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. 

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.