Chasing the “I”

Dear Memoir

By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Published on August 6, 2010

I met your kind in college.  It was in Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. Your pages were musty, your spine well-broken.  Your words engulfed me, lassoed me in the undertow of Jamison’s death-thoughts and hallucinations.  You suited her telling just right.  When I closed the cover I knew Jamison, could feel the tumult of living bipolar and discovering it so late in life.

What happened next?  I did not seek another incarnation of you. Instead, I met your cousins, the Personal Essays.  They were enchanting, always touching my arm and pulling me aside to confide some story well worth my time through its hilarity or gravity.  My favorite of these cousins?  Bernard Cooper‘s “Winner Taking Nothing,” Adam Gopnik‘s “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” James Baldwin‘s “Notes of a Native Son,” Joan Didion‘s “Goodbye to All That,” and E.B. White‘s “Once More to the Lake.”

Then your sedate, worldly wise, and pondering cousins came to dinner.  These were the books of Literary Journalism.  How I liked meeting Tracy Kidder‘s Mountains Beyond Mountains and Old Friends, Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, the nonfiction sections of Joseph Mitchell‘s Up in the Old Hotel, and Anne Fadiman‘s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

Next to these sat their children, sun-burnt and bespectacled.  The Researched Essays.  They brought bug jars, binoculars, and yellowed biographies to the dinner table, and whatever our conversation topic, they had some trivia to toss us, or excused themselves and consulted Britannica.  They were brilliant and conversational; still, I chose favorites–Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, David Foster Wallace‘s “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” Gay Talese‘s “New York is a City of Things Unnoticed,” and John McPhee‘s “The Search for Marvin Gardens.”

Halfway through dinner, in flowed your niece, the Lyric Essay, with emerald rings on her fingers and hair down to her waist.  I loved Lia Purpura‘s “Glaciology,” John D’Agata‘s “Notes Toward the Making of a Whole Human Being,” and Albert Goldbarth‘s “After Yitzl.”  After dinner, we sat in the guest room and I tried on her rings.

Your relatives were such good company that I forgot about you.  And when I turned back to you, I found we’d grown apart.

Full article at The Curator

The Fog Horn

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like the trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.””

The Fog Horn blew.

“I made up that story,” said McDunn quietly, “to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The fog horn calls, I think, it comes…”

“But-” I said.

“Sssst!” said McDunn. “There!” He nodded out to the Deeps.

Something was swimming towards the lighthouse tower.

It was a cold night, as I said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the ravelling mist. You couldn’t see far and you couldn’t see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on it’s way about the night earth, flat and quiet, to colour of grey mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth/ And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck And then-not a body-but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water ona slender and beautiful neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

I don’t know what I said. I said something.

“Steady, bot, steady,” whispered McDunn.

“It’s impossible!” I said.

“No, Johnny, we’re impossible. It’s like it always was ten million years ago. It hasn’t changed.. It’s us and the land that’ve changed, become impossible. Us!”

It swam slowly and with a great majesty out in the icy waters, far away. the fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disc held high and sending a message in primaeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

“It’s a dinosaur of some sort!” I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.

“Yes, one of the tribe.”

“But they died out!”

“No, only hid away in the Deeps, Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn’t that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the worldin a word like that.”

“What” we do?”

“Do? We got our job, we can’t leave. besides, we’re safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing’s as big as a destroyer and almost as swift.”

“But here, why does it come here?”

The next moment I has my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.

“Now,” whispered McDunn, “do you know why it comes here?”

I nodded.

extracted from The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury. Full story here

The magnetic field of the human heart has actually been measured. It has only a millionth the strength that of the earth, but is a hundred times stronger than that of the brain.

– Cole Swensen, Flare.

