February 2004 Archives

NEXT APPEARANCE:
Saturday, March 27th, Virginia Festival of the Book, 2:00
I'll be sitting on a panel entitled Publish and Flourish: Networking through Readerville.com, along with my online chums Gretchen Moran Laskas (The Midwife's Tale), M.J. Rose (Sheet Music), and, in a change from the original lineup, Roxana Robinson (Sweetwater). Readervillean, writer, and radio commentator Janis Jaquith (Birdseed Cookies) will moderate. Visit www.vabook.org for more information.

Every once in a while, if you're very lucky, you'll pick up a book and realize it was written for you. Usually, when that happens to me, the book in question is a novel; I can recall the rush I felt when I realized that Douglas Coupland had written Microserfs with my demographic in mind: college-educated semi-computer-literate middle-class American male with a pop culture fixation centered on the early seventies--the group for whom he coined the term Riot Nrrds. But it's a rarer and perhaps more amazing thing when the book in question isn't purely the creation of a mind whose formative experiences were similar to your mind's. A novelist can show you something you haven't seen before, and even a non-fiction writer can guide you through a part of the world with which you have no familiarity. What's surprising about the nonfiction book I recently finished, however, is that it took me into an area I'd visited before, and it showed me how much I'd missed there.

The book in question is David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo. I've been reading about Quammen's subjects for decades: birds, evolution, natural history, reptiles, extinction, mammals, scientific rivalry, colonial history, travel, spiders... I mean, there's a shelf behind my head at this moment with such works as Stephen Jay Gould's The Lying Stones of Marrakech, Gordon Grice's The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes: Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, Tony Juniper's Spix's Macaw: The Race to Save the World's Rarest Bird, Anne Matthews' Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City... and those are just the ones I own... and have read this year... written by people with names from G to M. In other words, when I engage in the following hyperbole, it's reasonably informed hyperbole:

The Song of the Dodo may be the best science book I've ever read.

Quammen is a writer, not a scientist, but that's to his advantage. Because he's not a scientist, he's liberated from the stylistic flaws that sometime haunt scientists' writings: he doesn't shy away from bold or impolitic statements, nor does he establish a lecturing tone. He's not pretending to be a scholar of the subjects he discusses (though the book's extensive bibliography suggests that he's done a good bit of reading up on his own). Instead, he sets himself up as an enthusiastic tour guide, running gleefully through the Museum of Island Biogeography and expounding upon every exhibit in extensive detail. He not only knows what each exhibit is, but how it got to the museum, which scientists were responsible for putting it there, how it relates to the other exhibits, and how to make its story as interesting as possible to his audience. He writes with as much wit and energy when describing the photocopies on a scientist's office door as he does when he's describing his trip through the spider-infested forests of Guam in search of venomous brown tree snakes. His mini-biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, the young unknown who hit upon the idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin, draws the reader in from the beginning, and when he occasionally drops his guard to describe a search for a bird of paradise, or to imagine the last dodo's last days on earth, he reveals a touching and honest passion for the fragile world he lovingly describes.

It's a masterful performance, delivered in 178 individual islands of text spread over a sea of 600 pages, and I'm recommending it as strongly as I've ever recommended a book.

8:49 PM

NEXT APPEARANCE: Saturday, March 27th, Virginia Festival of the Book, 2:00
I'll be sitting on a panel entitled Publish and Flourish: Networking through Readerville.com, along with my online chums Gretchen Moran Laskas (The Midwife's Tale), M.J. Rose (Sheet Music), and Clea Simon(The Feline Mystique). Readervillean, writer, and radio commentator Janis Jaquith (Birdseed Cookies) will moderate. Visit www.vabook.org for more information.

Winter is still here. It's brisk and windy, though sunny, and I'm still preparing my debaters for the state tournament in early March. Clearly, spring remains unsprung.

