woobiquity

Wish I were here

It's the Bambi effect. Childhood whimsies that occupy a person's - and especially a writer's - imagination for years, becoming more mythic with every remembrance, can be stripped of all their charms the instant their bare, pathetic reality comes back into physical view.

Still, it must be done.

To the mountains, then, for a myth-crushing drive down memory lane. First past the Nantahala River, whose whitewater fierceness is documented in various family photographs, with at least one accompanying story of an almost-drowning. This time we drove the full rafting portion of the river in under 15 minutes. It was a fine drive along a paved road that never left the riverbank. The water looked precisely as treacherous (and as deep) as a the kiddie pool at a man-made water park.

Next the town of Cherokee. Forget the little-boy awe of shopping for imitation tomahawks and real arrowheads. Here were cramped stretches of tourist tat, of vinyl teepees and crumbling motels. (Actually, the more I think about this, the more a new kind of fascination emerges, but let's not be distracted by that.)

"We went all the way up there?!" Granny offered at Maggie Valley, conjuring an enthusiasm that I couldn't. True, the chair lift to Ghost Town in the Sky, a misplaced wild west theme park, loomed high and steep above the road, but I didn't need to see the 'town' beyond the crest to know that going there would make me wish it was deserted.

I'd go back for a showdown, mind you, if I thought the 30-something showgirl who sat on my 12-year-old lap during her saloon act, leaving a scar on my psyche (it's the smoky breath that haunts me, and the lace), would not by now have received her ruthless, Western reward: demoted to Fainting Spinster in a gunfire scene, her racy pantaloons long ago passed on to someone closer to my own age.

Of course it's not the places from our youth that change so much. We do. And so going back to the scene may be the worst way to reconstruct them. Vicariousness is the only safe route, with the odd primary document thrown in to keep the way mysterious.

Or scrap the whole idea and take a trip down someone else's memory lane, where you'll be free to make the stories up from scratch. Where to begin? Try this collection of old post cards from North Carolina, which used to go by the heart-sinking marketing moniker, Variety Vacationland.

However sorry we are to see what adulthood has done to our old haunts, and ourselves, it can be good to remind yourself that some people may still have more to sort out than you do.

A noun at a stretch

Philoprogenitive, filoprojenitiv (adj, formal), having many offspring; Having love for one's offspring. Also philoprogenitiveness.

As in: Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is stronger in semi-rural areas; therefore, and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better here.

The line is from a story by O. Henry, who is honored in a multi-piece bronze sculpture in downtown Greensboro, the city of his birth. Either O. Henry or the sculptor misspelled the word. Or the word's spelling has evolved. Or the character rather than the author misspelled it. The last is most plausible and most interesting. But at any rate once it's cast it's cast.

Not so the chalk graffiti on the bathroom walls at the terrific Green Bean coffeehouse further down Elm Street. By definition, nothing here is ever set in stone. Of course, wherever writing on the wall in men's rooms occurs, whether encouraged or illicit, all scratchings inevitably lead to 'gay'. O. Henry this is not, but E.B. White maybe.

Other voices and other voices

I’ve recently been reading The Reader by Ali Smith. I bought it on a whim at Daunts and have been glad I did. It’s a book that, conveniently, doesn’t have to be read linearly, because there is nothing linear about it. Rather, poems, stories, essays and extracts from novels that have inspired this Booker-shortlisted writer are organized loosely into themes. Journeys, for example. 

Opened randomly, The Reader is a Lucky Dip into the psyche of a celebrated writer. What’s knocking around in there? Everything from a Joyce Carol Oates story to an ee cummings poem. It’s a delight.

But this is not a book review. It’s a complaint about being kept up at night, thanks to this book, by the ceaseless chatter of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy.

“‘Do you think one can write poetry if one sees people?’ I asked. ‘One might be able to – I don’t see why not. It’s a question of strength,’ said Hardy. But clearly he preferred solitude.”

I read those lines from A Writer’s Diary in a state of near sleepingness a few nights ago and then didn’t sleep a wink. Their profundity pinged around my subconscious like a racket ball all night long.

Of course, reading is also a form of seeing people, and when Smith says that ‘there should be no person between the reader and the book’, referring to the distraction of authorial celebrity, she is clearing the way for a more intense examination of other persons, generally of the Fictitious breed and her own making.

It is Ali Smith’s extraordinary, intuitive knack for inhabiting voices that allows us to see her characters so intensely. But in The Reader we see how much good reading has gone into her skillful writing too. The link between Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Small Avalanches’ and Ali Smith’s short stories is not the least bit obscure, but that doesn’t make it any less mysterious.

Having come away for a few weeks, partly to write, I left The Reader in London. If seeing people while writing really does come down to a question of strength, I know I don’t have it. And in The Reader there are just too many people to be seen.

Summer elegy

One of the side effects of coming back to your childhood room is that you're certain to stumble across things that plunge you into the past. Here's one such object.

Summer 1982. Blurry, but that's appropriate to a summer memory, when we feel more than we see. Heat. Splash. The bristle of concrete under foot. And we linger in this time of warm naivety, knowing nothing of manhood, of the accident, of what time will burn into us or away.

