Thoreau of the Desert

It is not the answer that enlightens,

but the question.

---Eugene Ionesco

Desert Solitaire, a 2016 Reading Challenge book, has been in my mental To Be Read (TBR) stack for many years. The title beguiles me and has kept me from reading the book because I was afraid it would disappoint, as if the title was too beautiful for what may follow. I have not been disappointed.

Desert Solitaire epigraph:

Give me silence, water, hope

Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes

-- Neruda

Delicate Arch

Edward Abbey worked as a seasonal Park Ranger at what was then called Arches National Monument in Utah, in the late 1950s. He lived twenty miles away from the nearest house in a "little tin government house trailer". Mice-ridden, (an adopted gopher snake took care of them), freezing cold in April, stifling hot in July, equipped with the bare necessities for living, the trailer became a place to store food and belongings. When the weather turned warmish, he built a lean-to "ramada" and a fire pit and moved outdoors, where he slept under the stars. Desert Solitaire was written ten years later from the journals Abbey kept during his seasonal work at the Arches.

From Abbey's Introduction:

This is not primarily a book about the desert. In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea...If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.

Edward Abbey held strong views about modern America's attitude to wilderness. He could not abide the superficial way most tourists visited the Arches. His "word of caution" regarding "industrial tourism":

Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe...

Some have attributed Abbey with the beginning of the Earth First! movement and ecoterrorism. His book The Monkey Wrench Gang is about sabotaging a dam construction project in the Southwest, so it is kind of understandable that he would be seen as a proponent of drastic means to stop man's destruction of the natural environment. Abbey strenuously denied that he supported ecoterrorism. However, in Desert Solitaire, he admits to tearing out several miles worth of new road survey markers near his trailer house. A very naughty protest, but not ecoterrorism.

Rattlesnakes, wildflowers, poisonous water springs, fresh water springs, cliff seeps and hidden grottoes, flash floods, quicksand, range cattle, and uranium are described in beautiful prose in this masterpiece of nature writing. One of the most interesting things to me is that according to Abbey, the beautiful land forms in the Arches are not the result of wind erosion, but of the slow drip of water and the effects of contraction and expansion of cold and heat over eons of geologic time.

Lake Powell, Glen Canyon

Abbey describes not only his surrounds in the Arches, but a river raft trip down the Colorado through Glen Canyon, as the dam was being built. It is heartbreaking to know that the beauty he describes is now deep under water and silt, buried forever. Even if the dam is not permanent, the silt is. His solitary foray up the side canyon where the Escalante River enters the Colorado is my favorite part of the book. He finds the ruins of a cliff dwelling perched high up the canyon wall. It is all now buried forever. And sadly, Glen Canyon Dam was built not for irrigation but for electricity so that hordes of people could live in the desert southwest.

Mt. Tukuhnikivats in the La Sal range

We accompany Abbey on a camping trip and solitary climb up one of the highest mountains overlooking the Arches, Mt. Tukuhnikivats. And, we go to the bottom of Grand Canyon where Abbey spent 35 days camped near the Native American village of Havasu. While there he nearly trapped himself on a ledge while exploring the area around his camp. He worked his way down a cliff side and was stranded. Piling rocks and then centering his walking stick in the pile, he climbed up to the tip of his stick and used it as a launch to jump up to a handhold in the rock above. Risky.

Havasu Falls, Grand Canyon

The Maze

This same fearless attitude sent him and a friend to The Maze, a no-man's-land of canyons (now part of Canyonlands National Park). At the time, they were barely able to get into the area with a Land Rover. They repelled down a cliff face to the maze itself, not knowing if they would find a way to climb back up. Yes, risky but Abbey described himself as "not an atheist but an earthiest". He believed one should "be true to the earth". He was not afraid because he did not separate himself from the environment.

He believed in the desert.

"The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert."

The title Desert Solitaire is perfect for this book. It is beautiful. The book is beautiful. I will read it again.

P.S. While recuperating from hand surgery, I could hardly hold a book in my hands for more than a few minutes. This is what I did as I inched my way through Desert Solitaire:

 

Tunnel Redux

I am recovering from my second carpal tunnel surgery, doing well, but not ready to take up where I left off before this medical flurry.

