Aug 022014
 

CaptureAn elf

People living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. And if you’re in Iceland, even displacing a stone could be sacrilegious. That’s because there could be elves under there.

Warped rock in the continental rift between the North American and Eurasian plates. There may be elves hidden in there.

Don’t ask why, but I”m on the loose in this lusciously green country of volcanos, glaciers, geysers, and $30 fish-and-chips. (Don’t even get me started on the price of beer.) I’ve found this country of 325,000 people to be an exotic, friendly (tourist-trappy, even) haven for lovers of isolation, the outdoors, and folklore.

As the ridiculously cool Settlement Exhibition explains, scientists are still uncertain when the island was first discovered, ever since a recent unearthing of pre-Viking ruins debunked the conventional story that Ingólfur Arnarson was the original settler, in 874.

Capture

And as detailed here last year, another ongoing mystery is the existence of “hidden people,” or elves. They live among the rocks in the lava fields that cover substantial parts of the island. Now, many Icelanders kind of mock this traditional superstition, but few have gone so far as to say they are certain elves don’t exist. On one tour I joined, the guide spoke of elves without a trace of irony. On the other hand, ethologist Árni Björnsson suggests only 10% of Icelanders actually believe in the little guys.

Many are agnostic on the issue. That’s partly why activists have successfully protested even large-scale construction projects in the name of the Huldufólk.

CaptureFemale elf near tree hideout. I myself did not see this.

Whether elves themselves exist or not, there’s something uncanny and lovely about the idea of a “hidden” entity contributing to the mystique and beauty of this rather unique country. At the time of this writing, no elves were immediately available for comment. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

A geyser with water reaching 80-100 degrees Celsius. Probably no elves in there, but the steam felt quite lovely.

The heath and lake in the continental rift.

The gorgeous Gullfoss (gold fall), so powerful it sprayed much water up onto its visitors.

The gorgeous Gullfoss (gold fall), so powerful it sprayed much water up onto its visitors.

No elves out here in the ocean, where I caught a majestic rainbow rising above the mainland. I was riding to the Westman Islands, where a 1963 volcano birthed one of the world's youngest islands, Surtsey.

No elves out here in the ocean, where I caught a majestic rainbow rising above the mainland. I was riding to the Westman Islands, where I observed colonies of the beautiful puffin and where a 1963 volcano birthed one of the world’s youngest islands, Surtsey.

—Tom Faure (on Elf Assignment for NC)

 

Jan 312013
 

Joe Milan
Herewith Joe Milan’s lovely, ever so slightly melancholy portrait of the Seoul he has come to know teaching at the Catholic University of Korea. This is contemporary Seoul, dominated by a priapic, neon-lit tower, the traditional architecture destroyed by war and rebuilt to resemble someone else’s urban dream. What should be his own world is strange to Joe Milan; his life in the city is punctuated by memories of home in America and rumours of war. His Seoul is a complicated place, riven with memory, tradition, absence and paradox. But sweepers shape the piles of raked leaves to look like hearts and the rice cakes his grandmother serves have the scent of pine.

This is the latest in our growing collection of What It’s Like Living Here essays, the 41st in fact. Think of that.

dg

Seoul Tower

Concrete

Seoul Tower, a tourist magnet in the heart of the city and the best quick way to see the place, reaches into the sky, perched alone on a forested hill apart from the packed clothing shops, red sauce stained food carts and sterile department stores of Myung-dong. In the shade of trees, you huff your way up the winding road. There are heart shaped piles of leaves raked onto the walkway and every few meters piles of rocks stacked beside the path. A young child, biting his lip, totters toward one of the piles with a rock. His mother cheers him on, “Put it on the top and make a wish.”  Years ago you did the same. But unlike this child, you tumbled and fell short before the stack.

The tower stabs the sky, a rocket ready to leave the trees and the ancient rock walls behind. For centuries this hill was a lookout. You imagine bored men with long beards and spears in hand staring out to the ridgelines, waiting for the signal fires of incoming invaders. Today’s soldiers stand watch on hills fifty kilometers north of Seoul. They are mostly eighteen and nineteen-year-old boys doing their military service, cursing their fate, waiting for a different sort of fire that would pop and boom and flash and screech and burn.

