Category Archives: Places

What I’m Reading Now: June 26, 2018

The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, by Jenny Uglow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 588 pp.)

Social media and smart phones have made face-to-face interaction passé. It was not always so. Jenny Uglow reminds us that in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, people formed clubs of all kinds and for every taste, in London coffeehouses and far beyond. There were clubs for singing, drinking, and for poets, clubs for pudding makers, politicians, even clubs for farting.

Here she focuses on the Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal group of friends in the 1760s who began meeting in each other’s houses on the Monday nearest the full moon, hence the name. In the age before headlights and streetlamps, they relied upon the moon to light their way home after a night of good food and drink, and lively arguments and conversations.

This was the heart of the Age of Enlightenment, of Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, of Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Captain James Cook, before science was really a profession (the word “scientist” wasn’t even coined until the 1830s), when it was possible to be a polymath with interests in nearly every branch of the arts and sciences. They were curious about the world and the way it worked, and were not afraid to push the boundaries of knowledge into new, exciting, and controversial places. They were freethinkers and non-conformists who ushered in the Industrial Revolution and transformed the world.

And what an extraordinary group they were: Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), doctor, poet, botanist, and evolution pioneer; James Watt, the famous Scots steam-engine designer; Josiah Wedgwood, revolutionary pottery designer whose china we still eat from; Joseph Priestley, the radical scientist-clergyman who isolates oxygen and discovers carbon dioxide and other gases; Matthew Boulton, who built the great Soho manufactory and financed Watt’s steam engine; the Scots chemist James Keir, clockmaker John Whitehurst, Dr. William Small (one of Thomas Jefferson’s most influential teachers), Dr. William Withering, who pioneered the use of digitalis in treating heart disease, and several others.

The Lunar Men “build factories, plan canals, make steam-engines thunder. They discover new gases, new minerals and new medicines and propose unsettling new ideas. They create objects of beauty and poetry of bizarre allure.” In two generations, from 1730 to 1800, “the country changed from a mainly agricultural nation into an emerging industrial force. By the time these friends died, iron and coal and cotton were king” and millions of lives were changed forever by the factory, the railway, and the rise of a global empire.

The author warns us that this books “smells of sweat and chemicals and oil, and resounds to the thud of pistons, the tick of clocks, the clinking of cash, the blasts of furnaces and the wheeze and snort of engines, but it also speaks of bodies, courtships, children, paintings, and poetry.” It’s a charming portrait of extraordinary individuals who are driven to unlock the secrets of the universe.

But what did all of their achievements and discoveries really bring? Aye, there’s the rub. Was it progress, or something else? Heaven on earth or hell itself? Factories overran farms, and machines turned humans into interchangeable parts. It was the dawn of the age of the consumer culture that brought luxury and shallow materialism, including, eventually, the smart phones that now make the kind of face-to-face social interactions like the Lunar Society a thing to be longed for. The science that made it all possible has its roots in their long-ago Monday night gatherings under the light of the full moon.

Despite all our technology, in many ways we still live as much in the dark as the Lunar Men did. But there is no denying that they were, as she says, “a constellation of extraordinary individuals” who “felt the greatness of the cosmos and its limitless possibilities, the beauty of the infinitely small and the grandeur of the vast.”

The best advice I can give is to echo book critic Michael Dirda: Here “is a book you can live in for a month or more, especially in these dark times. Start reading some evening when the moon is full.”

What I’m Reading Now: June 19, 2018

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The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner, 1925, 180 pp.)

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is one of those artists whose tragic life has become in some ways more famous than his creations.

He was a founding member of the Lost Generation of (mostly) expatriate writers who flourished in the 1920s and ’30s, and who have been endlessly romanticized and criticized, particularly in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

Fitzgerald’s meteoric rise after the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, his stormy marriage to Zelda and her descent into madness, his rocky friendship with Hemingway, his close partnership with editor Maxwell Perkins, his alcoholism and depression, and his last frantic scriptwriting hack days in Hollywood are all well-known and well-documented. When he died of a heart attack four days before Christmas in 1940 (at age 44, like Robert Louis Stevenson), with his last novel only half-finished, he considered himself a literary failure who would quickly be forgotten.

But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity. His third novel, The Great Gatsby, had never sold particularly well in his own lifetime—in the first year Scribner’s sold only 20,000 copies—and was considered nothing more than a 1920’s period piece. Then during World War II the paperback version became enormously popular with soldiers stationed abroad, and in the post-war years it was added to high-school curricula across the country. Suddenly it was re-evaluated as a towering classic of American 20th-century fiction, and sales skyrocketed. It has now sold over 25 million copies (including about half a million worldwide annually) and remains Scribner’s most popular title. If only Fitzgerald had lived to see even a bit of it.

