One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands,
He must somehow see the one thing;
This is the level of art
There are other levels
But there is no other level of art

I confess to something akin to bewilderment mingled with admiration for such an idea–such an ambition. I very much feel as though I have a thousand threads in my hands and am struggling to see the one thing. And so there is for me, in this task, as in so many others a felt necessity to arrive at some greater precision, some usefulness, some method of seeing and saying that offers something to someone else, even if as is the case with this dissertation, I’m not entirely sure who that someone else might be. Still, I’m glad to have chosen to write about poets who I admire so fiercely, women like Lorine Niedecker and men like George Oppen, who not only has given me the challenge of seeing the one thing but who wrote in the concluding lines of the first section of the poem “Route”:

Clarity, clarity, sure clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity.

I find a statement of this kind daunting, but there’s something about it that I also find beautiful. I want to make this my ambition: to write my dissertation carefully, honestly, clearly, without the desperate feeling of having a thousand threads in my hands, but still capable of acknowledging the ways that I am limited and limiting. If anyone reading this has any insight or advice into seeing the one thing when it comes to a large academic writing project or into achieving clarity, please share your thoughts with me. I could use them.

George and Mary Oppen, photograph by Stephen Johnson

Lorine Niedecker, reading (Walden, I hope)

I spent most of that day looking for Niedecker marginalia. It was one of the best days I’ve ever spent researching anything. A few months later I was stunned and overjoyed to learn that Tom Montag had spent more than 120 hours carefully going through all of Lorine’s surviving books and recording her marginal annotations. You can see them all on the Friends of Lorine Niedecker website.

I’m posting this because of a chance discovery I made in that marginalia earlier this week while I was looking for something else. I saw with interest that Lorine owned a copy of legendary Wisconsin Senator and Progressive Party leader Robert La Follette‘s Political Philosophy (published in 1920), the inside cover of which says simply, “Lorine Niedecker – Junior Year” (she graduated from high school in 1922). The annotation that caught my eye wasn’t particularly expressive, in fact, all Niedecker had done was to mark the passage with brackets. It was the contents of the passage itself that interested me, particularly in light of the recent political protests here in Madison (and the ongoing ‘Recall Walker‘ [and Kleefisch] movements) and the burgeoning Occupy [ ] and We Are the 99% movements. In a speech given on the Senate Floor in September 1917 (a time of war) responding to objections made by Senator Porter McCumber (North Dakota) regarding a ‘War Profits Tax’, La Follette asks: “Who does the senator think are the people of this country? Is it the 2 per cent, owners of two-thirds of the wealth, or is it the 98 per cent of the population who have to divide among themselves the meager balance of this country’s wealth, which, apportioned among them per capita, is a little over $800 apiece?” La Follette’s math needs only slight updating, and the current mood is even slightly more inclusive (“We”–”We the People”–”The people of this country” are now the “99%” rather than La Follette’s “98 per cent”), but the sentiment seems remarkable relevant, and I’m pleased to see traces of the deep roots of Wisconsin Progressivism made visible in the material history of Lorine Niedecker’s reading practices.

La Follette with his family in 1917, the year he delivered the speech cited above.

It seems also to me that there is an interesting connection between the two chance passages I’ve noted in this blog post–Emerson’s idea of Thoreau’s richness consisting in a voluntary austerity and La Follette’s excoriation of the 2 per cent who own a full two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. While there is a certain stoical wisdom in pursing that kind of ‘poverty that enjoys true wealth‘, there is also a very real danger in following too ardently the Thoreauvian path of contentment with few wants (or the Christian version of ‘noble poverty’ expressed memorably in 1 Timothy 6:6: “godliness with contentment is great gain”), inasmuch as such a choice might resign us seeing the sometimes crushing meagerness of others’ material conditions as a basic, inalterable social fact–something along the lines of the shoulder-shrugging, responsibility-shirking way some Christians seem to interpret Jesus’ remark that “The poor ye have with you always” (Mark 14:7). It seems to me that Niedecker chose quite clearly to both see herself as one of the 98 per cent–I do wonder what her “I am the 99%” missive might have looked like, though I doubt she would have written something so confessional, much less photographed herself holding it–as well as one who, like Thoreau, strove to be rich by keeping her wants few. I do think, though, that however much we consciously limit the proliferation of our own consumptive desires, we should not extend a similar restraint forcibly upon others, but allow for the flowering of a vast diffusion of desires and wants in our fellow beings, a flowering which requires some basic conditions of comfort, peace, and fertility. I suppose that what I am really trying to say is that no matter how few we make our wants, it seems imperative to me that among them we must retain the desire that forms the heart of George Oppen’s remarkable poem “Street”, namely an “end of poverty” and the “real pain” that so often accompanies it:

