink. They were ineffable. I am still nourished by them. That is probably why I can be so firm about not eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all the grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them.”

This essay was published in The New Yorker in 1968, thirty-two years after Fisher ate those chips. The particulars of the chips are impressive enough–but then there’s that description of modern-day chips that “hang there like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all the grocery stores”. Dead food on dead trees–perfect.

Going back in time to her childhood:

“We spent our time in a stream under the cottonwoods, or with Old Mary the cook, watching her make butter in a great churn between her mountainous knees. She slapped it into pats, and put them down in the stream where it ran hurriedly through the darkness of the butter-house.”

I love the image of the churn between those “mountainous knees”.

On cooking for others:

“I was beginning to believe that is is foolish and perhaps pretentious and often boring, as well as damnably expensive, to make a meal of six or eight courses just because the guests who are to eat it have always been used to that many. Let them try eating two or three things, I said, so plentiful and interesting and so well cooked that they are satisfied. And if they aren’t satisfied, let them stay away from our table, and our leisurely comfortable friendship at that table.

I talked like that, and it worried Al a little, because he had been raised in a minister’s family and taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes.”

Gives you a sense of Fisher’s voice, her sass. She’s funny and practical and likable.

Here’s one of those character portraits that impress me so. She’s describing a waitress:

“She was very thin, and something about her was out of a drawing, out of an El Greco. Her eyes were bigger than human eyes, and slipped upwards and sideways; and her mouth was pale and beautiful. She was shadowy…a bad liver probably…but mysterious-looking. She wore black always, and her long hands picked up sizzling platters as if they were distasteful leaves from a tree. She had a light voice; and there was something good and fine about her, so that I always warmed to her.”

This is what I mean by Fisher’s female insight. Here we have a mix of the woman’s physical description, with those eyes and the way her long hands picked up platters, combined with the supposition about her liver, and the way Fisher feels about her. It reminds me of how a woman might talk with a friend over a cup of tea–if the woman had impressive gifts for description.

And here’s another waitress, only this time rendered in dialogue. This comes from an entertaining essay called “I Was Really Very Hungry” about a memorable meal that Fisher did not want, but which was thrust upon her by a maniacal waitress.

“‘You cannot, you cannot, Madame, serve old pastry!’ She seemed ready to beat her breast as she leaned across the table. ‘Look at that delicate crust! You may feel that you have eaten too much.’ (I nodded in idiotic agreement.) ‘But this pastry is like feathers–it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive! And why?’ She glared sternly at me. ‘Because Monsieur Paul did not even open the flour bin until he saw you coming! He could not, he could not have baked you one of his special apple tarts with old dough!’”

Funny. Fisher captures dialogue especially well.

And another portrait:

“One time we took Michel to the Raisin. He was the kind of short, virile, foxlike Frenchman who seems to have been born in a beret, the kind who is equally ready to shoot a wild boar, make love, or say something which seems witty until you think about it.”

It’s all good, but it’s the “seems witty until you think about it” surprise at the end that really does it.

And another, this time a girl Fisher’s younger brother has brought to visit, with whom he is obsessed.

“But the little blonde girl did not make a part of any of it. The game was too much for her, and the food was boring. She drooped wearily against the long crude table beside the alley, and whenever David seemed for a minute to forget her, she let her hand fall slowly toward him, let her soft pink fingers uncurl. It was wordless, and it was like the crack of a whip. He would drop anything…his bread and honey, the pins he was setting up, and come dazedly to watch her lift the fresh cigaret to her mouth and wait for him to light it.”

It’s all so carefully observed–I’m convinced of the girl’s dreadfulness. I especially like “It was wordless, and it was like the crack of a whip.”

On being driven home from the market in Provence in a taxi:

“Sometimes I would want him to go faster, for I could almost feel the food in the baskets swelling with juice, growing soft, splitting open in an explosive rush toward ripeness and disintegration. The fruits and vegetables in Provence are dying as they grow–literally leaping from the ancient soil, so filled with natural richnesses and bacilli and fungi that they seem a kind of summing up of whatever they are. A tomato there, for instance, is the essence of all tomatoes, of tomato-ness, the way a fragment from a Greek frieze is not a horse but horse itself.”

I love the analysis, especially the analogy in the last line.

Here’s her ending to the essay “Gare de Lyon”, about the restaurant in that train station.

“It comes down, I suppose, to a question of where one really chooses to be, and for how long. This is of course true of all such traffic hubs such as railway stations, but nowhere is there one with a second floor like that of the Gare de Lyon, so peculiarly lacy and golden. It has, in an enormous way, something of the seduction of a full-blown but respectable lady, post-Renior but pre-Picasso, waiting quietly in full sunlight for a chat with an old lover…”

That last line–and the whole essay–is a convincing argument for how much travel has changed. It makes you long for that respectable lady.

And one more, just because it’s the essence of M.F.K. Fisher, in three lines:

There might be one lamb chop left. It would not be good by noon. I would eat it cold for a secret breakfast, with a glass of red wine, after the family had scattered.”

Now I wish I’d started As They Were sooner. I want to keep reading, but it’s time to move on.

the plan for october:

Next up is Scott Russell Sanders. Years ago I read two of his essays, and I still remember their lyricism. I’m starting with A Private History of Awe.

Boy howdy, here we go again–try not to jump out of your skin! It’s time for yet another entry in my year of excellent essayists project.

random notes:

In August I read Pico Iyer, who is widely known as a travel writer, although he writes on a variety of topics, and often on globalism. He calls himself a “mongrel”: his parents were from India, he was born in England, raised in California and educated in English boarding schools, and now lives mostly in suburban Japan, but spends much of his time traveling the world. 

