In Which I Take An Inadvertent Step Backwards into My Poetic Past

A friend of mine, Leeroy Berlin, has had a poem published here and after reading it I thought, "Hmm...I've had a similar experience." and wrote up a quick response, which I shall now share here.

What are you working on?

It is the polite question to ask
at this event, once a year when
under a Christmas excuse
we gather in the name of Poetry
and wear little black dresses
and drink red wine, and I stand
the lone writer of lowly fiction,
drinking a beer.
And they ask it,
of course
and I answer,
of course
but not how they expect:
“Mystery novel.” I say, “A serial.”
They slip away, afraid it’s catching.
It’s the truth, in a way,
The mystery is language, the way it slips through
outstretched fingers and cupped palms equally,
They way sometimes it cannot be found
and other times,
no matter how hard I try,
it cannot be avoided.

The Last AV Cowboys

This morning as I was leaving the house and driving to a tax appointment I was treated to a very cool sight: one of the local cowboys had gone to visit a friend and had ridden his horse (there are a number of small horse ranches nearby) and left it tied to their fence.

I was transfixed by the sight of the placid beast: tied in front of a bland, peach-colored stucco house, his head raised as he watched the cars drive past, as curious about them as they were about him, no doubt.

When I was still employed (happily or other wise) I would make the early morning commute down Avenue S and often would find myself politely stopping to let a man, or a couple of men, out for their morning ride cross the usually busy street. It is a surreal and beautiful sight: their horses are in full western saddle, the men, usually Hispanic, wear sweat-stained cowboy hats to shade their dark faces, have thick coils of rope tied next to their hips and ride down that queer strip of greenery that is neither park nor median and runs along one side of the street. If I’m lucky sometimes they notice I’m a girl and they tip their hats to me. One morning one of them, in fringed leather chaps (I kid you not) saw me, lifted his hand to be sure he had my attention and then expertly reared the horse up: my own private Sunday morning show.

They are a vestige of a history rarely acknowledged here in Antelope Valley (where, yes, Antelopes DID once run): the tale of the valley before the incorporation of the cities, when it was all farms and open range. Once upon a time (not so terribly long ago) all of these tract homes weren’t even vague dreams and the land was wide and open and run by cowboys and tanned famers growing fruit and alfalfa and ranging sheep and goats. Here on my side of town it’s easy to see the final vestiges of farms long since gone defunct being hemmed in by the rapid tide of housing booms. The houses are only foundations now, the water tanks long since collapsed, but they ARE still there, for now, as is the final, clinging remnants of the barbwire fences.

Drive out 47^th Street East on an early morning and you might catch a glimpse of life here before ALL of this: big flocks of sheep and acres of freshly sprouting fields.

I imagine that once the housing crisis reverts back to its bubble-and-boom state, and the tract homes begin their consuming crawl once more, that at some point the new batch of yuppies will arrive. They will quietly drive out the Hispanic families that currently dominate my neighborhood and then, then, they will raise hell about that horse smell, or the sound of roosters calling in the morning and one new city ordinance after another will drive the cowboys and their horses and even the farms out of my neighborhood and further and further west and east, like the foam pushed at the front of an ocean wave.

I cannot help but think what an unnoticed loss it will be when no one will be treated to the sight of a horse tied up in front of someone’s home on a Friday morning anymore.

The Field Museum Or: How the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct

Ah, Natural History Museums. Was there ever an institution more friendly toward a short attention span?

I would argue not.

Where else can you spend an afternoon staring into the cloudy, glass eyes of (sometimes) poorly taxidermied animals, see a 3D movie about T-Rex, take a walk into the “lives of african bushman” and then have an ice cream cone all in the same place?

The Carnival!

That’s right, the Natural History Museum is the carnival of museums.

A Tasteful and Educational Exhibit at the Field Museum, Chicago

See an exhibit on the plants of the world, then see a 3D movie about how the changing environment and mankind are destroying the environment and driving animals to extinction and then, joy and wonder! Go and see the animals we’ve made extinct (or are giving a good try toward making extinct) taxidermied into a stiff mockery of life. Witness as a wild boar is killed (again) by two (already dead) tigers!

It’s riveting stuff.

On a slightly more serious note, the other day I realized that I’d never seen a passenger pigeon. They went exitinct in the 1800’s and, while I’d seen the Audubon illustration, I’d never seen one stuffed.

