Recently, my consumption of fiction has dropped off to within an epsilon of zero. I try to stumble through a New Yorker story now and then, and I’ve been known to stop what I’m doing to read Jhumpa Lahiri, even though I didn’t dig The Namesake. All in all, there’s very little fiction passing in front of my face.

Instead, to test my imagination these days, I’ve been looking toward geoengineering. You know, the idea that in order to save ourselves from the devastating effects of climate change, we need to act fast. We need to do something drastic and dramatic that will fine-tune our atmosphere and keep human beings alive a little bit longer; we need to build a great big something to save ourselves. Country by country, the climatologists are getting on board.

This is not an advocacy editorial. Or an anti-advocacy editorial. I’m not well-read, smart or scientific enough to advocate. Or anti-advocate. On one level, it does seem paradoxical. How do we know that if we do artificially adjust the global thermostat, we’re not causing bigger mal-adjustments down the road? Could it be true that the way to remedy the dire consequences wrought by human activity on the planet is to step-up human activity on the planet?

Many geoengineering ideas don’t seem strange: carbon sequestration, for example, seems fairly benign and, dare I say it, like a reasonable way to buy some time. But for the purposes of this blurb, I’m not interested in the reasonable ideas. I just want to point out a handful of the wildest papers, the ones that suggest thrilling and secret stories in a manner akin to one of my favorite children’s books, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. I’d like to think that these ideas will feature prominently in high-quality science fiction one day. There are other far-flung proposals out there: sulfur cannonballs that blow up in the stratosphere; dropping lots of lime or iron into the ocean; variations on an aerosols-increase-albedo theme; etc.. Here are my top four.

Idea 1: Inflatable mountains. I’d like to think that if either Ridley Scott or Philip K. Dick had thought of this, the last scene of Blade Runner would feature Harrison Ford and Sean Young riding away, dotting in and out of the shadows cast by an enormous floating peaks… Excerpt from the paper:

In this paper is presented the idea of cheap artificial inflatable mountains, which may cardinally change the climate of a large region or country. Additional benefits: The potential of tapping large amounts of fresh water and energy. The mountains are inflatable semi-cylindrical constructions from thin film (gas bags) having heights of up to 3 - 5 km. They are located perpendicular to the main wind direction. Encountering these artificial mountains, humid air (wind) rises to crest altitude, is cooled and produces rain (or rain clouds).

Idea 2: Use cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the atmosphere. The additional salt water would, in theory, increase the reflectivity of clouds above the oceans. Excerpt from an article in Physics World:

The 300-tonne unmanned ships used to seed the clouds would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 m-high, 2.5 m-diameter cylinders known as “Flettner rotors” that would be made to spin continuously. This spinning would generate a force perpendicular to the wind direction, propelling the ship forward if it is oriented at right angles to the wind.

Idea 3: (Similar to #2) Send tiny mirrors into space to reflect sunlight into space, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight that makes it to our planet. Surely these could be tuned to make an intergalactic lighthouse? From a press release:

The plan would be to launch a constellation of trillions of small free-flying spacecraft a million miles above Earth into an orbit aligned with the sun, called the L-1 orbit. The spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer. About 10 percent of the sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun, would be diverted away from our planet. The effect would be to uniformly reduce sunlight by about 2 percent over the entire planet, enough to balance the heating of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.

Idea 4: Hydromancy! Pump seawater out of the ocean onto the world’s sand dunes, thereby mitigating the harmful effects of a rising sea level. (By the same wild mind behind idea #1.) An excerpt from the paper:

Seawater extraction from the ocean, and its deposition on deserted sand dune fields in Mauritania and elsewhere via a Solar-powered Seawater Textile Pipeline (SSTP) can thwart the postulated future global sea level. We propose Macro-engineering use tactical technologies that sculpt and vegetate barren near-coast sand dune fields with seawater, seawater that would otherwise, as commonly postulated, enlarge Earth’s seascape area! Our Macro-engineering speculation blends eremology with hydrogeology and some hydromancy.

