Woodchuck visit

My friend Lucy is rapidly becoming one of the foremost woodchuck photographers in the country. Or so I imagine. Her latest gallery of woodchuck portraits can now be seen at her website, under the title Woodchuck Visit. 

Salt River’s opening

Jenn and I were talking about writerly stuff the other day—present tense, second person, POV, and so on—and I was reminded of something that struck me about the first paragraph of James Sallis’s Salt River. Here it is.

Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left. Val told me that, seconds before I heard the crash of her wineglass against the porch floor, looked up, and only then became aware of the shot that preceded it, two years ago now.

Sallis begins with the sort of “a shot rang out” opening that has been so overused, especially in crime fiction, that student writers are cautioned against it.

But at the very end, he does something different. Having put us right in the moment, with the words “two years ago now” he propels that moment into the past. You can almost hear the whoosh as it goes by. Message: Val died two years ago, but in the mind of the narrator (displaced Memphis ex-cop John Turner) that moment is still fresh, still happening.

Popular pages

Back in 2008 I reported on some of the surprisingly popular pages on my website. I’ve just taken another look, and here are the top ten most popular pages to date, in order. I’ve left out the home pages for various sections, my bio, and so on.

Most of these are book reviews, some of them quite old. A Woman in Her Prime and The Sand Child continue to hang in there, and A Woman in Her Prime has risen to the top. Maybe it’s being assigned to schoolkids in Ghana, and my review is one of the few available online to borrow from?

1. A Woman in Her Prime by Asare Konadu
2. The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
3. The Lives of Beryl Markham by Errol Trzebinski
4. Zimbabwe money
5. The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble
6. Marketing smarter (not more expensively)
7. Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night by Sindiwe Magona
8. The Sand Child by Tahar ben Jelloun
9. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch
10. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Moon rock in the High Peaks

Photo by Eric W. Sydor

Whenever I’m stuck for the next book to read, I can always go back to John McPhee, whose crisp sentences go down easily no matter what mood you’re in.

I’ve been rereading his collection Irons in the Fire, and although I never thought McPhee’s volumes on geology were as interesting as his other work, his long essay “The Gravel Page,” about the use of forensic geology to catch criminals, is fascinating. It’s peppered with quotations from Sherlock Holmes (the phrase “the gravel page” is from Conan Doyle) and it gave me a startling new viewpoint on the gray rock of the Adirondack High Peaks, which I used to scramble around during my high school days in Lake Placid.

Here ... were a dozen pebbles of anorthosite—looking like blue cheese with their gray crystals and yellow weathery rinds—and one could say with certainty just where they came from. There is an anorthosite body of limited dimension in the Laramie Range northeast of Laramie. You would find a very large percentage of pebbles like these in Horse Creek coming out of the Laramies toward the Platte. A monomineralic rock, anorthosite is rare on this planet and very old. Unaccountably, it formed only during the Archean Eon and an era later in the Precambrian known as Neo-Helikian time. Westward, the next anorthosite outcrop would be in the San Gabriel Mountains, above Los Angeles. Eastward, there would be scattered outcroppings in the Canadian Shield. Anorthosite, in unearthly proportions, is the rock of all the high Adirondacks. Upward, it is plentiful in the night sky, being most of what you are looking at when you look at the moon.