Iyer’s work is interesting. His style is less personal, more journalistic than most of the other essayists I’ve read so far. He’s there in the essays, appearing in a paragraph here, a paragraph there, but he’s more like an extra sipping tea to the right of the screen than he is a leading man.

But as he sits off to the side drinking that tea, he’s also, presumably, scribbling in a notebook. Iyer is a master at noting details, so many details. He observes people and places like the outsider he often is–with care, with curiosity. Then he analyzes those details for the meaning that connects them. There’s plenty of insight in an Iyer essay.

There’s also that lyricism that I always admire in writing–a rhythm to the lines, an attention to the sounds. There are single sentences that gallop on for a paragraph, and analogies that make me smile for the ride.

Perhaps because so many of his essays reflect on varied cultures, there’s a focus on disparity in Iyer’s work. Disparity between the rich and the poor in Haiti; between the jet-lagged and the un-jet-lagged mind; between the English language of England and the English of India. That theme of disparity continues even in essays not focused on travel: an essay on Leonard Cohen, for example, studies the disparity between the Cohen of legend, and the Cohen who resides in a Zen center as “cook, chauffeur and sometimes drinking buddy” to a Japanese roshi.

I focused my reading on two works: The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home, and Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign. The subject matter in these essays is fascinating enough–the L.A. airport, the Olympic Village in Atlanta, shopping mall-hotels in Hong Kong from which people never leave, Angkor Wat, the Dalai Lama–but then there’s Iyer’s analysis, and his talent for crafting fine lines. It’s intriguing stuff. See for yourself.

a few lines to love:

“And suddenly, in a flash, I am taken back to myself at the age of nine, going back and forth (three times a year) between my parents’ home in California and my boarding school in England and realizing that, as a member of neither culture, I could choose between selves at will, wowing my Californian friends with the passages of Greek and Latin I’d already learned in England, and telling my breathless housemates in Oxford how close I lived to the Grateful Dead. The tradition denoted by my face was something I could erase (mostly) with my voice, or pick up whenever the conversation turned to the Maharishi or patchouli oil”

Such great details.

“I woke up one morning last month in sleepy, never-never Laos (where the center of the capital is unpaved red dirt and a fountain without water), and went to a movie that same evening in the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles, where a Korean at a croissanterie made an iced cappuccino for a young Japanese boy surrounded by the East Wind snack bar and Panda Express, Fajita Flats and the Hana Grill; two weeks later I woke up in placid, acupuncture-loving Santa Barbara, and went to sleep that night in the broken heart of Manila, where children were piled up like rags on the pedestrian overpasses and girls scarcely in their teens combed, combed their long hair before lying down to sleep under sheets of cellophane on the central dividers of city streets.”

That’s a single sentence. Which is a brilliant construction, given that he’s writing about dragging oneself across the globe and how ”such quick transitions bring conflicts”.  Iyer drags us along on his long-winded sentence, and as we try to make sense, we feel his disorientation ourselves. Read the very last part of the sentence aloud, and listen to all the “s” sounds. Lovely.

“In the final winter of the old millennium, to see what the official caretakers of our global order make of all this, I accepted an invitation to go as a Fellow to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Forum gathers hundreds of “leaders of global security” in Davos each year–captains of industry, heads of state, computer billionaires, and a few token mortals such as me–to map out the future of the planet.

I had to include this as an example of the essayist’s “self-deprecatory cough” that Adam Gopnik writes about. A few token mortals such as me seems suitably self-deflecting.

The following is from a section of an essay called “The Empire”. Iyer writes about sitting at Cambridge with a friend, a fellow Indian, who has embraced England as his home and his lifestyle, but suddenly expresses disillusionment with his decision.

“I look at him and don’t know what to think. The punts are drifting past the shortbread-colored towers, and the late-summer light is gilding the fields and distant spires as in the kind of watercolors the Empire sent around the globe. My friend has a big heart, I know, and a quick mind, but both are so lost inside the character he’s chose to play that all I can hear, sometimes, is the sound of a lover disappointed, a boy who’s left everything he knows to pursue some ideal, unattainable woman, and arrives at her doorstep, only to find she’s given herself over to some mobster from Las Vegas.”

Ah. The “shortbread-colored towers”. The watercolored light. And then the mobster from Las Vegas at the end. Beautiful writing. (And doesn’t it remind you a little of E.B. White’s Corn Belt boy with “a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart”?)

On how travel can haunt us:

“When we sleep, as we do for perhaps a third of our days, we see not the places we know so well so much as somewhere we might have visited once, magically rearranged. Even when we’re lying sleepless in our beds, trying to will ourselves into the dark, what we meet, often, are not the people who surround us every day, but a stranger, perhaps, whose eyes met ours in a cafe in Reykjavik twenty years ago.”

I just like the idea he presents here. And that Reykjavik stranger.

From that essay on Leonard Cohen and his relationship with the roshi:

“It’s touching in a way: the man who has been the poet laureate of those in flight, who has never found in his sixty-three years a woman he can marry or a home he won’t desert, the connoisseur of betrayal and self-tormenting soul who claimed, twenty-five years ago, that he had ‘torn everyone who reached out for me,’ and who ended his most recent collection of writings with a prayer for ‘the precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world’– the man, in fact, who became an international heartthrob while singing “So Long” and “Goodbye” — has finally found something he hasn’t abandoned and a love that won’t let him down.”

