Rereading Herzog

Herzog is not even one of my favorite Bellows (those would be Henderson the Rain King, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and The Dean’s December—two of which are included in the latest Bellow volume from Library of America) but now that I’m reading it again after many years I’m rediscovering some wonderful passages. I thought I would tweet this favorite sentence, and discovered that it’s exactly 140 characters:

There is a distant garden where curious objects grow, and there, in a lovely dusk of green, the heart of Moses E. Herzog hangs like a peach.

Here is Herzog on his way to Martha’s Vineyard:

In the mild end of the afternoon, later, at the waterside in Woods Hole, waiting for the ferry, he looked through the green darkness at the net of bright reflections on the bottom. He loved to think about the power of the sun, about light, about the ocean. The purity of the air moved him. There was no stain in the water, where schools of minnows swam. Herzog sighed and said to himself, “Praise God—praise God.” His breathing had become freer. His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines.

And here he is watching some demolition in New York City (on the same page where his heart hangs like a peach):

At the corner he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage. Moses heard the air, softly pulled toward the flames, felt the heat. The workmen, heaping the bonfire with wood, threw strips of molding like javelins.

Circus books

Jeffrey Ford, author of The Drowned Life, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Shadow Year (which I read recently), and much more, recommends several books about the circus. Check it out soon, because his previous lists are apparently nowhere to be found.

I was pleased to see some of my favorites on the list: The Circus of Dr. Lao, Nights at the Circus, and Edward Hoagland‘s first novel Cat Man, which he wrote before graduating from Harvard in 1954. (John Updike was his classmate.) If the others are as good as these, they will be well worth checking out. 

Floating Off the Page

I sometimes feel I’m cheating when I read the quirky human-interest stories in the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. Those stories aren’t the reason why the Journal exists, after all. They’re just a sop to English majors like me who get tired of reading about GDP and inverted yield curves.

But how many yield-curve stories would still be fresh and readable forty years after they’re published, or even forty days? The pieces collected in Floating Off the Page still live, and some are forty years old, or older. Short, varied, and entertaining, they make perfect reading for hot summer days when the attention span is limited.

A surprising number of the columns are about animals. There’s one about people who get high by licking toads, one about people who put their dogs and cats on a vegan diet, and one about a guy who turns roadkill into recipes like “groundhog baked in sour cream, spiced mustard and a bit of rosemary.” There’s the New York City truck that picks up dead horses, sea lions, and bison, a man paid by the FDA to sniff fish all day, and the cannon that shoots dead chickens at the windshields of aircraft. There is also a heartbreaking story about the struggle to save sea otters oiled by the Exxon Valdez.

Some of these pieces actually have something to with business (though frequently coupled with animals). We find out about copyright enforcers who have cracked down on Girl Scout singalongs, about a Chinese restaurant that cornered the market on rat recipes, about a Scotsman who makes stainless steel braces for sheep, and about a maker of prison underwear whose business became much more profitable when he started turning the underwear scraps into gun-cleaning patches. Enjoy!

Hitch-22

If I’d known how interesting Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 was going to be, I would have lined up an assignment to write a full-length review before it appeared. For blogging purposes, there is so much here that it’s hard to know where to begin.

I had read some of Hitchens’ columns in The Nation before he broke with the magazine, and his support for the Iraq war made me regard him as one of those liberals who lose their grip on reality for no apparent reason. Still, to see him speak on TV, or especially in debate, was to be impressed with his focus, erudition, and combativeness. Having read his book, I can see that the erudition was honed by an Oxford education and the combativeness by a youth spent as a Trotskyist rabblerouser.

A long time ago I overheard someone ask a young activist what party he belonged to, and he replied, “I’m a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.” It hadn’t quite sunk into my brain before that “left” and “right” are not the only ways to organize one’s political life. Hitchens’ political instincts, like those of that activist, have more to do with human rights than party platforms. Whether or not you agree with him that it was our job to overthrow Saddam Hussein, this belief is consistent with his previous positions, and based on extensive experience as a reporter around the world. (Photos show him not only in Iraq but in Kurdistan, Cyprus, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Uganda, Venezuela, Romania, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and the Western Sahara.)

Hitchens says he discovered only while on the tour for this book that he had esophageal cancer, the ailment that killed his father. But reading “Prologue with Premonitions,” which introduces this book, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have a strong sense that something wasn’t right. It begins as Hitchens picks up a copy of the National Portrait Gallery’s magazine Face to Face and sees a 1979 photo of himself with Martin Amis, captioned “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He moves on to thoughts of T.S. Eliot, Julian Barnes’ book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and to this thought:

When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps “too soon.” Nothing dissolves this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken too “late.”

Well, Hitch-22 wasn’t conceived or written too late, because—well, here it is. I hope that the author, too, will be around for many more years to goad, infuriate, and stimulate his readers and listeners. 

Water lilies

Here are a couple of the water lilies in bloom yesterday at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

“Men will travel to the Nile to see the lotus flower, who have never seen in their glory the lotuses of their native streams.” (Thoreau)