I am excited to report the existence of The Dirty Pond, a new literary journal based in New Haven. In their own words:

The Dirty Pond is an independent online literary journal based in New Haven, Connecticut. The journal’s primary objective is to provide a home for work by New Haven-affiliated writers, with an eye towards curated gatherings in the near future. We will be updating biweekly.

First edition goes live October 15, 2009.

Submit, artists, musicians, and writers of New Haven! Submit!

Just for fun I recently re-read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979; trans. 1981), which I first read around 1983 and was enchanted by.  My memory of the novel has always been a reference point whenever anyone discusses fictional sleight-of-hand, as with Borges, or Cortázar, or Barth, or what-have-you.  Calvino’s version of fictions that fold in on themselves provides a send-up of the reader’s dependence on a text — a text that is never simply a story — while at the same time conjuring the extent to which people become the texts they read or write.

One could say it’s a novel that treats the status of being ‘a reader’ as a certain kind of identity, as a defining characteristic, and Calvino is charming in his evocation of the oddly personal communality of that status.  What’s more, he’s willing to put that very relation — his relation to his own readers — at stake by treating us as hopelessly hooked on whatever he chooses to do with his narrative, which involves several tales within the tale, stories that actually comprise the opening pages of the novel we (or rather, ‘you,’ dear reader) are attempting to read, a novel initially called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

In other words, we read with a second-person character who is reading a series of openings to novels we (and he) never get to finish because something always happens to the text.  These proferred novels are of a variety of types and are almost equally interesting, as far as they go, but they are also meant to be page-turners, things we won’t put down till we see how it all comes out.  And we won’t ever know.  The story of what keeps happening to interrupt our reading of this succession of novels is the story that ‘you’ are engaged in: involving the Other Reader (an attractive and arguably more knowledgeable female counterpart to the masculine ‘you’ of the story); the Other Reader’s sister; an Ian Fleming-like novelist; and a novelistic forger. It all ends with our happy couple — you, the reader, and your female counterpart, the Other Reader — settled in bed together as you finish If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

The closure of reading is where real life begins — we step from the page to our own imaginative version of our lives.  Calvino perpetrates his fiction on the premise that the reader of fictions merely wants fictions to go on and on, if not one kind of story then another, if only to keep the mind engaged in play rather than in ‘reality.’  And Calvino wisely brings his novel to a close before the proliferation of openings becomes tiring, and before the characters, who never become ‘real’ characters, begin to bore us with their lack of particularity.

Why I enjoyed the novel is because Calvino maintains its pace so well and builds up its comedy through a readerly frustration he expects us to enjoy, even as he takes us on a tour of various literary genres.  But I value the novel because it seems to me that at its heart is a clear-eyed appraisal of the ruse of fiction (or, if you will, ‘creative writing’), of how it applies conventions to give us ‘the reality effect’ it aims for, and how, mutatis mutandis, all such details can easily be something else, if only we are reading a different kind of story with different conventions.

The reality is all in the mind’s eye, so to speak, or, even more to the point, all in the terms, the language, the conventions of depiction that we trust to render what we find ourselves in the midst of.  Without an acceptance of artifice, we have only opposing subjective ‘takes’ — otherwise known as opinions or anecdotes — on what we suppose to be ‘reality,’ and Calvino archly sees that, ultimately, editorializing is a blow against the art, or artifice, itself; such literalism is a refusal to suspend disbelief in any world other than the one one knows to be the case.  A world that can only exist, in print, through the subterfuge of writing.

Calvino’s approach is a great joke — but without malice — on all those who want to ‘lose’ reality in a fiction (thus all the interruptions), but also on all those who can’t abide a fiction that doesn’t correspond to ‘reality’ (thus the infinite regress of stories which come to include the story of the readers themselves).  Bravo, Calvino!

