reading natural history is a political act

In these hazy days of ongoing exhaustion, I've turned to natural history and science—cures in the face of mind-boggling news. In particular, I've been reading Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature, the much-lauded biography of Alexander von Humboldt; re-reading Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust; and settling in with a book that has long sat unread on my shelf, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard.

On every page of these very different books lie warnings about what happens when we ignore the interconnectivity of man and nature, trees and air, the rhythms of our bodies and the patterns of our thoughts. Narrow ambition is mostly catastrophic. An incapacity for awe is inhumane. A trampling of others as we advance ourselves will have unbearable, forseeable consequences. The future of us depends on looking close, and listening well.

It's a political season. Let natural history be our guide.

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Katie Hafner, Kate Christensen, Nathaniel Popkin: what I'm reading now

This past week I read Howard Norman's beautiful (and Michael Ondaatje endorsed!) I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place as well as Rebecca Solnit's fierce and bracing The Faraway Nearby.

Now on my desk sit Katie Hafner's Mother Daughter Me and Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special, along with my friend Nathaniel Popkin's first novel, Lion and Leopard, due out in October from the new Philadelphia publishing house, The Head and the Hand Press.

So much wrong can happen each day. But a good book close by is transformative.

I'll be sharing word about these books as soon as I can.

In the meantime, those looking for a good memoir to read (beyond the nearly 100 referenced in Handling the Truth) can find a few recommendations here.

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The Faraway Nearby/Rebecca Solnit (Reflections)/and thank you, Katrina Kenison

Several years ago, my father, a talented gardener, asked me what I wanted most, and I said hummingbirds. A few weeks later, there he was—digging a hole near my front door and planting a trumpet vine.

It's become a monstrosity, since—making the overtaken house look like something straight out of a Grimm's fairy tale. My husband threatens to do away with the vine. I trim it back, faithfully. I say, "But the hummingbirds will come." And this summer they've come in force.

Earlier today I was sitting outside, reading Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby, when one particularly curious hummer came near and stayed long enough for me to take its portrait. It was as if Solnit herself had engineered the scene, or given it to me. I own every single Solnit book. I take great pleasure in them. And I'm pretty sure that she'd find a story here—in the monstrous vine and the sweet visitation, the madly fluttering wings and the stopped heart of the reader who looked up in time.

The Faraway Nearby is Solnit at her most fierce and, often, her most fine. This is memoir intellectualized. It's Solnit reflecting on the gift of apricots—countless apricots—that came her way just as she was entering her final chapters as a daughter. Held within this frame are other stories—of the man who left Solnit at a terrible time, of Solnit's own experience with illness, of a trip taken to Iceland, of a river ride. In-depth investigations of fairy tales and Frankenstein, hot and cold, forgiveness and understanding, surviving and dying bind. You cannot anticipate Solnit's mind. You cannot think, even if you feel as if you are on solid, shared ground (the story of Frankenstein, for example, or the biography of Virginia Woolf) that you know where she is headed. But you can trust that, no matter how far away from her seeming purpose Solnit goes, she will remember where she started from, and she will loop back in, put in another stitch or two, even as she warns against pretty seaming.

Solnit's evaluation of her mother often bristles. Her characterization of Alzheimer's alarms. The old boyfriend doesn't get away with much. But there's so much, so much, to Solnit's intellect, her search to understand, her desire to get things right, her ability to transcend herself, and she's brilliant with those apricots—bracing and authentic.

This abundance of unstable apricots seemed to be not only a task set for me, but my birthright, my fairy-tale inheritance from my mother who had given me almost nothing since my childhood. It was a last harvest, a heap of fruit from a family tree, like the enigmatic gifts of fairy tales: a magic seed, a key to an unknown door, a summoning incantation. Bottling, canning, composting, freezing, eating, and distilling them was the least of the tasks they posed. The apricots were a riddle I had to decipher, a tale whose meaning I had to make over the course of the next twelve months as almost everything went wrong.

I am glad to have read this book. Glad that I fought for the time.

And I am glad, too—grateful—for Katrina Kenison, who was one of the very first readers of Handling the Truth, who was the very first person who put words to it, and who has shared my quest, throughout the years, to write and understand memoir. Katrina has more friends in the e-universe than I can summon a quantifier for. And today she blesses me by sharing Handling with her readers on a blog that—newly updated—has something for everyone. She's even offering a give-away.

That's all happening here. Please take a look.

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What's Your Story: Thoughts from Rebecca Solnit (The Faraway Nearby)

I buy every Rebecca Solnit book. I like the invented nature of her thoughts and prose. Today, facing all kinds of work deluge (and other such stuff), I share the opening paragraph from the Solnit book I'll read and review here as soon as the clouds settle.

But for now, Solnit's take on love—and stories.

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

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Philadelphia in the gloaming; two empty nesters

I can never use the term "in the gloaming" without thinking of my friend Alice Elliott Dark's perfect and classic short story by that same name. And so, last night, leaving the city at the gloaming hour, I thought of Alice. I thought of Joan Didion, too, and Rebecca Solnit, and all those writers who have captured this shade of sun-glinted blue with words.

The city was eager for spring, and full of its promise. Rittenhouse Square and its horn player, a little spontaneous drumming on the side. Restaurants and their outdoor seats. People reading on benches with their coat collars high.

My husband and I were there at the end of a long moving week—cleaning our son's now vacated city apartment at Spruce and 16th, and imagining him at the park in his new near-Manhattan 'hood. Sharing a meal at Serafina. Going home in the old Wrangler, two for-sure empty nesters now.

Meanwhile our son texts me this morning, his first day of his first full-time job. Up at 5:30, he confides. At Starbucks. Excited.

There's dusk. And then there's dawn.