Enter the Chicago Museum of Natural History which, evidently, contains the entire North American population of passenger pigeons shot and stuffed and on display for your long, hard-hearted, fascinated stare. I am not sure, exactly, why the passenger pigeon went extinct (because I do not read the wall tags, they are boring) but I’m pretty sure that the number of them in the natural history museum gives us a pretty good guess.

Hooray for scientific inquiry!

One of the videos (some videos are less boring than wall tags and therefore worth viewing, some, but not all) said that less than 1% of the Natural History Museum’s stuffed specimens are on display.

Less than 1%.

1%.

So, If I saw, say, 1,200 stuffed specimens (birds, mammals, fish, etc.), what is that multiplied by 100%? Other than a lot, which is my answer, since I’m really bad at math.

Perhaps if I read more wall tags I’d be better at math?

Possible, but unlikely.

But, frankly, who cares! I got to pretend to be a barnacle filter-feeding in the pacific, not that they were specifically Pacific barnacles, or at least, I don’t think they were. But I can’t be sure. Wall tags, you know.

A Highly Accurate Depiction of Barnacles Filter Feeding

Also, The Chicago Natural History Museum has (drum roll please!) Mold-A-Rama machines!

Seriously, Life Gets No Better.

For those of you who did not grow up going to the Los Angeles Zoo this probably means nothing to you.

But for those of us who went to the zoo when we were very little we remember these machines as being the ones that would produce blisteringly hot plastic animals in primary colors for the price of a few quarters (now inflated to two dollars, but so worth it).

So, meet Cal. Trans. my new dinosaur friend:

Who, really, is the perfect ending to a highly educational day.

Overheard in an Art Museum

Ladies and gentleman when you go to an art museum, do pause to listen to your fellow patrons, they never fail to amuse.

For my part, I think the best thing I overheard all day was, “Oh my god, is that a real painting?” spoken by, and god strike me dead if I am lying about this, a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl of that curious indeterminate age which occurs somewhere between 16 & 20.

Now, in her defense, I should say that this is taken slightly out of context. So let’s place it in context: I was in the Chicago Institute of Art and, more specifically, I was in the American galleries and, to put a pin on the exact place of my location, I was standing in front of one of the most iconic paintings in American art, American Gothic.

So, by now, I’m sure, you’ve realized that what she was really asking wasn’t, “Is that a real painting.” But rather is that THE real painting, as in, was that the original American Gothic or was it a copy of some sort.

Which I think speaks as much to society on the whole as it does about this single girl. She is, after all, at one of the best art museums in the United States and, arguably, one of the top ten in the world (I speak from experience here, I have, after all, been to both the National Gallery of London and the Louvre), what part of that context would indicate to her that the gallery would have a copy of the painting and not the painting itself? Did she stand in front of Hopper’s Nighthawk and ask if it was real? More importantly, did she ask where Marilyn Monroe was?

It is unfair, I suppose, to insist that she realize that this is THE painting. How many versions of American Gothic can one find? It has to be as ubiquitously re-printed and re-done as Mona Lisa.

Of course, in my defense the second most amusing moment originated from the same girl when she walked into the modern part of the American galleries (where it says in bold, clear lettering “AMERICAN GALLERIES” on the walls and doors), looked around and declared, “Oh, we should find Picasso here, right?”

And I think I’ll go ahead and end on that note.

To Kindle or Not

For the book lover there is nothing more pure, more essential to life, than a good book.  That arrangement of language, whether in poetry or novel or essay form, moves us to tears and to laughter.  At times it can frustrate us with complexity while at other times it soothes our hot and angry souls.  For some of us it is an escape into another place; for others an inspiration to be more than we are.

Books are a source both of love and of constant anxiety.  I always fear that I will end up somewhere without something to read.  I am never far from a book and I have them even in my car (just in case, you know).  I pack obscene amounts of them on airplanes for fear I’ll finish one or more before we land. 

On a recent cross-country road trip I practically installed an entire bookshelf in the back seat, clearly worried that I’d end up in some mysterious part of the country where they didn’t have books and I would finish mine and be left empty-handed.