In an earlier post I had mentioned Neil Gaiman’s presence at a conference I had attended, where he was putting in time signing books (at that moment his young adult fantasy The Graveyard Book). I first encountered Gaiman’s work when I selected American Gods for a local book club I was running at the Mitchell branch of the New Haven Public Library. It was, and still is, his best novel, even though I have enjoyed some of his other ventures (particularly his early novel Sandman series.

In brief, American Gods is an adventure yarn and con game of, quite literally, mythological proportions, as well as a meditation on the Voltairean dictum “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” And, yet, as thematically bold as the novel is, its topic is not by any means original. As literary renderings of this philosophical conundrum go, it stands on the shoulders of giants. I note this because the clash it depicted between the older gods of ethnic legend—from the Norse Odin to Africa’s Ananzi—and the modern deities of the Almighty Dollar and All-Consuming Computer, came back to me with renewed vigor after re-reading Harlan Ellison’s remarkable Deathbird Stories.

Devoted to the gods of modern urban life, each tale in Ellison’s story cycle was an experiment in writing and consequently a literary effort to knock the stiffness out of science fiction itself. Bound too long by the traditions of pure pulp and space opera, American science fiction found in Ellison the American answer to the New Wave of British SF flowing from the pens of Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, and John Brunner. His editorship of Dangerous Visions broke new ground by giving a distinctively literary turn to this much put-upon genre. His follow-up eight years later in The Deathbird Stories did no less.

Like American Gods, Deathbird Stories is a full-frontal assault on our many species of worship and obsession—the distance between the two never that great to begin with. Each tale is an act of literary transgression blessed by modernist rage. They experiment with time, place, voice, language, symbol, pattern, and even when they fail, the failure strikes us as epic as short stories go.

Yet amid the dark brilliance seams have begun to show, breaks that have grown more prominent with the passing of years, a matter that becomes ever more interesting for me in my study of the reading experience over time. When I first read the Deathbird Stories, I was “blown away,” which, notwithstanding the overblown-ness of that hackneyed, was quite apropos then. My experience was in keeping with Ellison’s tongue in/not-in cheek warning:

CAVEAT LECTOR
It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole. H.E.

Now as I read these tales, despite the vibrancy, their 1970s-ness shines through, dampening that potential to upset. The unhappiness of this decade in America—white flight, urban crime, oil embargoes, cocaine trafficking, Christmas bombings, failed presidencies—is deeply felt throughout. “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” is a literary reworking of the Kitty Genovese tragedy (immortalized as well in the first verse of Phil Ochs’ “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”). “Neon” is an ode in prose—quite literally—to that flashing light that infuriatingly blinks outside our windows at night but which we love to no end on darkened streets when thinning crowds deprive us of that nocturnal protection in numbers. “Basilisk” places the horrors of war on a collision course with the hypocritical inanities of American chest-thumping patriotism (a story that weirdly resonates in today’s climate with current debates on torture and its consequences). And on it goes, with dark-tinted paeans to drugs and free love, the automobile, business and religion.

Among my favorites is “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” an encomium to the selfishness and loserdom that typify gamblers on the downhill side. I especially enjoyed Ellison’s mind-bending depiction of Maggie’s dissolution into a slot machine:

A moment out of time | lights whirling and spinning in a cotton candy universe | down a bottomless funnel roundly sectioned like a goat’s horn | a cornucopia that rose up cuculiform smooth and slick as a worm belly | endless nights that pealed ebony funeral bells | out of fog | out of weightlessness | suddenly total cellular knowledge | memory running backward…

The classic of the collection, however, remains “Along the Scenic Route,” which upon rereading holds up surprisingly well only because it is one of the few stories that does not situate itself within the 1970s. Where most of the tales read like magic realism gone awry, this literary gem is a true work of “science fiction.” It is also his least experimental: the telling is straight, the weirdness stripped away. But there is an O Henry-like twist ending that will forever make this story a dark pleasure, which is my superfluously literary way of saying that I had as much fun reading it this time as when I first encountered it.