Heart-shaped leaves

When you reach the elevator doors it is dark until the walls burst into blue light from hidden projectors in the ceiling. An image of the tower at night appears on the elevator door, back-dropped by stars that you had never seen in the sky in Korea. Lasers write in English “love n tower.” You wonder if they are going for “lovin tower” or “love in tower.”

At the observation deck you’re greeted by an attendant dressed in white and black like a maître d’. She bows slightly–a nod really–and motions you around the half-wall to the windows that surround you. From up here the city is field of concrete buildings and glass towers rising and falling toward the river: the Han River. You are not sure, but it could mean the “One River,” or the “Korean River,” or even the “Suffering River,” but your Korean isn’t as good as it should be. The river is a bluish crack between the two halves of gray city. Crisscrossing veins of tight alleyways wrinkle the city, hold the city together with backstreets wide enough only for scooters loaded down with TVs and tin boxes of cheap Chinese food. Alleyways walled with brick and concrete branded with random acts of paint that always seem to morph into the same dull gray. This gray, like fog smothering and hiding a hillside, is the Seoul you remember from your childhood visits.

But this isn’t the same city. Speckled in the gray are wide highways and glass towers and miniature red brick boxes that litter the gray field to the base of white stone mountains wrapping the city. Your eyes trace the spine of the mountains where, long ago, tigers cloaked by the black of night, crept down and preyed upon the villages clustered just outside of the city walls. Now on those same peaks blasé hikers dressed in florescent pink and blue Gortex drink rice beer and eat savory pancakes.

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You think of the mountains of your life in America, the jagged knife edges of the Cascades and the Olympics: young and bold mountains skirted in a shag of green. These mountains in front of you have spots too ragged for the trees where the naked rock shows white. The new concrete poured over cracks in the alley by your apartment, yet to turn gray from the rains, is white, too. The rains leave trails of gray streaks clinging to the cracked corners of windows and the bars that guard them. You think about the concrete your father taught you to pour. When you rushed, didn’t let it settle right, tiny fissures and wrinkles broke to the surface. He would shake his head as his finger traced the cracks and say, “Haste makes waste, boy.”

Here, in Korea, elderly faces speak of decades of haste.

 

Have you eaten?

You finger the stenciling on the window in front of you. It reads 9,596.52 Km to Los Angeles. Seattle is in the same direction, though not as distant. You remember the cold damp air coated in the smell of pine and cedar. Below the tower, to your surprise, are green blotches dropped in the gray field: parks. They’re newer, brighter, than the growth on the mountains. This is where old men in Member’s Only jackets, hunched over lacquered wood boards tattooed with black grids, play Go. They argue over where the next white or black game piece should go. Old women gather in the parks, too, chatting while they unpack their foiled rolls of seaweed and rice: Kim Bap.

The other green blotches are the palaces with tree lined parade grounds rebuilt for the umpteenth time after the invasions that came every century or so. Out of the rubble of the last invasion, people rebuilt Seoul anew with brick, glass and concrete. They rebuilt Seoul replicating the buildings of the world outside of Korea. The replicas of itself are the only buildings built with wood.

You try to find your apartment, Block 20. One gray lego block among thirty other blocks flanking the glistening steel bowl of World Cup Stadium. Twenty-five years old and already your apartment looks dilapidated. You’ve considered calling a location scout. You would tell them, “Hey man, I got the perfect place for you to film 1984 and you know remakes are all the rage.”

When you open the creaking cold metal door, walk down the half-wall corridor, step into the dark stairway where the lights flicker to life after a few steps, emerge out of the building into the hazy sunlight, and find your way through the maze of double parked cars jamming the parking lot, you see them. The retirees. Beside the first floor windows they crouch over trashcans and styrofoam packing boxes tending their gardens of verdant life. The old men and women are guerrilla gardeners suited up in dirty white gloves and teal visors. They start early in the morning, planting, weeding, battling the gray one clump of vegetables at a time. No one tells them, “You can’t do that” since, they are old. And here, at least for people, age gets respect.

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A vine has snaked up three floors of your building, clinging to your window, offering what could be cucumbers, or some knobby vegetable more bent and rugged than anything you’ve seen at the supermarket. Can you take one for a salad, or will a battle-weary old woman come knocking on the door to ask for her harvest?

From the trashcans and styrofoam boxes along the sidewalks, the gardens grow. On rooftops and huddled in demolished housing lots, these gardens grow. But you know this is no green fad. This is memory that is spoken even now in the elderly’s greetings, “Have you eaten?”