STREET

25 And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

26 He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

28 And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

29 But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

30 And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,

34 And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

Aimé Morot's "Le bon Samaritain"

The text indicates that the lawyer intends to test Jesus in some way with his questions (the Greek term εκπειραζο [ekpeirazo] translated here as ‘test’ can also carry the meanings to try, prove, or tempt). In my reading Jesus chooses to respond to this ‘test’ by challenging traditional categories and identities, suggesting that it was possible for a Samaritan to be a neighbor to a suffering traveler in a way that a priest or Levite who felt compelled not to render assistance by duty or precept might not be. After reciting the parable, Jesus asks the lawyer a rather stunning question, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”

What is striking to me about the English phrasing here is the way that neighbor is employed as a way of being. Instead of the more common usage, “I am his neighbor…He is my neighbor, etc.” which would have resulted in Jesus asking “Which of these three men was the traveler’s neighbor?” he asks which man was neighbor unto him. The Greek word used here is πλησίον (plesion) [derived from πέλας (pelas), meaning near or proximate] which in this case means ‘the one near.’ In this usage, I think that Jesus suggests that the idea of ‘neighbor’ central to the Deuteronomic commandment to ‘love one’s neighbor as one’s self’ is both a function of proximity, as the other who approaches me, or whom I approach, thus being corporeally near, and of being, namely, a way of relating to that other that supercedes mere presence–in this story the one who was neighbor was the one who first had compassion and then “took care” of the wounded man (perhaps this mingling of compassion and action constitutes what the lawyer describes as ‘mercy’ in his answer?). Consequently, one can conceive of a neighbor neither as another person that is distant nor as a nearby person towards whom one does not admit/assume corporeal responsibility–responsibility for the health and wholeness of that other’s presence, their body. In this story, the one “of these three” who was neighbor unto the wounded man was the one who came nearest his wounds, the one who handled and endeavored to heal, the one who took care of him, the one touched him. I wonder whether in this story there is another neighbor (not one of the three which Jesus asks about)–not the host, whose job it is to “take care” of strangers, particularly since the host receives payment for the taking care, but the beast, the animal who was conscribed in the carrying, the one who bears the weight of the wounded, who literally carries the wounded man from the place of wounding to the place of hospitality. Suppose Jesus had expanded the question by asking, “which of these all was neighbor unto him that fell among thieves”? If the lawyer was right in pronouncing as neighbor the one [of the three human passersby] who shewed mercy, was not also the beast in this story neighborly? Did not the beast have compassion, and show mercy, and not only that but did not the beast’s mercy and compassion precede the encounter with the wounded man? Was not this beast already showing mercy on the Samaritan by exchanging its strength and labor for payment that could never be fully commensurate with its value? I suppose that one could argue that the beast functions in the story in the same way as the host, doing its job (as a beast of burden) for some pay (one presumes that it is fed and housed in the evening in compensation for its labor), but I think there is something neighborly and too quickly forgotten in this story’s beast, an animal mercy which I have typically overlooked when thinking about this story  [I admit this is a generous reading of what could just as easily be read as exploitation of animal labor or as the symbiotic, mutually beneficial exchange that may explain early species domestication, but still, it's one way to read the story].

