News that isn't News = the Literature of Newspapers?

As I typed the title of this post, I realized that the "literature of newspapers" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "newspapers as literature," which is our topic for this week's discussion. But in terms of this week's readings, I do think that the Wolfe and Shteyngart fall into the former category. All three readings have in common the fact that they're not your typical newspaper article, but I'd say the Nutt is closest to what I think about as traditional newspaper reporting, although of course she goes into great depth; it was a piece that easily could have worked as a longform journalism piece or even as a more narrative piece written for a magazine. But the Wolfe and the Shteyngart, of course, are opinion and op-ed pieces, from two sections of the newspaper (in this case "The" newspaper) where we're allowed to read something not so newspapery. Hail to opinions and lyricism! And so I wonder--is it the parts that aren't technically news that get labeled as literature? (Or maybe I'm thinking about this too much.)

What I loved about Wolfe's piece was that it wasn't really news at all. The connection that made it germane enough for printing was that it's been forty years since the moon landing, and Wolfe throws us his screed: "What NASA needs now is the power of the Word." What's newsworthy here is the fact that not much has changed in the past 40 years--without someone to act as a powerful spokesman, NASA has resorted to "killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects...But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston's Johnson Space Center--by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth." Or at least I'm reading Wolfe's "Word" to mean someone, besides Wernher von Braun, to act as NASA's philosopher, a person to invoke the beauty of the mission (building a bridge to the stars) to the public.

I found this, and the history of the "single combat," the details of NASA cutting back after Apollo 11 all incredibly fascinating. I think Wolfe's presentation of facts starting with the heat-shield-specialist-turned-tourist-guide to Wolfe's ideas on why the manned Mars mission hasn't happened yet is quite gripping. But I couldn't help wonder if this was just a fast forward through much of the information that's in his book The Right Stuff. I haven't read it, but according to Wikipedia the book is primarily about what kind of person it takes to want to do space missions, and focuses heavily on the men's personal lives. "The story is more about the space race than space exploration in general," focusing on the political aspects of US vs USSR.

If this is the case, than it seems like Wolfe perhaps just slapped on the ending about how for "40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress," and it almost makes this op-ed a plug for his book. I suppose this is perfectly legitimate--obviously it happens all the time--and probably I should just go read his book if I'm curious about the topic. I'm not against this idea at all of an author essentially using old research for a new piece, I just find it interesting that it happens. Mostly because I like to believe that an author's piece is always created with intention for a specific publication. (I spent some time as a volunteer in a magazine office about ten years ago and I remember the editors having a fit because the piece a famous writer was writing for them was essentially pulled directly from a few different books. They had expected to receive something freshly for them.) Of course, I could be totally wrong about this--perhaps none of this is in his book. But this piece does leave questions in my mind, such as: what overtures? I'd love to know some of these contemporary details Wolfe glosses over about sending up robots, etc.  And the snark. I don't hate it, but I could do without it. It feels like he or editors were compelled to dress up, well, old news and put a fresh spin on it. Or maybe fresh isn't the word for it--maybe it's more...Wolfe-ian. Sometimes I loved it--the first line grabbed me with the "knee in the groin" line, because I was curious. But the little asides, such as "And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! ... Who couldn't use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma ... made you think of re-election...." I think it just got a little over the top for me.

With the Shteyngart, obviously something a little more sentimental going on here. Again, nothing new. Famous writer writing about how the latest technology is keeping us from really seeing the world around us, is forcing us into our little bubbles and making us less human. We've heard that before. Yet, it works. I love it. It's sweet and funny. And I wonder if part of what makes it work is the venue--it's the sort of (I hesitate to use this word) light piece that we expect to find in the Sunday Book Review. Perhaps from several sections of the Sunday New York Times--there's a lot of fluff in there. Yet in these various sections of paper--and this could go for any paper--we have our expectations. In a piece labeled "Essay," we expect a certain level of personal narrative tied to a perusal of broad ideas. Here, Shteyngart gives us his vision of traveling upstate, leaving the city behind, and remembering how to lose himself in literature, book style:

Slowly, and surely, just as the sun begins to swoon over the Hudson River and another Amtrak honks its way past Rhinebeck, delivering its digital refugees upstream, I begin to sense the world between the covers, much as I sense the world around me, a world corporeal and complete, a world that doesn’t need the press of my thumb, because here beneath the weeping willow tree my input is meaningless.