The River and the Highway

“Culture has quite literally reshaped the world. In the nineteenth century, if you had asked well-traveled Americans to sketch a map of their country, including its most significant features, they would most certainly have drawn you a continent full of rivers. The Mississippi, of course, but also the Connecticut, the Ohio, the Missouri, the St. Lawrence and a dozen more. Rivers – part of the created, “uncultured” world – were a crucial part of the world that early Americans had to make something of. And make something of them they did indeed – the rivers, in their dual role as transportation routes for cargo and people on the one hand, and barriers to travel on the other, prompted myriad cultural innovations. Just to name the rivers is to realize that they gave their names to many of the states created as America expanded westward. Cities arose at the juncture of rivers. Technologies were developed to harness the river for transportation. Songs and stories arose that depended on rivers for their setting and meaning – try to imagine Huckleberry Finn without Huck and Jim on the barge floating down the Mississippi.

But if you asked similarly well-traveled Americans in the twenty-firstcentury to sketch a map of the continent, I suspect they would have a hard time identifying any river but the Mississippi. Here’s a quick quiz: where on a map is the Missouri River? If you know the answer, you probably either live in St. Louis or have a lifelong obsession with geography. Rivers, so central to the world of the nineteenth century, are now peripheral at best. Interstate highways, on the other hand, are the principal means of travel by land, and most Americans can sketch out the rough lines of Interstate 90, cutting east to west across the continent from Boston to Seattle, and the highway Southern Californians call “the 5”, stretching from San Diego to the Pacific Northwest.

Highways are our rivers. Cities arise and economies thrive where they intersect. New forms of commerce flourish alongside the interstate. The extraordinarily complex web of modern intermodal transport, depending on containers that can be transferred seamlessly from ship to rail to truck, depends on the highway system. Songs and stories arise from the highway system too – if nothing quite so romantic and durable as Huckleberry Finn, then at least the enduring tradition of the American “road movie” and Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic On the Road.”

– Culture Making, Andy Crouch.

Actually Actually…

… and this is my 100th post. I guess it’s an appropriate milestone?

I actually write like
a daily mail journalist

I Actually Write Like Analyze your writing!

Apparently…

I write like
George Orwell

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Forgottonia

I was scrounging around Left Bank Books, St Louis, Missouri, and picked up the delightful volume “Lost States: True Stories of Txlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made it” by Michael J Trinklein, and thought I would copy a passage relevant to my current location.

An accurate name for the land Illionis Forgot.

Illionis is pretty much all corn. Once you venture outside Chicago, the state becomes one giant field dedicated to the creation of tasty high-fructose corn syrup. To serve the corn farmers, small and medium-sized towns have grown up all across the Land of Lincoln – cities like Peoria, Decator, and Springfield.

What’s curious is that interstate highways connect nearly every one of the villages. Compare a map of Illionis to a map, say, of Iowa or Missouri, and you almost have to augh: Illinois has so many more miles of freeway compared to its neighbours.

Here’s how it happened: A big city like Chicago has a lot of people, and that means a lot of money and a lot of representation in Congress. But you can build just so many highways in the Windy city. So the “downstate” residents reap the benefits of living in a populous state…

Having said all that, one section of the state has been left out: the counties in the western bulge. Largely cut off by the Illinois River, this area didn’t get any fancy freeways in the 1960s and 1970s.

In protest, a group of residents decided to form their own state, Forgottonia. They appointed a governor and tried to attract attention. But what they really wanted was an interstate – specifically, Interstate 72, which would provide a shortcut between Chicago and Kansas City. Legilsation that would have authorized the construction of I-72 was defeated in Congress in 1968 and then again in 1972. Parts were eventually built decades later, but even today I-72 extends only to the Illionis-Missouri border….

Such is the sad story of Forgottonia. It never had a real shot at statehood – and it’s still pretty much forgotten. But they do have corn. Lots and lots of corn. So long as America keeps drinking sixty-four-ounce fountain drinks, Forgottonia’s people will survive. In fact, about the only thing that could hurt orgottonia would be medical reports suggesting high-fructose corn syrup isn’t healthy.

Oh.