The idea of responsibility for the other that I was discussing before considering the case of the beast seems similar in several respects to my understanding of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the other is frequently discussed as being a ‘neighbor’ (Levinas uses the French term prochain (from the word proche–near) rather than voisin, which carries an ocular connotation as it resembles voir–to see, a French verb derived from the Latin vicinis [a word for neighbor from which we get the English vicinity]. A similar sense is also present in our English word neighbor [the Old English neahgehur: neah, near + gebur, dweller. See Martin Heidegger's wonderful essay Building, Thinking, Dwelling for some powerful thoughts on the etymological significance of dwelling]. What is both striking to me about this story and about my practice of neighborliness is not only how limited I sometimes am in considering the plenitude of beings towards which I will consider the possibility of becoming neighbor, but how readily I abdicate my call to be neighbor unto these beings I dwell among, how rarely I choose to become a prochain instead of a voisin, and much more I need to not only see the wounded around me but to approach, to draw near, as though to heal, and occasionally to mutely bear the burden of that other’s wounded body from the place of wounding to a place of hospitality. How much work there is remaining for me to do not merely as one who observes or bears witness to another’s being and suffering, but as one who attends to that other being’s wounding, as one who cares and heals with my embodied presence. To those beings I have lived near but failed to approach when there was need of compassion or healing, I am sorry. I want to be neighbor unto the wounded of every species, and to be neighbored in return when I am wounded or in a place of danger. Please, near ones, help me to attain (and receive) a quality of mercy worthy of the neighbor.

Thanks to Sam Crowfoot for taking the photo.

William Langewiesche

I spent some time catching up on the NPR Story of the Day Podcast today while I was folding laundry. Some were fairly memorable, but my favorite was an interview with this All Things Considered interview by Guy Raz with the journalist, novelist, and former pilot William Langewiesche. After the World Trade Center was destroyed, Langewiesche spent five months at “ground zero” observing the Department of Design and Construction‘s clean up efforts, which he detailed in a long-running series for the Atlantic and later published as American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. I knew nothing about Langewiesche or this story prior to hearing the radio piece, but I was instantly impressed, especially with Langewiesche’s cool and considered manner of speech, his deliberate rationality, and his insistence that his job was to observe and to speak honestly, without judgment, about the things that he observed. Despite this strong sense of journalistic integrity, I was also pleased (and somewhat surprised) to discover that there were some things he experienced that he would not write about, like the private grief of the families of the dead, he called it a “deep, deep grief, that is everlasting.” According to Langewiesche, he did not write about this grief because he “think[s] that’s a private matter. It would have been a violation of these people to write about their grief.”"

Later in the interview, Langewiesche said: ”I believe that grief needs to be private. That doesn’t mean that help can’t be given to those who are grieving, it should be given. But you don’t make a spectacle out of it. You don’t stand up as a politician and wallow in it. And as the media, you don’t wallow in it. It’s not to deny the tragedy. It’s to question the utility of public grief.”

Hearing Langewiesche articulate his particular feelings about the events that he witnessed resonated quite powerfully with me. I too feel a certain reticence towards what feels to me like overly performed and demonstrative expressions of deep feeling and personal or private emotion. I wrote a few days ago about seeking to avoid the spectacle of 9/11 commemoration (I think Newt Gingrich even referred to 9/11 10 year anniversary “celebrations” in the Republican Presidential Primary debate last week), and why I have had a certain distaste and aversion to media representations of the disaster. After hearing Langewiesche speak about his experiences, I’d like to reaffirm his reminder that we ought “to question the utility of public grief.”

"Aspen Cycle" by Owen Mortensen

Each year it happens suddenly, sometimes surprisingly so. This year I began to notice it first when the pickup soccer game I play in ended when the light began to fail, and I biked home and showered and it wasn’t yet 8 o’clock. While puttering around the house the past few days, I closed the windows and put socks on for the first time in several months, signs that it was happening, that summer was giving way to something else, that the long bout of sunshine and lush, abundant verdancy and good weather we’ve enjoyed in Madison was beginning to give way to something else. Today I even got an email from the community garden committee with the ominous subject line “Frost Warning,” which sobered us so much that we pulled indoors the rubber tree and jade plant we’d been keeping on the back porch. I love living in Wisconsin, and I love the richness of it’s several seasons, but I’ve grown especially fond of Spring and Summer. I hope it’s a lengthy Autumn, but even if not, here’s a beautiful song by the great Ane Brun to both chill and keep you warm in all the right ways:

Lyrics:

He falls asleep on her chest, / the best sleep he’d ever met, nevertheless / he dreams of some stranger’s caress

He awakes and he knows / maybe someone else is supposed / to meet his hazy anticipating eyes

He draws the curtains aside / unfolding the first morning light, / he glances at his disenchanted life

Restlessness / is me, you see. / It’s hard to be safe. / It’s difficult to be happy.