 Not only is this lyrically pleasing, but he arrives at a little climatic punch. We receive that sweet little change in the narrator, punctuated by the epiphany. Exactly the sort of reading I'd expect from the Sunday Times.

"Hell, yes." On McPhee's moves

Well, I came of intellectual age dissecting the exact sort of confrontation McPhee sets up Archdruid and in many of his other books. The conservationist vs. the commissioner (or insert any other, generally federal--or worse, state (especially if a western state)--gov't official) trope is one I've studied, recreated, stumbled into unknowingly while studying wolves on the New Mexico/Arizona border, counting birds in Wyoming, and--god forbid--looking at alpine flowers in Alaska. I knew of Brower before I did McPhee, but that's sort of my former life, so to see McPhee make caricatures of both sides made me smile. He does so sweetly, endearing us to Brower and each of the three "villains." I love seeing Brower presented as this sort of dopey, butterfly-catching, statistic-inventing, perhaps slightly unaware "druid," but McPhee does us the favor of complicating his character by juxtaposing Brower's staunch conservationism with his befuddling acceptance of some of Fraser's plans.

I've started slightly off topic, but let me transition by saying that I found some of the conversation happening between Brower and Park up in the Cascades a little forced. It felt transcribed, as though McPhee was dubbing all the lines from the conservationist's or prospector's handbook over the generally mundane conversations people tend to have while hiking. Granted, Park and Brower aren't your everyday Joe and maybe they do wax idealistic up in the mountains, but it felt unnatural to see each sermonizing endlessly, saying all the things we need to know in order to understand where each is coming from. My favorite scene from that first section is when they're all tired and pulling copper-laced pebbles from the stream bed. Even the blueberry scene towards the end felt a little forced--of course, Brower's the type to load up his cup and save his berries for "the future," whereas Park's just going to get it while the eating's good.

But. I suppose this is done for a reason, to initiate the reader into the simplest of scenarios where we can get Brower in full blast, his most iconic personality, that can later be broken down into a more nuanced and complicated persona. What's not predictable about Archdruid is its three-part form. It feel strange to leave Park and then Fraser behind, but in the end I'm grateful to do so because for each scenario to go on would become exhausting, or come to an I-get-it-already point. Through Brower's three different excursions, we get a slightly different scenario, and therefore an incrementally more complicated look at environmental and development issues in the United States in the era of the birth of the Earth Day movement (which started the year before this book was first published).

Writerly speaking, I see McPhee making moves in the second and third sections that are much more wow than what I saw in the first part:


WAITING FOR HIS SUBJECTS TO FALL ASLEEP: McPhee takes advantage of this pause in the events to shift into a flashback or to philosophize for a minute. After Brower, McPhee and Fraser retire to their 1500 dollar tents, we have a space break on page 126 where McPhee talks about how "sleep was not all that easy" because of how the bunks rolled up and down. Then we sort of get a McPhee lying awake in bed thinking about the day sort of scenario. He reflects on what Fraser had said--"A beach is for children," how Brower is also "reverent toward the young" (127). We drift into the background of Fraser for 2-3 pages, which shifts into some anecdotes from his wife. Then we get Brower's wife (131), then we are lead back into the theme of the book--this time regarding the issue of the Valley of the Mineral King. On 134 we are left with a Browerism: "Told he was being almost poetically impractical [regarding how Disney should build a tunnel or fly people to the proposed ski resort], Brower responded that the Disney people were going to change something forever, so they could amortize the changes over a thousand years." And then McPhee brings us swiftly back to the moment: "Fraser rolled over and sighed in his sleep. I wondered if in the day to follow he would find that Brower's apparent tolerance for the development of Cumberland Island was equally tied in string" (134). It seems almost gimmicky, but the territory that McPhee's able to cover in those few pages make the move swift and fluid. He wanders with purpose, and he brings us back with purpose.

