Laudo the Seas!

(Relatively) jobless as I am, I've decided to audit a Latin class at UVM. One week in, and there is no doubt that learning Latin is hard work. But it also feels like entering a Fairy Kingdom; the first verb we learn and conjugate is Laudare- To Praise! Lately, I’ve been snooping around 18th century whaling books for good Anglo-Saxon, consonant driven words for my poems. The other day, I read Remarkable Observations: The Whaling Journal of Peleg Folger 1751-1754, edited by Thomas and Nathaniel Philbrick, 2006. Hacklets, sprunyarn, tow iron. Scum, wist, and parbuckle.

Peleg (pronounced Pill-ick) was a teenager aboard various whaling ships out of the great whaling isle of Nantucket during the mid 18th century. What’s funny about reading his journal is that he starts every lengthy entry with “Nothing remarkable today...” and then he manages to philosophize about whales, life, and death, and “drinking flip” for a few, remarkable pages.

I came to love Peleg. His endearing piety (Peleg was a Quaker) in light of his massacring trade is the fulcrum of his entries, like a thoe-pin, (the strong, straight pin) that allows his oars to pivot along the waters of his writing. Peleg quotes contemporary poets, mostly English Quaker writers, practices his signature (there are pages and pages of his loopy scrawl in the original journal), and wrote his own verse:

Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale That wondrous monster of a mighty length Vast is his head and body, vast his tail, Beyond the conception his unmeasured strength.

But, everlasting God, thou dost ordain That we, poor feeble mortals should engage (Ourselves, our wives and children maintain,) This dreadful monster with a martial rage.

Peleg also spends much of the journal writing in Latin, or translating English into Latin. Sprinkled throughout his remarkable observations are Latin phrases: Benedic Dominum, o anima mea, et omnia quae Sunt inter me. Benedicite Nomen ejus Sanctum. (Praise the Lord, o my soul, and all who are with me. Bless His holy name.). And nearly every passage ends with “Hujus dici operis peroratio, per P.F.”, (this concludes the day’s work.) “Laus Deo,” Praise God.

It is as if Peleg translates or writes in Latin as a sort of self-soothing ritual. It’s a way for him to begin and close the day. It’s a language that connects him to the shores of his home and community thousand of leagues away. Only just beginning to know, study and appreciate Latin, and certainly not in the 18th century religious way, I understand it’s magnetism as ritual. Latin is about structure and placement of words. It is a language of spirit, and culture, and democracy (okay, and of crucifixion...).

And the great dialectical pairing of seafaring words next to Latin expression is wonderful. Peleg writes, “to the Westward we found fine Black and White Sand and Whore Eggs (sea urchins). We hope to be at our Bar before Sunset. Deo Volente atque adjuvant.” In our Latin class, we conjugate Laudare, to praise, and a guy beside me asks if I can reach over and plug in his computer to the outlet on the wall.

Film Adaptations: Short Stories vs. Novels

I’ve had a hypothesis for awhile that short stories lend themselves better to film adaptations than novels do. Of course, as soon as I sat down to make the case in writing, I remembered dozens of novels made into good films. Still, looking at the different ways novels and short stories are treated seems to tell us a little bit about the nature of those literary forms. I came by the original theory through no particularly powerful powers of observation except noticing that whenever a movie is made out of a beloved novel (Beloved, for example, or Lord of the Rings) their fans get very territorial. Meanwhile, when a film is made from a short story nobody notices. For one thing, readers get very anxious about how “faithful” the filmmaker will be to a novel. Will Hollywood will transmogrify the elegiac qualities of the literature into exploding skyscrapers?

Usually, though, readers just say to themselves, “I hope they don’t cut out my favorite part,” often necessary for the obvious reason that novels are long and have too much material to cover in 100 minutes. But apart from length, novels are a form that begs for the sorts of experimentation that other written literature tolerates less: digression; superfluous minor characters and subplots; essays; and, most importantly since Madame Bovary, the dramatization of an evolving internal consciousness.

War and Peace, for example, can’t be faithfully adapted not just because of its impossible length but because of the impossibly novelistic nature of it. (I’m ignoring for now that Tolstoy claimed that it wasn’t a novel at all but some other new form he was inventing.) With all the time in the world – or at least control over the Masterpiece Theatre schedule – a film of that book wouldn’t feel too long but too much like a jumble of four different narratives, a how-to video on fox hunting, an essay on the methods of cultural history, a historical documentary and the director’s commentary all at once.

