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“Run Towards the Danger”

“Run Towards the Danger”

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I just finished reading Sarah Polley’s memoir Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory. It’s not a book I’d heard about before, but a dear friend loaned it to me, put it in my hands, said it was written by the screenwriter of “Women Talking” and I would love it.

At first, I thought it would be a replay of “Women Talking,” which I enjoyed but wasn’t sure I wanted to relive.  Then, a few pages in, I almost put it down because the opening essay is about Polley’s scoliosis, a condition that runs in our family and about which I have a fair amount of guilt. 

But it is not about “Women Talking” and I pressed on through the scoliosis parts, and less than two weeks later I finished the book, wanting more. 

Honesty is endearing, and Sarah Polley is not only scrupulously honest, but honestly funny, even when she’s describing sexual abuse, placenta previa and a concussion. The book’s title and theme, “run towards the danger,” come from her neurologist, who not only heals her brain but gives her a motto to live by — don’t shy away from what frightens you, embrace it instead. Not a bad message for this (or perhaps any) stage of life. So here’s to books loaned by friends — and friends who loan books. Sometimes they know what you need better than you do. 

(It’s telling I had to hunt for a photo to illustrate this post. Are the “Exorcist Stairs” as close as I come to danger?) 

Seriously Speaking

Seriously Speaking

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I’ve just finished George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life. It’s a slightly misleading subtitle because Saunders is the one giving the master class. It’s his interpretations of Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy. The interpretations are only there because the stories are, of course, but Saunders has a way of parsing and illuminating these classics that makes you want to read them—and do your own best work, too. 

One piece of advice I found especially helpful (even as a nonfiction writer) is when Saunders describes how he came to find his “voice.” I use quotation marks here because Saunders points out that we have many voices. What we need to do is find the voice that is most energetic, even if it’s not the spare, Hemingwayesque one we originally thought was ours. 

When Saunders first found his “voice” (I will persist with the quotation marks), the story that resulted was the best he’d ever written, he said, but it was no Chekhov or Tolstoy. He felt he had let the short story form down. “It was as if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a Barbie doll.”

In a world in which writing is taken oh-so-seriously, Saunders is seriously refreshing. 

The Space Inside Your Head

The Space Inside Your Head

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I just finished reading a novel I had previously “read” by listening. I approached this as an experiment. Would I catch more of the nuance when my eyes scanned ink on paper? Would I possess the story more fully?

The answer, so far, is inconclusive. While the spoken version brought forth the rhythm of the language, and the voice of the narrator captured its emotive power, the act of reading did what it always does for me: it created a private conversation between me and the author. It’s a conversation that seems more completely “mine” when there’s no middleman. 

The words of the novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, say it better than I can: “Turn a page, walk the lines of the sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.”

TMT

TMT

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While I’ve never been a clean freak, I do keep a relatively neat house. Just don’t open any closets or drawers, and avoid the basement at all costs. 

But even I can experience what I’ve come to think of as TMT — Too Much Tidiness. 

With four friends over for dinner last weekend, the house had come perilously close to this condition. Waking up to a blank coffee table for the second morning in a row, I knew what I had to do. I marched down to the basement and brought up two armloads of magazines. 

Here are two years worth of National Geographics, a year and a half of Atlantics and various other publications, plus a couple of books for good measure. 

Ah yes, that’s better. 

Visit from a Vulture

Visit from a Vulture

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Today we had a visit from this fine fellow and two of his pals. Attracted by a suet block, I hope, though I later read that black vultures (his type, as opposed to turkey vultures) attack vulnerable small birds and mammals rather than dining only on carrion.

I marveled at the Thanksgiving-turkey-size heft of this bird, at his noble profile and the wisdom of his folded wings. He seemed to have arrived from an earlier age. 

My thoughts on him today are no doubt shaped by the book I’m reading. In Field Notes from a Hidden City, Esther Wolfson elicits understanding for the less-understood denizens of the animal world. She takes up for magpies, foxes and even slugs. 

“Slugs and snails, as everything else, have their place in the scheme of life, in the food chain, in the ecology of the earth: a purpose, you might call it, even if it’s a purpose that doesn’t always accord with our own. “

And as long as the vulture’s purpose is not to eat the birds that sup at our feeder, I’m fine with that. 