As life experiences go, I was never one for bird watching, preferring to run my eyes across bookshelves than search the branches of unidentifiable trees in strange parks. So let’s just say this time I was glad to spot this rara avis once more and, taking it down from its perch, worship at its altar. For before there were American Gods, there were The Deathbird Stories.

A new novel by Ben Greenman, published by Melville House

Rock-and-roll fiction tends to take easy outs, playing up the obvious excesses of the lifestyle so that we get big splashy works resembling tell-all accounts like Stephen Davis’ Hammer of the Gods or Peter Brown and Stephen Gaines’ The Love You Make. Groupies queue up, bottles are smashed, TVs are tossed, and it’s Satyricon, 1960s-style.

Ben Greenman, though, has hit upon something far more dexterous with Please Step Back, which features a protagonist—the protean Rock Foxx—who has fused rock’s free-styling id-component with a poet’s soul. The two halves wear away at each other, and Foxx’s saga becomes less a march on the Billboard charts than a quiet, personal quest for lucidity—in his marriage, his music, his past, and his quotidian thoughts as he tries to decode everything from the motives of bandmates to the very source of songs.

He’s a funkster, set in the black musical culture of the iconic genre-blenders, musicians like James Brown, Sly Stone, and post-In a Silent Way Miles Davis. In short, a hoodoo artist. Greenman’s prose renders Foxx the personification of a walking, scamming, ever-playing record collection, a patois of rhyming couplets and jerking syncopations. There’s a coming-of-age quality to the novel—Foxx does indeed take the journey from unknown to cover-boy—but this is a frail heroism, if it’s heroism at all. Drama originates not in Foxx’s rock and roll conquests, but rather from his marriage, a union that Greenman dissects with the careful, shot-by-shot imagery—and context setting—of a Godard film.

Bands are roiled with creative difference, people get on the junk, and opportunities are missed (Foxx’s band ditches Woodstock—a clever fictional tweak of history), but it’s the dissolution of relationships and what that reveals about one’s own failings that’ll do you in. Foxx’s music starts to navigate away from soul and funk over the course of the book, and soon it’s loaded up with the blues, albeit a rocking, Fillmore-friendly blues. Lyrics and references tap the back catalogues of Little Walter, Memphis Minnie, and Slim Harpo. Identities—and archetypes—blur, and meaning begins to emanate from states of relative confusion, as if a song had emerged from what had been a noodling, band practice jam. Like when Foxx quotes Shakespeare to his wife:

“You ever heard of him? Tall cat, good with a knife. I think he’s from Denver.”

“You’re a strange person,” she said.

“Please,” he said. “Mercurial.”

And that he is. He’s also almost Macbethian by the end; everything’s blown up on him, and now the forest is marching on the castle. It’s at this point that Greenman introduces an inspector tandem that could have strayed from a Flann O’Brien novel, with absurdity now pressed into service to help Foxx find his meaning. His explorations—and attempted extrapolations—become ritualistic, like an endgame that cycles over and over again, or a series of encores played to an empty room.

Colin Fleming writes for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Criterion, and many other publications. His fiction appears in Boulevard, The Hopkins Review, TriQuarterly, and The Republic of Letters.

Rafael Yglesias’s new novel, The Happy Marriage, is wholly autobiographical, a fact which may interest some readers, including those of our own pages. Ygliesias, a novelist and screenwriter who lost his wife, Margaret, to bladder cancer after nearly 30 years together, tells the story of a novelist and screenwriter, Enrique, who, after a long, happy marriage, loses his wife, Margaret, to bladder cancer. The novel alternates in chapters between the couple when they first meet and at key points in the marriage, and their final three weeks together as Margaret makes the decision to take herself off intravenous feeding and bid farewell to family, friends and of course, Enrique/Rafael.

