The Ideas Mill

This is what Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer at the The New Yorker, thinks about ideas for writing:

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it's a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting...We filter and rank and judge. We have to. There's just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day.

Perhaps another challenge is to remind yourself that, contrary to rule #1 and the dominant prejudice of the profession, the writer himself is not necessarily all that interesting.

The book: Malcolm Gladwell, 'Preface.' What The Dog Saw. Allen Lane, 2009. xiii.

Dead metaphors (or metaphors for the dead)

Garrison Keillor's short personal essay on the death of his brother, Philip, has me thinking about noticable devices, or those literary effects that are immediately apparent to the reader, and which even border on being cute. His piece ends with this observation:

If I had died (say, by slipping on an emollient spill and whacking my head on a family heirloom anvil), I believe Philip, after decent mourning, would've gone about locating a replacement. If your brother dies, improvise. Someone you run into who maybe doesn't fit the friendship profile but his voice is reedy like your brother's, the gait is similar, he takes his coffee black and his laugh is husky, he starts his sentences with "You know," and the first words out of his mouth are about boats. I didn't run into him in Rome but I'm sure he's out there someplace.

As the list of Philip's qualities becomes more specific, we are, in effect, being told that there is no way of replacing him. And the imagined injunction - to find a replacement - is presented as one of the very characteristics that makes it impossible for Keillor to find a stand-in.

The device being used to convey a commonplace of bereavement - that the departed is irreplacable - is characterization. But with a twist, because the characterization is done for Philip's sake: the lost brother, rather than the author, is telling us to find someone new (itself a commonplace--he would've wanted me to find someone else type thing).

Out of it all, the cliches of the obituary are replaced with a dialogue of sorts, a very fresh one, between the surviving brother and the echoes of the dead.

The piece: Garrison Keillor, "When Your Brother Dies", Salon.com, 4 March 2009.

French Sentences

As part of revisions that I am making for my lecture on travel writing, I have collated six travel pieces on France. A sentence or two from each:

The bathroom is equipped with a bidet. I try to remember exactly when you're supposed to use it: after you've been to the toilet or after sex? (Sarah Turnbull, Almost French, 2002, p. 14)

Attached to the back of the house was an enclosed courtyard, and beyond that a bleached white stone swimming pool. There were three wells, there were established shade trees and slim green cypresses, hedges of rosemary, a giant almond tree. In the afternoon sun, with the wooden shutters half-closed like sleepy eyelids, it was irresistible. (Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence, 1989, p. 3)

There was the old masonry and woodwork of the village itself, of course. There was hay, and dung to go with it. There was the smell of mossy water, from the old fountain with the lion's head beside the bridge. There was that faint smell of good cooking which, even in the age of convenience foods, still hangs habitually about French homesteads. (Jan Morris, Journeys, 1984, p. 81)

The fashionable action moved to the Mediterranean. Biarritz still served the turn as a plush funk-hole, but as a display case it was past tense. The postcards on sale from year to year showed little that was altered, still less that was new. (Clive James, Flying Visits, 1984, p. 63)

We left the choice of our menus to Madame [Barattero]. Indeed, there was little alternative but to do so. For although she does not herself do the cooking Madame has been studying her guests and composing menus for them for thirty-four years and she neither likes being contradicted nor is capable of making a mistake in this respect. (Elizabeth David, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, 1984, p. 57)

I can't resist giving a whole paragraph of Barnes:

In the spring of 1998 I was on a walking holiday in the Vercors, south of Grenoble. On a perfect May morning, two of us were traversing a high upland plateau just below the snowline. Turf impeccable enough to re-lay fairways at Augusta was crossed by thin, pure streams; here, in boastful profusion - Nature showing what it can do when left alone - were a billion gentians, edelweiss, dwarf narcissi, buttercups, and orchids; once or twice, against the melting snow, we glimpsed what was probably a small fox, depending on how big marmots grow. A padlocked shack denoted a provisional human presence in what was otherwise a swathe of changeless France. In the late afternoon we descended into a small village, some forty buildings jammed between two hills. As the grass track gave way to semi-asphalt, we encountered another item from changeless France: a peasant pasturing his goats on the public hedgeside. He was ancient, rubicund, and toothless, accompanied by a psychotically hostile dog of mixed ancestry, and as he told us the long story of his rheumatism he would, as punctuation, give the nearest goat a dust-raising thwack with his stick. (Julian Barnes, Something to Declare, 2002, p. 3)

The point I want to make with these excerpts is not entirely clear to me yet, but I am interested in tracing a movement across them from travel memoir to travel essay, and then to essay that includes travel. And, perhaps, in tracing the decline in commerciality as the genre goes from personal experience to argument and anlysis: the most accessible and commercial travel writing is really just memoir in a foreign place?