THE RANT PUNCTUATED BY THE QUICK QUESTION: Pages 172-174, when McPhee meets Dominy. We get Dominy's 2-page long self-aggrandizing rant about "The unregulated Colorado [being] a son of a bitch." Then we can sense McPhee mousily jumping into the first opening he can to cut to the chase and ask if Dominy would go down the Colorado in a rubber raft with Brower, and we get Dominy, never missing a beat, replying, "Hell, yes." The long rant, which could have been cut, compressed, or summarized, serves to 1. let us know about Dominy, 2. let us know his/their side of the debate, and 3. allow McPhee to move the plot forward.

THE FAST CUT TO SPEED UP TIME: In the rafting section the tense is switched to present, and we get what I think is a much more lyrical rendition of events. I get the sense McPhee is trying to illustrate how "There is a sense of acceleration in the last fifty yards," and that, "There is something quite deceptive in the sense of acceleration that comes just before a rapid." We spend much more time seeing nature and the river (I love this description: "Tents of water form overhead, to break apart in rags" [182].). It's much more about the experience, and even, I think, about McPhee's experience. He does this weird thing throughout this section where he moves back and forth in time. For instance, from 185 to 186, at one moment we are wandering through a canyon with Brower, McPhee, and Dominy, Brower picking up an old beer can. Then suddenly in the next paragraph we're catapulted to dinnertime, "Inside Dominy's big leather briefcase is a bottle of Jim Beam, and now, at the campsite, in the twilight..." that little "now" being the orienting clincher. On 183 we get a similar leap forward: "The river is a shadow, and we have stopped for the night where a waterfall arcs out from a sandstone cliff." The three are now assessing the waterfall, and although we have just leaped forward in time, McPhee still pauses to give us a little flashback: "With the raft as a ferry, we crossed the river an hour or so ago and stood in the cool mist where the waterfall whips the air into wind. We went on to climb to the top of the fall..." (184). I'm not sure what to make of these little leaps forward in time. It gives the narrative a much more slipstream feel, no pun--I don't think, anyway--intended.

THE QUINTESSENTIAL EXAMPLE OF USING A JOURNEY THROUGH A LANDSCAPE TO EXPLAIN VAST SWEEPS OF HISTORY IN ORDER TO LEAVE THE READER WITH THE OVERWHELMING FEELING OF HAVING WITNESSED THE PASSAGE OF TIME BACK TO THE VERY ORIGINS: Easiest to do, I guess, when talking about geology. Especially in the Grand Canyon. For example, starting on p. 176 with "This is isolation wilderness...Having seen the canyon from this perspective, I would not much want to experience it any other way. ... The river has worked its way down into the stillness of original time" (177).

Writers on Writers Writing, in Various Writerly Ways

A good piece, for me, makes me feel nostalgic for something I didn't even know I could be nostalgic for. Makes me miss something I've never really known, where writers writer about writers make me nostalgic. The south makes me nostalgic. As does fantasizing about a writer's life, a sort of yearning for an artistic community a la the "Twelve Southerners," or for an off-the-grid cabin with damp floors and a narrow bed piled up with quilts where people talk in airy abstractions ("He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, 'Breath of My Nostrils.'). In this week's pieces we get writers as the subjects in all their (wonderful) writerly cliches: promiscuous, rebellious, reclusive, peculiar, stubborn, elusive, lovable, unlovable, forgivable.

I love how these three pieces work on a meta level. As not just profiles of great (or I suppose, according to Sullivan, almost-great) writers, but as pieces where the authors are sharing their first-hand experiences with these writers. Janet Malcolm's words rang clear for me: "The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job." In these pieces we get to see writers attempting both, openly admitting their personal connection to what they're writing about, and in Rolphie's case hearing her talk about her interactions with Malcolm, but we get the added benefit of hearing how Malcolm tests the boundaries journalism. As Rolphie puts it: "One of the most challenging or controversial elements of her work is her persistent and mesmerizing analysis of the relationship between the writer and her subject."