It’s the changing of the seasons. / He says I need them. / I guess I’m too Scandinavian.

The relief of spring, / intoxication of summer rain, / the clearness of fall, / how winter makes me reconsider it all

Restlessness / is me, you see. / It’s hard to be safe. / It’s difficult to be happy.

Then she awakes / reaches for the embrace / he decides not to worry about seasons again.

On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, I traveled with a small group of missionaries to an ASDA grocery store in town, where a few of us heard rumors of a plane crash in New York from local British patrons while standing in the checkout (they had recognized our accents, and wanted to share what was probably breaking news at the time). We returned to the MTC, shared what we had heard, and waited for the next group to return from their shopping. As the day progressed, and more and more missionaries returned from their daily shopping, small rumors began to spread through the MTC about what had transpired in the United States. For most of my mission, I kept a fairly regular journal. Here is the entry from my journal at the time (exactly as written) for Tuesday, September 11th, 2001:

Tuesday, September 11

Tonight we learned of the terrible tragedy that has rocked America. Two planes were hijacked and crashed in the NY Twin Towers and a 3rd was crashed into the Pentagon and a 4th crashed into the Pennsylvanian forest. There were over 260 people aboard the 4 flights and probably thousands more killed. My heart is heavy with sorrow even as I write this. Tonight we had a meeting and President Jensen [an older American man and Vietnam veteran who was our ecclesiastical leader and with his wife, was responsible for our training and wellbeing in the MTC] spoke to us about it and then we heard many questions and then we closed with a prayer. He asked me to give it and I did. I was powerfully touched and guided and directed by the Spirit of the Lord as I gave that prayer. I spoke of many things of great importance to me and asked for forgiveness and peace to rest in my and our hearts and comfort and knowledge of God and of the Saviour and Redeemer to all men. And I asked for all hearts to be touched and comforted and turned to good. I felt directed also to pray for the families of the victims in their sorrow and loss, but also for the victims that they may learn of God’s truth and be comforted and also for those who planned and carried out the attacks that all the people of the earth and even those who labor in and under darkness and hatred would soften their hearts and turn to God and know that he is and be forgiven and seek forgiveness and exercise faith and be humbled and repent and be embraced and embrace others in brotherhood, sisterhood, friendship, and love. I wept often through the prayer for God and especially for the love of God and the power of his Spirit touched my heart and directed my words. I am very happy to be alive and to be where I am in the Preston MTC and to have the knowledge of God that I have and to have the love for my fellow men that I have, but most of all to know that I have not learned these things of myself, though I learned them for myself, nor of men but of and from and by the power of God. Please bless and comfort and calm the world tonight and all the people distressed and affected and afflicted by the disasters today that thy love, O God, may rest upon them, and be perceived by them and that they may be healed and comforted and converted. Amen, book and amen.

Obviously, I read this entry now with mixed feelings and some embarrassment. While there are some ideas expressed in it that I can no longer in good conscience stand behind, I do still yearn for greater peace and forgiveness, for a certain broad quality of mercy and consideration extended to all, and feel especially fortunate that I was equipped to think of mercy, peace, and forgiveness, even for the then unknown perpetrators of shocking violence at a time so close to the event itself. What’s most striking to me about this entry, however, is that it’s the only time that the events of September 11, 2001 register themselves on my recorded conscience for the next 10 years (they never again appear in my journal entries or elsewhere in my writing).