One thing I am going to do in the next week or so is re-visit the purpose of this blog so I can focus on getting along with some serious reading. Using LibraryThing's Legacy Libraries, find authors I like, and read the books I have in common with those authors. Simple.

See you around the corner.

Still in the Tunnel and Mystery Bookmark

Sorry for the abrupt interregnum here. I should have let you know that I had carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand so would be absent for a bit. The surgery was not scheduled to happen until this coming Monday but there was an opening so they whisked me in on Friday, May 13th (yikes!!!) so it was all a big whirlwind. Anyway...three weeks into recovery and I am nearly back.  Very satisfied with the procedure and expect to be fully recovered in another week or two. Left hand is scheduled for June 28, so fair warning, another pause to come!

Enough about that.

With lots of time to dawdle, I finished two 2016 Reading Challenge books. I will post on the Lopez book soon, and the Farrell book later as it is part of trilogy I need to finish.

Also, I have listened to many audio books while playing one-handed Churchill Solitaire on my iPad. As usual, my genre choice is British mystery but I also listened to a short history of Greece and a mystery with a knitting theme. Random, but I do tend to choose my reading matter based on the most shiny thing I see at the moment.

Here is what I am currently reading in the physical book world:

Provence by Ford Madox Ford

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje

I have "dipped into" Plutarch's Lives, The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, and The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell. I will save those for later. The Dunnett is quite dense. So much so, I have a companion volume to refer to when I do not understand her historical references. I love the challenge but am not quite ready for it right now. Plutarch is part of my mental "must read the classics" obsession and the Farrell is part three of a trilogy so I will wait to post about it when I can speak to all three books. I need to re-read Troubles, the second book in the trilogy because for who knows what reason I began reading them out of order and it was several years ago and I cannot remember much about Troubles. The first book, Siege of Krishnapur, winner of the Booker Prize, is shown above. I am still thinking about that one so am looking forward to the next two.

Here is a teaser for you ~~

Side Two of a Bookmark

I found this in one of the books I am now reading...more to come. Now, I have to grab some ice and rest my hand.

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out."

--Heraclitus

In the opening epigram, facing the Table of Contents page, Heraclitus, over 2,500 years ago, said in twenty words what Annie Dillard used 279 pages to say in her masterpiece of nature writing, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Using keen observation and much research, her chronicle of a year of life near Tinker Creek and its surrounds is a much more nuanced and detailed look at the Fire that keeps each of us and the rest of the Universe in constant aliveness and motion.

A 2016 Reading Challenge book, I finished my well-worn ex-library copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last night, and have some thoughts about it before moving on to the next book on my list. This book reminds me of a project begun in 2013 by my favorite book blogger who blogs as dovegreyreader. She had been reading nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin and decided to learn as much as she could about the area covering a one mile radius surrounding her English country home. She has written about her explorations here: Beating the Bounds.

From the frontispiece of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance...I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

"It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen..." From the beginning, Dillard is "beating the bounds" of her neighborhood in western Virginia while using what she sees and hears as evidence for her personal abiding faith in a Creator. We are with her as she walks along Tinker Creek and then stands stock still as she watches a frog collapse inward, like a leather purse being slowly folded flat. She then reports what she found through research that an aquatic water bug with pincers holds the frog in place from behind, injects a liquefying agent, and quickly sucks the frog to death. Poor innocent frog! But wait, does not the frog eat something else alive one second and dead the next? As Alfred Lord Tennyson said in a poem, nature is "red in tooth and claw" and that is quite apparent from the start in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Organized by season, Dillard takes us around her suburban surrounds. From the sky to the quarry we learn how to "see" nature. Once seen, we learn a little more about how to understand what we are seeing. And, for some of us this understanding is a spiritual experience, for others a confirmation that physics and biology work together in mysterious ways.

For Dillard, the journey's ultimate goal is spiritual. For me, reading about the journey resulted in a better understanding of what is over my head, in the water around me, and under my feet. Satisfying enough for this reader. The ongoing confirmation of Dillard's faith actually seemed "preachy" at times and nearly caused me to put the book down and not finish it. However, reminding myself that not everybody is the same (thank you, Jane Austen!), I stuck with it and am glad I did.