1983, eleven-years old, at the less-than-bustling Angeles-sur-mer

Swim for your lives

In the Icelandic daily Morgunbladid today, news that unemployed people will receive free swimming passes.

If you were unemployed, would you want, particularly, to go swimming? Of course you would.

As unlikely as it may sound, swimming is the main recreational sport in Iceland. The pools are friendly, open places: one of the few places in Iceland where strangers speak to each other. The tourist brochures call them "the cafes of Iceland" (even though there are now actual cafes in Iceland), but I prefer to think of the pools-- the Reykjavík pools, at least--as the villages brought to the city. That's because there are outdoor pools dotted throughout the country, even in the smallest villages where the post office, banks, and shops have long since left.

Halldór Gunnar Pálsson and I have written a song called "Swimming", which is unequivocally about swimming. (I think it's about a fisherman trying to swim while he is drowning; Halldór thinks it's about swimming in a beach in Queensland.)

Now it can also be a song about swimming your way out of a recession. Or, past a volcano.

Here I am on a summer's night swimming in the Icelandic sea. No pass needed.

Letting people speak for themselves

Another suggestion from Martin Duwell, this time a television review by the relentless and merciless A A Gill, which includes:

Indian Hill Railways could be in my top-10 list of programmes I’d lose an eye not to have to watch. The romance of steam completely passed me by. I’m a locophobic. All that Betjemanesque whimsy for branch lines and unmanned halts is simply ghastly. I can just remember steam trains for real. They were filthy and they stank. It’s a bit of Englishness I find as embarrassing as it is dull. Neither can I abide the soft nostalgia for the Raj — that imposed reverie of happy hot days playing at empire. So the combination of old India and Tariq the Tank Engine is deeply unpalatable. All it was missing was Michael Palin.

I began watching with a grim resistance, but it sort of crept up on me with observance and careful charm. The railway was a linear motif that chuntered its way through the stories of the people who work around it. It became a chance to look at lives with a care and tenderness rare in documentaries about foreigners. We tend to the anthropological, comic or sentimental when filming abroad. This was oddly old-fashioned, like Grierson or early Lindsay Anderson. It was a programme that began with what all socialist documentaries used to begin with: a respect for the dignity of lives that run uphill.

I was as much touched by the way it was made, and the assumptions about people, and the role and purpose of the television eye, as I was by the subject. Most television documentaries try to elicit empathy for or inquisitiveness about individuals. They rarely attempt to use the individual as a candle to illuminate the human condition. This was well done, not least because it was so unexpected.

The final observation resonates with William Dalrymple's aims in Nine Lives, that is, with the desire to ease the narrator or "eye" out of the frame, and so let the subjects of the piece emerge in their own right and on their own terms. I am also reminded of a much earlier work, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, which too had the knack of letting people speak for themselves. Like Dalrymple, Heat Moon was in the mood for listening.

Source: A A Gill. "All the better to eat you with, my dear." The Sunday Times 28 March 2010.

African Ghosts

My friend Martin Duwell put me onto a lovely review of Joanna Lumley's "Nile" show. Look out for "Abdul thought she was joking, but we all know better". Wonderful, grand-motherly timing by Nancy Banks-Smith.

And this piece, I believe, I came across through Benjamin Law, senior writer for Frankie magazine and tutor at QUT: "Either/Or" by Ariel Levy in The New Yorker--very much one for lovers of the paragraph.

Volcanoes in the Sky

When the Icelandic financial system collapsed, leaving billions in debts in Europe, the British government responded by declaring Landsbanki, the Icelandic National Bank, a terrorist organisation.

I wonder if the same will happen again, now that an Icelandic volcano is causing a shutdown of European airspace.