Another one of those long Iyer sentences. I love how he carries us along.

On considering Singapore while jet-lagged:

“Along the shiny malls of Orchard Road–the new, official Singapore, where Barnes & Noble and Marks & Spencer and Nokia and Nike all share a single entrance (there’s a Starbucks on this intersection, a Starbucks on that one)–tall girls who weren’t girls when the day or the decade began flounce outside the Royal Thai Embassy, walking up the sidewalk, walking down it.”

These lines are all about the sounds for me: the rhythm in the rattling off of the “and” shops; the repeat of the words Starbucks and girls; the alliteration in day and decade. And then the walking up and walking down. It’s almost singsong–a perfect way to convey the altered jet-lagged mind.

And more on jet lag:

“I feel, when lagged, as if I’m seeing the whole world through tears, or squinting; everything gets through to me, but with the wrong weight or meaning. I can’t see the signs, only their reflections in the puddles. I can’t follow directions; only savor the fact of being lost. It’s like watching a foreign movie without subtitles, perhaps: I can’t follow the story, the arc of character, but something else–the inflection of a hand, this unregarded silence–comes through to me intensely.”

Yes! This describes the state of jet lag so well. Such apt analogies. And again, the rhythm of the lines.

The essay “A Far-Off Affair” examines the English language in India. This particular essay has a more humorous tone than most of Iyer’s work; as a fellow wordlover, I ate it up.

“Indian English, when it is not overly formal, comes at you with the fatal tinkle of an advertising man who’s got his hands on the Ten Commandments: there’s always a trace of sententiousness in it, and yet the lofty sentiments are placed inside the jingly singsong of a children’s ditty. A decade before, traveling across my stepmotherland, I’d been struck by the signs that said LANE DRIVING IS SANE DRIVING and NO HURRY, NO WORRY, but now they had been joined by half a hundred others, trilling, RECKLESS DRIVERS KILL AND DIE, LEAVING ALL BEHIND TO CRY (or, a little more potently, RISK-TAKER IS ACCIDENT-MAKER). As I drove out of little settlements crammed with such instructions, the signs offered brightly, THANKS FOR INCONVENIENCE.”

And:

“But I always felt that I was speaking a language quite different from the English being spoken all around me (more Indians, of course, speak English than Englishmen), and came to feel that the one companion who’d been with me all my life, the English language, had stolen away into a corner and come back in a turban, a finger to its lips.”

There were so many funny examples in this essay; it was hard to know which to include. Just as it’s hard to stop reading Iyer. But it’s September and time to move on.

the plan for september:

I meant to read M.F.K. Fisher earlier in the summer–she’s summery reading to me. But here near the San Francisco Bay, the best summer weather is just now in full swing. So Fisher it is.

There has been a lot of new folks poking around this blog lately; I hope this post doesn’t make you run for the hills! It’s part of a little project I’ve undertaken, a year-long attempt to read twelve essayists in depth, and to study their styles. You can read more about the project here.

I’m late at posting this entry, but it’s meant more time with E.B. White, so I’m not complaining. He’s absolutely charmed me.

random notes:

In his introduction to White in The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate writes: “In 1925 he joined the staff of The New Yorker, and he maintained a lifelong association with that magazine. The persona that he created in his essays and “Talk of the Town” pieces–a friendly, gentlemanly family man, curious about nature and city life, undidactic, modest, civic-minded, mildly nostalgic and elegiac–set the tone for the periodical. At times White’s persona threatens to become irksomely bland in its genial self-effacement, but his intelligence and humor save the day.”

And in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2008, Adam Gopnik has more to say about that self-effacement: “The language of littleness and self-deprecation rises even from masters like Max Beerbohm and E.B. White, who practice competetive self-disparagement the way novelists practice competitive self-praise. I’m but a wee thing with a wee craft, the essayist says. Look to the novelists for largess.”

Well, yes. White seems to feel a bit sheepish about placing himself at the center of his writings, so he does like any polite person and puts himself in his place. Here’s what I came to realize about him: if I could play that game in which I choose three people from history to invite to dinner, E.B. White might very well be on my list. I’d pull in some bigger, flashier characters too, but I’d want White around. Because he wouldn’t monopolize the conversation, or draw attention to himself. He would compliment the home-grown tomatoes I served, and would ask how I was faring as a first-year beekeeper. Yet something tells me that by the end of the night, White would be the one charming the table with his humor, his wit, and his stories. And I’ll bet he’d even send a hand-written thank-you note.

Let’s see if I can convince you of White’s potential as a dinner guest. And master essayist.

a few lines to love:

He starts off his essay, “Death of a Pig” like this:

“I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.”

Already you get a sense of his voice. The polite formality, the subtle humor.

“I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotypical roles. The pig’s lot and mine were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From then until the time of his death I held the pig steadily in the bowl of my mind; the task of trying to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession.”

As I’ve said before, how can you not love a man who cares so much for pigs?

“There had been talk of getting a “sensible” dog this time, and my wife and I had gone over the list of sensible dogs, and had even ventured once or twice into the company of sensible dogs. A friend had a litter of Labradors, and there were other opportunities. But after a period of uncertainty and waste motion my wife suddenly exclaimed one evening, “Oh, let’s just get a dachshund!’ She had had a glass of wine, and I could see the truth was coming out.”

Love that last line.

From “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street”:

“On one of the mornings of the disposal, a man from a second-hand bookstore visited us, bought several hundred books, and told us of the death of his brother, the word “cancer” exploding in the living room like a time bomb detonated by his grief. Even after he had departed with his heavy load, there seemed to be almost as many books as before, and twice as much sorrow.”

