Thoreau and jigsaws

Lately I’ve been reading two books I plan to review: Margaret Drabble’s memoir The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws and the new edition of Thoreau’s Journal from New York Review Books.

It was interesting to discover an odd connection between the two. In a passage included in the NYRB edition, Thoreau not only compares the disassembled shell of a painted turtle to a jigsaw puzzle, he actually anticipates (a key word in the Journal) the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Oct. 18, 1855
I find the white fragments of a tortoise-shell in the meadow, — thirty or forty pieces, straight-sided polygons, — which apparently a hay-cart passed over. They look like broken crockery. I brought it home and amused myself with putting it together. It is a painted tortoise. The variously formed sections or component parts of the shell are not broken, but only separated. To restore them to their place is like the game which children play with pieces of wood completing a picture. It is surprising to observe how these different parts are knitted together by countless minute teeth on their edges....

To rebuild the tortoise-shell is a far finer game than any geographical or other puzzle, for the pieces do not merely make part of a plane surface, but you have got to build a roof and a floor and the connecting walls. These are not only thus dovetailed and braced and knitted and bound together, but also held together by the skin and muscles within. It is a band-box.

Bending the Bow

Bending the Bow is a new anthology of African love poetry, edited by the Malawian poet Frank Chipasula and published by Southern Illinois University Press. Here’s an excerpt from my blog post at Words Without Borders:

The earliest poems are among the best, and do much to undermine the idea that ancient Egypt was a gloomy place oppressed by pharaohs and preoccupied by death. “My love is back, let me shout out the news!” begins the first. “My arms swing to embrace her, / And heart pirouettes in its dark chamber / glad as a fish when night shades the pool.”

Naturally enough, many of the poems collected here are addressed from a young man to a young woman, or vice versa. These African lovers sometimes focus on different details from those a Western lover might. “My dark-brown girl is like a cow,” begins a traditional poem in the Aandonga language. Liyongo Fumo of Kenya praises a woman in these words: “Her matching eyebrows / are perfectly parallel / and neatly join at the root / as if they are knotted together.”

The New Yorker goes to Governors Island

A couple of weeks ago Nick Paumgarten published an article on Governors Island in The New Yorker that nicely captures the strange appeal of the place, and the difficulties involved in figuring out what to do with it. (The full text is available only to subscribers, but an abstract and video tour are available).

The fortunate few who were permitted on the island after the Coast Guard left—park rangers, ferry crews, architects, city dignitaries and their guests—discovered a time capsule, with the beguiling anachronisms of Havana and the eerie emptiness of Chernobyl, minus the tyranny and the radiation. Reports came back of spectacular views, shady lanes, weird buildings, ocean breezes, and a wealth of oddball archeology.

That ghost-town feeling is a large part of what has drawn me to the island over the last few summers. But as of this year the place has definitely been discovered, with long lines at the ferry building and Time Out publishing a supplement on how Governors Island is a hip new getaway. I would prefer it to stay sleepy and undiscovered, but as Paumgarten explains, that isn’t a viable option.

The island can’t remain whatever it is now, in spite of its charms. To stay open to the public, it needs remunerative tenants and regular constituents. It needs someone to need it. The cost of maintaining the island (so that roof tiles and tree limbs don’t kill people), and of operating the ferry, is fourteen million dollars a year, enough to give anyone in the executive or the legislative branch of local government pause, especially in an era of severely straitened public finances.

The Thing Around Your Neck

My review of The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is out in the fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation (where Scott Esposito just interviewed me!). Here’s an excerpt:

Chimamanda has a clear, deceptively plain style that is well suited for investigating the subtleties of her characters’ motivations. Only rarely does a phrase call attention to itself and make you notice that what she is doing is far from easy.

One of these moments comes in the title story, “The Thing Around Your Neck,” shortly after the female narrator had been subjected to an unwanted sexual advance.

“You locked yourself in the bathroom until he went back upstairs,” says the narrator, “and the next morning, you left, walking the long windy road, smelling the baby fish in the lake.”

I’m not sure why the smell of the baby fish is so peculiar, yet so right. It may have something to do with the clean, lonely smell of a lake and its alien life in the early morning when no one else is around.

Subway reading

From what I’ve seen, most people on the subway prefer to use their time staring into space. Quite a few listen to music, and some watch movies on miniature DVD players. Most of those who read seem to read newspapers, but there are still a few who read books on the subway, and those are the focus of the New York Times article Reading Underground.

I do a lot of my own reading on the subway, and a large part of it standing up, as there is usually no seat on the C train to Manhattan during rush hour. But with access to a vertical pole, it is easy enough to keep a good grip while balancing an open book in my left hand. I can tell when a book is really absorbing because I miss my stop.

Reading on the subway is not only good for the mind, but a useful way to avoid eye contact with panhandlers and erratic individuals. At the same time, it doesn’t mask potential danger signs as badly as the white earbuds do.

I’ve heard it said that the quality of books read on the F train from Park Slope is the highest of any subway line, but on the C line as well I see people reading local authors like Paul Auster and Colson Whitehead, or the occasional oddball choice like Humboldt’s Gift in an old copy from the paperback series that features the enormous face of the character on the cover.

Sometimes you have to think twice about what to read on the subway. At Jenn’s recommendation, I changed the dust jacket on The Satanic Verses before taking it underground. And Consider the Lobster, with its cover image of a lobster lifting a claw in greeting or an appeal for help (though actually neither, since the lobster is red and therefore already boiled) seemed to beckon a pleasantly deranged gentleman who approached me with his own claw waggling in the air. “Consider the lobster!” he declaimed.