Whenever I have trouble falling back asleep after waking up to go to the bathroom, I remind myself that however long I spend tossing and turning, it will feel like only a brief intermission in the morning. And so while I’m up at 2 or 2:30 or 3, I imagine my morning myself, barely remembering the trip to the bathroom or the fear that sleep will elude me for the rest of the night.
And when I wake up again, I am always right.
The Geography of Alice Munro (Literary mapping with Google Maps)
If you (obsessively) like books, you should be following Vintage Anchor.
On repeat of late.
Whenever I catch a view of the Denver skyline against the mountains, I stop worrying about being lost and I start appreciating the geography. photo.
Sometimes means people are willing to trade rent for an awkward, semi-sexual living arrangement for a month:
Date: 2011-09-07, 8:49PM MDTReply to: hous-he3bs-2587623880@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Seeking very special roommate situation. You – please be a liberated and open minded female (college student, struggling artist, or something like that) – we share the house, which is a very nice home in nice neighborhood, close to RTD, washer & dryer, high speed internet, fenced back yard, access to pool, parks, and a 10 minute bike ride to downtown………The catch – hit me back with a picture – to see if you’d fit the bill – and I’ll clue you in further and continue the dialogue. If curious - give this a whirl - it’s not a bad arrangement - everyone smiles at the end of the day - that’s the thought. Enjoy!
My soundtrack to driving around Denver in the rain, with occasional interruptions from Garmin.
In the Adirondacks, I stay at my friend’s house, Crows Acres, which is seasonally occupied by people, but occupied full-time by rodents and the threat of fire. Every time we leave, we unplug all the kitchen stuff to keep the mice from chewing through electrical wiring and causing a fire.
The clock on the Crows coffee maker starts at 12 as soon as it is plugged in. On my first full day in the Adirondacks, I usually wake up early to go on a long hike, and for the rest of my time in there, I make coffee around 1 or 2, according to the coffee clock. Of course, time is kind of hazy concept in the Adirondacks, where activities are scheduled for “Crow morning” and “Crow afternoon.”
The rest of my summer, though filled with adventure, was not as lazy. Driving across the country was amazing, but to see Cleveland, Chicago, Taliesin East, Sioux Falls, the Badlands, the Black Forest, Yellowstone, Jackson, Ketchum, Arches, Rifle, and Fort Collins in three weeks took a lot of work. We didn’t even have the benefit of a coffee alarm.
I was thinking about all this because the clock on the coffee machine in the house I’m staying at in Denver is about four hours off. I don’t know what that even means. Probably nothing. Not every detail is part of a larger narrative.
“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
Friday Night Lights is a big part of my life right now.
“Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me. I don’t see this novel as a departure, but I do think it has been a major step in my career. Formally speaking, this is the first full-length novel I have written from beginning to end in the third person.”
- Haruki Murakami, the author of this week’s story, “Town of Cats,” talking to the magazine’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Click through for the rest of their chat. (via newyorker)
I rarely get so excited about a new book that I buy it in hardcover. 1Q84 will be one of those exceptions.
Related: The worst part about not having a mailing address is not having my New Yorker subscription.
So I’m on a farm north of Fort Collins for a few days, in what would be an amazing writer’s cabin except there are a ton of flies and I have to pee outside.
A lot is going on back in New York. There was the earthquake and the hurricane, and the tenth anniversary of September 11 is coming up. My friend Jordan said there’s an energy in New York right now, a sense that everyone in the whole city is dealing with the same thing.
I can remember that feeling, and I can imagine what my life in New York would be like if I hadn’t moved. I probably would have felt the earthquake from my second floor apartment, while I was writing, or more likely, reading something frivolous online. I would have holed up with some friends in Clinton Hill and watched movies for the Hurricane. On the anniversary of September 11, I would have remembered my awkward and uncertain reaction during my first week of college, when I went to top floor of my dorm and could see smoke from the fallen Twin Towers.
But as I write this, the farm’s border collie is playing with a dead mouse. With all the thinking that went into leaving New York, I had no idea that on August 31,, I would be watching a dog who just licked my hand lick the inside of a rodent.
So there’s that. Also, this is true every year.
I don’t even know how I became a US Open nerd, but I appreciate the NYT having my back on this issue.
My favorite Murakami translator, Jay Rubin, talking about translating Murakami.
The internet is so huge, you can pretend it’s small. If you’re, say, into running, you can spend all day every day reading running blogs, forums, and watching youtube clips of Ryan Hall’s form, and think that’s the only thing happening online.
Yesterday, I fell into an internet hole on a subject I’m only half interested in. But the moderator and her commenters seemed to have no other interests, and were clearly not yet 18.
The people who visit this website know it’s not a secret; they know it can be found with a cursory google search. But because the site is so specific, and filled with content that would only interest a certain subset of people, it must feel like a safe space to them. I went through 36 pages of the blog, and I felt like I was spying the whole time.
The more immediate fear, as they drove up the winding road to the top of the pass, was that Chase would miss one of the invisible turns and they would go over the invisible edge and plummet to the valley below. The thick curtain of snow parted only a few feet in front of them, and Chase drove slowly, for him, into that curtain, following the disappearing tracks around each curve. The insides of the windows iced, and when she scraped the glass her own frozen breath showered her.
