Rich Mintz  

I was referred by a friend (OK, it was her) to Wade Rouse’s At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life, which I read this weekend. It’s light, a loose collection of essays tied together. And Rouse takes the stereotypical gay thing a little further than I can usually stomach (and, hello, I’M GAY) but, you know, in the service of art. In the service of art.

And I have to admit I really enjoyed the book, and that Rouse’s spiritual journey has enhanced my spiritual journey.

The thrust of the book is “urban gay couple move to the great outdoors in search of a Walden experience,” “urban” meaning St. Louis (well, okay), and their “outdoors” being the middle of nowhere several miles outside of Saugatuck, Michigan. Not literally off the grid; but no Starbucks within an hour or more (!), no cable TV (at least initially), no NPR.

Can they survive? Can they thrive? Can they live without the things they have to live without, and learn to live with the things they have to live with?

You’ll have to read the book to find out, but I came to the end appreciating Rouse’s willingness to try to follow his passion (and make serious life changes in order to do it) and discuss it honestly, including the aspects of it that drove him crazy. If you want to be a writer, you have to write! And if you want to live a simpler life, you have to, well, simplify! And — if someone like Rouse can do it, someone much more deeply embedded in consumer culture than you probably are, then so can you! Etc.

Also: Dude doesn’t have to be Shakespeare to be worth reading.

Also: Why should I make fun of Wade Rouse, in my urban-cynical way, for being gayer than me? He is who he is. Not to mention that he isn’t gayer than me, he just wears more product and goes to the gym more often. Not to mention that he’s had four books published, and gets to live in the woods!

I eagerly awaited Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, having devoured his previous ones. This one was not disappointing, and I was sorry to see it end. It spans almost a century of time in England, from an era that has long been buried under the rubble of wartime and modernity to the present day.

In the long sweep of the first half of the novel, the earlier scenes that set up the contemporary second half, I was struck by the degree to which the book felt like an artifact of its age. Those earlier sections read like a contemporary novel (of their day) rather than like a later reconstruction, and I kept having to remind myself that Hollinghurst wrote this in 2009 and 2010 rather than, say, 1923.

As usual, there are Gay People in this novel (not always recognized as such at the time, of course), and a literary consciousness and a sense of humor, and an exceptionally fine sense of discrimination among types of shame and self-loathing and self-censorship.

I finally read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, two years or more after Greg Payette recommended it to me. One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read this year, and hard to paraphrase (like the best life-affirming practical philosophy always is).

Crawford’s mission is to show that the manual arts not only qualify as intellectual pursuits, but are more closely tied to human fulfillment than much white-collar work (in a world where so much so-called “creative” work has been both mechanized, and abstracted from its locus in a human community). Someone who works in an office can be said to be “successful” if he has met the internally defined, arbitrary constraints set by management, without regard to any ethics or even physics. But a motorcycle repairman, or electrician, etc., is successful only if his motorcycle (or wiring, etc.) “works” in reference to a standard that’s at once objective (verifiable), and aligned with the human experience of using the product of his work correctly.

My own experience correlates. The time in my life when I felt most certain that I was situated and successful, as a human participating in a community, was the two years in Atlanta when I ran a money-losing, objectively failing bookstore. The money-losing part was a problem, of course, and imposed painful side effects of its own, which led me to abandon the endeavor; but I suspect I would have been perfectly happy taking home $50,000 a year indefinitely (an achievable sum) as proprietor of that shop, especially in a city where it’s possible to live respectably on a mortgage payment of $800 a month.

The reviewers said that Jonathan Raban’s new essay collection Driving Home: An American Journey was uneven, that it could have benefited from a bit of pruning. And after grazing my way through it I can assure you they were right. But his essays on the landscape, culture, and history of Seattle are spot-on. That’s the reason I soldiered on to the end of the book, and it was worthwhile.

My father’s family is from Seattle. To be precise, my father’s mother’s family is from Seattle. My grandmother (who is still living out her destiny as queen of the family hive) was born in Seattle a bit more than a century ago, was the first valedictorian of the then-brand-new Garfield High School, grew up in a house on Yesler Way where her brother ran out to catch the streetcar as they heard it clang past. (My father’s father grew up in Spokane, and came to Seattle to court and marry my grandmother. Two Jewish families in Washington at the turn of the century, go figure.)