 

Sirens

Yesterday you pushed and swayed and weaved through the currents of people in the subway station and jammed yourself into the subway car. You let go of your briefcase and it didn’t fall to the ground. It floated, defying gravity, hanging with the friction of bodies dressed in suits.

Youthful figures in black, their headphones jammed in their ears, all silently ignoring the chug of train tracks as if this is part of a pact where everyone pretends not to be clutched by the crowd swaying with the train. The flat-screen monitor above the exit doors loops a video about how to use a smoke hood hidden in padlocked glass boxes at the station. There are at least ten steps and you felt like you should take notes. There had been fires on the trains before.

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At lunch you heard the sirens. Wailing loudspeakers erupted from their hiding spots on poles painted like trees. Fake branches and leaves shrouded the speaker horns and square boxes. Radio transmitters? Looking out your office window, you saw the cars stop and the sidewalks cleared. You waited for the flashes from a far off ridgeline, artillery fire booming and shells smashing and battering the buildings, dogs howling, fires exploding and engulfing the city then raging and rioting all the way up to the peaks. The office corridor hummed without pause, and you heard someone laughing. You alone, it seemed, wondered of the possibilities.

 

English

Everything in Seoul Tower is in English. Everything new is tattooed with it. On neon signs jutting off buildings, on the menus in the Korean dive bars serving “pork intestine,” in catchy commercial slogans, and on K-pop tracks that old expats describe–with derision–as nothing more than “nursery rhymes slapped over euro-techno beats.” English isn’t hidden away in the enclaves of black walled of foreign bars of Itaewon anymore. It was in those kind of places you hid after work, always looking for a blank space of wall to add your name in chalk. You hid there with the other English teachers and American soldiers. Those places are gone like most of the people who wrote their names on walls.

In Itaewon, vendors shout in English “we have clothes in your size.” But outside this little corner of Seoul, you force yourself to speak Korean, hesitantly, trying to spit out phrases while gagged by the rocks of verbs and conjugations. In the beginning you motioned and pointed and people would look at you with confusion and ask, “Mwol?” But now, they understand you and applaud you. You can order yourself a coffee. It is something, although your pronunciation is butchered to the point of another language altogether. Being half-Korean doesn’t help. Nor does that feeling of shame whenever you utter that fact and they search your face for something left behind.

You worry that your English is getting worse. With lightning speed, chopped and spliced with slang, you feel lost with your friends in America on the phone. English is continuing without you as each year passes. You are losing your ear for the only language you have while surrounded by a language you should have had.

 

The concrete house

As you make your way back to the elevator in Seoul tower, you see through an opposite window a fog of buildings climbing a hill in the distance. That’s where your grandmother lives. You know it; its shade of gray is darker and older than the rest.

Next week is Chuseok, an ancient holiday celebrating the harvest and the dead. Your apartment, like the subways, the streets, all the gray city should be empty and cold except for a few stragglers without a hometown or a family to go to. Almost no one is from Seoul. You’ll buy a box of fruits to give your grandmother and you’ll carry it with you on the abandoned subway on one of the few days you can get a seat.

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But the night before Chuseok, you’ll gather with your friends and have a few drinks. Someone’s girlfriend will feel bad for all of you. And before she leaves for her own hometown, deep in a dark corner of a friend’s concrete walled apartment, you and your foreign friends–who each have lost a parent to one disease or another–will solemnly stand as she lays out a table with food and empty plates. She will tell you this is a Jaesa: a way to honor the departed family spirits, something many Koreans don’t do anymore.

There will an empty plate set out for your father. You’ll pour liquor into a shot glass and circle it around the incense smoke three times and pour it out into a bowl. Taking a fork, instead of chopsticks, you’ll clang it down three times against your father’s empty plate and rest it on the fried fish dish. You’ll imagine him tearing apart southern fried catfish, the crumbs littering the plate. He had always missed “real catfish from way back down home.” He would say the same here, but maybe the thought will be good enough. Three times all the way to the floor, resting your forehead against your hands, you’ll kneel and bow and breathe deep. Then you’ll walk out of the room so your father’s spirit can eat. You’ll miss your father as you stare at the web of cracks scarring the wood print linoleum floor.