The short fiction of Maile Meloy may have had some influence on my decision to move West. The quote above is from “Garrison Junction,” which appears in her collection, Half in Love. Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It is pretty great too.
Just some things about this Chris Thomson fan site:
“I don’t know if I want to be good at car camping,” Truman said on our tenth day on the road, and our fifth night in a tent.
And fair enough: car camping is neither luxurious nor outdoorsy. There are conveniences, like access to showers that take quarters and having bear-attracting odors locked safely in the car. But the fact is, you’re sleeping in a tent and cooking food on a glorified bunson burner. On our third night in Yellowstone, Truman said, “We haven’t had vegetables in four days.” We had even gone through the carrots we had brought as emergency roughage.
But after driving more than 4000 miles over three weeks, and camping in Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and now Colorado, we know how to do it. Some tips: you can’t have too many reusable bags and bottles filled with water. Small treats, like chocolate and wine, go a long way. Buy firewood when the opportunity presents itself.
Yesterday was the last night we will spend out of a car. We knew where to stay: we found a site by a small tributary to the Colorado River. We knew how to be friendly: we ran out of fuel for our stove, but asked around and were able to borrow another camper’s spare. And we knew how to cook: we made brown rice with herring and avocado with a side of steamed broccoli.
But the pleasantness of last night was in part because we were in Rifle, CO, a small town 100 miles north of a national park I had never heard of. We’re here because Truman’s grandmother grew up here.
There isn’t much tourist industry in Rifle. The mountains aren’t too tall and the rivers aren’t too wide. But that’s what I like about modest beauty. It’s still beautiful, but there are no crowds.
Until recently, I never shopped at a supermarket with a parking lot. The only time I saw people do so was in trashy magazines, in photos of celebrities being “Just Like Us.” Walking out of the Albertson’s with a bag of groceries, I briefly felt completely glamorous. Then I realized I had been in New York for too long.
One of the defining elements of my time in South Dakota has been the Sturgis Rally. For an official week, and unofficially, the week before and after the rally, South Dakota gives into the tourist dollars of a half-million Harley-Davidson enthusiasts.
By design, motorcycling is a solitary activity, and I can appreciate how exciting this rally must have been for them. It’s a chance to meet other riders, show off sunglass tan lines and buy leather accessories.
But as someone driving across the country in a hatchback, the rally has been a pain. In South Dakota, I wasn’t able to experience the silence I imagine fills the state during non-rally weeks. And I feel bad for South Dakota residents. Summer there is so short, and three weeks of it are given up to the rumble of motorcyclists. Of course these riders nearly double the population of the state, and the economic benefit outweighs the cost in noise pollution.
When I planned this trip, I had never heard of Sturgis. The timing just worked out to be in South Dakota at the same time as all those bikers. I have a friend who drove out to LA from New Jersey, the timing just worked for her to do the whole trip in five days. Even if driving across the country feels like my American birthright, it’s really an adventure in logistics. It’s not possible to plan the perfect cross-country adventure. Things just time out as they do.
Yesterday, I was in a cave, but a few days before, I was in “The Greatest Domestic Space in America,” Frank Lloyd Wright’s living room in Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was of course beautiful and impractical, a joy to tour but probably impossible to live in.
I like visiting Frank Lloyd Wright buildings–I’ve seen maybe seven so far–but while flipping through Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly Magazine in the visitors’ center, I started feeling a bit like a dope. Can you imagine writing the editor’s note to that? What’s to report? Frank Lloyd Wright is still dead and we need more money to repair the leaking?
After the tour, we went to the Unitarian Church where Frank Lloyd Wright, his family and some of his apprentices were buried. On some graves, the deceased were described by one relationship–loving mother, devoted brother, loyal student. By Frank Lloyd Wright’s grave, there was a quote from the architect himself: “Love of an idea is love of God.”
Speaking of loving an idea, the Sturgis Bicycle Rally is happening all around us in South Dakota. The density of motorcyclists hasn’t stopped being absurd. I don’t know what idea these riders love, but they all seem very happy to be together, wearing leather and talking about RPMs.
It was Jordan’s lake. Well, she never owned it, but it was her neighborhood lake out in Solon, Ohio. It was where she learned to swim, where she and the other neighbors used to bike to every day in the summer, and where she was a lifeguard in high school. Before we jumped in, Jordan, her dad, Truman, and I had gone trail running in the nearby Metropark. It wasn’t a huge park or a wild one, but it was enough of both of these things that Truman and I got lost and dogs could be off leash.
We were sneaking into this lake, in a way, since Jordan’s family doesn’t live in Solon anymore, and she has no more claim to this lake than I have to the high school I went to ten years ago. No one stopped us though. As Truman noticed while watching Jordan and me walk to the car, we don’t look like kids anymore. No, we look like adults, perhaps even new homeowners in Solon. And while I was treading water in this lake, I had this feeling that after a nice place to run and a natural body of water to swim in, the rest was just details.
