Travel Without Motion

There’s an interesting interview in the The Scotsman on Sunday with the novelist and, more famously, travel-writer, Jenny Diski, whose “award-winning travel books, Skating to Antarctica (1997) and Stranger on a Train (2002) … consolidated her reputation as a writer of uncompromising honesty and beauty. And as one who almost transformed the travel genre single-handedly, giving us as many personal glimpses as geographical ones.”



The great irony of this writer follows:

So it comes a something of a shock to hear her confess she doesn’t even like travelling very much. “I’m always baffled by travelling, I can’t see the point of it,” she says. “Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve seen more clearly on TV or in my head!” And she cites as an example, missing out on a day trip to the glow-worm caves in Te Anau, in New Zealand. Holed up, ill, in her hotel room, she read the brochure about them instead. “It was a wonderful piece of writing, all about the pleasure of the imagination. Travel is an act of imagination - it’s supposed to be about going somewhere but there’s always the possibility you could make it up.”

It’s an interesting interview, because one always has the image of the travel-writer as an intrepid explorer who can’t stay still, who doesn’t want to stay still, and must dive headfirst into the most difficult and remote locales available.

“Susan Sontag says travel writing is always about disappointment,” Diski continues. “Disappointment’s important because it keeps us going, the fear of disappointment is what makes us get up in the morning. But I’m really a very inactive person, I like reading about ideas, about what people make of what happens. That’s just more interesting than actually doing it.

Anyway, it’s an interesting interview. I don’t personally know Diski’s work, but I’m interested now. Her most recent book, On Trying To Keep Still, deals with this very subject, her fight against the necessity of traveling.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

The other evening I saw an interesting and, to me, very accomplished film, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Though he’s directed one previous film for TV, this is Tommy Lee Jones’s big-league directorial debut. And I’m damned impressed.



It’s a simple story, taking place along the Texas/Mexico border, about Pete Perkins (Jones), a rancher whose best friend, Melquiades Estrada (played very sweetly, but without mawkishness, by Julio Cedillo), is found dead in the ranch lands that look a touch more grandiose than the pictures I set up here earlier from Texas.



Simultaneously, we follow the border guard (brutally played by Barry Pepper) who committed the murder, and then watch as Perkins carries out his idea of justice on the man, a journey that leads deep into Mexico.

The cinematography is especially striking, carried out by Chris Menges, who utilizes the terrain beautifully without ever hitting you over the head with it. A review I ran across mentioned that the film was shot largely on Jones’s Texas ranch. If so, I’m jealous of the man.The acting is wonderful across the board, clearly the result of an actor-director who wants to give his actors time to express the moment. And I was particularly happy to again see Melissa Leo, who I’d known and loved in TV’s “Homicide”, back in a solid role.



But what most struck me for the first half of the film (because this is the kind of movie that reaches a mid-point, then becomes a very different movie) was how beautifully constructed the narrative is. It’s nonlinear, following the border guard as he arrives in the small Texas town and finds a home with his wife and begins learning the job. Simultaneously, we follow the discovery of Estrada’s body, the man the guard will later kill, and the steps taken, and steps not taken by the bigoted sheriff (very nicely played by Dwight Yoakam) to deal with the body.



Yet the film never wears its subverted chronology on its sleeve. It plays along, and allowing you to figure out, over the first half of the film, what is exactly happening, and when. But you never feel cheated by this, nor really disoriented. It does what it does quietly, building on itself based on an emotional logic, rather than straight cause-and-effect.



And that, as a writer, is what encourages me to play more with my own narratives. Building stories based on an emotional logic rather than the straightforward cause-and-effect can sometimes lead to trouble; but when it works, it works in a way the reader, or viewer doesn’t always understand logically, but gets. Emotionally. I love it when that happens.



All I want to say is, it’s a very fine film. Check it out.

In Pictures, A Writer's Fascination With Fame

Over at A Dark Planet, David Terrenoire (a man of impeccable literary taste) has brought up a subject we muse about here at the Nomad probably a little too much: Fame and the Writer. Says David:

The truth is, even if a few writers reach rock star status in this business, not many readers are going to hyperventilate if they see them in a restaurant. Even a household name like John Grisham could probably walk through a mall without getting mobbed. Of course, John Grisham has people who walk through the mall for him.