On Chuseok you’ll go to your grandmother’s apartment. The two of you will eat: glassy japjae noodles, chilly red pork, and damp white and green rice cakes filled with sugar and the smell of pine. Afterward, as the sun sets behind the haze, you’ll walk with her through the grayed alleys on cracked pavement. Soon her neighborhood, built forty years ago, will be torn down and buried in memory for newer apartments that too, will crack and gray with the rains. She will say in Korean to her friends that pass by, “This is my grandson. This is my grandson. He came home for Chuseok.”

When you reach the old house that she lived in years ago, built when the concrete buildings were new and clean, she’ll say, “This is where I lived.”

“I remember,” you’ll say.

—Joe Milan

———————

Joe Milan has spent nearly a third of his life traveling and living outside the borders of the USA, and his most recent landing is in Seoul where he writes and teaches at the Catholic University of Korea. Joe is a recent graduate from the Vermont College of Fine Arts .

Feb 152012
 

 

It comes as a shock to think that I have known Robin Hemley for over thirty years. I didn’t think, honestly, that I was that old. We met at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1980, across a workshop table, I recall, with the then program director Jack Leggett chairing the proceedings. Robin looked too young to be in graduate school, and he still carries himself, even writes, with a kind of wide-eyed, cheery openness to EVERYTHING that is both charming and compulsively readable. Nowadays he’s achieved that remarkable state of being able to turn almost anything that happens in life into something worth writing about. He is an indefatigable world-traveler, prolific author, inspired teacher, and an amiable friend. Here he is taking a group of American undergraduates to Cuba for a winter course. Academia, life, politics and art merge.

Robin Hemley is the author of ten books of nonfiction and fiction, and the recipients of many awards for both, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes.  His most recent books are A FIELD GUIDE FOR IMMERSION WRITING: MEMOIR, JOURNALISM, AND TRAVEL (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and REPLY ALL: STORIES (Break Away Books, Indiana University Press, 2012).  Indiana University Press is also reissuing his novel THE LAST STUDEBAKER in 2012.  He is also the author of the popular books, TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION (Graywolf Press) and DO-OVER (Little, Brown), and the BBC is currently at work on a feature adaptation of his book INVENTED EDEN: THE ELUSIVE DISPUTED HISTORY OF THE TASADAY (Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press).  He is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, founder of the NonfictioNOW Conference, a senior editor of The Iowa Review, editor of the online magazine DEFUNCT, and a colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts .

dg

§

The eighty-three-year old Cuban poet grasped my arm, whispered, “I love your people.  I feel a spiritual connection to them.”  I didn’t know what to say.  I had just met him.  He had spent a dozen years in New York, much like the Cuban National Hero, Jose Marti, who, before dying in battle against the Spanish in 1895, spent fifteen years in New York.  I had spent a total of two weeks in Cuba, and what was I to say?  To lie?  “Right back atcha, Cuba! I feel a spiritual connection to you, too.”  I didn’t.  But neither did I feel a spiritual connection to my own country. I thought that he and nearly every other Cuban we met idealized the U.S. the way Americans idealize Cuba.  The Columbus Syndrome works both ways. Columbus spent a few days in Cuba and then sailed back and said it was the loveliest place on earth, and certainly my students had an enormous case of Columbus Syndrome.

I and a colleague had brought thirteen undergraduates with us to Havana for a Winter term course, as had, it seemed, nearly every other U.S. university.  A bellman at the Presidente Hotel, Gringo Central, told me there were more Americans now than ever, but “they will all go when Obama loses the election.” True, the restrictions have lessened over the last year, allowing more short-term visits by educators, researchers, and students.

Every day, it seemed a new group from George Mason or Randolph College or American University showed up at the Presidente and we compared notes on our respective itineraries: who was going to visit Che’s grave or the hot springs at Las Terrazas or the beaches of Varadero. Canadians, Brits, Russians, Germans, Chinese, Argentines, Colombians, and Japanese have been coming here for years, but for the throngs of young Americans now legally entering Cuba, the approach is not unlike the hordes of shoppers awaiting a midnight sale at Target on Thanksgiving. And what are they waiting so impatiently to purchase? Authenticity, of course.  It’s what the country trades in when all is blockaded.  Cuba es autentica, the commercial warbles.  Tom Miller, a travel writer and Cuban expert along with us, warned my students never to use the words, “quaint,” “nestle,” or “local” in a travel piece, but his warning was of no use.  Any traveler infatuated with a new country sees nothing but quaint nestling locals.