Beautiful description of the effects of grief.

The first lines of  ”Once More to the Lake”:

“One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond’s Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was place in the world like that lake in Maine.”

I like the chatty quality of this opening, and the details.

Here’s an example of the self-deprecating quality that Lopate and Gopnik write about:

“It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to my society: and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.”

Of course, if you read the essay–”The Ring of Time”–it’s clear that White did not fail in his duty, but we’ll indulge him his humility. It’s part of his persona.

From the wonderful essay, “Here is New York”:

     “There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and aceepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter–the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last–the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is the third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

I fell for this quote and highlighted it in my book, but later when I searched for it on the internet so I didn’t have to retype it myself, I saw that it was cited widely. Yet those citers almost always cut out the section about the specific settlers. How could they leave out the Corn Belt boy with “a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart”? That’s my favorite part!

And look at this paragraph which appears toward the end of the same essay.  It’s quite eerie considering 9/11, and considering that it was written in 1949.

“The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”

Can you believe that one? Talk about insight.

The following quotes are for Susan, who wrote in a comment, “Will you reread Elements of Style and note every time E.B. violates his commandments to good effect? I am out of love with him as a theorist of style but I love his writing.” For those of you who don’t know, White revised and added to The Elements of Style, which was a small writing handbook that one of his college professors had written. He wrote an essay on that professor, Will Strunk, and it does explain a few things. (And entertain as well.) In the introduction to the essay, White writes, 

“I discovered that for all my fine talk, I was no match for the parts of speech–was in fact, over my depth and in trouble. Not only that, I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.”

And within the essay, there’s this:

“The professor devotes a special paragraph to the vile expression “the fact that”, a phrase that causes him to quiver with revulsion. The expression, he says, should be “revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.” But a shadow of gloom seems to hang over the page, and you feel that he knows how hopeless his cause is. I suppose I have written “the fact that” a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worth while.”

Can you forgive him, Susan?

I appreciate White’s talents at ending his essays. I highlighted many final paragraphs, but I’ll share just one:

“With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality… and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world. I know, too, that on some not too distant night, somewhere in pond or ditch or low place, a frog will awake, raise his voice in praise, and be joined by others. I will feel a whole lot better when I hear the frogs.”

Beautiful all round, but it’s the plainspokenness of the last line that gets me, following the more poetic ones. Quintessential E.B. White.

the plan for august:

I’ve been reading Pico Iyer. Very different voice from White. I’ve stumbled across a few of his writings lately, here and here, and am intrigued. The fact that he writes so often about traveling seems fitting for August. One last fling before fall.

I went and had a little summer fling. I suppose I can blame it on those long afternoons by the lake and the absence of responsibility. And surely the hammock had something to do with it.

I was supposed to spend my afternoons with E.B. White. I promised you I would–or at least I’d promised to devote June to him. But I was behind in reading for my little project and had planned to use the long weekend to catch up. Then Molly Wizenberg hopped into my book bag and poor Mr. White never got even a glimpse of the lake.

If you aren’t addicted to blogs, there’s the chance that you’ve never heard of Molly’s A Homemade Life, the book which grew from her popular blog, Orangette. I came to Orangette late, maybe six months or so ago. I was quickly smitten though, because Molly’s posts are long and writerly. She writes about food, but each post reads like a short essay. And you know I’m a sucker for that.

When the book came out a few months back, it got mentioned on several blogs I follow, almost invariably, it seemed, with a nod to the recipe for coconut macaroons with chocolate ganache. I assumed the book was a cookbook. I imagined recipes and glossy, artsy food photos. I found the book’s virtual waitlist at my library’s website and got in line.

Was I surprised when I finally had the book in my hands. There wasn’t a single photo. It’s a book of essays. There are recipes, sure, and some pretty tempting ones at that. But the recipes are secondary, really–codas to the stories which precede them. Stories, well-told, about food. After reading Orangette, I don’t know why I expected anything less.

It’s funny–I don’t write much about food here. Which means I’m giving the wrong impression. You probably don’t realize that I’m the sort of person who plans vacations around where we’ll eat each meal. Who goes to New York City without seeing a show because that means we can fit in one more restaurant. Who thinks that when it comes to birthdays, getting to eat your favorite foods is as important as the gifts you’ll get. For H’s seventeenth this year, I went to Bakesale Betty the day before, bought one of their famed fried-chicken sandwiches, disassembled it into separate containers so it wouldn’t get soggy, and sent it to school in his backpack for his birthday lunch. (He requested bacon for breakfast and burgers for dinner. This is what comes of having a vegetarian mother.)

Molly’s book charmed me right off. I’d read an essay, and then another. It was like having a plate of her chocolate-glazed macaroons beside me. Oh, just one more, I’d think. And I’d turn another page.

The fact that I find myself referring to her as Molly, rather than Wizenberg, speaks of her chatty, candid style. She may write about food, but she also writes about her embarrassment at being a debutante (albeit one with a pierced nose), about sleeping in her French boyfriend’s tiny bed at twenty-one, and about her beloved father’s death. She writes about meeting the man who would become her husband via her blog, a story with as much romance as the meeting of Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson in that poppy field in A Room with a View.

I suppose this collection is a bit less weighty than most of the others I’ve read for this project. It’s a book of small stories, about first kisses and first apartments, about pies and pickles. But the telling compels you to keep reading, which is a fine quality in an essay. It also makes you very hungry.