I suspect that writing has lost its mystique. Back in the day, with the lower frequency (not lower quality) of education, fewer people thought they could write a book. It was still a bit of a magical thing.



Now, there are budding writers everywhere. Retired businessmen come up to me at parties and confidently tell me about the book they’re going to write, how much of an advance they’re interested in, film prospects, etc—though they’ve never written anything besides business proposals before. When I was in grad school for writing, a janitor at the library I worked in ranted to me that learning to write was foolishness; anybody could tell a story, so what’s the big deal?



Stars are people who can do something you know you can’t do, and who are prettier than you’ll ever be. Writers do something most of the populace thinks is pretty easy, but the writers are just luckier because they got published.

Before leaving for Texas, I mentioned I did a small reading here in Budapest. Now, it was a great group, I enjoyed myself, and felt like I did well. But upon returning home, something was nagging at me. I thought about it, then understood: No one at the reading (admittedly we’re talking about only 20 people) had ever read any of my books.Why did this bother me? Because, within the cloistered expat world of Budapest, I have a single claim to fame: I’m the only English-language published novelist living in Hungary (that I know of, at least). And I came to the reading because one of the organizers (I was told) thought it was crazy that the only English-language novelist in town hadn’t been to this open-mic night, which has been meeting monthly for years.



And I agreed. When I arrived, I apologized for never having been to their nights before, and they thanked me for coming. Afterward, a couple people said, “Hey that was really good. Maybe I’ll read one of your books!” One of the organizers said that too. Another man—an older Hungarian whose honesty I appreciated—asked if there was violence in the book (the section I read dealt with a hijacking). When I said yes, he peered at me. “That’s why I won’t read your books.”



Then I was back my little apartment, wondering how a room full of budding writers living in Budapest hadn’t gotten around, in the past three years, to reading any of my books.



But I think it’s as I said above. Even in the secluded world of the expat, when you hear about someone who’s doing what you’d love to be doing with your life, your reaction isn’t awe. It’s the feeling that someone else had the connections you didn’t have. That someone else got lucky where you didn’t. Sometimes that leads to bitterness—which I’ve run across elsewhere—and sometimes it just leads to people feeling—or at least acting—utterly blase.



I don’t know. I spent a full decade wanting nothing more to be a published writer, and failing. When I met published writers (and I met some incredibly talented ones) in Boston, I always sought out their work. I was fascinated by their accomplishment, and all I wanted was to learn from them. From their work and from them. I didn’t place them on the Hemingway level of a ga-ga star, but I did raise them above myself, because I knew I was no where near as good as they were; and if I didn’t get my act together, I never would be.



And this attitude helped me.



But in the end, perhaps I should be thankful, as I also mentioned at the Planet:

It’s a drag that I’ll never be famous like Hemingway. But maybe it’s a blessing, as I’ll be less likely to eat a shotgun.

T3: Just the Pics, Please

Don’t really have anything left to say about Texas, so I’ll let the pictures—mostly road shots, as we spent a hella lot of time on the road—speak for themselves.

A little somethin’ we call pride.

A place called Levelland, for obvious reasons.

Lubbock, home of Buddy Holly, and a little vacant.





Olen’s Face; Brother’s Hands





Galveston





Sister’s Face; Sister’s Car





George Bush’s Brain





Dust Storm—no, really.





Brother’s Face; Brother’s Shirt

The Bishop Returns

Over at the New York Times, there’s talk of controversy…well, controversy in the world of letters. Alice Quinn of the New Yorker has edited and published Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop. The irony—and the problem—is that Bishop published only 90-something poems in her life, and this book contains nearly 120 of these unfinished things.



Elizabeth Bishop was a well-known perfectionist. Poems sat around for years as she fiddled and fiddled, never appearing until she had decided they were right. And the results were right—by my estimation, and many others.



I’d never heard of Bishop until grad school, where one of my professors, the wonderful poet Gail Mazur, sat us down with her work. I was stunned. Those poems really are crystalline in their perfection. Not a word to be changed. And they taught me a lot about how wrong I can easily get my language—how wrong I still get it.



The tragedy is that, outside the rarified world of American letters, few people know Bishop’s name.



So now a new book, which essentially doubles the breadth of her output, has been released. Perhaps it’ll lead to a greater appreciation and understanding of this elusive poet. Or perhaps, as it has so far, it’ll just piss people off. People like Helen Vendler of the New Republic.