At the same time, though I know it's still winter--after all, the Juncos are still swarming in my back yard, landing on and around the feeder, and as long as they're around, I expect another snowstorm--I feel as if I'm starting to emerge from my cocoon a bit. I crawl into my cocoon at the start of the school year, roughly mid-September, and I don't really come out again until March. The fibers that enfold me are the ones that tie me to my extracurricular commitments: directing the fall Black Box play and coaching the debate/forensics team in the winter. But in the spring trimester, I have no such entanglements. I still teach, but when the last class is over for the day, I'm free to spread my wings and flutter about.

My upcoming schedule offers several options for doing a little fluttering. I've got an invitation to a reception in New York for the writers selected for Barnes & Noble's 2003 Discover picks. It'll be a brief visit, alas, as I have to give exams both before and after the day of the reception (and the presentation of the Discover award, which--you read it here first!--I won't be winning.) Still, it'll be nice to shift gears into Writer mode again, after having been in Teacher mode for six months.

(I'll get to return to Writer mode in late March, when I'll be part of a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book (see above).)

I'm also planning a trip to Florida with my dad, and that should give me a chance to shift back into Birder mode. Florida is rife with unusual bird species, many of which exist nowhere else in America (and in some cases, on Earth): the Limpkin, the Snail Kite, the Mangrove Cuckoo, the Reddish Egret, Wurdemann's Heron, the Roseate Spoonbill, the Groove-Billed Ani. Dad and I plan to visit some of their habitats with field guides and binoculars in tow. If I'm really lucky, I'll talk him into renting a boat and following one of the canoe trails in the Everglades.

I'm already feeling somewhat Birderish again, thanks to one of my Christmas presents, a big and rather pricy Droll Yankee feeder that I think I've mentioned here before: the Yankee Flipper, specially designed to flip squirrels off its feeding perch with an automatic 90-degree spin. So far no squirrel has dared assault it directly, but a number have enjoyed feeding on the spillage left by the dozens of Juncos that have adopted the feeder as their own. (An occasional Chickadee, Cardinal, or White-Throated Sparrow has lit on it, too, but the Juncos are by far the most numerous and most regular visitors.)

We've also had a new visitor to the area, and I'll confess to a bit of mixed emotion here at seeing him. I spotted him this afternoon in one of the pine trees that flank the feeder-bearing cherry tree. He was jay-sized, but from what I could see out of the corner of my eye, he was a bit too dark. He also flapped from one branch to another in a vaguely crow-like fashion, but didn't seem big enough. A brief look into the pine told the story: long, cleanly squared-off tail, small head, small curved bill, pale underside--a Sharp-Shinned Hawk.

You might think this was a moment for untrammeled joy, and indeed, I was delighted to add the bird to my yard list. (He's the 46th species to fly through or over my yard since August of 1999, if you're wondering.) Nonetheless, a birder who sees a Sharpie in his yard has a good reason for feeling trepidation: the bird is an accipiter, a small hawk of the forest whose primary prey is smaller birds. It's hard not to feel guilty at the thought that your feeder serves primarily as a gigantic venus fly-trap for songbirds. On the other hand, there's no denying that hawks are cool in their own right, and it was quite a sight to watch this one leap out of the pine tree and engage in a sudden, darting chase around the yard in pursuit of a loudly protesting Cardinal. At least I can feel happy that she outdistanced him.

We're sure to get one more snowfall--we always get one after my birthday--but I'm starting to see some signs that the ol' vernal equinox is on its way. And man, I'm dying to get out of these threads.

9:07 PM

I much marvel at this thing men call "the Internet."

No sooner was the ink dry (metaphorically speaking) on my entry from January 15th than kindly souls in far-off places were stumbling over it during web searches. One of these souls, Chuck Welch, looked over my account of my recent experiences with Doc Savage books and decided to offer me some solace. He heard my crie de coeur about bad writing in the books, "What if they were suffering from it all along?" and offered me an answer: "They were, but not to the degree you might imagine."

