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Saturday, October 9th, 2010
From time to time Elvissa Mackey Lipitz Stein has a dream in which she and her husband and children, and his children by his first wife, and Robert and his parents and wife, and Elvissa's parents and her brother, and a whole crowd of Steins and Mackeys and Lipitzes and Critchfields, all go up on Critchfield Mountain to celebrate an open-air meal under a pink sky.... Elvissa always wakes from the dream with a gratifying sense that everything fits together. She never remembers exactly how it fits, but she has a profound belief that it does fit, and that the most important thing in the world is that she knows.
This week I read Meredith Sue Willis' Out of the Mountains, a collection of short stories set mostly in West Virginia. I wasn't sure what to expect going in -- I've known Ms. Willis for several years as a neighbor and friend, but this is the first book of hers I've read. This has been a mistake on my part -- looks like I should go read her back catalog.Out of the Mountains has a feeling of memoir about it -- you get the sense that Willis' narrator is telling her own stories and the stories of people familiar to her. And indeed in the afterword, she acknowledges that some of the stories are taken from her life. The sense of intimacy and familiarity with her characters is one of the primary reasons I'm recommending the book -- getting inside people's heads this way is a favorite part of the reading experience for me. The other main thing I loved about the book was its structure, which reminded me a bit of Annie Proulx' Bad Dirt -- you meet the same characters and the same families sprawled out across different parts of Appalachia and of America, from the early 20th Century up to the early 21st. It's a broad scope for such a short book -- and I'm not meaning to say the book is encyclopædic -- but it really works, really gives you a sense of the vastness of the well of experience from which Willis' characters' particular experiences are drawn.
posted morning of October 9th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
Two fine galleries of photography of newly discovered or identified species: Alan Boyle of ms-nbc reports on 200 new species in Papua New Guinea -- insects, arachnids, rodents, marsupials and more -- including the bejeweled katydid pictured above; and the Telegraph presents a widely varied census of new marine species, from the Protoperidinium pellucidum under a scanning electron microscope to the bizarre furry crab Kiwa hirsuta (which, as Sheldon notes, will inherit the earth).
posted evening of October 6th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
 David Byrne was in Detroit for a week, working on Paolo Sorrentino's forthcoming movie Divo; while he was there he composed a post about the feeling of being in Detroit -- his writing coupled with the breathtaking photos were enough to take me there briefly.
Speaking of breathtaking photos of Detroit, you should by all means take a look at the slideshows on detroiturbex.com, some amazing images including the string band I've excerpted here. (Thanks for the link, Todd!)
posted evening of October 5th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, October third, 2010
There were no parrots -- that was one thing I noticed -- nothing bright or feathered or talkative at all. The other thing I noticed was that this wasn't a restaurant, like the book said it would be: it was a motel. The book had gotten it wrong. Or maybe the place had changed owners or something. Because it was definitely a motel. The neon sign outside said so, even though the O and the T and the E and the L were out. Just the M was lit, flickering and buzzing to let you know what kind of place you were about to go into.
Exley gives you a great sense of the physical place which is Watertown. And all of the places Clarke has mentioned so far -- Crystal Restaurant, the Watertown Daily Times building on Washington St., the library across the street from there, the VA hospital, the New Parrot Motel (since renamed the Relax Inn) are easy to locate and view with Google Maps.
posted afternoon of October third, 2010: Respond
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Every Sunday morning my dad and I would walk down to the Crystal, which was my dad's favorite restaurant and bar, eat breakfast, take a few laps around the Public Square, then walk home. Usually we'd run into someone my dad knew, and my dad would talk to him (it was almost always a him, and it was almost always someone my dad knew from the Crystal, and as a matter of fact, it was usually someone who was either going to or coming from the Crystal) for a while. I just stood there and let the noise of their talking go back and forth over my head and didn't think about anything in particular until my dad said, "OK, bud, let's get going." But the Sunday after I found out about A Fan's Notes -- how my dad loved it, how it was set in Watertown -- every guy my dad talked to I thought might be Exley.