Another way of thinking about the challenge of adaptation is to consider Randall Jarrell’s famous definition of a novel: “A prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” Novels by their nature seem to have imperfections that are appreciated as beauty marks. They would perhaps look more like carcinomas on celluloid, so they get trimmed away.

When novels are faithfully adapted, they are usually shorter novels. But more tellingly they are novels that don’t indulge in all the woolly possibilities of the form. Film noir adaptations of Raymond Chandler are good examples. Besides being short, the books have minimal exposition, all of it focused on present action rather than background, and are packed with dialogue.

The novels of Tom Perrotta, which have prompted faithful adaptations, are similar in scope, prompting some critics to snootily characterize the books as “cinematic” precisely because of how ready-made for film they seem to be. But to me that’s like dismissing Frank Baum’s children’s classic The Wizard of Oz because it’s too cinematic.

“Faithfully adapted” and “successfully adapted” aren’t the same things, of course. Little Children is faithfully adapted to a fault. (Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay, too.) In that case, nothing is left out, not even a narrator’s voice that works in the book. It is imposed in the form of a movie voiceover that spoils otherwise emotionally powerful scenes. The voiceover undercuts the natural advantages of working with moving images by telling us what we can see for ourselves.

Given how attractive written literature is as a starting point for film and the challenges of adapting novels, I wonder why Hollywood doesn’t use short stories more. Probably it’s an outgrowth of our behavior as readers. For one thing, directors who are genuinely inspired by the literature they read are probably, like everyone else, not reading many short stories to get inspired by. Two, the novels have more of the name recognition that Hollywood requires for marketing and promotion.

This is why film adaptations of short stories either go by unnoticed or succeed despite their origins. I’m an attentive fan of Alice Munro, but somehow the film Away From Her, based on her story “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” came and went without me ever hearing about it. Approaching from the other direction, I remember the delight many years ago of stumbling on Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and recognizing one hilarious chapter as the original source of the movie A Christmas Story. I loved all the other chapters in the book, too, but I’m glad they didn’t try to jam them all into the movie.

I found an anthology of these kinds of forgotten stories called Adaptations: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films. Apparently, the films Memento, All About Eve, Rear Window and The Wild One all started out as short stories. One not included is “Home For the Holidays,” which inspired the Holly Hunter movie by the same name, the viewing of which is a Thanksgiving tradition at our house. I can’t say if it’s a faithful adaptation or not, because it’s out of print and difficult to find. Every year, whenever the credits scroll by and I see “based on a story by Chris Adant,” I think to myself, “Man, I’d like to read that.”

The best-known recent example of a short story being adapted into film is Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” After the success of the film, a curious little book was published that included the original story, the screenplay, and essays by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. They touch on many of the same points I’m discussing here, but I especially like one telling metaphor of Ossana’s – that the story is an “excellent blueprint for a screenplay.”

In other words, short stories, with their economy of language balanced with a depth of emotional complexity, are not thickets that Hollywood has to hack through to salvage a movie from but something that a movie can be built up out of. Rather than existing as machines for churning out saleable product, short stories lend themselves to new creative exploration in film. That probably isn’t sexy enough to get much attention in a blockbuster economy, but once filmmakers give short stories a chance, they get the pleasure of engaging with an intensely felt work.

New Haven resident Robert McGuire is a freelance journalist, copywriter, college writing instructor, frequent traveler, and author of a new blog.

The Cultural Dictionary of Punk

You wouldn't say that I was a punk rocker, but my record collection (yes, record collection) seems to have an awful lot of Ramones albums in it. For decades I wore a locket every day with a picture of Joey Ramone in it. I seem to have a weakness for some of the old CBGB's bands. When I need a little pick me up, I play "Atomic" (Blondie, I probably should explain). Really loudly. I feel it is good for my so-called soul. My close friends, and even some casual associates, know this about me, which is why I was surprised -- and then not surprised at all -- when a bookseller friend of mine, Kate H., appeared at my house recently with a book for me. "We got this in," she said, "and -- well -- Here!" Then she stood, waiting, waiting to see the expression on my face when I unwrapped the book (which she had, in excellent style, wrapped in old newsprint).