It is June. The day is waning. Still, a week of swimming and pinball machines and miniature golf stretches out like a lifetime, like a canal that may never reach the sea.

Oranges are not the only vegetable

My grandfather looked up from the daily specials menu and spoke in a cheerful, conspiratorial tone. “Do you like blackberry cobbler? You can order it as one of your vegetables. People like to do that, because it means they get dessert and don’t have to pay any extra. They make good blackberry cobbler here.”

I smiled and turned back to my menu, furtively surveying the restaurant. Most things, the menu said, came with one, two or three ‘veggies’, but the woman at the next table seemed to be having onion rings and sliced peaches(?) with her country style steak. Not wanting "all that meat", the older lady dining with her had evidently ordered the vegetable plate (four vegetables for $4.40). But I’ll be damned if she stuck a fork in anything that would come back ‘vegetable’ in a lab test.

Southerners have long held to an open-minded definition of the word vegetable. Macaroni and cheese? Vegetable. Baked apples? Vegetable. In essence, if it goes well with meat but isn’t meat, it’s a vegetable. Even if, thanks to lardy techniques of extreme cooking, even these non-meats could, in certain clinical conditions, be classed as a meat.

This isn’t ignorance. It’s a time-saving shorthand. And now with 30 ‘veggies’ on its menu, this North Carolina family restaurant (it’s called that, by the way, not because it’s for families but because they don’t serve beer) had taken this concept to new heights of choice and dietary complicity. If you want mashed potatoes and turnip greens, so be it. But if your idea of meat and two veg involves cottage cheese and banana pudding, nobody’s going to look down on you here. Honey, we all love vegetables.

I thought briefly about walking into an Apple Store and ordering an iPhone from the vegetable menu (or is it a fruit?), in hopes of getting a deal. But I kept that to myself. I could already hear my grandfather’s response.

“Huh?”

When the story comes welling out

In today's New York Times Review of Books (which I've been reading from Concourse C of Newark Airport, with the city itself a hazy allegory in the distance), Haruki Murakami explains why, for him, writing is like making music.

"Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow."

My new workshop

Don't I wish. This has to be one of the finest examples of found type I've seen. The worn-off paint from years of coming and going, to and from the private space where work is done, is just an added bonus. (Via del Boschetto, Rome, Sunday.)

Where every window tells a story

The once-in-a-lifetime tour groups can have their pictures posed with sham centurions next to ruined ruins. And a younger version of myself can have the perfectly cropped views of quaint, geranium-accented streets. Give me the commerce of modern Rome and its 20th-century antiquities.

Once upon a time, the Monti neighborhood was seedy. It was where Forum-weary politicians went for a bit of uncomplicated huh-huh. Now it's an upmarket but down-home residential area with even better window shopping than I remembered. What a way to pass a Sunday afternoon.

I spied with my little eye:

Of course, these shops weren't just closed on Sunday afternoon but on Monday morning as well, so, no, I will not be admiring a bust of the young Estee Lauder or a queer antique space cadet in my living room curio cabinet while wearing a 'Nude Riders Scooter Club' tee-shirt. Oh well. It's always the thought that counts. (Chiquita!)

Not the glory days of air travel

Fresh from reading famous writers on some of the books they’ve enjoyed while traveling (an intriguing idea from the clever editors at the Guardian Review – though in practice it seems maybe you had to be there), I decided to have a go myself at juxtaposing a book with an unrelated travel booking. So I threw Cat’s Cradle in the bag and flew over to Rome for the weekend.

If only it was that easy. It might have been the airport rage affecting my short-term memory, but at one point Vonnegut’s narrator was having such a free and interesting time of it (the book came out in 1963) that I had to flip back a few pages to check I had the setting right in my head.

Yep, he was on a plane. And yet, he might as easily have been in a gran caffe during Carnevale the way he and the others mingled. An unpublished manuscript passed through various hands, new acquaintances speculated on the love lives of others, and anyone not visible in their seats was probably “in the bar”. As in, “I was in the bar with Newt and H. Lowe Crosby and a couple of strangers, when San Lorenzo was sighted.”

And if anyone said, “That will be $5.00. Exact change is appreciated,” Vonnegut didn’t mention it. Although one of the stewardesses does say (a tad coquettishly, one imagines), "Please, gentlemen, you really must get back to your seats and fasten your seatbelts." The plane is landing.

I’ll spare you the annoying, unliterary details of my own air travel on Friday: the snaking security queue, the incompetent staff, etc etc. After all, no car bombs went off. Or, er, not at Stansted anyway. (Though if there is a point to Cat’s Cradle, the mad, bad science of botched suicide bombs probably wouldn’t be an inappropriate way to reiterate it.) By day two, yesterday’s proclamations about never flying again were an eery memory, as the rented apartment's patio doors opened onto a warm morning and Vonnegut went on to add nothing of special note to the Roman experience itself, except perhaps to make the screeching swarms of lost sea gulls above the cloister gardens sound more menacing than they might otherwise have done.

And a second glass of very drinkable 1.65Euro rosato pleasantly filled the feeling of horrific emptiness after ‘The End’.