I love that these three pieces dance around this relationship in such different ways. I'm most interested in talking about Sullivan's piece, though, simply because I loved the writing the most. (And as I write this I become--unnecessarily, I know--disappointed in myself for being drawn to the one male writer in the bunch, who is nonetheless writing about an uber-male writer. But his writing was just the best.) I found Schenkar's piece to gush too much about Keogh, and Rolphie's was just the opposite--a little too cold and calculating. Although I really love how she allows Malcolm to call her out on that in this piece:

Earlier you had made the distinction between writers for whom the physical world is significant and writers for whom it scarcely exists, who live in the world of ideas. You are clearly one of the latter. You obediently took out a notebook, and gave me a rather stricken look, as if I had asked you to do something faintly embarrassing.

 I really like what Rolphie's doing in this piece, the way she allows her experiences with Malcolm to reflect what makes Malcolm's work "controversial," that relationship between writer and subject. But I'm just a sucker for a good story, and on that front Sullivan delivers.

I admit I felt disoriented at the beginning of this piece--trying to figure out where we were, what time period we were in, what country even. I'm glad Sullivan admits that "Middle Tennessee at the crack of the twentieth century [had] more in common with Europe in the Middle Ages than with the South he lived to see." This scene of coffin building--the green cedar, the beeswax, the harried and anxious coffin-builder, the scrollwork--all seems too quaint to be true. And what stunning details to characterize a person right off the bat--the formality of his name (Mister Lytle) vs. the strange familiarity/formality of what Lytle's sister calls him (and perhaps here is our first clue of a geographic setting within the pronunciation of "brutha."). The "mon vieux," "breath of my nostrils," and "beloved;" they're all so strange yet endearing and funny at the same time. We get a good sense of what this person immediately via names/naming, even though we technically haven't even "met" him in the essay yet. I suppose death always provides a good scenario to reflect on a person's character with such poignant precision.

I appreciate the sentimentality of this essay, because I admit I'm a sucker for sentiment as long as it's in the right hands. And of course Sullivan defies being gratuitously so by being completely honest at the same time. I found myself wishing I could have had that experience, that I could have spent those months in that house with the peculiar writer who had for some reason taken a liking to me. I love how Sullivan admits that he was totally aware of the objectification going on--the chopping wood, etc., and that he just didn't seem to mind. It isn't until he's groped and nibbled by Mister Lytle that my charm for the man is broken, despite previous misgivings about his fascism, racism, annoying habits, etc. Because Sullivan gave him the benefit of the doubt and still found him remarkable in his own way, I'm compelled to do the same.

Continuing further in the nostalgia vein, there's a certain level of yearning that's evoked when people write about certain time periods in their lives, or when I'm reminded of a certain time period in my own. Sullivan was twenty when he lived with Lytle. He was young enough to afford such an open-mindedness towards this man who easily could come across as a tyrant if I were to come across him now. Reading this piece and wanting to have been Sullivan in that experience (of living in the house not the groping, that is!) I had the profound sense that I'm simply too old for such an experience any more. My time for quirky and cantankerous mentors is over; I simply wouldn't put up with it now. But ten, twelve years ago, sure. And reminiscing about such time periods--when I could be so moved by a person--is mixed up with this romanticized South--the misty Tennessee back woods with its enclaves of eccentric artists.

I became a little disappointed when we meet the girlfriend in the essay, simply because she broke the spell of the relationship that had been developed so far in the writing. But clearly she broke the spell in reality, too, as we get to witness Lytle's infantile reactions to her. So where that was a noticeable shift in the essay, the scratching of the  needle across the record, it was for good reason. The era, like Lytle himself, was simply coming to an end.

Jungle Fever

It was April or May in 2006. I can't remember which month. It was the dry season, that much I know, because the mealy parrots weren't nesting, and I no longer had to slog through knee-deep slop along the path each morning on my way to the bird blind. There was no longer any chance of being rained out, and I remember missing those mornings where rain came down like sheets, so hard it was nothing but white through the screens of the sleeping quarters, making a rasping sound across the palapa-style roofs so loud that it hushed everybody--the researchers, the guides, the tourists, the mouthy kitchen workers with their Amanda Portales wailing from the grainy TVs in the back rooms, the men always huddled around watching the women, always with exceptional cleavage, dressed in traditional peasant clothing dance across mountaintops to Incan pan-pipe style pop--into a subdued, blank silence.