What more could you want from a summer fling?

a few lines to love:

On dating:

“…I learned some important lessons. I learned that some things, like whether or not a man makes the bed, aren’t that important. I learned that men who like to dance are, in general, more fun than their non-dancing counterparts. I learned that kissing a man while leaning against a warm dishwasher is a lovely, lovely experience. (Go ahead! Try it! I’ll wait.)”

Still haven’t tried it. Are you reading, Sweetie?

“I’ve never liked the word blog. It’s kind of weird and lumpy. When you say it, it tumbles out of your mouth with an unbecoming thud.”

Yep. Here’s more on that:

“I guess you could say that having a blog is a little like the windows of a house I used to live in during my sophomore year of college. I loved opening them wide during the day, so that the smell of the eucalyptus trees outside could drift in and sweep out the rooms. But occasionally I would come home and fine a squirrel on my desk. A live squirrel. He would have climbed up the tree outside and jumped in through the window, and now here he was, rifling with his tiny, scratchy claws through whatever he found, tearing up every paper and scrap. Blogging is a little like that. It’s an incredible pleasure to open the window, to put yourself out in the world that way. It’s even better than the scent of eucalyptus. But occasionally you come home an find a squirrel on your desk, so to speak: a nasty comment, maybe, or even worse, something you wrote yourself, probably late at night, when you should have been sleeping, something that makes your cheeks hot.”

Such an apt analogy.

After scattering her father’s ashes in Paris:

“I say that Paris is the place where I’ve been loneliest, and also where I’ve been happiest. But what I mean is harder to say. The thing I call loneliness is delicate and lovely, like a blown-out eggshell. It’s both empty and hopeful, broken and beautiful. Paris couldn’t be anything else for me now, because it’s full of my father.”

Another nice analogy. (And another example of her tendency to overuse the word lovely. A tendency I share. It’s a lovely word.)

“Plus, Brandon once showed up at my door with a quarter pound of a very rare type of cured pork, and nothing makes a girl feel googly-eyed like getting pork from a vegetarian. Especially if he’s just visiting, only for ten days, so the gesture is especially poignant. And even more if, over the span of those ten days, he makes her a batch of pita, a vat of hot sauce, ten caneles, two lunches of Thai green papaya salad, rocky road candy with homemade marshmallows, a quart of milk chocolate ice cream with cocoa nibs, cilantro chutney, sticky tamarind sauce and the finest chana masala ever to flirt with her lips. There’s no reason to ever look elsewhere.”

There’s nothing like a well-placed list in an essay. This one is pretty irresistible. (And so seems Brandon.)

And more on that chana masala:

“After the onion comes a small but spirited parade of spices, a tin of tomatoes, and some cilantro, cayenne and chickpeas. Then things simmer for a little while, during which time you can safely enter the kitchen to do some dishes or kiss the cook, which will cause him to wrinkle his brow and mumble about cumin.”

It’s the brow-wrinkling and mumbling that I find endearing.

In addition to many more lovely lines of writing, there are all those recipes. I’m looking forward to trying the Fresh Ginger Cake with Caramelized Pears, the Pickled Grapes with Cinnamon and Black Pepper and, of course, those chocolate-coated macaroons. I’ll have to return my library copy for the next person in the queue, and buy one of my own.

the plan for july: I’ll stay out of hammocks and get back to E. B. White. I’ve already read several of his essays and have found him quite charming in his own right. How can you not be charmed by a man who loves pigs?

Post #5 in my year-long project.

random notes:

I have to watch myself when I read Anne Lamott.

I only have to read a little, and suddenly I’m trying to write like her. Trying to be funny. Littering my lines with qualifiers: the merest bit jealous, or a tad overzealous. Once the tidepool metaphors start showing up in my paragraphs I recognize what’s going on and force myself to stop.

Much as I’d like to, I can’t write like Anne Lamott. She’s one of a kind. I know she drives some people batty with her gritchy neuroses, but my love for her is unabashed.

She makes me snort aloud as I read.

She writes analogies like no one else–similes and metaphors that you don’t expect, but which are apt and ridiculous and perfect. She might compare her anxieties to both Richard Nixon’s posture and a sea anemone (see: tidepools!) yet she does it in such a way that you absolutely get what she means.

She whines and grouses and worries about Robert de Niro’s mole, but then she turns around and sees unfathomable beauty in the most homely of people and situations.

And the woman knows how to end an essay. Reading her last paragraphs, I often think of what it must be like to parachute from a plane. I see the white space approaching, and I know I’m almost to the end, about to hit the ground. But then in the last few lines, she’ll throw something unexpected in–an image from earlier in the essay, maybe–and the words will come together in such astounding beauty that I’ll hit the last word feeling sucker-punched and stunned and utterly exhilarated.

I like to think of her as my own little pocket writer. I’m a little possessive of her, I’m afraid: I discovered her early, on the shelf of a local bookstore way back in the late 80’s when she was just a Bay Area writer who’d published a few novels. But then suddenly she was helping me just when I needed her: publishing Operating Instructions when my oldest was a baby; Bird by Bird when I was desperately trying to learn to write; and her books on spirituality just when I needed to be reassured that Christianity and intellect don’t have to be mutually exclusive. She’s the pebble in my pocket that I come back to for comfort and reflection, again and again and again.

But allow her to speak for herself.

a few lines to love:

These are from Bird by Bird:

“I learned to be like a ship’s rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.”

It’s the veined ears trembling that does it for me.

What can happen when you sit down to write:

“Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.”