And that’s not the half of it with Cuba, where a powerful strain of Columbus Syndrome, resistant to any known ideological antigen, infects most American tourists who find their way here legally or not. It’s not just the antiquated American cars from the fifties and sixties, belching smoke and plying the uncongested streets of Havana.  Or the two and three hundred year old buildings, some being restored, some too ruined to save.  It’s also the view from the rooftop of the Presidente Hotel at night – the modest skyline with only one or two signs lit by neon.  My colleague and I had wondered if our students would miss the Internet and Facebook and Skype and their cell phones.  Instead, they worshipped the lack of it.  It’s not the U.S. blockade against Cuba that blocks the Internet, but the Castro government, though nearly everything else seems the result of the blockade, including the cars and the crumbling buildings.

What the elevator operator in the Presidente Hotel said about the U.S. elections is true most likely.  If Obama loses the election, the Blockade will undoubtedly continue at least four years more.  No one, American or Cuban alike, could give me a good reason why the Blockade, in place since 1960, continues, except for the most obvious political reason, that the Blockade serves the interests of a minority of Cuban Americans in Florida.  And there’s too much money being made in the maintenance of the Blockade, (including spending 500 million taxpayer dollars annually on Radio and TV Marti, the latter which is blocked by the Cuban government in any event).  The word I heard most frequently was “inertia.”  The Blockade has been in place so long, no one has the energy or will to end it.

Romney must be a little embarrassed by a 2007 speech on Cuba, which he mistakenly ended with the phrase, “Patria o Muetre!  Venceremos!”  It means “Fatherland or Death, We shall overcome,” a phrase that Castro used for decades to end his speeches, and which my students and I glimpsed occasionally on banners strung across Havana’s streets (Gingrich has had a lot of fun with that Romney gaff).  Our tour guide admitted unabashedly as we passed under one such banner, “It works, growing up with those slogans, seeing them everyday.”  Of course, it works, but blockades and embargoes don’t work, unless we hope to push the blockaded country into war.  When was the last embargo that worked?  In the forties, we wanted Japan to leave China and stop massacring its population.  A noble desire on our part, but not an easy solution.  After we imposed an oil embargo against Japan (at the time, America supplied 80% of Japan’s oil), Japan asked FDR for a summit to discuss the matter, but the U.S. said Japan had to withdraw first from China and instead Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.  Go figure.  Why didn’t they just do the right thing and obey us?

Throughout World War Two, comics routinely portrayed Japanese as monkeys, inhuman, not worth a moment’s thought, but now of course, we’re the best of idealizing buddies again.  It could be so again with Cuba.  In his youth, Fidel Castro wrote to FDR addressing him as his good friend and asking him for a ten- dollar bill.  I’m sure he doesn’t give this youthful faux pas a moment’s thought now, and it means nothing because he was a child.  But grown men like Romney and Gingrich should at least be a little realistic when they ask the Castros for something.  They don’t want ten dollars from Raul or Fidel Castro.  They want, in Gingrich’s words to “promote democracy” in Cuba.  They want “free elections.”  Sure, we all do.  We want them in China.  Let’s blockade it.  We want them in Iran.  Let’s embargo it . . . oh, we are?

This just in: Cubans don’t want to drive junker cars.  They’d rather drive new cars, which they now get from China, along with scores of new Chinese busses.  They long to eat Pringles.  But I don’t want them to eat Pringles!  Or Big Macs.  I certainly never want to hear any quaint Cuban locals ordering skinny lattes.  Then all hope for humanity will be lost.  For this reason, I find myself curiously conflicted about the Blockade, on the one hand wondering what good it serves (beyond reasons to do with a small minority of Cuban Americans in Florida).  On the other hand, I was delighted to see so many old American cars so well preserved.  The country seems so real!

During our visit, a rumor spread in the Miami Cuban community that Fidel had died, relayed to me by Tom Miller, who added that such rumors crop up every eighteen months or so.  “Assassination by Twitter.”  I mentioned the rumor later to our Cuban tour guide who assured me it couldn’t be true because if it were, her mother, a well-known journalist, would have been in tears that morning.  Cubans mourning Castro?  Actually mourning him and not in the official North Korean way, in which a family of bears reportedly sobbed by the side of the road upon learning of Kim Jong-Il’s passing? Undoubtedly, few woodland creatures will mourn Castro’s passing, and not many more Americans, but now I wonder if even his passing will signal a change in our policy toward Cuba?