I'm not sure yet how much I am going to like Exley, how good of a read it is going to be -- but I am pretty sure 30 pages in that it is going to be an interesting book... Much of the structure is seeming forced. I do not connect with the psychologist's voice, and did not at first connect with Miller's, though it is growing on me. I like the Watertown setting though, it reminds me of the time I spent upstate in Potsdam (Watertown is the closest city of any size) and it is making me want to track down A Fan's Notes, to which this book is an homage.
posted afternoon of October third, 2010: Respond
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Friday, October first, 2010
 We've been to a couple of local author events at indie bookstores around NJ these past few weeks -- not long ago we went to Words in Maplewood to hear Meredith Sue Willis reading from her new book Out of the Mountains, short stories about Appalachia in the 21st Century; and tonight we headed out to the Clinton Book Shop to see Joyce Hinnefeld and get a copy of her new book Stranger Here Below, coincidentally also with an Appalachian theme. (Plus Ron, the shop's gregarious manager, sold me on Exley by Brock Clarke, which he said was the best book he had read this year.)
The picture to the right is of the river which flooded over its banks yesterday in the center of Clinton, marooning a big piece of construction equipment. The constant roar of the water flowing by was amazing.
posted evening of October first, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
 Karen Lillis spent the end of the 20th Century and beginning of the 21st working as a clerk at St. Mark's Bookshop; she inaugurates her new monthly column at Undie Press with some engaging reminiscences from that time and some reflections on independent bookselling in the US.
 Update: Jen Michalski of JMWW has a great interview with Lillis about independent bookselling, about libraries and bookstores, about her memoir project and about her memories...
posted evening of September 28th, 2010: Respond
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Michael Jacobson, blogger at The New Post-Literate, has started working on an "asemic novel" consisting (so far) of animated logograms -- he is documenting the work in progress at a new blog, Mynd Eraser. (I love the scribbles running off the page and reconstituting themselves...)
posted afternoon of September 28th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, September 26th, 2010
Radoslav Radoslavov Valkov of Bulgaria won the under-21 category of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management's Environmental Photographer of the Year contest for 2010 with this gorgeous picture of a fly taken in his back yard. (Thanks for the link, Djini!)
posted afternoon of September 26th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, September 25th, 2010
Something you will occasionally see in books translated from a foreign language and published in America, is that metric units of measurement are rendered as English units*, with no conversion of the number next to the units, e.g. "cinco kilogramos" is rendered as "5 pounds". I'm not sure how often this happens, I have noticed it a couple of times and it's driven me just batty. (Also have seen it with monetary units, "cien francs" being translated as "100 dollars" which does not make much sense either.) I believe the thinking behind it is something on the order of, someone reading this story in the original language would get an immediate sense of what 5 kg means, where a US reader would need to pause and convert it mentally -- at the very least it seems to me every time I notice this that it at least ought to be rendered as "ten pounds" or whatever, to keep the meaning the same. Well: when Saramago was writing The Elephant's Journey he faced a similar issue in terms of translating archaic units of distance into metric, and he came up with a very tidy, winning solution. Check this out -- on the first day of the journey, Subhro is reckoning how far they have travelled:
How far have we traveled, a league, possibly two, he wondered. ...Let us consider the league, which was the word used by subhro, a distance that was also composed of paces and feet, but which has the enormous advantage of placing us in familiar territory. Yes, but everyone knows what leagues are, our contemporaries will say with an ironic smile. The best answer we can give them is this, Yes, everyone did in the age in which they lived, but only in the age in which they lived. The old word league, or leuga, which should, one would think, have meant the same to everyone at all times, has in fact made a long journey from the seven thousand five hundred feet or one thousand five hundred paces of the romans and the early middle ages to the kilometers and meters with which we now divide up distance, no less than five and five thousand respectively. It's the same with other measurements as well. ...Now, having presented the matter with such dazzling clarity, we can make an absolutely crucial, almost revolutionary decision, namely this, while the mahout and his companions, given that they would have no other means at their disposal, will continue to speak of distances in accord with the uses and customs of their age, we, so that we can understand what is going on in this regard, will use our own modern itinerary units of measurement, which will avoid constantly having to resort to tiresome conversion tables. It will be as if we were adding subtitles to a film, a concept unknown in the sixteenth century, to compensate for our ignorance or imperfect knowledge of the language spoken by the actors. We will, therefore, have two parallel discourses that will never meet, this one, which we will be able to follow without difficulty, and another, which, from this moment on, will remain silent. An interesting solution.
*Ooh and look! I did not know anything about this; but until the mid-19th C. there used to be an entirely separate Portuguese system of measurement units.
↻...done
posted afternoon of September 25th, 2010: Respond
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