And here it’s the weird coppery breath.

or:

“Typically you may find yourself wondering how some really awful writer you know is doing, and why he is doing so much better than you, and what it will be like to be on David Letterman’s show, and whether he will mock you or laugh at all your jokes and let you be his new best friend, and what you should eat for lunch, and what it would feel like for your hair to be on fire or for someone–like a critic or something–to stick a sharp object into your eye. Not to worry. Gently bring your mind back to your work.”

Over and over in Bird by Bird–and in all her writing–she makes you feel like you can’t possibly be as insane as she is; if she can write, you can.

“My friend then mentioned apricot jam, which was even worse than raspberry. I had not thought about this in thirty years, but now it all came back with horrible clarity. Apricot jam looked too much like glue, or mucilage. But you could count on having apricot jam when your father made the lunch. Fathers loved apricot jam; I don’t know why, but I’m sure Anna Freud could have a field day with it.”

Maybe I’m the only other person whose father would make such sandwiches (if he wasn’t making peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise ones) but I think not. Somehow Lamott manages to capture the odd universalisms that no one else has bothered to notice.

Advice on finding your writing voice:

“I love for my students to want to have this effect. But their renditions never ring true, any more than they ring true a few months later when Ann Beattie’s latest book arrives and my students start submitting stories about shiny bowls and windowpanes. We do live our lives on surfaces, and Beattie does surfaces beautifully, burnishing them, bringing out the details. But when my students do Beattie, their stories tend to be lukewarm, and I say to them, Life is lukewarm enough! If I’m going to read about a bunch of people who drive Volkswagens and seem to have mostly Volkswagen-sized problems, and the writer shows them driving around on the top of the ice, I want a sense that there’s a lot of very, very cold water down below.”

and two pages later:

“And the truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice. If it is wrapped up in someone else’s voice, we readers will feel suspicious, as if you are dressed up in someone else’s clothes.” 

Or, in my case, parading around in a Lamott-y dreadlocked wig. Somehow I just can’t pull it off.

From Operating Instructions.

On breastfeeding:

“Sam does these fabulous nipple tricks now, lolling around at my nipple, pushing it in and out of his mouth with his tongue, sort of lackadaisically, like it’s a warm summer day and he doesn’t have much else to do but work over his wad of chewing tobacco.”

See what I mean about ridiculous, absolutely apt analogies? Here’s another:

“I swear Sam is a week away from walking…Yesterday I was in the bathroom, and Megan was with him in the kitchen, letting him crawl around. She went to the front door to let the kitty out, and when she got back, Sam had climbed the four steps of the ladder to the loft and, as Megan reports, was sitting on the mattress like the Buddha, very pleased with himself in the most casual possible way, like “Hey, baby, just hanging out here on my mom’s bed. Come on up and have a beer!”

Let me see if I can show you what I mean about her final paragraphs. (Of course, the paragraph is more powerful if you’ve read the entire essay.) This one comes from Traveling Mercies, in an essay about sharing a stage with Grace Paley. Lamott and Paley gave two appearances together; the first time they tried out Lamott’s idea for a format and the evening went badly. They tried a second time, and here’s her final paragraph:

     “And the evening went really well. Grace was honest and sweet and tough, and she made everyone in the audience feel like going out and fighting the great good fight. Also, she’s absolutely the only woman I know who can wear socks with fancy shoes and a dress and still look great. It’s the beauty of comfort. She shone. I was just me, which Grace said later was all anyone asked. I’d really wanted to by Cyd Charisse onstage, but as usual, if I’d gotten what I wanted, I would have shortchanged myself. What I wanted was acclaim, and what I got was Grace, lovely and plain in her faded dress and dark socks, smiling at me all night.”

Yep. I’m keeping her in my pocket always.

the plan for june:

I’ll be reading E.B. White. I have an inkling that one ought not attempt to be an essayist without spending some time with White.

The next installment in my little Year of Excellent Essayists project.

reading didion in los angeles

random notes:

I sure loved reading Joan Didion.

I read most of The White Album when we were in Los Angeles. It was a treat to read Didion’s take on The Getty before we went there; to read about the Santa Monica Freeway as we drove on it; to read about Hollywood and then to traipse around on streets she’d mentioned. 

When we got home, I read The Year of Magical Thinking. Which, like my selection last month, is not technically a book of essays. But Didion’s style in this memoir reads quite like her essays (although she has said it doesn’t) and I’ve been wanting to read this book since it was published. The book is Didion’s chronicle of the year after her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, died; the same year in which her only daughter was in intensive care for several months. (And later also died.) Yes, it’s heavy stuff, not the type of book I tend to read by choice.

But. It’s not a depressing book–it’s a fascinating book. Didion lets you into her mind and you see how grief affects her thinking. It’s not a melodramatic, emotional sort of book, with scenes of sobbing and falling apart; rather it’s a book full of details. And questions. She conveys her loss with details from her life with her husband and daughter: the orchards blooming on 101 on her wedding day (where there no longer are orchards); an old man saying that her daughter, Quintana, at three was “the picture of Ginger Rogers.” Didion is at heart a journalist, and every page of the book is filled with journalistic details. Many appear more than once in the book, hauntingly, evidence of how her grief-stricken mind is functioning.