My grandparents moved to Los Angeles in 1927 (my Spokane-born father was barely out of swaddling clothes when they caught the train south), and most of my remaining family left Washington long ago, mostly for California; but one branch of cousins has stayed on to this day, and others have returned to Seattle in their old age, preferring to live out their last years in a familiar place. Seattle isn’t a place I visited frequently as a child, but it was symbolically important to my family, I did experience it enough times that I have memories of it from each stage of life, early childhood and tweenhood and young adulthood and, more recently, my twenties and thirties and forties. I have only the most rudimentary Seattle geography in my head, but the directions toward mountains and sea and canal are usually clear, and on each adult visit I get better oriented.

After spending longer in the East than in my childhood California, the Seattle landscape always surprises me with its Western brightness and crispness. It’s an evergreen city, with surprisingly traditional houses on secluded hillside streets and unexpected water views everywhere. Portland is like that, too, but Portland is somehow softer, gentler; Seattle is angular, craggy, proud.

I loved the way Raban captured the aspirational cosmopolitanism of Seattle in these essays, not just now, but throughout history. It’s a big city with an unusually large rural catchment area — Raban claims the hinterland of urban Washington State reaches to North Dakota, barely 600 miles from Minneapolis, the next place of note as you travel in an easterly direction. This may sound absurd, but I must point out that my great-grandparents, before moving to Spokane at some point in the nineteen-teens, came from the Pale (from a village in present-day Belarus) first to Fargo, North Dakota, where my grandfather attended elementary school. Someone or something they encountered in Fargo drew them west to Spokane.

Seattle has always had an unusually large proportion of midlife arrivals (Raban points out that early explorers like Vancouver and Puget were among them), disproportionately non-American immigrant in origin, disproportionately Scandinavian (perhaps matching the weather). People who don’t know Seattle are often surprised at how international a place and how self-consciously cosmopolitan a place it was from the very beginning, which is reflected in the architecture and in the healthy civic life and self-consciousness. People call it provincial, but it isn’t, really; it’s merely a frontier city (as Raban, through someone he quotes, observes), with all the positives and negatives that that implies.

Charleston, South Carolina (another city I have some experience with, which is worth its own post) is another bright and cultured, internationally aware urban settlement at the edge of the wilderness, or at least it was 300 years ago. But Charleston faced directly toward both England and more established Caribbean colonies such as Barbados, giving it a cultural connectedness that a place like Seattle never had in its earliest days. Even in 1900, before the Panama Canal, when the typical rail journey from Chicago to Seattle took three or five or seven days, the place must have felt awfully remote. And so it built its own heimishness, which is still much in evidence.

My dozen or so visits to Seattle are seared in my memory. I think of the trip to the Kingdome I took in 1977 to see the Mariners, with my great-uncle and some cousins, and I remember everything I saw and heard and tasted and smelled. I remember taking two elderly relatives (both now deceased) to dinner in Pike Place Market five years ago. I remember visiting my great-aunt’s modest house in View Ridge in the mid-1970s, a traditional-style home that’s common in any city built before 1950 but which in my childhood I thought incredibly romantic. I remember driving around trying to find the location of my grandmother’s childhood home on Yesler Way in early adulthood and realizing it was probably buried under Interstate 5.

I’m reading my way through Vernor Vinge, starting with A Deepness in the Sky and moving on to A Fire Upon The Deep. This means I’m reading in in-universe chronological order but not in the order the books were written.

I have to say I liked Deepness in the Sky a bit better, probably because it’s more straightforward space opera (albeit placed in a universe with non-human races) — Fire Upon the Deep (which I’m halfway through) is thinkier, and the Singularity aspects to the story are less interesting to me. (Nothing against transcendence, I just prefer my transcendence more nano- and techno-.)

In both cases, you get a detailed look at the inner life of a race that is non-human not just in physical terms but in terms of its mentalizing — lots of authors do this but usually it’s at the length of a short story, and for someone to be able to sustain it credibly at book length is remarkable. And these are long books. There is some suspension of disbelief (how exactly do creatures with no opposable thumbs, and only jaws for manipulation, manage to use a forge?), but, eh, that comes with the territory, no?