For me, the most incredible bit in the book takes place in a quarry, in the fall. Dillard has decided to contemplate the sunset as she looks over a quarry. She notices a curved "something" on a rock ledge over the way. Deciding to take a look, she walks in that direction but stops as soon as she realizes it is a small copperhead snake resting on the rock, still warm from the last of the day's sunlight. Knowing the risk she is taking, she moves closer to the snake and sits down within four feet of it. She sits very still and observes the snake, its scales, how its tail decreases in size to nothingness, how its head is raised up above the rock. Then, in amazement she watches a mosquito land on the snake's back and begin sucking its blood. This lasts for about two minutes. She imagines how much effort the mosquito has to expend to reach between the scales and find the perfect place to insert its needle-sharp snout. After this is over, Dillard wonders if the snake could feel the mosquito as it went about its work. She also tells the reader that copperhead snakes are abundant in her area, account for most poisonous snakebites in the U.S., and are not quite poisonous enough to kill an adult human. There are timber rattlers in her woods too and she always carries a snake bite kit with her wherever she goes.

I admire her courage. Copperheads are found in the hill country of Texas too. When we visited relatives there I was always worried sick about one finding my kids as they played in the brushy areas around their grandma's house. We should have thought of a snake bite kit!

Here are a few of the notes I took as I went along:

Dillard quotes Arthur Koestler: "Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become spheres."

From a physicist: "Everything that has happened is a particle, everything in the future is a wave."

Dillard: "Beauty itself is the language for which there is no key."
"I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want seen. It demands my full attention."

This is a GOOD book. If you are interested in nature and like nature writing, even down to the gory bits, I highly recommend it.

Annie Dillard is now in her early 70s and lives on an island in the Puget Sound. Here is what she has to say about her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

"In 1971 I wanted to try my hand at prose. My journals were full of facts that I used to write Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), a sustained nonfiction narrative about the fields, creeks, woods, and mountains near Roanoke, Virginia. Because I "Named" its chapters, in the style of 19th-century narratives, many reviewers took it for a book of essays. The book attempted to describe the creator, if any, by studying creation, leading one writer to call me (wonderfully) 'one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th century' ".

It's that "nature, red in tooth and claw" bit.

The Sea, The Sea and The Sea

The sea. My favorite, most favorite place is the seacoast. I love how the sea changes. I love the smell of the sea air and the feel of the biting wind. I can never get enough of sea gazing.

A friend is traveling to Ireland later this year. She is reading Irish writers for the culture, history, geography, and to take the pulse of the country. She mentioned that she was reading The Sea by John Banville. At the time of our conversation I was reading one of my 2016 Reading Challenge TBR books, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. Both Irish writers, both winners of the Booker Prize for these books. I had read Banville's book several years ago but hardly remembered it. We agreed that we would get together soon to talk about our respective books. I decided to re-read The Sea and have just finished it.

The books are quite different, but also eerily the same. Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea is a chunk at 495 pages. Banville's is a quick read at 195 pages. I say "quick read" with tongue firmly in cheek. He packs a lot into one sentence. Both books are about memory and its vagaries. The protagonists are both men approaching old age. The setting of both is by the sea and the sea is a main "character" in each.

In The Sea, The Sea Charles Arrowby, recently retired from the theatre, has moved to an isolated house somewhere in coastal north England. His property includes an old Martello Tower, a remnant of the Napoleonic Wars. The house has no electricity or central heat. He is a lifelong bachelor who cooks hideous meals from canned goods, and he hints at a grand romantic disappointment in his early years. Charles intends to write his memoirs, but the book is barely begun before he is frantically writing about current events, of his own making, as they spiral out of control.

Here is Charles' proud description of one of his meals:

"Spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil; spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill; boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soy oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in; with these a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef; a bottle of retsina."

Sounds good, eh?

Charles is self-regarding, manipulative, jealous, obsessive, treats people very badly, and thinks his house might be haunted. He has delusional visions which he ascribes to possible LSD flashbacks. He swims in the sea daily and is eventually visited by many of the old acquaintances he is meant to write about in his memoirs. Due to an obsession about his lost love, he commits a crime and finds himself in the middle of a horrible mess.

I could not put this book down. Murdoch's writing compels the reader to find out what crazy thing Charles or one of his visitors is going to say or do next. But it is not only Charles who is a main character. The sea, the sea is ever present. Murdoch's descriptions (written by Charles) of the sea are simply breathtaking. Rather than describing the sea in relation to someone or something happening at the time, it stands alone as its own separate entity, never just background for the action.