I was engrossed and delighted with the book. Reading it, though, I couldn’t help wonder if what I knew about the author (as fully disclosed in the book flap and about the author) informed my reading, and if so, to what extent. Did I find the characters compelling because I automatically assumed the writer’s authority over them? Did I make allowances for contradictions and inconsistencies in characters because they sprang from true people? What did the known link between the writer and his material do for me as a reader? Did it lend a certain versimilitude? Why is versimilitude even necessary for me in a novel? Is truth indeed stranger than fiction?

When asked in a recent NPR Fresh Air interview why he didn’t simply write a memoir a la Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Ygliesias immediately clarifies that it wasn’t because he wanted to provide any “cover” for himself. Indeed, the protagonist Enrique as written is at times selfish, impotent, and unfaithful. However, Yglesias continues, he wanted to tell the story of a marriage and keep the reader very present in this marriage. Thus, he chose to use fictional devices of dialogue—conversations as he remembered them from 30 years ago—and compression.

I like this thin line between novel and memoir. Lately, I find a resistance, perhaps even an aversion, toward fiction. Is it ego? I feel that my own life and head is so busy that I resent extending my attention and sympathy to invented characters, only real ones, or at least, ones based upon real ones. However you label fiction or nonfiction, it all comes down to story. I read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces because it was a memoir. When all hell broke loose, I couldn’t understand the uproar. He told a damned good tale, so what difference did it make if it was all true or not?  We all know that stories contain many Rashomon effects. We all know stories are subject to embellishment. Frey would have saved himself a lot of trouble if, like Inglesias, he’d only called his book an autobiographical novel.

A conversation I was having with someone recently got me to thinking again about Gitlitz’s Bakery, which used to be up on Whalley Avenue.

It was the opening of Manjares, a new cafe in Westville, that started it again. I think about Gitlitz’s all the time, at least once every three weeks, I estimate, but Manjares got me thinking about it again because I suspect it’ll be one of those neighborhood bakeries people get all territorial about (if it succeeds, which I ardently hope it will). There’s an article in the Independent about it, if you want to read about Ana and her bakery; better yet, go, because Ana is one of the nicest people I’ve met in recent years….

But anyhow. Gitlitz’s. I remember it was on Whalley Avenue in a building that got torn down a few years ago, a sort of art-deco era strip mall. I could be wrong, but I remember a grocery store/produce shop called Paramount one or two doors down from it. The stores all had neon signs that must have been really glitzy when they were first put up. By the time I was a kid, it was kind of seedy looking over there. But my family adored Gitlitz’s. My parents still wax rhapsodic over the chocolate birthday cakes they bought there for my older brother. They remember ordering one cake that was decorated to look like a football field. (This is hilarious in retrospect; my brother is not exactly what you’d call a jock, and I don’t think my father could name a football team if you asked him, but I guess that’s what it’s like if you have a little boy — you get birthday cakes that look like football fields.) There were little football player figurines on the cake and everything. A few years back I vowed to try to replicate this cake for my father’s birthday, which we always celebrate at Thanksgiving, and at the (now defunct) Goatville Trading Company I found vintage football player cake decorations. They were all different sizes, so my cake looked a little weird. And I don’t know how to draw a football field anyhow (I’m my father’s daughter). But, you know, the point was made; everyone understood this cake was a tribute to Gitlitz’s, and it was pretty good, too.

So just now I Googled Gitlitz’s Bakery and found that someone on Chowhound.com laments the passing of their coconut layer cake, of which I have no memory (I hated coconut when I was a kid), and that Emily Bazelon has an article on Slate.com where she talks about the babka at Edge of the Woods, which she misses now that she lives in DC, and which apparently is made using the old Gitlitz recipe.