If were to say to another book lover, “Here, I’ve found a way that you can take your entire library with you, always and forever, it’ll never be more than a few inches out of your reach,” I might expected them to hug me and award me the bookish version of the Medal of Honor. Yet if I say the above and then hand them an e-reader (a Kindle or Nook or iPad), they will probably cast it to the ground and shun me from the clan of readers. Heretic, they will say. Apostate. Be gone!

But WHY? I imagine myself shouting to them.  It’s all there! After all, for books, it seems that if everything I have listed above still exists if it is translated into a digital format.  The power of the story to sweep us away, the joy of an excellently written poem—it’s all STILL THERE.  And consider the possibilities!  No more traveling with just five or six paperback books, you could instead travel with one slim Kindle and have inside, magically, 10,000 paperback books! And (almost) anywhere in the world you could order a new book in your native language.

Never. Ever. Be without something good to read ever again.

It sounds like a small version of paradise. Why shouldn’t we embrace the digital book as our savior?

The answer, of course, is not simple.  But I think I’ve got it figured out.

It is because our books, or I should say, the printed artifact that we call a book, are so much more than the words they contain.  If mothers save clippings of their children’s hair at certain ages, and some sailors collect vials of sand from the beaches they’ve visited, then most serious readers collect books. Our books are artifacts of our lives.  They are souvenirs of our changing personalities and tastes.  From the copy of Harry Potter that you bought hot-off-the-presses in 1997 to your copy of Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human that you bought in 2007 for a class, these books are the history of ourselves.  And not just a visible, tangible way to see the person-you-were vs. the-person-you-are, but also of the places—the physical geography—where you experienced those books.

In December of last term I spent a few weeks in Botswana doing the safari thing with my husband and a pair of friends. For that trip I took with me Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.  I’d read it before, but since I’m starting a writing project centered at a place featured briefly (though prominently) in the novel, I was re-reading it for the sake of research and, also, because I just liked the story.  Into the day pack it went.

What does the book look like now, after that? Between four twelve-hour flights from here to London to South Africa and back, in between six bush plane flights and five field camps, it took on quite the patina. A thick section of pages came loose after a thunderstorm made the air so humid you could have gone swimming in it.  The cover has been bent in a number of places, the spine is so broken at this point that it can lay flat (not easy on a paperback this size), there’s a shoe-print on one of the pages, there’s a dead ant embedded in another, and a number of dead are gnats preserved too.  It has a faintly mildewy scent about it (though by now, three months back in the arid desert climate, it is definitely dried out, creating that wavy, pleated look).

In some ways this beat-up novel has taken on a different story, one not written by the author but written by me: Abbey’s travels in Africa.  I read this book and heard hippos fighting over territories.  I read this book waiting for a bush plane to come pick me up.  I read this book and looked up to discover a group of giraffes (young included) moving into the camp, browsing the leaves high over my head.  I read this book and looked up to discover a group of vervet monkeys were sneaking closer to attempt to steal my snack.  It can do this because it is just one book.  This is the book that I chose to take with me; this is the book I read while traveling in Africa.

This is what an e-reader will never be to us.  This is what we mourn when we give in and buy one; this is what we shun when we hold fast against the pressure to do so.  A Kindle holds 10,000 books, it’s true.  It could, potentially, hold all the books currently stacked around my office.  But because of that, it will never take on the patina of being “The book I read when….” 

It will get scratches, it’s true, but you won’t remember the how or why or where, because it will go so many mundane places with you.  And when it breaks, you won’t fight with yourself about replacing the way I do when I consider buying a new copy of a book that I’ve just worn the spine out on completely, because it’s like buying a new cell phone or a laptop: You expect to need to replace it.  You expect the battery to wear out.  You expect technology to leap ahead and leave it behind.

This doesn’t happen with our physical books.  We buy new books, sure, but we love them or we pass them on.  We don’t consider our books outdated; we don’t need to upgrade them.  If anything, we love them more as they get older.  We love how the ideas that had been so commonplace suddenly become stranger and stranger.  We love that odd smell they take on, or that weird yellow color.

I suppose ultimately what I’m trying to explain is not why you should avoid an e-reader— please, buy one.  I wish Amazon no ill will, and I have spent many days at Barnes & Noble, looking at a Nook. But rather, what I am trying to explain is why it is so hard for us to give up our real books.  Why we fight so hard to keep them, and why, in our hearts, no matter how good the story is on the e-reader, we will always know that it is not really a book.

The book is dead. Long live the book.