Says Vendler:

Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems, and some drafts and fragments, should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified “No.”

She also said, “I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts.”



I don’t know if that second statement is true or not—though I know the first assessment is; that is, while she was alive, Bishop would have detested the idea of publishing this stuff. But once you’re dead, once your ouvre has been established, does the opinion remain the same? If so, why do all these pieces even exist?



Frank Bidart—a fine poet who I’ve met, who was also a good friend of Bishop’s—said,

Believe me, Elizabeth was perfectly capable of destroying things. If she had never wanted these to see the light of day, she would have destroyed them.

And as a Vassar student, she clearly knew what happens to great writers’ notes once they’ve passed on.



But it’s an interesting moral dilemma. And I think it has something to do with how writers see, or want to see, themselves.



Do you want to see yourself as someone who effortlessly reaches perfection with few intermediary drafts? Or do you want to be seen as a crafts(wo)man, slowly working the chaotic flow of language, honing it and sanding it down until it’s right?



My personal feeling is that this is no problem for Elizabeth Bishop’s reputation, nor for American poetry. It’s not an ego battle. We all know which poems Bishop wanted to represent her legacy, and those volumes will continue to do that. No amount of amateur drafts will water down her reputation, because all of us know—or we should know—that great poems (with rare “Kubla Khan” exceptions, if you believe the legends) don’t come out of the ether; they’re the result of hard, hard work.



And this kind of scholarship is also good for American poetry, a segment of culture that’s become increasingly walled-off from the rest of American culture. Show people the bones and drafts of truly great poetry, and they might not be so scared of it anymore. They might actually learn a little of how it’s done. They might, in fact, want to do it themselves, and do it well.



That, to me, is just plain good, for all of us.



And for those who don’t know, here’s one of her finest, “Visits to St. Elizabeth’s” (1950). Stuctured on a famous children’s song, it’s about Ezra Pound, who at the time was committed to this hospital while having treason charges hanging over his head for making pro-fascist and anti-Semetic radio programs in Italy during WWII. Check it out, as well as the others at the great Academy of American Poets site.

5 Questions: John Nadler

John NadlerCanWestTime MagazineVarietyA Perfect Hell



Publishers Weekly











The Devil’s Brigade

2. Your previous book, Searching for Sofia, deals with the Kosovo War in the late nineties. As a war correspondent during that time it makes sense that you’d tell this story. What brought you back in time to the story of the First Special Service Force in A Perfect Hell?I always wanted to write a WWII book mainly because my parents were of that generation. They spoke of the war a lot when I was growing up, and over time I felt somehow connected to that epoch. My mom talked about the war years more than my dad. She of course spoke of watching the boys leave for Europe and the Pacific, and the helplessness and fear of waiting on the home front. This is one element I tried to inject in A Perfect Hell: showing the connection between the men on the frontline and the families at home. One thing I learned was that nothing on a battlefield happens in isolation. Every casualty reverberates somewhere else: creating grief, changing lives, sometimes destroying lives. As much as anything, the book helped me to come to terms with the legacy of the WWII generation, now that this generation is disappearing.



3. Reading A Perfect Hell, I was struck by the great sympathy you clearly have for the soldiers, and the respect you have for their experiences. The same is true in Searching for Sofia. It comes through in your word choice and the way you construct scenes and elaborate characters. Who do you think are your biggest influences as a writer?



As a teenager, I guess I was most influenced by the new journalists of the ’60s and ’70s: George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Peter Maas, Truman Capote, Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, and even Hunter Thompson, writers who pioneered the use of literary techniques to tell a non-fiction story. This technique seemed to create new vistas in journalism that even as a young guy I was really excited by. A fascinating sub-genre was the participatory journalism of Plimpton’s Paper Lion and Thompson’s Hells Angels, which inspired me in Searching for Sofia because circumstances demanded that I be part of the story. A Perfect Hell is straight narrative, but for me it was a fascinating writing experience because it was a literary non-fiction exercise, a journalistic exercise (based on my interviews with veterans), and a chance to try my hand at popular history.



4. A lot of our visitors are writers, or budding writers, and as such are interested in how one ends up where you are, publishing books, writing articles, and generally making a living off of words. Can you give us a little of your history? How did you break into journalism in the first place? What led you to the publication of your first book?