Honestly, ask yourself, don’t you want to visit Cuba before Fidel dies and/or the Blockade ends?  Of course you do.  You want to see Cuba as it exists now, poor and blockaded, but resilient and proud, one of the lone anti-U.S. bastions that’s any fun. If North Koreans had conga lines and made Pyongyang Club Rum, maybe they’d have more visitors, too.  But North Koreans don’t salsa.  At least, the Cubans know how to resist the U.S. with panache.  When the American Interests section, a tall building along Havana’s famous seafront, the Malecon, streamed electronic anti-Castro messages around the building’s rooftop during the Bush administration, Fidel retaliated by erecting over a hundred flagpoles flying enormous flags to block the messages.  The messages are gone now, but the Cuban flags remain, as well as an adjacent plaza, “Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Plaza.” It was here, on January 1st, the anniversary of the “Triumph of the Revolution,” that my students and I listened to a Cuban singer belting out tunes with a string of young women straight out of a USO Show, as one of the savvier of my students remarked, line dancing on a stage before which thousands were gathered, most of them dancing too.  And between sets the enormous anti-imperialist video screens played the latest American music videos.

 —Robin Hemley

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See also Stanley Fogel’s ¿Que Coño Pasa? Snapshots of my Wonderful Cuban Life, a book length essay on living in Cuba published earlier on NC.

May 112011
 

photograph by Jessica Pezalla

When he was young (in the last century), dg had a thing for that 1936 (definitely before dg was born) Clark Gable movie San Francisco (with Spencer Tracy and Jeanette MacDonald). DG actually used to want to be Clark Gable when he grew up. Unfortunately, things turned out otherwise. But he did go around for a number of years humming that song to himself even though he lived in Ontario and did not see San Francisco until, um, 1969. But enough about dg. Here’s a lovely “What it’s like living here” piece from Danielle Frandina who actually lives in San Francisco and perhaps never even saw that ancient movie (forever twined in dg’s mind with SF)—a pleasant and striking contrast to the economic doom-sayers and the plate geologists who all see the state sliding into the Pacific figuratively or actually pretty soon. After reading Danielle’s words, I think we should all join Jeanette MacDonald for a rousing chorus or two of “San Francisco!”

dg

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What it’s like living here

From Danielle Frandina in San Francisco

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I grew up in Colorado, and if you’re from the West, but not the West Coast, you’re born with an innate suspicion and resentment of Californians.  Back in high school, my boyfriend wanted us to move there after graduation, but I refused, choosing the deserts of New Mexico instead.  During the mudslides and fires that plagued the Golden State in the mid-Nineties, I remember thinking some very insensitive thoughts about Californians, something along the lines of, “They’re getting what they deserve.”  In my mind, California was Los Angeles, and Los Angeles represented all that was despicable and embarrassingly indulgent about Americans.  But eight years ago, I loaded up a borrowed car with little more than my clothes, books and music and headed to the Bay Area for the sweet shelter of my two best friends, the debris of my former life smoldering in the rear view mirror.

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The Apartment

photograph by Joe Frandina

I live in a lemon-yellow building on Dearborn Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District.  It was built in 1910.  This date matters.  It means it was constructed after the 1906 earthquake, so I can’t gauge how the structure will hold up when another one of that magnitude hits. The Bay windows of my studio apartment face street-side onto three palm trees that guard a locally famous community garden, the oldest in the city.  During a storm, the palms sway and shake so violently that it’s easy to imagine I’m witnessing a tropical storm.  This sight always sends me back to the beach town of Mui Ne in Vietnam, where, as a lone backpacker, I was once bedridden for three days.  In my fevered state, all I had the energy to do was watch the palm trees dance through the glassless windows of my bungalow as monsoon season really took root.  Strangely, this is a soothing memory.  I recall feeling no fear, no resistance, just letting the illness course through my body, being completely at ease with my surroundings and circumstances.  I rarely feel that way.  At ease.