I feel an affinity with Didion’s writing. She’s a researcher; I’m a researcher. My own husband has said the line, “stop researching and make a decision,” so many times that we ought to paint it on the kitchen wall, above my laptop. Research seems to be Didion’s knee-jerk response to situations: she researches grief and death at great depth; she buys medical books at the UCLA bookstore when her daughter is hospitalized. I’m sure if I were in her place–God forbid–I’d do the same. She also seems to use her love of detail to stand in for emotion at times, which is a tendency of mine as well. That tendency isn’t always effective in novice hands like mine, but Didion is a master. I’ve learned so much from reading her.

a few lines to love:

It’s funny: for the other essayists I’ve read, I’ve included lines from their works which I’ve loved. But Didion isn’t a single-line writer. I’m sure if I looked, I could find lines of hers that I admire, but Didion’s power, I think, comes in the rhythm of her paragraphs, her use of repeated words and lines. In the first pages of Magical Thinking, she writes, “As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…”

Yep. The beauty of her writing lies in those rhythms. So in that vein, I’m going to quote just a few longer passages from what I read.

From her essay, “The White Album”:

“Someone once brought Janis Joplin to a party at the house on Franklin Avenue: she had just done a concert and she wanted brandy-and-Benedictine in a water tumbler. Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat. Spending time with music people was confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired. In the first place time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later. We would go down to U.S.C. to see the Living Theater if the limo came at the very moment when no one had just made a drink or a cigarette or an arrangement to meet Ultra Violet at the Montecito. In any case David Hockney was coming by. In any case Ultra Violet was not at the Montecito. In any case we would go down to U.S.C. and see the Living Theater tonight or we would see the Living Theater another night in New York, or Prague. First we wanted sushi for twenty, steamed clams, vegetable vindaloo and many rum drinks with gardenias for our hair. First we wanted a table for twelve, fourteen at the most, although there might be six more, or eight more, or eleven more, because music people did not travel in groups of “one” or “two.” John and Michelle Phillips, on their way to the hospital for the birth of their daughter Chynna, had the limo detour into Hollywood in order to pick up a friend, Anne Marshall. This incident, which I often embroider in my mind to include an imaginary second detour to the Luau for gardenias, exactly describes the music business to me.”

See what I mean about detail? About repeated phrases and rhythms? She’s so good.

And from Magical Thinking, a section a bit more difficult to follow out of context. Didion is responding to a Dr. Volkan, a professor of psychiatry who developed a treatment for “established pathological mourners”. The quoted phrases come directly from Volkan’s report; the personal stories are drawn from remembrances relayed at various times earlier in the book:

“But from where exactly did Dr.Volkan and his team in Charlottesville derive their special ability to “explain and interpret the relationship that had existed between the patient and the one who died”? Were you watching Tenko with me and “the lost one” in Brentwood park, did you go with us to Morton’s? Were you with me and “the one who died” at Punchbowl in Honolulu four months before it happened? Did you gather up plumeria blossoms with us and scatter them on the graves of the unknown dead from Pearl Harbor? Did you catch cold with us in the rain at the Jardin du Ranelagh in Paris a month before it happened? Did you skip the Monets with us and go to lunch at Conti? Were you with us when we left Conti and bought the thermometer, were you sitting on our bed at the Bristol when neither of us could figure how to convert the thermometer’s centigrade reading into Fahrenheit?

Were you there?

No.

You might have been useful with the thermometer but you were not there.

I don’t need to “review the circumstances of the death.” I was there.

I catch myself, I stop.

I realize that I am directing irrational anger toward the entirely unknown Dr.Volkan in Charlottesville.”

It’s my birthday month, so I’m indulging myself with Anne Lamott. I’ve already read all of her stuff backwards and forwards, but hey, it’s my party and I’ll read Lamott if I want to.

The latest installment in My Year of Excellent Essayists project.

random notes:

You may or may not have heard of Sue Hubbell. I chose her because she wrote a wonderful book called A Book of Bees…and How to Keep Them, which I read a couple of years ago when I became curious about beekeeping. Since we’re getting our bees this month, I figured that rereading Hubbell would be a nice opportunity to both study her writing, and delve into the world of bees. 

Hubbell was a librarian before she moved to a farm in the Missouri Ozarks, and began keeping bees. Her words read just as you might expect from a librarian-turned-farmer. Her writing is straightforward and mostly unembellished: the voice of a no-nonsense farmer. It’s also full of allusions to literature, poetry and the classics, which you might expect from a former librarian. 

A Kirkus Reviews’ quote from the back of the book says it’s “A melodious mix of memoir, nature journal and beekeeping manual.” She presents a lot of practical information about beekeeping, laced with her own stories and experiences. Her voice is easygoing and familiar; she makes you feel as if you’re sitting beside her under a tree, chatting and drinking coffee from a thermos while watching a hive, as she does so often throughout the book. As I read, I did my usual highlighting routine. Trouble was, I made two types of highlights: favorite lines, as usual, but also insightful information about beekeeping. I should have used different-colored pens–there are lots of highlights.

I suppose one could argue that this is a memoir, rather than a series of essays. (Although the distinction between personal essay and memoir always seems to get a little murky.) I also read some of Hubbell’s essays from her collection From Here to There and Back Again. I found myself drawn most to the essays that took place in the country, on her farm, like A Book of Bees does. Somehow, she seems most at home out there. I’d like to read  A Country Year, which is more about her life in the Ozarks.

a few lines to love:

“For a long, long time–for nearly forty years–I never had any bees. I can’t think why. Everyone should have two or three hives of bees.”

This is how she starts the book. Her down-to-earth writing voice comes through right off.

“The first rule of country living is to leave gates the way one finds them: open when they are open, closed when they are closed.”

Her writing is full of aphorisms like this one, which make country living seem both simple and complicated. She’s figured out how to do it.

“When only a few flowers are blooming the bees fly around in a desultory way, and often, if the weather is warm, they hang aimlessly on the front of the hive or stand in bunches on the alighting board.”