My two biggest career steps were, firstly, to re-locate in Europe in 1992; and, secondly, to push for assignments to cover the Kosovo war. I didn’t have to push hard. An editor recently reminded me: ‘Half of life is showing up.’ Kosovo was a perfect example. This story was there in my backyard, it was major, and all I had to do was show up for it. It’s fortunate I did. My first hours in Kosovo I encountered the story that later became Searching for Sofia. But in truth, Sofia would never have happened without the support and blind faith of Maya Mavjee and Nick Garrison at DoubleDay Canada. Searching for Sofia also helped me connect with a great agency, Writers House, which sold A Perfect Hell. So it is true: half of life is simply jumping on those opportunities that suddenly appear.



5. You’ve lived in Budapest for many years now, and have by all appearances “settled” here. What’s that like, making a home in a foreign land? Do you advise other writers to follow your path?



I don’t know that the expatriate life is for everyone. One drawback, at least for writers, is that you lose perspective on home. So definitely it would be the wrong choice for the likes of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. But as the Olen Steinhauers and the Arthur Phillips of the world prove, a foreign venue can offer up new troves of material. But removing oneself from the popular culture of home has one great advantage: it is an intellectual hermitage. Meaning, by removing yourself from pop-culture distractions (like TV for one), you can focus on the task at hand, namely writing. As a journalist, foreign locales offer up more interesting stories. I’ve had the good fortune of watching the former East Bloc move from the communist epoch to democracy: an unprecedented transition that I’ve felt privileged to witness. And happily the story is still not over.

Unfathomable Zealotry

from the Washington Post:



Richard Cohen looks at the Abdul Rahman case in Afghanistan:

The groupthink of the Muslim world is frightening. I know there are exceptions — many exceptions. But still it seems that a man could be killed for his religious beliefs and no one would say anything in protest. It is also frightening to confront how differently we in the West think about such matters and why the word “culture” is not always a mask for bigotry, but an honest statement of how things are. It is sometimes a bridge too far — the leap that cannot be made. I can embrace an Afghan for his children, his work, even his piety — all he shares with much of humanity. But when he insists that a convert must die, I am stunned into disbelief: Is this my fellow man?

T2: Pass the Ciprofloxacn

Thank You for Not Smoking

The question that’s batted back and forth in Lee’s post is: “Is second-hand smoke bad for you?” Of course it is. But in this case, the question is: “Is second-hand smoke outside—that is, a single inadvertent half-puff—bad for you?” I don’t think so. It’s not good for you—it doesn’t healthily increase the blood flow to the brain or something like that, but I doubt seriously that it damages anyone. This is a perspective I utilized a couple years ago when I argued the point with one of my publisher’s PR people, who suggested that walking behind a smoker amounted to getting shot with a bullet that would kill her in 30 years.But I’m not here to argue this point, just to connect it to something I noticed in the States—the concern with health. It’s an amazingly contradictory thing. On the one hand, Americans are obsessed with medicines. Turn on the TV, and half the ads are for new drugs to curb your errant body—like the “restless leg syndrome” (recently identified) that apparently keeps millions from getting a good night’s sleep. As soon as I landed, still recovering from my previous week’s illness, mom noticed me blowing my nose and offered her cough medicine—which I took, and which immediately knocked me out. Any time a physical discomfort was brought up, I was pointed to a list of possible prescriptions to make my life easier. My brother, like his friends, has been put on mood-enhancement drugs to curb his teenage angst—and this is the one medical focus that’s never set well with me.



I call this obsession contradictory, because the other side is obvious. My family lives in a small Texas town where they drive everywhere, getting no exercise within their daily routines, and most of their diet comes from prepackaged foods in plastic bags. Since I cook every day in Budapest, from fresh ingredients, this change in diet was particularly rough for my insides (though I’m sure I could’ve taken a drug for that).



Mom, who’s a sociology professor, got me into her school’s online film library where I watched a piece on American obesity, and how lower-income Americans are at the highest risk. I can’t remember all the stats, but one social worker pointed out that if you walk into McDonalds with a five-dollar bill, you can get 5 hamburgers, or 1 salad. With a family to feed, which are you going to choose?



Even in more sophisticated restaurants, I found myself eating something I haven’t had in a long time—battered, deep-fried seafoods and meats. At other tables, fat middle-class Texans gobbled down the same stuff with relish. Luckily, there’s plenty of heartburn medicine available from the pharmacy.