Now, the Gitlitz babka was legendary to me growing up. It was perfect. Chocolatey with no annoying distractions like fruit or nuts. Why have I never gotten a babka at Edge of the Woods? Possibly because I only go there twice a year or something (it’s not convenient for me; I have recurring dreams about them opening a branch on Willow Street or State Street); however, I have now determined that I will get my ass up there and buy a chocolate babka soon.

But this was it, for online referenes to Gitlitz’s. I felt this was a shame — a shanda, really — and determined to put my own voice out there in praise of Gitlitz’s. Because if I’m doing a Google search for them, there must be thousands of others doing the same thing. (Ok, maybe not thousands. Maybe six people a year do a search for Gitlitz’s Bakery. But they’re a demographic, too, and I am catering to them, my fellow Gitlitz devotees.)

The other thing that was so important to me at Gitlitz’s was something that we always called a pull-apart cake. I have no idea what the bakery itself called this cake. And I’ve baked cakes that are similar to it. But I’ve yet to make one that was as perfect as theirs. It was, I suppose, a Jewish variant of what Midwesterners call Monkey Bread. This was an eggy yeast dough, I’m sure, somewhat dry, that was placed in a tube pan in slabs that had been thoroughly coated with some kind of shortening (butter? maybe, but maybe not) and lots of cinnamon sugar. The cake rose in the pan again before baking, and what resulted when you removed the cake from the pan was a cake that didn’t require slicing. Each section of cake came away neatly by hand. Grownups ate this with a cup of hot coffee; I remember eating piece after piece while downing glasses of very cold milk. We had this on weekend mornings. (My mother hated to cook but believed that all meals, should come with dessert, not just dinner. I’m not sure how many parenting magazines would advocate this but my brother and I thought it was just fine.) Pull-apart cake was excellent stuff, and you could eat a lot of it because it wasn’t cloying and didn’t have frosting to distract you from how good the cake was.

I didn’t hear about Monkey Bread until I was in college, and when I tasted it I realized that it was a cousin of my lost Pull-apart cake. I started comparing recipes, and making them when I was home, and while they were all pretty good, none of them were quite what I was looking for. Most importantly, the method of piling all the butter-and-sugar-coated dough balls in the pan was so time consuming, and it meant that the shape of the finished cake was never the same as what I had in mind. And the dough wasn’t ever quite the same.

I now wonder if maybe it wasn’t just challah dough they used in the Pull-apart cake. I will have to investigate this. If anyone has insight or, even better, recipes….

By Werner Herzog; translated from the German by Krishna Winst (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2009)

In the annals of moviemaking catastrophe — from Apocalypse Now to Cleopatra to Heaven’s Gate to Waterworld — perhaps no famously troubled production has been more copiously documented than Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Maybe it’s because, in that case, the making-of really is more interesting than the movie itself. Or maybe it’s because they tell the same story. Fitzcarraldo is a tale of one man’s nearly ruinous obsession with bringing opera to the Amazon jungle. Its backstory is a tale of one man’s nearly ruinous obsession with the first man’s obsession. So the annotation of Herzog’s 1982 movie, much of it from the filmmaker himself, just seems to flow like a — well, like a great, majestically indifferent tropical river.

You’ll find it in Herzog’s commentary on the Fitzcarraldo DVD. And in his 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, about his nutso leading man and nemesis Klaus Kinski. You’ll find a lot of it in Les Blank and Maureen Gosling’s exceptional documentary, Burden of Dreams, whose Criterion Collection DVD edition even comes with a book gathering Blank and Gosling’s journals from their experience of Herzog’s production. And now you can read the maestro’s own journal of the event, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, originally published in 2004 and newly available in English from Ecco Press.

In his preface, Herzog writes: “These texts are not reports on the actual filming — of which little is said. Nor are they journals, except in a very general sense. They might be described instead as inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle. But even that may not be entirely accurate — I am not sure.”