When President Jenson made his announcement about the events of the day, he showed a short (3-4 minute) film clip from the news with the events–an exception to official mission policy, which stated that we were not to watch television of any kind, and we discussed the events for a few hours that evening and the next day. I didn’t leave the MTC until late September, by which time the only visible reminder of the events were the ubiquitous newspaper inserts in the windows of so many English homes with American flags and a message that read something like: “We support you.” Occasionally, people would ask us what we thought of the ‘towers falling’ on the street or on their doorsteps, but once they heard that I had only seen a few minutes of footage of the event and didn’t know a whole lot about what had taken place, they quickly lost interest in me as a Yankee curiosity. To this day, my relationship with “9/11″ (a term I have an inexplicable but virulent dislike for, incidentally) feels peculiar, and I feel deeply aware that I did not participate in any significant way in a shared, collective experience that was so important and momentous for nearly all of my peers and fellow citizens of the United States. I have never felt any desire for vengeance or retribution, nor have I felt an especial desire to punish guilty parties for the events of the day, and my desire for justice and the cessation of violence and needless suffering feels the same in this case as in any other. During the 5 year anniversary ceremonies, I saw a few minutes of a documentary film on PBS, but I did not fully engage nor was I particularly hungry to know more. On the whole I discovered that I could not appreciative either the tone and tenor of the televised festivities (for lack of a better word), and consequentially, I completely disregarded the 10th anniversary of the events this past weekend, bypassing media (audio, visual, and printed) entirely on that day.

For me, the question of my ‘memories’ of September 11, 2001 is almost wholly irrelevant–I have almost none–no significant encounter with any form of media or visualization of the events, response, or aftermath. I did not hear any of the political rhetoric or national mourning immediately following the event, saw few public expressions of grief, and read next to nothing about the event, its significance and causes, and how it was projected to change the course of history, as it were. In fact, I have a much more clear memory of sitting in the home of three African men that we had befriended in Newcastle and seeing video footage of green tracers being fired at night into the Iraqi desert in March 2003 on their small 10″ television set and feeling disbelief, awe, and deep dismay at the grim visual evidence of war and destruction carried out by young men and women from my own country of origin. A man named Paolo had made us dinner, fu-fu with peanut soup, and I remember how my hand draped over my knee, pausing over the bowl, unsure of whether I wanted to continue eating, whether I could stomach anything while watching scenes of real destruction on their television set.

About September 11, 2001 and its meanings and many griefs, I have little to say that is not banal. I do not think that there is any healthy way to discover that a war has begun, or that planes have been intentionally flown into buildings, or that cruelty, fear, and hatred have been unleashed, given form, and embodied.

Happy Geeks

                Oranges in the greenest valley I’d ever seen.  Damn, I loved Sacramento.  First we lived on Londonderry Dr. in Rancho Cordova, but then we got a house on base and let my dad’s cousin, Max Liedtke, and his family move in with us.  They had lived with us for a while before that.  They had a pretty big family I think, but I only remember their mom, who was blind in one eye from a fireworks explosion when she was a kid, Greg, the oldest boy, and Natalie, who I called Gnat, which she hated.  She took my room and I had to share with Greg and a younger blonde kid, Nick.  Sometimes I would walk around the back between the side of the house and the wooden fence where there wasn’t much space and protected by the whirring of the fan, pick up the loose white rocks and throw them at Gnat’s window.  That pissed her off too.  But then we moved out, those bastards, and onto the base.  116 Semple Pl.  We had those ugly-ass bushes out front that smelled like poison insecticide pine trees.  And behind the itchy one in front of the house there was a nozzle and hose that I would use to spray my sisters cat, Ink.  I was a mean little bastard to that cat.

I had the best friends there.  Trevor Miller, Robert Rice, Robert Ringer, Stripper Stripper Stripper McCrory Crory Crory, who was from Mississippi and who I traded all my Daryl Strawberry’s to, Jared and Josh Crandall, one of whom busted their heads open on the big jump we’d always hit on the way home from school, and Josh Bass and Nick Corcoran at the end.  At the end of my street there was a red headed kid named Michael, whose mom read a book on how to win sweepstakes and drawings and won a car, t.v. and some other stuff.  When I was in 2^nd or 3^rd grade, he caught some strange virus that completely paralyzed him for almost a year.  Finally it just went away, and he slowly regained motor skills, although when I moved years later, he was still slow and a little uncoordinated.  There was also one geeky kid, who read fantasy novels and picked his nose, that when I burned down the field with Greg and was shaking with shock as I was walking home the long way came up to me with advice like he had experience in starting huge brush fires. “What I would suggest is to enlist the services of the fire department without alerting too many adults.”  He told us once he wasn’t into sports, but like his dad was a real outdoorsman.  Outdoorsman my ass, he read The Hobbit in 3^rd grade.