For pictures of the volcano, see this great collection on Boston.com

Influence and Originality

When I first heard "Galileo (Someone Like You)" by Declan O'Rourke, I assumed it was a 1950s ballad: it has that decade's self-conscious awareness of earlier poetic traditions--the sonnet, the pastoral. In fact, the song was released in 2006.

It immediately attracted critical acclaim, including from Paul Weller, who says it's the song he most wishes that he'd written himself.

I can see why. It has an aching melody, but it's also such a wonderfully influenced work. The originality of the song lies in its debt to all the other star-gazers in poetry, from "Astrophel and Stella" through to pre-rock crooners.

In fact, it seems that the "murthering boy" (of Sonnet 20) visited Galileo (d. 1642) not too long after he'd hounded Sidney (d. 1586).

Galileo fell in love as a Galilean boy,
And he wondered what in heaven who invented such a joy.
But the question got the better of his scientific mind,
And to his blind and dying gaze,
He looked up high and often sighed,
And sometimes cried,

Who puts the rainbow in the sky?
Who lights the stars at night?
Who dreamt up someone so divine?
Someone like you and made them mine?

A live recording of the song is available here.

Returning In Cold Blood

Or, more precisely, returning to In Cold Blood, the opening to which I re-read each year for my Creative Non-Fiction subject. It's the first in a suite of readings for the Life Writing component of the subject. The opening to In Cold Blood is, of course, all about death--we are introduced to the village Holcomb, which with the exception of the morning and afternoon traffic of school children, is a dead town: a Gothic ruin or the set of a modern-day Western. It's only a matter of time before the shooting begins.

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveller reaches them.

Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see—simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railway, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced “Ar-kan-sas”) River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign—“dance”—but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window—“holcomb bank.” The bank failed in 1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town’s two “apartment houses,” the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school’s faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb’s homes are one-story frame affairs, with front porches.

Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy; the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do—only an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one of which doubles as a meagrely supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a cafe—Hartman’s Cafe, where Mrs. Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is “dry.”)

And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-looking establishment...

My students and I went through this opening for mood-setting adjectives, and found too many to count. Consider "lonesome", "hard", "aimless", "Far West", "barbed", "ranch-hand", "narrow", and "flat"--all in the first paragraph.

Sometimes less is more. But sometimes more is more, too.


Source: Truman Capote. "The Last to See Them Alive." The New Yorker, 25 September 1965.

Dalrymple's Nine Lives (again)

You can't fault William Dalrymple's interweaving of exposition, narration, and description. Consider how fluently he provides back story, information about local custom, and a sense of place in the following extract:

I had known Mohan and Batasi for about five years when I set off with them that morning from Jaipur. We had just done an event about the Pabuji epic to a conference, and were now heading in the direction of their village of Pabusar, which lay deep in the desert towards Bikaner.

Soon after I had first met the couple, in 2004, I wrote a long New Yorker article on Mohan, and after the piece was published, Mohan and I performed together at various festivals; but in all the time I had known and worked with him, I had never yet visited his home. Pabusar, he told me, was a small oasis of green in the dry desert, and was named after the hero of his epic; indeed the village supply of sweet water was believed to have appeared thanks to Pabuji's miraculous intervention. Now it was the tenth day of the full moon, the day of Pabu, when his power was at its height and he was unable to refuse and devotee. This time the epic was to be recited not in part but in full, at my request, and I was looking forward to seeing Mohan perform it.

On the lonely, potholed single-track road to Pabusar, the last leg of the journey, we began to meet other pilgrims who were coming to celebrate the modest village festivities which marked the day of Pabu. Some of the pilgrims were on foot: lonely figures trudging through the immensity of the desert in the white midnight. Other villagers rode together in tractors, pulling trailers full of women in deep-blue saris. Occasionally, we would pass through a village sheltering in the lee of a crumbling high-walled fortress, where we would see other pilgrims taking their rest in the shade of the wells that lay beside the temples. As we drove on, the settlements grew poorer and the road increasingly overrun with drifting sand. The fields of dew-watered millet grew rarer and more arid; and the camel thorn closed in. Dry weeds heeled and twisted in the desert wind.

Source: William Dalrymple, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. 80-81.