Mercifully, I was never required to read it in high school, because if I had, I would have brought a 17-year-old’s sensibilities to a great piece of literature, and it would have been wasted on me. Now was my time to read it. Harrumph alert: It irritates me to no end when I hear grown, mature adults wave off reading a great book because “I read it in high school,” or, when I tell them what I’m reading, ask “Didn’t you read that in high school?”

The Encyclopedia Britannica calls Gatsby “the most profoundly American novel of its time.” The Modern Library in 1998 voted it the 20th century’s best American novel and the century’s second-best English-language novel, behind only—if you can believe it—Ulysses.

Is Gatsby worthy of all the praise? In the immortal words of James I. “Bud” Robertson, Jr., “oh my yes.”

It’s a novel that works on and in you, that will continue to make you ponder just what was going on in it for a good long while after you’ve put it back on the shelf. I just finished it, and I’d like to re-read it already, and that’s not something I say very often. If I were writing a novel, I’d study it and use it as a model for what a writer can do with plot, a few characters (and there aren’t many) and pacing, using spare, lean language that says more than you think it does, all in 180 pages.

The book was written when Fitzgerald was just 29 years old . One can only marvel at his felicity with language at so young an age:

“The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found out what it was.”

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

“The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a deep sleep as I entered my front door.”

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.”

It was a literary feat that proved hard to live up to, much less repeat. Fitzgerald spent the last sloshy 15 years of his life pitifully trying to recreate the magic. He did not know that he had already achieved literary immortality:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Finally: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Those last words adorn Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s grave in Baltimore, a fitting literary blanket under which to slumber, marking two lives that ended much too soon.

What I’m Reading Now: June 12, 2018

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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon, 1994, 237 pp.)

Writing, someone once said, is easy. Just sit down and wait for the blood to pour out of your forehead. Mark Twain said that to write, all you had to do was cross out the wrong words. This is not unlike the fellow who carved birds out of a block of wood. All you need do, he advised, is carve away all the parts that don’t look like a bird.

What does it say about writing that when you were in school, one of the worst forms of punishment was being forced to write an essay on why you were being punished? Who among us didn’t dread that thousand-word essay on “What I Did During My Summer Vacation”?

Writing—or at least writing well—is simultaneously one of the most difficult and one of the most romanticized of all occupations. Writers are either mysterious, reclusive creatures who are seldom seen (Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger) or celebrated alcoholics (F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway) who draw attention to themselves for their eccentricities.

Some writers seem to need the stereotypical secluded garret—complete with exotic location—to stimulate the muse. David McCullough famously has a writing shed on Martha’s Vineyard (pictured here). Christopher Morley built his writing nook, “The Knothole,” with his own hands on his Long Island estate, and it’s preserved at Christopher Morley Park in Roslyn, NY (and pictured below). The late Carl Vipperman, UGA history professor extraordinaire, built a similar shed in his own backyard that I was privileged to see. Pinterest boards of “writing retreats” abound.

Ideal conditions still don’t always do the trick. Dick Van Dyke played television writer Rob Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” but he never felt like a “real” writer, a theme the show explored amusingly in several episodes. In “A Farewell to Writing,” Rob’s friend Harvey Bellman completes his new novel, The Day of the Sky, and invites Rob to borrow Harvey’s mountain cabin, described as a “perfect place for a novelist to nov.” Desperate to finish his own novel—and thus be a “real writer”—Rob spends several days there alone, and of course suffers completely from writer’s block.

So if writing is so difficult and mysterious, and something that we all loathed in our school days, why does everyone seem to be a frustrated writer? Thanks to the Internet, blogs like the one you’re suffering through at this moment have proliferated, and anyone with a keyboard is a writer now.

Anne Lamott’s book helps us make sense of it all. The daughter of a writer, she de-mystifies the process and boils it down as best she can. Like finding time to read, there is no secret formula for writing. You just have to sit down and do it, day after day.

Other good advice she dispenses:

If you’re writing a novel don’t think you have to have it all figured out beforehand. She quotes E.L. Doctorow: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

“Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better” (Think Dr. Watson).

“You probably won’t know your characters until weeks or months after you’ve started working with them. Don’t pretend you know more about your characters then they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them. Listen. It’s that simple.”