California was perfect for kids.  Long hot summers, a huge pool where I saw Crystal Clear Pepsi for the first time, and sports.  I don’t know why, but the pool was surrounded by a big fence with barbed wire on top.  It was even radder because it had a separate diving pool with a high dive and every hour they had a 10 minute adult swim.  That was how we kept track of time.  Baseball was hot too, a dry heat, but I loved it because sweating was fun then.  Roger Jolley, the old guy who ran the youth baseball leagues always called me and Trevor ‘rookie’, so we called him ‘Sportswriter’ or something cheesy like that.  After Stripper, Kevin, Trevor, and Robert Rice had all moved, I used to ride my bike, the only bike with real tires I have ever owned, a red Huffy street bike with white tires that used to make awesome skid marks on the black asphalt, down to Robert Ringer’s house or to the rec center.  We played pool, foosball, shuffleboard and I often watched older kids, the homies with half-domes, play marijuana basketball.  Then I would go to one kid, who hated me but was friends with Trevor’s house and we’d all relax or usually play some sport.  Boner was always there.  A real laid-back bone-skinny black guy named Jonas, he was the only guy, other than myself, that I had ever seen wear high socks, and he only did it a few times.

My hero was an older guy with a traditional boxcut afro, no fade, just square.  He was the coolest guy I’d ever met, and the nicest.  I was a goofy dresser and since I hated socks with stitches along the toes, I always wore long tube socks without the stitches and my thing since I was little was to pull them up, all the way up, which looked funny with the short shorts from the 80’s that little kids always wore.  I also had tiger stripe socks that were knee-high but had 3 fat stripes at the top, usually in a color-new color-first color pattern.  This guy would always take the time to help my fashion.  Everyone made fun of my high socks and I remember one time, riding my bike back from Randy’s house (he wasn’t home), Randy being the crazy-wild white trash kind of kid with long blonde dirty hair that probably drank and had sex in 5^th grade, had no dad and an easy mom.  He was a really nice kid though.  Anyway, I rode by this group of guys and my hero was there, and he called me over, took me aside and rolled down my socks so I was looking pretty cool.  I rode my bike home, looking cool the whole way back, but then I pulled them back up again.  I was a hopeless geek.

The Oakland A’s were my favorite.  The Bash Brothers were heroic, but I worshipped the Man of Steal, Rickey Henley Henderson.  I wore #24 for years because of him, I even read his book [to read a fantastic piece by David Grann from The New Yorker about Rickey still playing minor-league baseball well into his 40s, check this out].  The year of the A’s was ’89.  That’s when they swept the Giants, my hated enemies because they were Trevor’s favorite team.  ’89 was the year.  The year I started hating Kevin Mitchell (Trevor’s favorite player) and the year of the earthquake.  Game 3 was just getting startedwhen Candlestick fell down.  I was asleep in Sacramento when my bed moved and I woke up.  My mom was reading in the living room with her cheeks in her hands and elbows on the carpet when she felt herself shaking.  The World Series was postponed for a week and a half while they picked up bodies, moved cement, and repaired San Fransisco.  We learned Gay Pride meant as much as straight pride during a real crisis.  The A’s swept.

I tasted the sunset alot.  I supposed to be home when it got dark, and I always waited too late.  So I’d race home on my kick-ass Huffy with the cool wind in my face and mouth and sometimes sprinklers blew at me which shivered, but I drank them because cold air makes you thirsty.

Outside that pool with their sprinklers on was the first time I ever swore, too.  I was walking with Trevor, my best friend and the only person I have ever thrown a punch at and lost in speech and looking at the barbed wire, the sprinkler hit us freezing cold.  Surprising even myself, I said, “Shit.”  I had to make him promise not to tell my parents.  I think he will keep that secret forever, but that’s just what friends do.

So, reading this years later, I’m embarrassed at times (especially by the needless profanity), but still a little impressed at how perceptive I was at 15 or 16. There are moments in this piece that I’m kind of proud of, and insights that surprise me–I’m glad that I had the attitude that I did about Gay Pride despite being a young Mormon teen heavily involved in very masculine, gender normative, and largely homophobic sports, and I’m impressed with the attention I give to sensory details and perceptions–I can sense an early desire to show instead of tell. There’s probably more to be embarrassed of than proud of, but it’s what I wrote, and it was my truth at a certain point in my life.