I’m not telling anyone from the States or Canada, or even the UK, anything new. I’m just pointing out that when you’ve lived outside for a while, all this strikes you as slightly surreal. It seems that everyone you meet is on some drug or another, yet they seem no more healthy—and usually less healthy—than people you run into in Hungary.



Yet when I light a cigarette, there’s an instinctive arched brow from everyone, a pause in the conversation, and the conviction that I’m dragging myself to the grave. That’s true, yes…and yes, I will quit. But there’s more to health than just the lungs.

T1: Big

There’s an obvious thing I want to restate for those who think they know it already, but haven’t actually made it to Texas, or the US: These places are big. Not just “kind-of” big. They’re enormous. Even having lived many years in Texas, and far more time in the other states, I still forget. Take last week for example.



The plan was to go to Galveston, on the Texas coast, for a few days’ vacation. What that meant was 671 miles (1080 kilometers), driving time around 14 hours. Here’s what it looks like on the Texas map:







Now, that’s a long drive, particularly when you’ve decided to do it in one shot, as we did. During that journey, with lots of time on my hands, I started wondering where the same distance would take me were I to drive from my home in Budapest. Follow the jump to find a map of part of Europe, and some answers…

From Budapest to Berlin is a mere 545 miles (878 km), and that includes crossing three national borders.



To get to Florence, Italy, and cross only two national borders, takes 608 miles (980km).



With a few more miles added on to the Galveston trip, I could drive to Minsk, Belarus (743 miles/1196 km), sleep, and reach Moscow by the end of the next day.



Maybe these numbers don’t sound too exciting, but the fact is that this distance is just covering a single state, and just a portion of the US as a whole.







See what I mean?



And what’s even more amazing to me is that, during that long drive to Galveston, the landscape really only changed a little. Texans will point to each errant hill and claim that the whole ecosystem is drastically different, but to outsiders it all looks about the same—more hilly, or more flat, it’s all the same to us. There seem to be the same cowboys and faux-cowboys, the same Walmarts, the same Tex-Mex joints, even though in Europe you would’ve gone through three languages to get to the same place.



There’s more to this than physical mass, which is why I bring it up. To outsiders, Texas is a land of cowboys and Bush-lovers, fundamentalist Christians and country music. That’s all here, yes, but in a space this big no culture can maintain real homogeny. So within this state you’ve got Austin-hip music culture (which is as hip as anything Seattle could pump out), oil money, Baptists, and in the little (and I mean little) town my family lives in is a lesbian-run burger joint with Janis Joplin and Hendrix posters everywhere, along with the best beef you can find between two buns.



Take this idea of size and expand it to include the entirety of the United States, Alaska and Hawaii too. Variety is America’s saving grace. It’s the one thing that I carry with me when I travel, the one thing that keeps me from ever pretending I’m Canadian.



Yes, America’s full of problems, and it dumps its problems on other countries. I hear this from all corners when I’m out of the US. (Truthfully, I hear it just as much within the US.) But the fact is that America can’t be summed up in an argument the way, say, Hungarian culture can be summed up. It’s simply impossible to generalize completely (though a certain amount of generalization can be done) when you’re dealing with this kind of scale.



I’ve been in arguments where I’ve tried to make this clear to people who I think don’t quite understand, but I never have numbers on hand. Now I do, and perhaps it’ll help a little.



Perhaps it won’t.

Must. Stop. Reading. The News.

Kansas Church to Stop Picketing Funerals



That’s the headline. Read further, and you find the church has been picketing soldiers’ funerals. American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.



Okay, so this must be a particularly insensitive anti-war campaign, right?



Wrong.

Westboro Baptist has outraged mourning communities across the nation by showing up at soldiers’ funerals with signs that read “God Hates Fags” or “God Made IEDs,” a reference to roadside bombs. Members of the congregation contend soldiers are being struck down by God for defending a nation that tolerates homosexuality.

[Shirley] Phelps-Roper [an attorney and member of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka] said the group will eventually protest in states with the new laws, but it will find a way to obey the new laws.



She also said the church is considering legal challenges to the laws. “We’re waiting until all the legislatures are over to see what tattered shreds they’ve left the Constitution in,” she said.