Bobcats and suicides

Nature writers have the reputation of being solitary souls, alone in a cabin like Thoreau or in a desert like Edward Abbey. It’s an oversimplification—Thoreau, for instance, knew and described enough of his neighbors to fill up the intriguing volume Men of Concord -- but it’s an enduring one, and it’s one reason why many writers avoid the nature-writer pigeonhole (no pun intended).

Still, it’s rare and somewhat dazzling to encounter a writer like Edward Hoagland who is just as inquisitive and perceptive about people as he is about red-tailed hawks. Here’s a passage from Sex and the River Styx, about his home in Vermont, that few other people could have written.

Southwest and uphill from me only half a mile is a ledgy outlook above where the local mother bobcat has her kittens every spring—a few hundred yards from the cleft in a pile of rocks in which, every other February, a mama bear gives birth to cubs. It is also where, on account of the spacious view over a pond and, further, undulating mountains, our Congregational clergyman chose to subject himself to an eighty-hour annual fast and “vision quest.” But his hunger pinched him too badly to meditate properly, he said, so the next year he cut the fast to sixty hours, and in the third year to forty: whereupon he sought a transfer. Another man, a Roman Catholic unconnected to the minister, then picked the area of the scenic site to shoot himself, after being accused of sexually molesting a mute, paralytic nursing-home patient dying of Hodgkin’s disease whom he was supposed to be caring for. He left both a death certificate already filled out and an apology for his girlfriend to find when she came back to their apartment from her own work, specifying his location; and she tied his belt around a tree at the spot, to mark her forgiveness. It’s worth noting too, perhaps, that land is at such a premium, not just the bear, the bobcat, the clergyman, and the suicide have recently shared the vicinity of this ledge for important events. Catty-corner across a marshy brook and notch, yet remarkably close, as the ravens fly, is the ridge slope where the pair of coyotes raise their April pups—above but not far from a cow moose’s June nursery bed, and ten flaps from the cliff face on which our ravens nest.

Roger Ebert on being well-read

I’ve known for many years, from watching him on TV, that Roger Ebert is a smart guy. I’ve known at least since I read his review of Days of Heaven that he is an exceptional writer. But it is only now that I’ve discovered he is not only literate but literary.

In an article called Does anyone want to be “well-read?”, Ebert reacts to an article in which Cynthia Ozick poses this question:

Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his “field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados--or Trilling himself?

“I read through this list with dismay,” writes Ebert. “I have read all but two of those writers, love some, and met five.” Yet noting that Ozick’s list was prompted by her review of Saul Bellow’s letters, he confesses that although he still reads Bellow, “I confess I have no plans to return to any of the other authors on her list in whatever time I have remaining.”

As for me, I’ve read at least 20 of the 32 writers on Ozick’s list. I have heard Mailer, Hellman, and Ginsberg read their work, and met Mailer at a reception afterwards. Robert Lowell is probably my favorite American poet, and I have great affection and admiration for Edmund Wilson, who rivals John Updike for the title of greatest overall 20th century American man (or woman) of letters. Wilson was so prolific, and wrote such clear springwater prose, that it is discouraging how few people seem to read him anymore. Frederick Exley found that in the throes of alcoholism and depression, Wilson was the only person he could read.

Ebert calls Wilson “a role model,” and writes that “I have every one of Edmund Wilson’s books, in the sublimely uniform Farrar Straus & Giroux editions.”

All of them? Really? Even The Undertaker’s Garland? If so, I am very impressed. I have 33 myself, and have read them all, and the only other person I know with a similar collection is the old friend who turned me onto Wilson in the first place. (He now works for the Library of America, the nonprofit publishing project that Edmund Wilson championed.)

Year of Meteors

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an unusual painting by the Hudson River painter Frederic Church, picturing an “earth-grazing meteor procession.” The meteor was the inspiration for a poem by Walt Whitman, ”Year of Meteors.”

YEAR of meteors! brooding year! 
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;

(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;

I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;) ...

The old man on the scaffold was, of course, John Brown, who was hanged in December 1859 for treason after the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Researchers at Texas State have tracked down the details of the meteor.

A large Earth-grazing meteor broke apart on the evening of July 20, 1860, creating a spectacular procession of multiple fireballs visible from the Great Lakes to New York State as it burned through the atmosphere and continued out over the Atlantic Ocean.

“Any town that had a newspaper within all those states is going have a story on this,” Olson said. “We have hundreds of eyewitness accounts, but there are probably hundreds more we don’t even have.

“From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we’re able to determine the meteor’s appearance down to the hour and minute,” Olson said. “Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would’ve seen it at the same time, give or take one minute.”

The Thoreau You Don’t Know

At Book Court not long ago, where I went to hear Mimi Zeiger talk about Tiny Houses, I was reminded of Thoreau and his own tiny house by the shores of Walden Pond. I took the train to Concord many times when I was living in Cambridge, and on an early date with Jenn we got drenched in a rainstorm on the way back from the pond. (She continued to go out with me anyway.)

Leaving the bookstore, I looked at a schedule of readings and was sorry to see that I had missed Robert Sullivan reading from his new book The Thoreau You Don’t Know.* I loved his books The Meadowlands and Rats, and was curious to see what he would make of Thoreau, the writer I have probably delved deeper into than any other.

A lot, as it turns out. The Thoreau You Don’t Know is largely devoted to blowing up the usual image of Thoreau as a recluse, a crank, a skulker, a prig, even a jerk. (It is also devoted to erasing the false idea that Thoreau drew a sharp line between nature and man, and came down hard on the side of nature. Those who complain that Thoreau’s cabin wasn’t in the wilderness, and that he took his laundry home for his mother to clean, miss the point that Thoreau was interested not so much in pure wilderness as in the places where man and nature interacted.)

The Thoreau you don’t know sang, danced, played the flute, looked after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children, and threw big watermelon parties. Though he avoided the usual careers that awaited a college graduate (medicine, law, religion) he was hard-working not only as a writer but in more practical ways. Answering a question from his alma mater, he wrote, “I am a Schoolmaster—a Private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.”

The Thoreau You Don’t Know is full of things I didn’t know about Thoreau, and am glad I do now. He owned seventeen dictionaries. He subscribed to a magazine called Businessman’s Assistant. He did magic tricks: making pencils disappear, then pulling them out of children’s ears. He once trapped a bothersome woodchuck and carried it two miles away rather than kill it. (I once did something similar with a raccoon.)

And he liked Walt Whitman and New York City quite a bit more than is usually reported. “When I think of them together,” writes Sullivan, “the ultimate city poet and the ultimate nature writer, the divide between city and country, between nature and civilization, melts away like a polar ice cap.”

*As it happens, I didn’t entirely miss the reading. It’s available on Sullivan’s quirky and engaging book blog. ....

Whitman’s Brooklyn

Greg Trupiano of The Whitman Project, who led the Walt Whitman tour I wrote about a while ago, has announced the launch of the new website Whitman’s Brooklyn. This is from Russell Granger, who created the site:

Whitman’s Brooklyn is now live online—please share the good news!

Come enjoy this highly-immersive experience of Brooklyn’s pictorial heritage. Many of the images we’ve uncovered have never been published online before, and most have never been seen in such a large, vivid format. Color, too!

All the images can be viewed at maximum browser size, and some-- including bird’s eye views and maps--can be explored using a powerful zoom-and-pan tool.

The site currently contains only a portion of what we have collected and prepared. Many more remarkable images and stories will be posted over the coming weeks.

The site has been built in a format to enable visitors to participate by leaving comments, questions, ideas, and stories. Join in!