Now here’s the saddest part for me: I don’t know what happened to any of the children I mention in the story, my childhood friends and acquaintances. I lived in the same dorm with Jared Crandall during my freshman year at BYU, and when I moved to Oklahoma a few years later, I ran into Trevor Miller and we played baseball together for a few years, but since that time, all of these boyhood friends have vanished from my life. I miss them–Trevor especially–and would love to know where they are and how any of them are doing. And so, dear readers, I turn to you. If you’ve got any leads, please pass them on. Readers, what are your most vivid memories of childhood? What pieces of writing from your teen years can you dig up, and what feelings do they stir up in you?

Bill Bryson, at home in the North of England

Bryson was born in Iowa and attended college at Drake University (where my cousin Rick earned his law degree) in Des Moines for a few years  before dropping out to backpack across Europe. He got a job in the UK, met his wife in Surrey, and they briefly returned to the States, where Bryson finished his undergraduate degree. He then moved to North Yorkshire (he lived in Malham, a lovely village in the Yorkshire Dales) where he worked as a journalist for more than a decade. In the late 80s he left journalism to write independently, in 1995 he moved back to the United States and in 2003 he returned to England, just around the time that I was leaving the country after completing my mission for the LDS church. It was actually in Yorkshire that I first heard about Bryson. I was shopping for groceries at an ASDA (a Walmart subsidiary and large supermarket/grocery chain in the UK) in Barnsley when I saw a copy of what was then his most recent book: A Short History of Nearly Everything. 

Front cover of the UK edition of A Short History of Nearly Everything

At the time, I wasn’t permitted to read anything outside of what was known as the “missionary library”, which was comprised of the standard works of the LDS church, official church publications, and a small list of semi-canonical books (very safe, tame stuff, the most intellectually engaging of which were former LDS Apostle James Talmage’s Articles of Faith and Jesus the Christ). I was (and am) a voracious reader, and this restriction was difficult for me to abide, but for two years, I did my best to obey the constraints, though I was nearly always hungry for good literature (especially poetry) and intelligent creative non-fiction. On that particular Monday in ASDA, Bryson’s book caught my eye, and I remember taking it off the shelf to skim the dust jacket. I was carefully not to actually read the book, but I remember thinking that they book definitely looked like something I’d want to read when I again had the liberty to do so (however, I was so starved for interesting reading material that I probably would have felt this way about just about anything). I wheeled my cart of groceries to the checkout, paid for them, and promptly forgot all about the book.

Front cover of the US edition of A Short History of Nearly Everything

A few years later, after finishing my undergraduate degree and just before coming to Madison to start working on a Ph.D. in English, I was working as a land surveyor in Boise, Idaho. I had evenings and weekends off, which meant I had a lot of time to read. I started going to a small branch of the Boise Public Library! (more on the exclamation mark in a future post) just inside the Boise Mall a couple of times a week to find interesting books. One week, I saw a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything. Even though the US edition came equipped with a different cover, the name clicked and I checked out the book. It was a fantastic book, that rarest of things, a lucid, readable, but eminently intelligent introduction to just about every branch of science currently practiced in the West. Bryson is one of the best popularizers of detailed, scholarly knowledge that I know, and in many ways reminds me stylistically of Michael Pollan, in that both have a sharp eye for compelling, engaging narrative supported by a broad range of relevant information. In both cases, I come away feeling like I’m reading someone who has engaged with and synthesized a vast amount of detailed scholarly information, who is immensely learned and widely read, but who is capable of mastering their material rather than letting their material master them. It’s really a treat to read writers who can tell captivating stories while simultaneously summarizing a vast body of richly detailed information in a style that is both inviting and accessible. A Short History of Nearly Everything was the best thing I read that whole year summer, and when I finished it I decided to dig in to other books by Bryson.