When I saw The Cultural Dictionary of Punk (recently published by Continuum, the folks who did those completely awesome 33 1/3 books), I think I smiled so big and so hard my cheeks hurt. Kate is a doll. I immediately began flipping through it and knew right away that this was gonna be one FUN book to read.

I read it from cover to cover. Every chance I had, I was sitting down with it: with my morning coffee; with a drink at the end of the day. I had my quibbles with it -- this is a highly subjective little book -- but in general I had to admire Rombes' book, which is passionate and filled with interesting details I didn't know.

I had two real issues with Rombes' work, both of which I had the opportunity to discuss in emails with the author. One is that several entries are really these personal discourses on some obviously serious problems that have arisen in Rombes' life. His family suffered horribly from a traumatic event beyond their control, and I wouldn't dream of trying to dismiss them or anything like that. But the sections relating to them did read sort of weirdly next to entries on the glories of the Ramones first three albums. The juxtaposition was jarring, and it detracted from the force of the book as a whole. I often thought, as I read, that Rombes should have just written The Cultural Dictionary of Punk and then done a shorter, tighter memoir about his family's tragedy, which Rombes admitted to me was probably true. So we'll see what his next project is like.

My second issue (which Rombes is trying to address as I type this) is that the book does not come with a CD (or a list of links to recordings online) of many of the songs Rombes discusses. Over and over again he has long discussions of songs that he describes as, you know, bloodcurdlingly perfect examples of this, that, or the other, and I said, "OH MAN I GOTTA HEAR THAT NOW!" and ran to the computer, only to discover that there was pretty much no way I was gonna hear those songs; they're not available on iTunes, and frankly, with stuff like this, it'd be easy to spend waaay too much time and money hunting down obscure 45s. When I expressed my wish for a CD (impossible) or streaming audio or something like that (more possible, though a lot of work), Rombes took it to heart (others had made the same remark to him), and at his website he has begun to post links to key songs. This is really useful, but it's also, just, you know, really fun.

I want to explain that I don't believe that every song he mentions should be included in this compilation; I mean, anyone can find the first Ramones album, or Marquee Moon (that's Television, people: Television). The average reader of this book doesn't need someone to provide a link to "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" or "Chinese Rocks" or "Venus de Milo"; we've got those internalized pretty well by now, thanks. But there must have been at least a dozen really out there songs by, you know, punk bands from Cleveland or Tulsa -- bands that existed for about three minutes -- that Rombes talked about so tantalizingly that I basically wanted to shoot myself when I wasn't able to listen to them RIGHT THEN.

Well, listen: don't let my griping deter you. If you've got any interest whatsoever in punk rock, punk culture, punk whatever, then this book deserves a half inch of space on your shelf. http://culturaldictionaryofpunk.blogspot.com/

Conquest of the Useless

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.

Apnea Caesura Hold Break

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.

Extreme gardening

Something alien is growing in the community garden on my street. The garden occupies a narrow lot, fenced on all sides and bordered by multi-family homes. There’s a wooden fence in the front; the entrance is always open. In the nearly 30 plots, all of which are planted out this year, we earnest urban gardeners have planted our tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. Bold, racy types have planted lavender or arugula or wandering Egyptian onions or albino hybrids. In July, the garden goes wild: the tendrils of my neighbor’s pea plants have reached across the gap and grappled with my Brandywines, and the raspberry bushes are threatening mutiny. We’ve got a compost pile and bees in the back. Lots of bees. The plants are green and lush right now, which is exciting, but a few weeks ago the verdant hues dimmed a little. The organizer of the garden sent out an email saying that one of us wanted to lock the entrance gate. Fruits were being plucked from vines. A locked gate is an understandable reaction to pilfering, a common problem in community gardens. You grow your plants, you carefully tend to them all summer, and days before you reap, some hooligan comes by and cleans off your pepper plant. I get it: What’s the point of gardening, if the products of your labors walk off when you’re not looking?

Ultimately, the gate idea was axed: The majority of us preferred to keep our community garden unlocked and open. And if someone comes along and swipes, well, that sucks. You could get mad, real mad, and plot your revenge. Or you can say, in your best Pollyanna voice, “I hope the people who take it need it more than I do!” or you can stomp at the ground and get over it, or you can shrug your shoulders and say that’s the price of gardening in the open.