Apparently, the web research I'd done on the authors of the various Doc Savage books was flawed. (Does this mean that there are other websites out there make statements that aren't true?! I shudder to think!) According to Chuck, the man who created Doc, Lester Dent, wrote a full 137 Doc Savage books, not the mere 31 I'd credited him with. (A total of 189 were authorized.) In addition, Will Murray was NOT the author of a significant chunk of Doc's adventures after all; though he found the Lester Dent manuscript for The Red Spider in the 1970s (and may have edited it before publication), Murray wrote only seven Doc adventures, all of them after 1991. And I haven't read any of them. It also appears that most of my favorite Doc books (including The Derrick Devil, The South Pole Terror, The Majii, and The Seven Agate Devils) were in fact written by Dent.

In addition, of my recent disappointments in the Savage oeuvre, only two were penned by Dent: the aforementioned Red Spider (which may have shown Murray's hand) and The Magic Island. The other two novels weren't by Dent or Murray: Merchants of Disaster, which also ranks low in Chuck's estimation, was apparently penned by one Harold Davis, while World's Fair Goblin was written by the fortuitously-named William Bogart.

Thanks, Chuck. I feel better.

Mind you, I'm still feeling a little gun-shy about picking up favorites from my youth, but that's got less to do with reading Robeson than with my recent re-reading of the first three books of Jack L. Chalker's Well World series. When I was 14, I picked up a copy of Midnight at the Well of Souls and was completely bowled over. Chalker created a fabulous playpen for a writer, a world where 1560 different hexagonal zones existed, each with a different intelligent species dominating it, and where each visitor was turned into one of those species and assigned to the appropriate hex. He got to create a pastoral mountain community of centaurs, a high-tech research lab full of Gumby-like walking plants, a desert under which meter-high intelligent T-rexes built their cities, and got to play with the foundations of reality to boot. The Well World immediately became my favorite created world, and when Chalker decided to write a few sequels and return to the place, I gleefully went along for the ride. By the time the fourth and fifth books came out, the sheen was wearing off the concept somewhat, but I still felt as though the five books in the Saga of the Well World were good entertainment.

Ten years later, when Chalker went back to the Well (so to speak), I began to have doubts. Reading his other series (The Four Lords of the Diamond, the Dancing Gods books, the Flux and Anchor series) had led me to the realization that Chalker really has only one trick: turning people into other things. In the course of doing this, he usually works through some other tropes: men and women alike are regularly transformed into female sex kittens, usually with their minds controlled so that they can experience the degradation but not feel bad about it; hive minds and alien religious fanatics (and even fanatical alien religious hive minds) of various sorts often get involved in the action, usually as bad guys; and thinly-disguised creatures from Walt Disney's Fantasia crop up with some regularity. (On the Well World alone, I counted the centaurs, fauns, and pegasi, plus a ridiculous-looking donkeylike beast of burden, from the Pastoral Symphony section, the glowing fairies and whirling flowers of the Nutcracker Suite, the opera-caped crocodiles from the Dance of the Hours, and the dinosaurians of the Rite of Spring.)

The next three books of the series all had more or less meaningless titles--I think they started with Ghosts of the Well of Souls--that didn't bode well for their contents. Sure enough, though the old pieces had been taken out of the box, Chalker didn't seem to be playing a game with them; instead, he was just moving them around the board. As a result, though I know there's been a more recent book, set in the water hexes of the Well World, I haven't seen fit to look it over yet.