Loved this book, and loved it more as it went on. It’s a relatively arch (and more so as it goes on) look at the impact that a crime (a child kidnapping) has on the social life of a small English village in remotest Devon, but most of it is about the inner lives of the inhabitants and how they interact. Very funny, and funnier as you get to know the characters. This isn’t Mapp and Lucia (specifically: the characters are realistic, not drawn to be deliberately ridiculous, and it’s set in the contemporary moment), but it reminded me of it. (Also: I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that the number of pages devoted to the social lives of gay bears was completely unexpected.)

I’m delighted to see that Kate Beaton’s cartoon collection Hark, A Vagrant has hit the top of the Times bestseller list.

I never heard of Beaton, a Canadian cartoonist whose specialty is “literary and historical scenes rendered in four panels or less,” until Abe Riesman called my attention to her a few months ago. Since then I’ve devoured every word and every panel on her blog and have been eagerly awaiting the book, which is very much as good as advertised. In fact, I think it may be my favorite graphic-novel* acquisition of the past year.

*Technically it’s not a “novel,” but this is the term of art that the publishing industry has decided to use.

So I finished “The City and The City,” and all I can say is man that guy can write. In fact, reading this one of the things that comes to my mind is “You can do this too” — not that I can write China Miéville as well as China Miéville can, but that I can write something. No doubt this is informed by all the Artist’s Way exercises I’ve been doing (primarily the morning pages).

What I love about Miéville, as I’ve said before, is the way he conjures a rich and complete not-quite-Earth — and a different one for every book. Lots of authors create a new world (I’m reading a Vernor Vinge novel now, set in a distant future), but Miéville’s (or most of them, anyway) seem to be set in almost-Earths, but with a serious twist. Like, for instance, non-human and even mythical creatures living among humans. Or, two cities overlain on one another somewhere in Eastern Europe, in a world that is otherwise recognizable as our own.

Much of my favorite fiction is like this: a world that is richly rendered, and obviously ours — except in the ways it’s not. I’m going to try to write a story like that, and maybe after I do I’ll share it with you.

I see in the NYT today that Steven Pinker has a new book out and it’s a doozy — The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is 800 pages on the decline of human-on-human violence across historical time, along with comment on virtually every other social trend you can think of. Ordered for Kindle (at $19.99!) because no way am I carrying around a 3-pound monstrosity like that on a bike.

Also, Amitav Ghosh’s release of the second book of his opium trilogy, River of Smoke, was the kick in the pants I needed to get me to download the first chapter of the first book, Sea of Poppies. Ghosh is one of those “should-be reading” authors and so we’ll see how I do. (I usually do fine with sweeping epics set in India, so the odds are good.)

Finally – Letters from an Unknown Woman, an English domestic wartime novel with an edge to the bleakness. Jincy Willett in the Times refered to wartime London as “a gray, cloacal city full of terrible food and cavernous public lavatories,” which was enough to get my attention. This one I’m taking out of the library.

So Amazon has done it: they’ve lowered the price of the Kindle to $79, which is low enough that I can’t really justify not buying one and trying out the e-Ink technology. I spend about that much already on Kindle e-books every month, which I read on the iPad and iPhone, which is an acceptable experience in some ways (i.e., always available on a device that’s at hand, possible to read in the dark) and not in others (i.e., can’t read in glare, eyestrain after a while).

The basic Kindle comes without 3G, and without touch controls; on the other hand, it’s smaller and lighter than the version it replaces. According to their promo photo, it fits in a back pocket (although who would stick a Kindle in their back pocket?). It also comes with on-device advertising, but on-device advertising from Amazon that is smart enough to pimp books I actually want to buy (which, based on my experience with their targeting overall, is something they have either figured out or will figure out soon) is probably a tolerable part of the overall package.

Most of the buzz today was about the Kindle Fire tablet, but to be honest, I don’t think the Fire is that interesting. Anyone that already owns an iPad and an iPhone probably won’t need this thing, and anyone who’s ever played with an iPad will probably find it wanting as a grownup device. That doesn’t mean they won’t sell millions of them (and I’ll probably buy one in a year, just so I can have an Android experience), just that I don’t need one.