The emails and responses grew quickly as people weighed in. People suggested signs: “Don’t Steal” or “We call the police.” A video surveillance system was proposed.

About this time, I realized I have no idea who these people are. I’ve probably seen them, greeted them, talked about bugs or taproot with them, but I can’t match emails with faces. I didn’t used to think of gardeners as being prone to extreme measures, but the situation escalated quickly in cyberspace. Last week, a gardener emailed all of us to complain that someone had stolen a few frying peppers and a basil plant from her plot. She went on to use her email to berate “them” (quotation marks are hers). In her colorful epistle, she questioned whether “they” even know what to do with the stolen food; she mocked “them” for stealing only a few peppers and not the whole plant; she said she thought “they” stole her food for spite, because “they” can. Finally, she said that if those thieves are the kind of people that live in the neighborhood, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with them. I find this fascinating because I, like most of the gardeners who garden there, live in the neighborhood—on the same street.

Her email became a battle cry. Someone thought they could secure broken-down video cameras to install around the garden—a ruse, to drive away vegetable thieves who are afraid of being recorded. Another gardener wrote back immediately to call for solar-powered electric fences. A few days later, a gardener/spy sent out a very excited email with a picture attached. He claimed he had caught photos of vegetable thieves in the act—and he was tapping the collective wisdom to find out if it was appropriate to spray the burglars with a hose. Later the same day, he sent out an email with the subject line “false alarm.” Turns out, he had taken pictures of a fellow gardener picking a few zukes from his own plant.

We gardeners are taking pictures of each other and thinking the worst. Where are we headed? An all-out produce rumble? I’ve been thinking about unexpected brinkmanship this summer because of a recent run-in with Dr. Seuss. (How’s that for a forced segue way?) We were vacationing with my in-laws in Florida, and one morning my mother-in-law surprised my son with new books. She said she had raided her kids’ bookshelves and found lots of lost Dr. Seuss books, and she was very excited to read them to Sam.

After reading The Butter Battle Book, she looked a little shaken. “Well,” she said. “That wasn’t what I thought it was.” I picked it up. The book tells the story of two peoples, the Yooks and the Zooks, who live on different sides of a wall. At the beginning, they disagree about some minor issues. The book ends with a Yook and a Zook facing off on the wall—and they both have nukes. That’s where you’re left, as a reader, seeing two Seussians about to blow each other to smithereens. It’s mutually assured destruction, the end of escalation, the final countdown, zero minutes to midnight. I thought I had known about escalation in Dr. Seuss—I’m familiar with “The Big Brag,” after all—but I was mistaken. I was delighted to find he was so political, so outspoken. I may not ever get past delight: I’m sure tomes have been written about the politics of Theodore Geisel, but that’s probably one area of literary arcana of which I will forever be ignorant.

As it turns out, one of the themes of my summer is “Escalation where you least expect it.” As for the garden—what’s going to happen when we leave the relatively cool climes of June and July and head into the really hot and humid waters of August and September? There's a storm brewing; people are drawing lines in the soil. I can't help but recall these wise words from It Came from Outer Space :

Did you know that more people are murdered at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. Lower temperatures, people are easy-going, over 92 and it's too hot to move, but just 92, people get irritable.

New Haven's Union Station's Lavish Display

New Haven's a wonderful place but it is pretty rinky-dink in a lot of ways. If it took itself more seriously, for example, matters relating to public transportation would be taken more seriously. Don't get me started on bus service here, for one thing. (I use the buses all the time, and I'm the first to try to defend them, but my point is, I shouldn't have to think about defending them. I should be able to just... use them, and boast about them.) One sign that New Haven used to be a bigger, more impressive place than it is now -- or a place that cared more about the public's view of public transportation -- is the train station, which is lovely, designed on a grand scale. When I was a kid, the New Haven train station wasn't the building it is now; that building, the original train station, was closed, first awaiting demolition and, then, eventually, renovation. In the meantime, we used this underground, scary, damp-feeling space which has somehow completely disappeared. If you took me there now I wouldn't know how to explain where it was. This is the trouble with memories from childhood; they get hazy. I'm sure many readers of this will be happy to tell me what happened to that piece of crap train station. (Please do.)