My apartment is around the corner from what is now called the Gourmet Ghetto.  Slow Foods Movement and Farm to Table restaurants line 18th Street.  To explain to San Franciscans where I live, I just tell them my street is catty corner to Tartine, arguably the best artisan bakery in the city.  On any given day, at any given time, there is a line around the block to get in and order a Morning Bun or Croque Monsieur.  And it’s worth the wait.

Continue reading »

Jan 252011
 
Barrett Olson-Glover 1

Journey’s end, back-country in British Columbia

It is an undoubted fact that in the heart of every young Canadian there lurks the impulse to pack up and drive across the country at least once. The road itself, the Trans-Canada Highway, and the immense distances beckon you. DG’s nephew, Barrett Olson-Glover, left Oakville, Ontario, just after Christmas and arrived in Vancouver New Year’s Eve. He was supposed to drive with friends, but his friends lacked the true adventurous spirit of the breed, and they abandoned him. Hence he had to take his trip photos while driving one-handed.  There is just something visceral, no matter how gray, cold and alien the outlook, in photographs of the empty land. Lake Superior is mythic, the Prairies are lunar, and the mountains  exude an air of being party girls who know how good they look (and yes their sheer immensity, catching the light, seems also inhuman). The back-country photos of Barrett (top and bottom of the post) in British Columbia were taken by his boarding friend Dan Robertson.

dg

Heading north to go west over the Great Lakes

First glimpse of Lake Superior

Continue reading »

Apr 262010
 

Though I’ve known and admired Jack Hodgin‘s work for ages, we actually hadn’t met til we ended up on the same judges’ panel for a literary award three years ago. Usually, these things are tense affairs, but Jack, our third panelist, the novelist Joan Barfoot, and I had such an agreeable time together we became internet friends, a tiny community of three sending group emails back and forth. Joan lives in London, Ontario, and Jack lives far, far away on Vancouver Island. He has been known to complain ruefully, upon finding a sequence of emails from Joan and me, that everything happens in the rest of the world before he even wakes up in the morning.

Jack has been a huge and beneficent presence on the Canadian literary scene for a couple of generations now. You can find all this for yourself by exploring his website (which, incidentally, contains a generous amount of writing advice). I love the list of prizes he’s won; it’s almost as long as the number of books he’s published. I am also fascinated by his real life relationship with the fictional character Dr. Jack Hodgins in the TV series “Bones.”

This little essay is just a taste. I like it because it reminds me of all the friends who have made the pilgrimage to Oxford–so many of us loved Faulkner and yet had to fight our way out from under his stylistic shadow.

Jack has a new novel coming out in May. It’s called The Master of Happy Endings. This is what Alice Munro says about it: “From one of Canada’s master storytellers comes a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his later seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself.” Buy the book.

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FAULKNER MISSISSIPPI:  April 1982

Walking up the pathway towards the front steps and white pillars of the house known as Rowan Oak, I was aware of a chill that lifted the hairs at the back of my neck. William Faulkner had lived here, had written most of his novels here, had walked up this pathway, perhaps had even laid this herringbone brickwork in the pathway himself. The man would not be inside, of course – he had been dead for several years – but the house was open to visitors, with a resident guide from the nearby university.  Still, I was about to reach the destination in what was really a sort of pilgrimage.

We had spent a few sunny April days in New Orleans before driving the little rented car north, pausing only briefly in Baton Rouge before passing into Mississippi. We’d visited the ante-bellum houses in Natchez and toured the 16 miles of Vicksburg battleground before driving on up the highway through pine forests in the direction of Oxford.

In the direction, that is, of the town where once lived the man whose books had thrilled and inspired me, and whose powerful voice and vision had so invaded me as to destroy all my earliest attempts at writing – two bad novels and several stories, all rejected and abandoned — before I’d eventually found my own place and my own voice. Still, though I may have shaken off much of the power I’d once allowed him to have, I had not abandoned my admiration for the man and his work.

Of course the first indication we were entering Faulkner country was the little signpost naming the Yocana River, which was just a narrow yellow creek barely moving at the bottom of a muddy ditch.  It was not easy to imagine this “Yoknapatawpha” in anything like flood, or to believe in the difficulties it gave the Bundren family when they crossed it with the mother’s coffin, heading, as we were, for the town where “Pa” would get a new set of teeth, bury his wife, and find himself a new one. I hoped this was not a hint of more disappointments ahead.

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