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on teaching teachers

This week, as readers of this blog know, I am at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where K-12 teachers from all around the area have gathered for the VAST: Nature Through the Lens of Art/Science program.  For two hours each afternoon I share passages from books I love, lay down challenges, talk about Rilke and Cezanne, Stanley Kunitz and Vaddey Ratner, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, ghosts in gardens and rivers that flow.  They write and I listen.  I suggest, and they counter.

The teachers surprise me.  They make me smile.  They are writers, too, many of them, and certainly they are readers—men and women with opinions about what can and should trigger memory, say, or about the color blue, or about students they'll always remember.  They are charming and determined and, most of all, curious and hopeful.  They make me wish that I was learning in their classrooms.

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not yet arrived: consoling words from Rebecca Solnit

Up since four with my students' work—their expectations essays, their prose poems on the color of life.  Blue factors in, theatrical skies.  Declarations and near opinions are wrestled onto the page.

But there are questions, too, and that is right: We as writers are always only just starting out, incessantly finding our way.  I wanted proof of this—or not proof, but consolation—and so I turned to this passage from Rebecca Solnit's "Open Doors." 

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale has not yet arrived, is what must be found.  It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it's where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own.

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Blue Nights/Joan Didion: Reflections

I was harder on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking than many readers were.  I thought it at times too self-consciously clinical, too reported, less felt.  Many of my students at the University of Pennsylvania disagreed with me.  I listened.  Of course I did.  I wanted to be convinced.

I do not feel disinclined about Blue Nights, which I have read this morning and which will break your heart.  The jacket copy describes the book as "a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter."  It is that; in part it is.  But it is also, mostly, as the jacket also promises, Didion's "thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old."

A cry, in other words, in the almost dark.  A mind doing what a mind does in the aftermath of grief and in the face of the cruelly ticking clock.  Blue Nights is language stripped to its most bare.  It is the seeding and tilling of images grasped, lines said, recurring tropes—not always gently recurring tropes.  It is a mind tracking time.  It is questions:

"How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?"

"What if I can never again locate the words that work?"

"Who do I want to notify in case of emergency?"

Joan Didion, always physically small and intellectually giant, is, as she writes in this book, seventy-five years old.  She is aware of light and how it brightens, then fades.  She writes of blue—a color and a sound that has long obsessed me, and has obsessed writers like Rebecca Solnit.  She writes of the gloaming, a word I will forever associate with the immensely talented Alice Elliott Dark.

Here is how she writes:

You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.  The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue."  To the English it was "the gloaming."  That very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.

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The color of life: a writing prompt

Today, at the Rutgers-Camden Summer Writer's Conference, I'll be asking the students to reflect on the color of life, a prompt inspired by the wholly moving Gerald Stern poem, "Eggshell."

Among the readings will be a brief passage excerpted from the Rebecca Solnit essay, "The Blue of Distance." Solnit writes from a place of knowing toward a place of wonder. An excerpt here:

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light,the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance.  This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

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The Preemptive Howl

These claims, only, can be made for this day: I gave it over to dreaming. To preparing even more for the young writers' workshop I'll be teaching tomorrow, though my agenda is jammed already—more to do, more to see, more to talk about than the girls and I could possibly squeeze into one day.

And yet, how can we call tomorrow a success if we don't also speak of Rebecca Solnit's way of seeing, for example, the color blue? The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. How can we not retrieve Jean-Dominique Bauby from the brink? The last time I saw my father, I shaved him. It was the week of my stroke. How can we talk about beginnings and voice if we do not begin with Ondaatje? Drought since December. How can we claim to move toward the authentic and raw, if we do not tantrum with C.K. Williams, if we do not share his "preemptive howl"? And did you really think it would be possible for me to face a group of aspiring teen writers without reading aloud, with them, from The Book Thief? An original book and a popular book. You see, I'll tell them. It can be done.

And then I'll remind them of what Natalia Ginzburg had to say. I'll warn them, so I can warn myself: There is a danger of cheating with words that don't really come from within, that we have fished up from outside at random and skillfully pieced together, for we do become cunning. There is a danger in becoming cunning, in cheating. It is a very difficult craft, as you can see, but the most wonderful in the world.

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Never Enough Time

I went looking for W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz yesterday, and of course it was buried. There are thirteen bookshelves in my diminutive house and all of them are double stacked—triple, if physics allows—and this despite the fact that I take an alarming number of books to the local library for broader circulation. Even more alarming, I don't consider myself to be sufficiently well read. Or perhaps I read too many genres to have ever specialized in one. I love experts. I wish I were one. I'm not.

In any case, in the course of hunting for Austerlitz, I fell upon The History of Love, the Colum McCanns, the Rebecca Solnits, the complete Cathers, The Book of Salt and The Night Watch, The Optimist's Daughter, The Awakening, and I was Amelia Earhart, and when my husband found me fortressed in by a tower of books and asked (inevitably), "What are you doing?" I looked up and said, "Oh, Bill, I love these books, I love these books." With tears in my eyes that I had not known were there.

Tears because some of my dearest titles have grown slightly vague in my mind. Tears because I can no longer recite some of my favorite lines. Tears because I've just bought three new books for me along with so many books for others—books I have not, in some cases, yet read. Tears because I'm reading Brideshead Revisited for the very first time—the first time!—and when will I have time to read again my favorite books?

Why isn't there ever enough time?

We will take our son to the university bus today, and he will be driven, along with some of his classmates, north, returning for his first set of college finals. He will come home again two weeks from now. We'll miss him in the meantime.

Separately, unexpectedly, yesterday I discovered that a blog reviewer whom I've always admired had this to say about HOUSE OF DANCE. Thank you, Becky of Becky's Book Reviews. Thank you so much.

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