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This summer, with my dad gone for two years, we’ll be cleaning out my parents’ garage and making it a safe place for the grandchildren to play. The garage holds camping equipment, bicycles, fishing gear, and snow tires. But for … Continue reading
“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
–Edward Abbey, “Joy, Shipmates, Joy!” High Country News, 24 September 1976
(via Melissa Lamberton)
In “Out the Window,” an essay in the January 23 New Yorker, Donald Hall reveals that he has let go of writing poetry. This is the quality of prose that remains:
As daylight weakens, snow persists. In the twilight of 4 P.M., the birds have gone, sleeping somewhere somehow. No: a nuthatch lands for a last seed. The cow barn raises its dim shape. It was built in 1865, and I gaze at it every day of the year. A few years ago, when we had an especially snowy winter, I thought I would lose the barn. A yard of whiteness rose on the old shingles, and I could find no one to clear it off. The roof was frail and its angles dangerously steep. Finally friends came up with friends who shovelled it, despite its precariousness, and the following summer I hired a roofer to nail metal over the shingles. Shingle-colored tin disposes of snow by sliding it off. Now I look at the sharp roof of the carriage shed at the barn’s front, where a foot of snow has accumulated. The lower two-thirds has fallen onto drifts below. The snow at the shed’s metal top, irregular as the cliff of a glacier, looks ready to slide down. In the bluing air of the afternoon, it is vanilla icing that tops an enormous cake. A Brobdingnagian hand will scrape it off.
However much I end up reading in this new year, or any year to come, I can hardly imagine I will find a new piece of writing with beauty, patience, wisdom, and strength to equal this one. My god, what a gift Hall still has.
You’ll see at the link above that the essay’s behind a paywall. Forget fixing the car or buying the baby new shoes: Subscribe already!
“Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write about my own self, the results were far from illuminating, for the simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as I began writing The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions so much but about the town where I grew up.”
–Jeffrey Eugenides, The Paris Review, Issue 199, Winter 2011
Since we’re still within the twelve days of Christmas, the philanthropists at Hayden’s Ferry Review are still in a generous mood. Through Saturday, January 7, if you know how to retweet, share a post on Facebook, or comment on a blog post, you can win the golden ticket: admission to the annual Desert Nights, Rising Stars writers conference.
Really? You’re already booked for the weekend of Feb. 23-26? Really? Then tell your friends. That’s what I’m doing.
Amazon may be the devil, but lurking on the Intertubes there are angels, too. Longform is one. Pair it with Instapaper, and you’ll never be bored again.
It occurs to me that the world could be divided into those (sheep) who find Chapter 32 of Moby Dick incomprehensible, and those (goats) who find it devilishly majestic and maybe even holy. Call me Goat.
Oh, right—Only four shopping days left. That wish list:
It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
I’ve been intending to write a long post about the decline of the independent bookstore, the deleterious impact of Amazon on state budgets and local community, what the music industry says about the book industry, and the occasional glimmer of hope.
I’ll get to that. For now, though, I’ll just say, take a look at the future:
Pretty awesome, isn’t it? Arriving in February.
Christopher Hitchens, in the January issue of Vanity Fair:
I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.
Sit down at your desk. And get to it.
In Slate, Katie Roiphe directs her attention to a minor item in the David Foster Wallace archive at UT Austin: the syllabus from an English 102 class Wallace taught.
It is, as you would suspect, glorious.
An excerpt, for those with weak vision from reading too many books:
So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machine-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student’s in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.