Uh, OK. And after 306 pages, he doesn’t seem much surer. Could anyone else get away with this? The book covers a very dreamlike two and a half years, through which Herzog remains mesmerized by his own restless tenacity. Only the most committed readers will do likewise, of course, but that’s exactly how the empathy of obsession is supposed to work.

Herzog’s narrating voice is an acquired taste. (Here’s his entry from July 20, 1979, in its entirety: “San Francisco. Emptiness.”) But you already knew that. The real fun to be had with Conquest of the Useless is in the cross-referencing.  Blank’s account of April 12, 1981, for instance, begins with instant coffee and vultures perched on a hotel roof. Herzog’s begins with a drowned workman and whiskey and card games. Consensus: Doom is in the air.

Those of us who remember Herzog’s comments on the obscenity and “overwhelming misery” of the jungle in Blank’s film, or his assertion that “I love it against my better judgement,” at last can have this clarification, of sorts, from April 14, 1981: “The Grand Emotions in opera, often dismissed as over the top, strike me on the contrary as the most concentrated, pure archetypes of emotion, whose essence is incapable of being condensed any further. They are axioms of emotion. That is what opera and the jungle have in common.” The next day, according to Blank’s account, “He expressed his intention to end his life if he failed to complete the filming.”

Rest assured, he did complete the filming — and apparently has yet to complete processing the experience of completing the filming. Maybe he never will.

People don’t necessarily think of the greater New Haven are as a beach town—I imagine the label university town is much more widely used—but in the summer, it is. And I don’t mean beach town in a snooty, country-club way. New Haven is a beach town the way that many of the towns on the Jersey Shore and Long Island are beach towns: In the summer, the place cranes its neck toward the Long Island Sound, and the skinny stretch of sand in front of the water becomes wonderfully overpopulated.

I should admit right here that I am a huge beach person, a trait I inherited from my mother. I am one of those people who could—and does—sit on the beach all day, alternating between reading, napping, taking walks, and watching the water. I’ve told my parents that staring at and swimming in the ocean is one of the closest things I have to a religion, and I’m only half joking. So after living in New York for years (too far from Brighton Beach and Coney Island to go as often as I wanted to), learning that New Haven had beaches was a revelation. In the seven years that we’ve lived here, my family and I have split our allegiance between two beaches: the shore of West Haven and Lighthouse Point, in New Haven proper. They are right across the harbor from each other; you can see one very clearly from the other.

Parts of the shore of West Haven are surprisingly untouched for a town beach. A lot of smart things happened in the course of its development, the biggest one being that they kept large areas of the dune intact. (Oceanography 101: If you keep your dune, the beach can replenish itself. Take away the dune and, even worse, build a seawall, and the ocean starts to take away the beach. Which is why so many beach towns end up building a line of jetties along the coast and still have to get the Army Corps of Engineers to dump tons of sand on the shore at the beginning of every summer. Also, the dunes protect the inland from all but the big storms. Build your house behind the dune, and you’re reasonably secure. Build your house on it or in front of it, and hey, you take your chances.)

Aside from being smart, the dunes in West Haven give the beach there a real sense of wildness, making the houses huddling along the beach road and the stacks of the water treatment facility rising in the middle distance almost surreal. But in front of Chick’s, my favorite fish fry place—because of their lobster rolls, vats of mustard for the french fries, and also their free beach parking—West Haven’s beach is a town beach, complete with dozing lifeguards, rioting children, casual swearing, loud reggaeton coming out of tinny speakers, and guys trying to catch blues off the pier and coming up mostly with sea robins. It’s great.