For me, writing fiction seems immensely more difficult that writing non-fiction, but Lamott’s rules of engagement still apply: get the words down on the screen (or paper), somehow, someway, and do it every single day. Find your voice. Write now, edit later. Allow yourself to write a crappy first draft. Don’t worry about getting published, or finding an agent, or think that if you ever do see your words in print, that it will demonstrably change your life. Unless you’re Stephen King, that’s not likely to happen. As a coach famously said, if you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough after you have it.

Write for the sheer joy of it, write to understand yourself and the life around you, write to explain yourself to your children. Listen to that inner voice, and don’t worry that you can’t see beyond the headlights.

Good advice for writers, and pretty good advice for life.

What I’m Reading Now: May 15, 2018

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In the Darkroom, by Susan Faludi (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2016, 417 pp.)

What creates our identity and makes us the person that we are? Our gender? Our sexual organs? Our DNA and our parents? Our country of origin? Religion and History?

Award-winning journalist Susan Faludi received in 2004 an email from her father, with whom she’d barely spoken for 25 years, with the subject line, “Changes.” Her father Steven—at the age of 76—had become Stefanie: “Dear Susan, I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.”

Her Hungarian father had undergone sexual reassignment surgery, and Susan would spend the next 10 years trying to get to know her father and uncover his long-hidden Jewish past during the Holocaust in Hungary: “As a child I had resented and, later, feared him, and when I was a teenager he had left the family—or rather been forced to leave, by my mother and by the police, after a season of escalating violence. Despite our long alienation, I thought I understood enough of my father’s character to have had some inkling of an inclination this profound. I had none.”

This book is the story of her journey to understand her father’s real identity. The title comes from her father’s fascination with photography, and his lifelong habit of using a camera lens to obscure not only the reality in front of him but also his own murky past—and ultimately who he really was. I didn’t think it possible to mix a study of transsexuality with the history of the Holocaust, but Faludi has done it superbly, uncovering layer by layer pieces of her father’s history.

The result is a fascinating journey into the meaning of gender, sexuality, history, and ultimately identity. Can we re-invent ourselves and escape who we really are by changing our name and our sexual organs? Is biology destiny? Is that ultimately what creates our identity? Or is the past unescapable, both for individuals and for nations?

Faludi the journalist tells a larger story here as well. As her father reinvents himself, so does modern-day Hungary. She deftly details the rise of the modern authoritarian government there and its quest to “restore” Hungary to its “true” identity, a frightening “pure” Hungarianism that is openly anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT. The clashes on the streets of Budapest reverberate far beyond its borders, across Europe and America.

The questions Faludi poses about identity and history are more pertinent and troubling than ever, both for ourselves individually and for our society collectively. Individually, social media allows us to reinvent ourselves as we choose and present a public brand of our own creation, while collectively we are seemingly at war over the meaning of our own history and the story it tells in the public arena. Some of those who decry the removal of Confederate monuments as “erasing history” applauded when Communist statues came down in Eastern Europe and approve now the erasure of slavery from American history textbooks.

The answers to the questions about history, memory, and identity remain elusive but astoundingly important. What, ultimately, creates our identity and makes us who we are?

What I’m Reading Now: May 1, 2018

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The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888; Easton Press edition, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth, 328 pp.)

Unlike many people—and for reasons I can’t now fathom—I never read Robert Louis Stevenson as a boy. Not until my mid-30s did I read Treasure Island, and then 10 years more elapsed before I got around to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Now another decade has gone by before reading The Black Arrow, Stevenson’s wonderful tale of history and romance set during England’s War of the Roses (1455-1485). (Still to come: Kidnapped, along with nearly everything else he ever wrote.)

I’ve read and re-read Treasure Island, and it’s safe to say that Stevenson is now one of my preferred authors. His short story “The Body Snatchers” has long been a favorite, a tale of supernatural horror that I’ve dipped into many times over the years on blustery winter evenings seated before a fire. No less than Arthur Conan Doyle considered Stevenson’s story “The Pavilion on the Links” (no, it’s not about golf) to be the height of perfection. It has the distinction of being one of the first short stories in the world.

Despite his reputation, Stevenson is not a children’s author. That label dogged him in the years immediately following his death, but by the middle of the 20^th century he had rightfully taken his place among the distinguished writers of English literature. His work speaks to anyone who loves a good story, great writing, and the thoughtfulness of a man who puzzled over the ambiguities of the human condition but who never professed to fully understand it.

Stevenson suffered most of his life from tuberculosis, and he traveled restlessly across the globe from one place to another seeking relief and good health. He finally found it in the South Pacific but died tragically in 1894 on the island of Samoa from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was only 44.

He lies there still, buried on Mount Vaea, with his own haunting poem, “Requiem” on his tombstone:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.