Instead, a few weeks ago I gingerly picked up the second and third books, Exiles at the Well of Souls and Quest for the Well of Souls, and re-read the adventures of Mavra Chang. The plot continued to work, and the story moved along at a fine clip, but the magic was gone, and the characters no longer resonated. Half-afraid, I picked up Midnight again, for the first time since 1996, and read it through. In past years, I'd always seen the fun of the place and enjoyed the "what-if?" element of the characters' various transformations. Now I saw painful lapses in characterization and clunky dialogue. Now I saw Chalker's well-ground axes getting their first touch against the whetstone. Now I couldn't enjoy the "what-if" because of improbable stretches of plausibility and lapses in basic continuity. I've lost the ability I had at fourteen to accentuate the positive, or maybe in those days I simply didn't know there was anything negative to be found in Midnight. Either way, though I value knowing the truth about it, I feel a real sorrow: I've lost a book I once considered wonderful

Marta Randall often quotes the old saw that "The golden age of science fiction is thirteen." I think she may be wrong, but only by a year.

10:16 PM

I walked out the back door this morning, which I can do, now that the big branch of the weeping cherry tree has been cut away. The upper section near the question-mark curve also had to be taken down, alas, but at least the part that holds my feeder is still intact. The workmen gingerly took the feeder down and put it in my study, where it promptly fell over and scattered millet and grapeseed and sunflower seeds all over the carpet. I had to crunch through a good bit of it to get out the door this morning, but I managed.

The weather has been cold for a few days, but it's been the kind of cold that feels like the cool edge of something warmer, rather than something cold in and of itself--it's the first splash of water as you jump into the swimming pool, rather than the penetrating chill of an ice bath. The sky this morning was a pleasant mix of pale milky clouds and patches of watery blue, and as soon as I walked out into it, sniffing the first vague hints of a season still only worthy of whispers (shhhh!pring), I heard them coming.

The honks of Canada geese are part of the landscape around here. Our campus has several small ponds where flocks of them congregate, but since the Rapidan River flows nearby, we'll see a larger skein of them flying overhead on the way to the river on a regular basis. I'll often hear them winging over the house at night, and sometimes, if I'm lucky, I'll come out as they're heading over and get a look at them.

This morning I saw them from my porch, just as the leaders came into visibility from the far side of the gym roof in a gigantic and horribly lopsided V. From where I stood, the right segment of the V was about three birds long, while the left side just kept growing. It was as if someone had sent an avalance of geese rolling down across the sky. The honking wouldn't stop. And then another V of geese appeared from over the field house.

I headed quickly out to my driveway to attempt a count. A hundred, easily. No, more like two. And all headed south. Their strings were starting to overlap, but I could see that this was one of the biggest single flocks I'd ever seen--and then I saw another smaller group winging in from over near the river. Two-fifty. The sight of the monstrous skein of southward-bound geese seemed to stagger them, and their formation wavered before it flew into the bigger group and was assimilated.

They were headed straight for the river, and I was still staring southward. And then I heard more honking behind me. I wheeled and spotted another skein, more regular in shape, cleaving through the sky in the wake of the squadron ahead of them. "Three hundred. Easy," I muttered to myself. And I felt just a little more certain, even though the birds weren't flying in the right direction, that spring is on its way.

I know they're becoming nuisance birds, and I'm sure they're creating havoc on a golf course somewhere near you, and for that I'm sincerely sorry. But any bird that can turn a Wednesday morning commute into something stirring is worthy of a tip of the hat. Branta canadensis, I salute you!

11:00 PM

LBJs


*I'm sick. I started feeling nauseated while driving back from yesterday's debate tournament, and when I got home I was feeling just about dead. I snagged a bottle of ginger ale from the vending machine, went home, and fell into bed with a thermometer in my mouth at 7:30. 101.5 degrees. I finally crawled back out of bed at 10:00 this morning. My stomach feels like I've been doing sit-ups all night, but at least I haven't vomited--there's always a silver lining. I've had a cup of Earl Grey, and now I'm making myself some chicken broth. I don't know that I'll be going to dinner tonight, though.

*The weeping cherry in our back yard took a hit from Thursday's ice storm. There are three big big curling branches that splay out from the main trunk at about five feet above the ground. One goes more or less straight up, and at about twenty feeg it suddenly flips over in a strange question-mark shaped curve. Another shoots up slightly to the right, then straightens out and begins branching. The last juts toward the house, curving up to about ten feet, then dipping back down a foot or two, then taking a sharp bend toward the left; this is the branch which holds up my bird feeder.