"There was nothing upon the luminous faintly-wrinkled expanse except wavery yellow replicas of the evening star and the low crouching moon. The sky was still a dimmed glowing blue, not yet sunk into the blackish blue of night."

"The sea was a choppy dark blue, the sky pale, with a smooth gleaming buff-coloured cloud just above the horizon like a long tatter of silk."

"Cool summer weather had come back with a misty sky and a calm sea. The water was a very pale luminous grey-blue almost white the same colour as the sky, shifting with a quick small dancing movement, and scattered by the misted sun with little explosions of metallic pale-gold light. It had the look of a happy sea..."

"The sea had regained its bejewelled purplish look, inlaid with spotted lines of emerald."

Sounds idyllic doesn't it, this deadly, beautiful sea?

Murdoch is known to be a difficult writer to "get". I have read several other works by her, and found them to be a bit inaccessible. Not so with The Sea, The Sea. She was a moral philosopher and this comes through in her writing.

"Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted."

Agree or disagree? Worth pondering. Personally, I think we are all actors most of the time.

Without giving away spoilers, I will leave it at that. Charles lands on his feet but is left with the prospect of aging:

"That is a dreadful land, old age."

I could not help thinking of Iris Murdoch's own "dreadful land" as she slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's disease.

 Moving on to John Banville's The Sea. What a treat! I am so glad I decided to re-read this book. I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Banville either unconsciously put in bits he gleaned from The Sea, The Sea or he was paying homage to Iris Murdoch. She won the Booker in 1978, Banville in 2005.

Both books include the word "plimsoll", a type of rubber-soled canvas slip-on leisure or sports shoe. The usage of this word is not very common nowadays so it seemed funny to me that both Murdoch and Banville would choose it to describe a pair of shoes.

In The Sea, The Sea Charles visits a churchyard cemetery. He finds a headstone with no name, just the word "Dummy" on it. Apparently a deaf-mute sailor from the 1800s is buried there. In The Sea Banville has given the nickname "Dummy" to one of the characters, a young boy who is mute and also has webbed toes.

As I said earlier, both characters are late middle-aged men, both remembering their lives, and dealing with those memories in their own way.

After his wife dies of cancer, Max, an art historian, moves to a lodging house called Cedars to grieve. The house is located on the seacoast. Max has been there before. As a young adolescent he stayed nearby with his parents in a lower-class beach shack for a few weeks each summer. Cedars (the entire house) was being rented by an upper class family called Grace. Max was befriended by the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, who were about his age. He was swept into the family life of the Graces and referred to them as "the gods" because of their carefree, grand style of life.

Max worshipped Mrs. Grace. He watched her, relaxing on the beach:

"She lifts a hand up high to brush a clinging strand of hair from her damp forehead and I fix on the secret shadow under her armpit, plum-blue, the tint of my humid fantasies for nights to come."

Max is a complex character. He is from the lower classes but he marries the only child of a well-to-do businessman so he moves up in society. He had aspired to move up after his summer with "the gods" but has always thought of himself as a fraud in that world. He has had a career as an art historian and is supposed to be writing a book on the French artist Bonnard, but it is languishing, and Max thinks of himself as a dilettante. His daughter Claire has given up the pursuit of an art history degree for social work and Max is determined to steer her back on course because he expects his daughter to be a serious scholar, not half serious as he considers himself to be. Max shows us glimpses of his cruel side. As a boy, he used to beat his little dog so he could enjoy how it came cowering back to him for love and affection in spite of the beating. He bullied a village boy in the presence of one of the Grace twins so as to appear "better" than the low class boy. Max's version of events in the book make him seem like a good person, but memory is unreliable and the cruelty in some of his actions and his sudden anger at his dead wife belie his belief in his own goodness.

The Sea bounces back and forth between the present and the past. Max recalls his wife's last year as she is dying. He remembers that long ago summer when he was first introduced to death but it is not until the end that we find out how. As with Murdoch, the sea is also ever present in The Sea. However, not as a character, but more as a setting for the action. The writing is, like Murdoch's beautiful:

"...air like scratched glass..."