You walked in at street level and the whole entrance was this massive ramp down to the waiting area, where there were sad little benches, and then you went up to the tracks, as I recall. I may be mistaken but I remember the ramp having dreary, ill-advised industrial carpeting on it (after a while, the flooring was some kind of equally depressing linoleum). The best part of the whole place was the vending machines, which isn't saying much. Kids always like vending machines anyhow.

The old Union Station (which, Wikipedia tells me, was designed by Cass Gilbert -- woo woo) is a huge improvement over that disgusting place I remember from the 1970s. It's airy, sunny; when you walk on the floors, your snappy shoes make a wonderful, adult "click-click-click" sound. (If you're wearing Birkenstocks or sneakers or shoes that aren't snappy, you just trudge along and miss out on the joy of the clicking.) There's a shoeshine station, which I've always wanted to patronize but have never had a chance to; there's a newsstand. There are a few little sandwich stores, which aren't remarkable but do their jobs perfectly well. My main point is, you come into the train station from the street or from the tracks, and either way, you think, "Huh. New Haven. This is a real place." It's a miniaturized Grand Central Station, and that sounds like I'm being slighting, but I'm not trying to be. It's a marvelous space.

One of the things that continues to make the station so appealing is its arrivals/departures board, which is something of an anomaly in today's LED display world (so my husband, who pays attention to these things, tells me). The board is a huge black and white thing with little panels that flip, like the numbers on the alarm clock my brother had in 1978, changing the displayed information. The panels turn incredibly fast, and the sound they make -- kind of "whp-whp-whp-whp-whp" -- is just awesome. When you're waiting for a train that's running late -- as the Amtrak trains often are -- you can get absorbed in your reading and not worry about missing anything because you know you'll look up when you hear the whp-whp-whp sound: it digs into your head, signifiying "new information on the board, pay attention." Sometimes the information is useful to you, and sometimes not, but either way it's fun to watch the text change. You can see all the names of the cities on the Northeast Corridor whip by, which is cool. You can think, "Well, maybe I'll skip going to Boston and just hop onto the Montrealer instead." (You won't, though, because your girlfriend in Boston would be pissed, and, what's more, you wouldn't have a place to stay in Montreal anyhow.) There's something about that board that keeps one's sense of travel intact in a way that the LED displays of Grand Central Station -- a shame they installed that -- just.... don't.

People who know me will snort at this; I am a homebody and am known for not liking to travel And it is true, I like being at home. But every now and then I also like going somewhere, particularly if there is a snazzy hotel involved (I'm big on snazzy hotels), and so I have had some experience with train stations and, yes, even airports. I'm one of maybe three people you'll ever meet who's actually been at the Los Angeles train station, for example. And I can tell you: New Haven's train station is nicer.

But, of course, I am biased.

The Good Will of Books

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with John Donatich, director of the Yale University Press at Yale’s Graduate Club on Elm Street, where we swapped stories from our respective careers in publishing. (I did most of the talking, to be honest.) In the course of conversation, we discussed the state of academic publishing. I had recently completed a research project for an overseas press looking to expand its English-language publishing program in philosophy. Since I had an amateur’s interest in the field and more than a decade in scholarly publishing of one sort or another, it was a perfect project for someone with my inclination. During a tete-a-tete, one item that caught my attention was John’s comments on the state of book publishing in the field of literary criticism. In brief, it is not an area that is doing especially well nowadays. This isn’t to say that it’s on life support. But in terms of raw sales figures—number of units printed and sold—it’s a less-than-ideal area of publication.

Reasons for the decline of "litcrit" sales are legion. Humanities-based book publishing programs have taken a real pounding. The elimination of university press subsidies has hurt, as has the steady migration of scholars to digital venues. Moreover, the overproduction of books in response to tenure pressures has produced a flood of publication that academic library budgets can no longer accommodate. And then there is the ontological problem of scholarly specialization, which automatically limits audience size and book sales.  This tailspin in academic monograph has thrown into question the future of humanities research, begun to reshape criteria for tenure, and obliged scholars to rethink the place the “book” in literary criticism.

Alas, solutions are not legion. Many publishers seem resigned to plodding on, producing works of literary criticism regardless of how much interest there really can be in the culture of the book in Tibet or new interpretations of Paradise Lost.  But even where there is interest--hell, even I'm interested in these topics--that interest will be be nominal at most and fleeting at best. Books of this ilk will take not 2nd or 3rd place on my reading stack; they'd be lucky to take 20th or 21st. Indeed, the fact that I’d have to re-read Paradise Lost before taking on a whole work devoted to a “dramatic reinterpretation” of it makes me queasy just thinking of the required page-turns.

Is it any wonder that literary criticism is on the ropes? And, yet, literary criticism done well can offer true pleasure.  This certainly occurs to me when I look at the litcrit section of my personal library and consider the characteristics that make for a good litcrit read. What matters is not any critic's purported insightfulness or even her work's importance to the history of literary exegesis. No, what stays with me is something different, something crystallized by my recent exercise in slimming down this part of my library.

It is now 15 years since I received my doctorate, and it is unlikely I will ever return to academia to teach or write literary criticism. So when my wife recently demanded that I reduce the size of my library, I decided to rake out the litcrit collection I had amassed in graduate school. Refreshing is the only word I can use to describe the experience. My academic career behind me and none ahead, I saw no  need to retain works that supplied so little satisfaction but had stayed on hand solely for the purpose of teaching or quoting. Now I could forthrightly assess the quality of the reading experience of this part of my collection, no small matter for a discipline excoriated during my graduate days for loose thinking and impenetrable writing.   The standing of works of ostensibly "breakaway" originality, held in high regard then by litcrit professionals, dissolved instantly before a fierce resolve to keep what I had enjoyed and eliminate those academic aspiration had obliged me to have."  Works that were once "hot" now seemed trite, belabored, ostentatious, or overindulged.  I bathed in the freedom of putting front and center new, more personal criteria: readability, narrative drive, force and clarity of argument, playfulness of voice.

So what sailed away to the local Goodwill? My collection of essays by Paul de Man, which, despite their presumptive brilliance, never shined for me as his extended explicationes de text all drove to the same tiring conclusion  that every text is a morass of contradiction, a perpetual shooting of one’s own feet; Walter Benjamin’s essays were also cast overboard, I never having found them all that compelling or even that well written; several of Foucault’s works—which were not even literary criticism but were so heavy-handedly adopted for  litcrit purposes that they ended up in this area of my library regardless—were boxed up, particularly the overlong Order of Things and the unnecessarily abstract Archaeology of Knowledge. Nor were all my rejects of the “theoretical” kind. Ihab Hassan’s Contemporary American Literature, 1945-1972: An Introduction was a rather pedestrian affair as introductions go; Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending was never going to get read; Cleanth Brooks’ Well-Wrought Urn, a series of essays illustrating how “close reading” of poetry ought be done, left this reader's experience of the poems entirely parched; Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature was neither readable nor useful, more a dryly written period piece; Terry Heller’s Delights of Terror, Clayton Koelb’s The Incredulous Reader, Joseph Grixti’s Terrors of Uncertainty were all well written and well argued, but took up shelf space only because of my now long-forgotten dissertation on the American gothic tradition; and then there were the multi-author essay collections on feminist criticism and theory, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and God knows what else.

So what stayed?  Walter Kendricks’ Thrill of Fear, another dissertation source, stayed not only because it offered reasonably good history of the genre in literature and film but also for the pugnacious tone of its treatment of bad horror art. I gladly held onto Mythologies and S/Z by Roland Barthes as examples of original thinking, humorous observation (especially) Mythologies) and truly novel presentation (has there ever been another work of literary criticism like S/Z?). Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? also stuck around for its clarity of prose, precision of thought, and force of argument.  I could not imagine letting go of fine introductory works like  Terry Eagleton’s tour de force, Literary Theory: An Introduction or the should-be-better-known Superstructuralism by Richard Harland.  Literary histories and works of cultural criticism that were compelling in their insight or unique in their approach—such as Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, David S. Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance or Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Lighting Out for the Territory—I also retained. Finally, I do admit a penchant for writers on writing: essays (Language of the Night by Ursula LeGuin), criticism (Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster), manifestoes (For a New Novel by Alaine Robbe-Grillet), memoirs (One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty) or interviews (Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations with Capote). As works of criticism go, none of these amounts to much. But as commentary by craftsmen on the crafting process rather than the crafted object’s final effect, they are worth something.

All of these titles stuck with me because they interested me as a reader and not as a litcrit professional. And so I wonder if, in the end, this is the direction that literary critics will ultimately have to take to stay in the book—as opposed to the academic journal—business.  Doing so might require setting aside calls to specialize or even theorize and focus more on voice, originality of presentation, quality of writing, force and range of argument, and—finally—on the story their book tells rather than the stories that are the object of their criticism.

Natural Storytellers

My son Sam is an early riser. For the first 16 months of my his life, give or take a month, the day began in the same way. I’d get up with him at 5:30 or 6 (or, on lucky days, 6:30). I’d turn on the radio, make coffee, eat a bowl of oatmeal, bundle my son, bundle myself, pour the coffee into a travel mug, strap on a harness used for tethering babies to people, and walk out the door. Judging by the looks of people on the street, I looked like a vagabond who had raided an orphanage. Twenty steps down the street, I’d realize I had left my coffee at home and, depending on the grayness of the sky or some other arbitrary measure, I’d go back and get it or make a beeline for Fuel, a small coffeeshop where they knew me and knew my son.

As he got older and the seasons changed, we introduced some variation. I stopped bundling both of us. He started riding in the stroller. I frequently planted him in a raised bed while I planted seedlings in our plot in the William Street Community Garden. Snacks became paramount to the success of the adventure. We went to Willoughby’s (big mistake with a baby when you’re facing off against the early morning rush hour), Moka/Koffee on Orange/Bru, Koffee on Audubon. Sometimes I remembered my coffee. Sometimes he ate croissant. We took long walks to marvel at the Quinnipiac River drawbridge in Fair Haven, or to marvel at the view from the Leitner Observatory, or to try out a distant and fabled playground.

There was one part of every day that did not vary during that time. There’s a man who lives on our street who I believe is a natural storyteller. We saw him every day, either in front of his house or in the garden or on the next street over. Because of him, I suspect there must be dynasties of storytellers, passing the storytelling gene from generation to generation, each new iteration changing and adapting the same stories. That isn’t to say they don’t have to work at it, but in these families I imagine a high premium is placed on telling the right story, at the right time, in as few a words as possible.

He’s known my son longer than anyone outside our family. I don’t know anything about him but his stories, and they’re kind of incredible. His stories stick: They bounce around in my brain and surface in my thoughts frequently throughout the day. He greets us with “Hello good people” or something similarly benign, and then he starts telling. The first one I remember well is the day it was particularly windy, and as we made our way down William Street he joined us and walked for a while. “Did you hear what happened in Washington?” he asked. He proceeded to tell me about a man who was walking his baby, in a stroller, along a river. The wind, he said, was so strong and so fierce that the man had to fight hard to finish the walk. But in the end, the wind won: The man and his son were blown into the river and disappeared, and they still hadn’t found him. “Okay, good people!” he said cheerily. “Have a great day! One day we’ll all serve Sam!”

As he left, I wondered it nature overtake us while we’re out in the world, just trying to have a normal existence. All day, I thought about strollers blown away by the wind; tornadoes taking away our children and our parents; waves rising up from Long Island Sound. I thought how the telling of the story seemed so effortless.

One time, the time it began to occur to me that he might not be the best company for our walks, I asked him how he had come to New Haven. He said that his probation officer was transporting him from Stamford to Hartford. They were handcuffed on the train, he said, but when the train pulled into Union Station in New Haven, his probation officer was asleep. He reached over, stole the key to the handcuffs, and escaped the train. Once inside the station, he ran in John DeStefano. The two of them chatted amiably; by the end of the conversation, DeStefano had offered him a job with the city, working as a counselor with recent inmates who had been released. Don’t worry about the probation, he said, I’ll take care of it. And ever since, Sam’s friend had been working in the prison system in New Haven.

I was both enthralled and disturbed by that story. I had known our neighbor for months: At what point do I start avoiding him in the morning? Do I have terrible judgment in the company I keep? What was his crime? He really does work for the city, and very well might have been on probation, but did he really know DeStefano? What was his connection to the way everything works?

My favorite story was about our neighborhood. We were walking down Lyon Street, and our friend pointed out the chimneys. He said he had worked on restoring most of the chimneys on that street, that I wouldn’t believe how many of them were on the verge of toppling. It’s barely safe to keep walking here, he said. Immediately I conjured up an inner movie, in which a whole block of houses just started crumbling, from the top down. He laughed and laughed to himself, and I asked what was so funny. He told me that when they renovated the house I’m living in, an opossum had been living in the basement; the first time they lit the pilot light, the opossum caught fire and made a beeline for the natural gas tank. (I was a little surprised at how well he knew the layout of our basement.) They caught him, doused him and expelled him. Don’t worry, he said, that opossum (of fire!) doesn’t live in your house anymore.

He then pointed to a house and said that many families of birds had been living in its chimney, but the new owners didn’t know. The first time they fired up the furnace (lit a fire? I don’t remember now), the flames ignited the nest, and the nest ignited the birds, and the birds came flying out of the top of the house. He opened his arms and fanned out his fingers, saying the sky was full of burning birds. That had happened so many time he couldn’t remember, he said. A house renovation, a pilot light, a furnace, and voila! Burning animals are running down the street; burning birds are filling the sky. It made our neighborhood seem dangerous but at the same time mythological.

I feel happy to live on a block where the oral tradition is alive and well, where stories circulate and grow. On the other hand, it’s time to move. We’ve got another kid now, and I’m tired of having to scan the nearest playground for rusty lighters and broken vodka bottles before I let Sam scramble. I don’t want to wonder if my walking companion, no matter how talented a storyteller he is, is a walking manifestation of my bad judgment. My New Haven street may not be the best place to raise a kid – indeed, most young families in Wooster Square eventually migrate to Westville or Whitneyville.

But hey, time passes. Things change. I’ll miss the natural storyteller on my block when we go, and I’ll probably always think of him when the wind blows so hard I wonder if it’s going to whisk us away.

Kindle a book, light my fire

I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, and I went into Bridge Street Books, located nowhere near Bridge Street, from what I could tell. It was on Pennsylvania Ave., off M Street, the main thoroughfare of Georgetown. The proprietor, who sat to the left, immediately upon the entrance, sitting between a two-sided counter, a wall of books, and the front window facing the street, was not particularly friendly (that seems to be a species of booksellers, deeply in love with books but not much for customers—it seems a unique form of vocational torture). When I asked him what was upstairs, for I had noticed a staircase, he said, "More books." When I asked him what particular sections were kept upstairs, he impatiently ran off a list for me ("fiction, psychology, sports" — something like that), but clearly wasn't keen to do it. I had hoped he might enjoy telling me about the vast selection in his store; he clearly hoped I'd have the decency to leave him be and go look for myself. When I did go look, I discovered that his was one of the best-curated selections of any bookstore I'd ever seen. Put another way: he's a splendid buyer. There were a dozen books I'd seen reviewed over the past six months but had never seen in a store; there were even more books, including some by famous or prestigious authors, that I had not seen reviewed, but which he had ordered from publishers' catalogues. He (or his buyer) quite simply had a terrific eye. The store was very, very well stocked, with reasonable quantity but unmatched quality.

It wasn't just that he had good taste, but also variegated and eccentric taste. This clearly was not a scholarly bookstore, although there were many fine books from scholarly presses. Nor did it suffer from the book-clubby quality of so many independent bookstores, the proprietors of which seem to buy books, primarily "literary fiction," with the predictable tastes of local book-clubbers in mind. (This tic results in shelf after shelf of Barbara Kingsolver.) And he was not a snob: there was no shortage of beach reads or what in Washington might be called Metro reads.

I ended up buying from his Architecture section a book I had never seen before, even as my current interests mean that I always look in a store's Architecture section. It's called Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, and it's by an Australian critic named Elizabeth Farrelly. I'm nearly done with the book now, and while in some ways it is familiar—her impatience with suburban sprawl will be familiar to readers of Philip Langdon, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Bill McKibben, David Owen, and many others—she has a deeply philosophical bent; her references range from Milan Kundera (on kitsch) to Richard Sennett (on the modern tension between our interior and exterior selves) to Aristotle, happiness psychologist Martin Seligman, and weirdo supremo Alvin Toffler. She misspells Nietzsche, but we all do sometimes; less forgivable is her misspelling of Lemony Snicket. The book is spellbinding, and I am grateful that I went browsing in a store that had it.

In other news, my friend Jonathan now has a Kindle; he is the first of my friends whose literary flame has been Kindled. He loves it, so far. From the public domain he has downloaded Hume and Freud; from the private domain, Gladwell and Michael Lewis. Jonathan said it even came with a little beach tent to keep sand out. Party on, my dear friend, party on.