Unfortunately, the ice seems to have put serious cracks in the third branch, and did so right at the point where it makes the sharp bend. As a result, the end of the branch and all the smaller twigs attached to it are now drooping down onto our back porch. The main weight of the branch is still in the air, but the twigs are blocking the path from the back door to our driveway. I suspect the branch will have to be trimmed, probably right at the sharp bend. It'll be a shame to lose all those leaves in the spring. At least I don't think I'll have to move the feeder.

But I've also just noticed that the question mark curve in the main branch has now been decorated with a huge, naked crack. It's horizontal from where I sit, but that means it's running along the branch, and it extends for at least three feet. I don't think that would be a crippling blow to the tree, but I'm hardly an expert.

I love looking at ice storms, and have for decades. At night, I'm easily transfixed by the sight of a street light framed by the silvered outlines of every twig and leaf in sight. But the next morning, looking at the fallen branches, seeing the violence of splintered and twisted wood... it's easy to feel guilty, let's just say that.

*I just finished Tobias Wolff's new novel, Old School, and I'm very puzzled. I've admired Wolff since I first read This Boy's Life, one of the seminal books in the recent explosion of the memoir as a literary form. His later memoir, In Pharaoh's Army, was also excellent, and his books of short fiction (including The Barracks Thief and The Night in Question) are also wonderful. I knew, therefore, that I was likely to find the writing in Old School right up my alley. Moreover, since the book is set at a boys' boarding school with a strict honor code, I knew the subject matter would be something I could appreciate. And sure enough, I found it completely riveting. The narrator's voice is compelling, and the dilemmas he faces are described with honesty and beauty. It's a great ride.

That said, there are two things that bother me. One is the ending, a twenty-page section that works well on its own, but I'm not sure if it's the way to end the novel. For one thing, it seems only tangentially related to the main story, as it focuses on a minor character; as an interlude, it might work, but it's a peculiar finale. Moreover, it's not told in the first-person voice of the rest of the book. I'm not one who feels POV should remain fixed; in fact, I just finished Amanda Eyre Ward's wonderful Sleep Toward Heaven, which uses three points of view (third-person present, third-person past, first-person) to tell the stories of the three main characters, and the device works absolutely beautifully. In Old School, however, the book's strength is the (nameless) narrator's voice; you see what he sees and feel what he feels because he is telling you the story, and telling it in a way that is painfully true. At the end, though, he's telling a story about someone else. You don't exactly lose his voice, but you feel as though a veil has come down between you and the raw beauty of personal experience. It reads like a short story Wolff wrote and set in the same milieu as the novel, and that he wanted to include in the book to give it a bit more heft. I wish in some ways he'd left the book a bit more slight, but also perhaps a bit more potent.

The other thing that bothers me is that this is touted as Wolff's first novel. Certainly it's the first I've read, and the first since he came to prominence. Apparently, however, he did publish a novel in England back in 1975, titled Ugly Rumours. He's apparently disowned it, which is of course his prerogative as the writer. At the same time, I'm not sure Old School should be promoted as a debut novel, as even the experience of writing a bad novel must have contributed to making Old School as good as it is. And if it's up for awards as a debut novel, which I've heard it is, I've got even more concerns. The irony, of course, is that Old School deals with questions of honesty, authorship, and honor. It confronts the fact that literature's power to connect us to others' experiences can sometimes make us feel we have experienced what we have not. If the heat of good fiction can melt and deform truth in this way, however, shouldn't we be especially careful to handle such fiction with care? I for one am wondering whether Wolff shouldn't have put on a thick pair of non-fictional gloves before picking this book up to promote it.

But despite all that, it's one of the best novels I've read in the last year. Don't miss it.

5:37 PM