Margins as Message

Margins as Message

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In a retrospective mood after yesterday’s blog anniversary, I pulled out an old hard-bound journal and started reading. 

It was summer. The previous fall, I’d accepted an editorial position downtown, my first office job in 17 years, though I hadn’t yet extricated myself from writing freelance articles. I had three- to four-hour roundtrip commutes and deadlines when I got home. My daughters were 10, 13 and 16. Every few minutes, I was driving them to band camp or track practice or the movies. 

Still, my first thought on reading the loopy entries from those crazy days was … why didn’t I leave wider margins?  Every available inch was pressed into service. I had trouble reading my own writing. 

It took me a minute to realize the connection, the appropriateness of the typography. The pages were as busy as I was. The margins were the message. 

(Above, some halfway-margined class notes from last week.)

“Not So Different”

“Not So Different”

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As part of our readings for the course I’m taking this semester, we’re learning about animal behavior to enlighten our view of human behavior. The basic point is that we are more like bonobos and dolphins and many other animals than we might care to admit. 

Many species mourn their lost loved ones, from the chimp Flint grieving his mother Flo, as described by Jane Goodall, to reports of elephants crying from the loss of a parent or child. 

Animals have an innate sense of justice, proved by studies in which primates refuse to solve a puzzle to earn a grape because the same treat is not being offered to their cage-mate. Vampire bats will feed each other even if it means giving up 20 to 30 percent of their own calories. Yes, there is an element of reciprocity in this. They do it, in part, because it might ensure their survival on a bad hunting night. But not all of this behavior can be explained away as quid pro quo. 

A basic question Nathan Lents asks in his book Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals is why must we prove animals have these emotions — rather than prove they do not?

(Photo of bonobos courtesy Wikipedia) 

Proud to be … Bipedal

Proud to be … Bipedal

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In class last night we talked about our earliest ancestors, about Australopithecus, Homo Erectus and the whole gang, the distant relatives on our ever-so-shaggy family tree.

A key trait, of course, is bipedalism, walking on two legs. In Maps of Time, David Christian talks about the hazards of this posture, especially for women, who had to bear children with large heads that required turning as they passed through the birth canal. 

For this, they needed help. Thus did a physical trait engender cooperation, social behavior, the collective efforts of women helping women during childbirth. And later on, the collective efforts of raising young humans, who are far more helpless at birth than most mammals. 

We don’t walk on two legs because we’re human. We’re human, in part, because we walk on two legs.

(One of my favorite toddlers shows off her stride.)

10,000 Books

10,000 Books

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A quick trip before school starts later this week lands us in Asheville, North Carolina, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. And when you visit Asheville, you visit the Biltmore, the Vanderbilt retreat and largest private home in America. 

There are four acres of floor space in the mansion including 250 rooms (43 of them bathrooms), 65 fireplaces, a bowling alley, swimming pool, pipe organ and a banqueting hall with a 70-foot tall barrel-vaulted ceiling. The mansion is crammed with priceless art, portraits by Whistler and Sargent and landscapes by Monet, and during World War II it housed treasures from the National Gallery of Art. The garden and grounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. 

Opulence is not my style but there is one room in the house I seriously covet — the library with its collection of 10,000 books. I stood a long time in that room, imagining the guests who visited, including writers Henry James and Edith Wharton, the conversation that flowed, led no doubt by Biltmore’s original owner George Vanderbilt, fluent in eight languages. Ah yes, I could spend some serious time in the Biltmore library.

Once More to the Breach

Once More to the Breach

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There is something both unsettling and gratifying about charging into a project that you’ve left idle for a month. Never mind the explanations for your idleness — a research paper due, the holidays to prepare for — the work itself has been left behind, and it lets you in on its annoyance. 

Surely nothing else can account for the way a once-admirable essay shrinks in power and perceptiveness. Nothing else explains the inelegant phrasing, the lack of insight.

And yet … with the power of time and distance, suddenly there is potential again, too. A new overview, perhaps even a revised table of contents. It’s a good way to enter the new year, with rolled-up sleeves.