Typical beekeeping manuals don’t say it so elegantly.

On joining other farmers at the coffee shop: “I pour a cup of coffee and sit with them. I don’t know their names, but they know mine: Bee Lady. A middle-aged woman in baggy white coveralls who smells of burnt baling twine is a standout in any crowd.”

Funny.

“The only time I ever believed that knew all there was to know about beekeeping was the first year I was keeping them. Every year since I’ve known less and less and have accepted the humbling truth that bees know more about making honey than I do.”

I love this. (And I find myself thinking that the same notion applies to my experiences as a homeschooler, with my kids and their learning substituted for the bees and their honey.)

On watching the bees on a cold winter day: “The textbooks say bees cannot fly unless it is 10 degrees Celsius or more. The bees have not read the textbooks and often fly out for their cleansing flights on days like today.”

Another (witty) way to show that humans haven’t mastered the bee.

“Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.”

Well, of course! (She follows this up with examples of beekeeping in literature, starting with Aristeus, the Greek god of beekeeping.)

“A single sunbeam and a lone wildflower mean springtime to an Italian bee.”

Reads like poetry.

On talking to new beekeepers to whom she’s given a box of her bees: “Last spring I began listening to myself talk and noticed what I sound like. I sound like a mother relinquishing her firstborn to the kindergarten teacher. I sound like a writer handing her manuscript to her editor. I sound like a Republican tax assessor turning over the job to a Democrat.”

Love the examples.

“Strictly speaking, one never “keeps” bees–one comes to terms with their wild nature.”

Sounds like good advice for a new “beekeeper” like me.

I could go on, but I’ll stop.  If you’re lusting after a beehive, I recommend A Book of Bees as a fine way of learning about bees and getting your fix.  And if you have hives but haven’t read it, you must.

More than anything, I appreciated Hubbell’s ability to convey practical information in a captivating way. 

the plan for april:

We’re taking a trip to Los Angeles, to visit colleges with H. I think it’s time for some Didion.

The next installment in My Year of Excellent Essayists.

Are you up for this? Notes on a sixteenth-century essayist? Before you click away, note that I’ve added a few marginally related photos to hold your interest.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is widely regarded as the father of the essay. The word essay originated in the term Montaigne used to title his writings:  essais, which is French for attempts, or trials.  My Oxford English Dictionary says that the early essay was considered unfinished, “an irregular, undigested piece”.  A musing.

I certainly didn’t study Montaigne in the few weeks I allotted for him; I merely exposed myself to him. (Please dismiss the image of me in a trench coat standing before an old French guy.) I read him because I felt I ought to; I surprised myself by enjoying it. Somewhat.

A few qualities of the personal essay that can be traced back to Montaigne:

Essayists deprecate themselves to make up for how much they talk about themselves.

In his introduction to The Best American Essays 2008, Adam Gopnik writes, “The essayist, like his friend the hangman, is expected to apologize for his profession even as he practices it…Alone among writers, he is assigned the self-deprecatory cough, the defensive cringe, the Mister Modesty shrug.” Something has to make up for all those I’s. Way back in the 1500’s Montaigne was pandering to his readers by putting himself down:

 “Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less.”

 On quoting others: “For I make others say what I cannot say so well, now through the weakness of my language, now through the weakness of my understanding.”

“The parts I most esteem in myself derive more honor from self-criticism than from self-recommendation…But when all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss. His condemnation of himself is always credited, his praise of himself discredited.”

 Humor can make an essay more enjoyable.

Is it just me, or do you sometimes forget that people long ago were funny? I can be reading Austen or E. M. Forster, and I’ll find myself thinking, surprised: This is funny! Of course people in the 1500’s were funny—one only has to read a half-page of Shakespeare to realize that. Still, reading Montaigne’s old-fashioned prose, I was often startled to find myself thinking it again: This is funny!

 ”If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them.”

On learning better from bad examples: “A good rider does not improve my seat (my riding form) so much as an attorney or a Venetian on horseback.”

“…agreement is a very tiresome quality in conversation.”  (I’m not sure he meant this to be funny, but I found it funny.)

Essays are a hodgepodge form—a quote and a digression here; an anecdote, an argument, an abstraction there. Logic and emotion are thrown in by random fistfuls. Montaigne reveled in this.

Leaping and gamboling.

“I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is at a distance, and they look at one another, but with a sidelong glance. …I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols. It is an art, as Plato says, light, flighty, and daemonic.”

Essayists often set out to raise questions, not necessarily to answer them. They want their readers to wonder, to come up with their own answers.

“If other men observed themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, on as much as another; but those who are aware of it have a little the better of it—still I don’t know.”

“…such frequent cutting up into chapters, which I used at the beginning, seemed to me to break and dissolve the attention before it was stirred…In addition perhaps I have some personal obligation to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly, to speak discordantly.”

Okay! Check off Montaigne with a flourish! And in his honor I will put myself down and note that I my study of him was rather pathetic. Moving on…

the plan for march:

I’m reading the work of Sue Hubbell. She’s probably not so well-known as most of the essayists I plan to read–but she wrote a wonderful book called A Book of Bees, about a year in her life as a commercial beekeeper. Since we’re planning to start keeping bees ourselves this spring, I figured that rereading her book would be doubly useful: I can study her writing style, as well as learn a few things about bees. I’ll read some of her other essays as well.

And if you’ve read this far down, you deserve a Best Blog Reader Ever award. You indulged me with Montaigne. You’re a peach.