I had loved the rain. It was the rainforest, after all. It had made everything difficult. A challenge. Clothes never dried. Backpacks molded. Everyday was a rain day during the rainy season, except you were never let off the hook because the skies might clear momentarily and then you had to be there, you had to be ready, because that hour, two hours if you were lucky, was your time. That's when the birds would come down to feed, down from the trees and gone again, so you had to be on even as you watched the sheets descend from the safety of your mosquito net.

But that was all over by March, and perhaps that's why Simon, Tylor, and I went up to the bowl after dark. It was a few miles hike from the research center; the bowl was a low scoop in the ground that collected months worth of rain that never quite evaporated completely during the dry season. It would have been impassible during any other month; the water would have been too deep at the place where we waded in. And it still was deep, colder than I would have liked. There was that moment where I remember wading up to my knees, the first of the water spilling up over the top of my boots and down inside, each step heavier as we slogged on. There was that resistance, the way we all--yes, even the guy who called himself an amateur herpetologist--tried to keep the water from going over the top, and then that moment where we just give in, let ourselves get soaked. Once we stopped being pussies and just acted as though we were walking into a lake rather than an Amazonian swamp, we moved forth at a faster clip, the water up over our waists, then up to our chests, as we navigated awkwardly around buttressed tree roots, ducking so our headlamps wouldn't get snagged by a vine or a branch and plunge into the murky water, god forbid leaving us at the mercy of each other in order to get back.

It always ended up like this for me. Always me and two guys. Always (generally) a platonic, intrepid threesome. It was never about the guys, but the experience, although being being one of the guys was an integral part to the experience. Of being able to tough it out. There were the nights in the Huachuca Mountains with Zac and Wes, tripping on acid at the old miner's ruins, the way the desert can fuck you up, leave you stranded as every ravine becomes less like something you recognize and just more of the same--pin oaks and granite, pin oaks and granite, even when you're stone sober in the middle of the day. Flying through through BLM land with Jim and Colin in Colin's hippie white-trash Blazer aiming for the place where the flat expanse of sage brush gives it up to the Wind River Mountains. Chris and Petter at Invercargill, New Zealand, and jut a few months ago me, Simon and Sergio sleeping out in the observation tower in the middle of the rainforest, tipsy and not caring about the bugs. In the morning Sergio woke up with his arms all bitten up muttering fuck, fuck, fuck because this area of the Amazon was a hotspot for Leishmaniasis--a disease that's carried by a little white fly that only comes out at night. It passes the parasite into your bloodstream and if not stopped it starts to eat away at your flesh, traveling across your whole body.

What I worshipped first was always the job description. Must be physically fit. Able to carry a heavy load over tough terrain. Willing to deal with extreme heat, extreme cold, high winds, heavy rain. Must work well with others. Must work well alone, for days on end, in remote and rustic lodgings with no amenities, no phone, no internet. Intermittent face-to-face contact with outsiders. There will be biting insects and poisonous snakes and possible chance encounters with charismatic megafauna: peccaries, javelinas, jaguars, mountain lions, grizzlies, cattle on the loose, ranchers, locals, caiman.

We'd actually gone up to the bowl in hopes of seeing caimans. Not the small ones that we could find in the vernal swamps, now nearly dried up, down by the lodge. Not the ones that were maybe two or three feet in length, cute little lizards really, that lurked in minty-green algae-scummed waters and sank silently from sight if you got too close. We were looking for the big ones. The ones that grew to be six feet long. The big caimans that ate the little caimans for breakfast, that were easy to spot at night because if we could stop all the sloshing through the chest-high water and be still for a minute we could turn off our lights, grow very quiet and wait for something to cross our path. The plan was, when that happened we'd turn our headlamps on and catch a glimpse of the animal's eyeshine before it turned and retreated back the way we came. We wouldn't really get to see the animal much at all. The thrill was really in knowing that we'd been that close, in knowing that a few feet away an animal pulsed in the same water we stood in, that for a moment we'd come so very near to touching it.