I got a copy of his book about trekking the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail on CD from the library, and starting playing the discs on the drive to and from work. Withing a couple of weeks it became the first (and only) book I’ve ever listened to from beginning to end on compact discs. I liked the book, but didn’t rate it as highly as A Short History, and so was a little less enthusiastic when it came to the rest of his back catalog. I decided to skip his travel writing (In A Sunburned Country) and his notes on American culture  started his memoir (I’m a Stranger Here Myself, which actually looks quite interesting), but did check out his memoir: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, but I was reading about 6 other books at the time, and I ended up moving before I finished it. I found the ‘book trailer’ for this book to give you a taste for what it was like.

A little more than a year into graduate school, I was browsing the new arrivals shelf at College Library (the same place that I first found Mark Nowak’s poetry, actually) when I saw a small slim volume on William Shakespeare. Picking it up, I noticed two things: first, that it was part of a series of biographies called “Eminent Lives” and more intriguingly, that the author of the book was Bill Bryson, the ginger-bearded imp himself. I was a little dubious at first glance–Bryson was a popular writer, and I generally regard books about Shakespeare as guilty until proven innocent of all kinds of crimes against historicity, hyperbole, and perspective. I trusted Bryson more than the average bear, however, and the book was small, so I decided to check it out. I started reading it, and couldn’t stop. I finished in a couple of days and was massively impressed. I decided to look up what Bryson was doing, and discovered that he had been recently appointed to serve as the Chancellor of Durham University, which is home to the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre (more on Bunting in a future post in this series) and housed in one of the most impressive cities I visited during the whole of my mission.

Bronze statue of the top third of a ex-MSU football coach, with my friend Eric. Is he a hermaphrodite? You decide.

After finishing the biography, I enthusiastically recommended the book to my friend Eric, who is writing a dissertation on satire in early modern English drama. Despite his passionately held belief that Francis Bacon is solely responsible for all of Shakespeare’s plays (as well as Jethro Tull’s entire discography, many of the Lumière brothers’ films, and approximately 90% of the furniture you can buy at IKEA), Eric also enjoyed Bryson’s biography and later lent me a copy of Bryson’s much earlier book on the history of the English language: Mother Tongue.

I just finished Mother Tongue last week. Here are some highlights:

English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly–so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. … We have a strange … tendency to load a single word with a whole galaxy of meanings. Fine, for instance has fourteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two as an adverb. In the OED it fills two full pages and takes 5,000 words of description. We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge, feeling fine, fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite separate things. The condition of having many meanings is known as polysemy, and it is very common. … In the OED, round alone (that is without variants like rounded and roundup) takes 7 1/2 pages to define or about 15,000 words of text. … Even when you strip out its obsolete senses, round still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb, and two as a preposition. But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participal adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words–the length of a short novel–to discuss them all.

I love the OED. Also on the subject of etymology, I learned about words that seem to appear out of nowhere:

For centuries the word in English [for dog] was hound (or hund). Then suddenly in the late Middle Ages, dog–a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word–displaced it. No one has any idea why. … Among others without known pedigree are jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat, fun, crease, pour, put, niblick (the golf club), noisome, numskull, jalopy, and countless others. Blizzard suddenly appeared in the nineteenth century in America (the earliest use is attributed to Davy Crockett) and rowdy appeared at about the same time.

Bryson tells a couple of funny, though possibly fanciful stories (he’s been taken to task in some of his books for repeating folk tales and urban legends as true), including the following: “The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers’ dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant”, and in the nineteenth century “one lady was reported to have dressed her goldfish in miniature suits for the sake of propriety and a certain Madame de la Bresse left her fortune to provide clothing for the snowmen of Paris”.

At one point, Bryson quotes the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen as likening the French language to the severe and formal gardens of Louis XIV, but describing English as being “laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations.” Whether it’s an accurate description or not, I liked the idea.

I also learned more about two very interesting poetic forms: holorime–a poem that uses lines that are pronounced identically but spelled differently and clerihews, which Bryson describes as “pithy poems that start with someone’s name and purport, in just four lines, to convey the salient facts of the subject’s life”.

There was a lot more of interest in the book. It’s a good one, like everything by Bryson that I’ve read. What I’m trying to say is that he’s a gem–read his books. Also, if you dress up in an awesome costume, he just might sign your copies of his work in a train station. And that’s when you’ll know you’ve made it to the big time.

Bill Bryson, just doing his thang for some big animals who like his style