Lighthouse Point is in some ways a more civilized place than West Haven’s beach. It’s a well-maintained park, complete with playground, water park, concession stand, ranger station, multiple bathrooms, a gorgeous old pavilion with an even more gorgeous old carousel inside (people looking to get married in the summer, take note: That pavilion would be a truly awesome place for a party), and, of course, the lighthouse itself. But in other ways, Lighthouse Point is crazier. No matter how crowded West Haven’s beach gets—and on Saturday afternoon, it’s pretty crowded—it never manages to kick off that sleepy vibe that all great town beaches have. Lighthouse Point isn’t a town beach; it’s a city beach, bursting with summer camps and the children of multiple extended families running amok, on the sand, in the water, on the swings, across the lawns, all over the rocks. A dozen big barbecues scent the air while multiple large sound systems compete with each other for dominance of the park’s groove—hip hop, merengue, reggaeton (again), bachata—and combine in the air. Charles Ives (who studied composition at Yale) would be proud.

Both West Haven and Lighthouse Point have their quiet times. People who like their beaches cold, on the off season, will find what they want at either place. And I’m lucky enough to be able to go on weekdays. But even on the busiest weekend, both parks have their secluded coves and stretches of shore with only a few people, or none at all. The days when I get both are when the religion hits me hardest. One minute there’s just the sand and rocks, sea and sky. The next, it’s people at their best, playing, relaxing, having fun, just being with each other. It’s bliss.

Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice — 
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.

-Emily Dickinson

Andy and I have been driving from Burlington, Vermont and back to New Haven a lot lately. Headed north from New Haven, the rise of New England and her green mountains unfolds like mighty sets of biceps, whose arms stretch out and point up and up till we reach the shores of Lake Champlain. Heading south from Burlington to New Haven feels like packing too many clothes into a small, square suitcase.

There is one particularly magical stretch of Route 89 between Montpelier (Capitale du Vermont, 12 KM) and Burlington that’s cause for pause. At this place, the road cuts through a jut of rocks, and for a second or two the road is pinched narrow between the cragged and geometrically planed ravine. Andy calls this pass Silent Rock. When we drive through, heading north or south, at the very start of the rock, we turn off the radio and look ahead, silent. “Yeah, but the funny thing
At the end of the pass, the radio’s back on and one of us is finishing our sentence. “about it is, there wasn’t even a stove in the house!” Maybe it’s six seconds long, maybe two. But, that silence inside the lash of our speed barreling down the highway has got gravity. It feels like we are living a line out of an Emily Dickinson poem. Silent Rock is our dash.

A friend told me the other night that her son’s been diagnosed with Sleep Apnea. She’s relieved because now there is a name for what’s been going on in his sleep. He simply stops breathing. Snores like an old drunkard. (He’s two.) And then stops breathing again. Maybe he’s got a Silent Rock in his sleep. He is left in the morning exhausted, hungry, clingy, and grumpy. There are various contraptions, of mediaeval proportion, that people strap themselves into to in order to stop themselves from stopping breathing. In this child’s case, he’ll have his tonsils and adenoids out. The cavities where those body pieces will be-apneas of flesh.

In a yoga class the other day, for which I was totally unprepared and much too inflexible, the instructor would remind us in the midst of the hardest most twisty, muscular moves — to breathe. The sound of breath would rise up again from all of us in the class, as we remembered that we actually need to make conscious the things that are automatic. Like forgetting to breathe is actually a natural thing.

So what of these holds and breaks that we construct or that the body stores as reflexes? All the spaces of silence between things makes me think there is a poem in that. (In truth, there are many poems in that, this is not a new idea!)

Last night on my way south again, I was blasting sad, old John Prine on the radio as I drove straight through Silent Rock. When I realized I missed the place of silence, I felt sick, unholy, and sorry. But, I couldn’t figure out why.

Charles Simic writes of poetry that he’s “in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence.” In the silence, there is witness to being. In silence there is witness to being-even if you are holding your breath, and grumpy or twisted, staring ahead, or alone in the car, you are sharing the silence with being. And silence is the twin of being. Poetically speaking. The excitement of holding your breath passing a graveyard or going through a tunnel is the same thing. Superstition, or an empathetic gesture for the dead or the still? We are honoring, in our apnea, a ghostly infinity, honoring the silence we are not, just to prove we are alive.