"...last spikes of sunlight..."

"...the water racing in over the flats, swift and shiny as mercury, stopping at nothing..."

"A breeze smacked down on the beach and swarmed across it slantwise under a skim of dry sand then came on over the water, chopping the surface into sharp little metallic shards. I shivered not from the cold now but as if something had passed through me, silent swift, irresistible."

"The mud shone blue as a new bruise..."

Overall, The Sea is, as reviewed by the NY Times, "about grief, the misery and confusion the narrator feels on losing his wife." It is also about memory and how we view the past through a small lens, in bits and pieces, usually static, and not necessarily as events actually unfolded.

Finally, from another reviewer:

"...Banville's prose is sublime. Several times on every page the reader is arrested by a line or sentence that demands to be read again. They are like hits of some delicious drug, these sentences. One has to stop for a while, and gaze smiling and unseeing into the middle distance, before returning to the page for one's next fix. For a shortish book, it takes a long time to read."

As I said, Banville packs a lot into one sentence.

I can highly recommend both of these books. Not light reads, either one, but good reading to take with you if you are planning a long visit to the seacoast. Just the descriptions of the sea are enough to keep one gazing out over the water for hours and hours.

Spotify and Desert Island Discs

Do you listen to music while reading? I do. Sometimes because I find it easier to concentrate without random noise, or because I am in the same room where television is on and cannot read otherwise. My favorite way to listen is Spotify. I subscribe to the ad-free premium version.

I first heard of Spotify when listening to the podcast Books on the Nightstand. Ann Kingman, one of the pair of publisher reps who created the podcast, was talking about listening to music while reading. She said she uses Spotify to find music to suit the mood of the book she is reading. This idea intrigued me, so I went looking for Spotify.

Now, several years later, I have many playlists that reflect my taste in music and I go to for enjoyment, background, or to set the mood for reading a particular book or author.

While reading Virginia Woolf, I play my "Woolf" playlist which includes Wagner, Beethoven, and Mozart (so far). I built this playlist from mentions of London concerts attended by the Woolfs in Virginia's diary.

Rainier Maria Rilke came from an old Bohemian aristocratic family. His letters and poems are accompanied by music from "old Bohemia", now part of the Czech Republic. I have downloaded Czech and Slovak folk music for my "Rilke" playlist.

A fun way to learn about an author's taste in music is to listen to BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. I love this podcast! There is a treasure trove of programs in the archives on the website. I am a big fan of Ian McEwan. He was interviewed on Desert Island Discs and his favorite music includes jazz, Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Donizetti, and Van Morrison. If I am reading one of his books, I might create a "McEwan" playlist including some or all of these. Just to set the mood.

Spotify has become part of my reading life. Not for everything, but today as I work my way through John Banville's The Sea, I am listening to music about the sea, like:

La Mer

Now I need to go find some more quiet sea music for my playlist "The Sea". Thank you, Ann Kingman, for introducing me to Spotify.

I will be back soon with a post on two books, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and The Sea, mentioned above. Both Irish writers, both Booker Prize winners for these particular books.

The Leopard

I finished The Leopard last week and have waited to write about it so I could gather my thoughts a bit. I share this book with the LibraryThing Legacy Library of author Robert Graves and it is one of my 2016 Reading Challenge books. It is a treasure, and I will definitely read it again. In fact, when finished, I was tempted to turn back to the beginning and start over. Beautifully written by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and a fascinating glimpse back in time to old Sicily when Princes ruled their isolated estates like Kings.

Our Prince is Don Fabrizio. He is based on the author's great-grandfather, Don Giulio Maria Fabrizio Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa. Set mostly in 1860 at the time of the "Risorgimento" led by Garibaldi, when Italy ceased to be two states, "...and the whole Italian peninsula would soon be one state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire". Don Fabrizio realizes this means the end of his way of life, and probably much of his fortune. He chooses to embrace it all hoping, as his nephew Tancredi tells him, "...everything must change so that everything can stay the same."

For an excellent review, go to JeffreyKeeten.com

Also, here is a link to the 1963 movie starring Burt Lancaster: The Leopard

I highly recommend the original version of this beautiful movie. It is long and slow-moving, but a feast for the eyes.

My copy of The Leopard is a TIME Reading Program Special Edition, published in 1966.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa