Retirement Reading List

The most positive part of my retirement has been the freedom to read what I will beyond the demands of the classroom. Since mid-May, the effective beginning of my semi-retirement, I’ve read the following books (plus a few more that I can’t recall right now), roughly in the order I read them (which is random):

Terry Eachout, Pops
Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. . . .
John Heilemann and Mark Helperin, Game Change
Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Eula Bliss, Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays
Dave Barry, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead
Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking
Simon Winchester, ed., The Best American Travel Writing 2009
Stefan Klein, Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw
Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life
Christopher Hitchens, ed., The Best American Essays 2010
Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates
Tom Grimes, Mentor: A Memoir
Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing
Keith Richards, Life
Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne
Holly Hughes, The Best Food Writing 2010

It’s no surprise that all of these books are nonfiction. That’s been my primary professional interest for 30 years. Plus I have a hard time getting into the imagined characters and worlds of fiction when there are just as engaging and enlightening characters and worlds in nonfiction. I suppose I’d be a more rounded reader if I were to spend at least a little time with fiction (not to mention poetry or drama), and perhaps I should make a New Year’s resolution to do so. But I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what happens. And that’s another positive of retirement, the freedom to go where whim demands.

Man recovering after hitting cow with snowmobile

There are occasionally news headlines that while engaging interest and raising questions, also threaten to be anticlimactic when one reads the full story. Consider the following example from this morning:

Man recovering after hitting cow with snowmobile

Certainly this headline provokes curiosity: What were the circumstances of this incident? Was there intent involved, either on the part of the man or the cow? Does “with snowmobile” refer to the man or to the cow? If the man were the one “with snowmobile,” was he riding it, or did he just pick it up and whack the cow with it? Did the cow retaliate? What were the nature and extent of the man’s injuries? And was the cow hurt? There are any number of intriguing possibilities here. But of course if one reads through the brief story that follows, those possibilities become rather tepid:

Authorities say a northeast Iowa man continues to recover after a weekend accident where he struck a cow while riding a snowmobile. The accident happened Christmas evening in rural Fayette County north of Clermont.

A Ski-Doo snowmobile driven by 49-year-old Kevin Mack of Fayette was southbound on a snowmobile trail when a cow crossed onto the trail and was struck by Mack. Mack was taken by ambulance to the West Union hospital to be treated for unspecified injuries. The Fayette County Sheriff’s Office continues to investigate the accident.

So it was a riding accident, not a bar fight, and while we know a Ski-Doo snowmobile was the model involved, we don’t know what the “unspecified injuries” were to Kevin Mack, let alone what, if any, injuries were suffered by the unnamed cow. I sometimes think it would be much more entertaining – and informative – to just read the headlines, skip the stories altogether, and let my imagination create a much more satisfying world.

Memory and Literary Nonfiction

I have a hard time tolerating those literary nonfiction writers (and teachers) who demand that every detail of a personal essay – every image, every piece of dialogue, every thought or emotion at the time – be precisely accurate, as it actually happened, as if it were a finely pixilated digital photograph. The “literature of reality” (as it is sometimes called, begging the question) requires devotion to a photographic (and phonographic and aromatic) rendition of experience. (This is an issue that has been actively engaged in the genre for at least a few decades; the most prominent being Lee Gutkin, the author, teacher, and editor of Creative Nonfiction.) Consider this passage from Jonathon Starke’s “The Wound” (Brevity 34):

I looked from the horse over to my brother, who was holding the trailer door open with a hip, both hands gripped together at his stomach. He was seven, two years older than me, but always afraid to get near something like this. I stepped closer to the horse.

. . .

Teddy walked over. He ground his teeth together so hard I could see the muscles in his jaw wriggle. He took the bucket up high in his hands. I didn’t know what was coming, what he was capable of, so I tucked my head in my arms and closed my eyes. Teddy growled and dumped the water over me. Then he threw the bucket into the dirt and took me by the arm. Teddy dragged me over to the horse with the stranger and the other men right behind.

"This funny?” he said, letting go of my arm and taking hold of the horse’s reins. He jerked hard on them so the horse’s neck was pulled. “You think this is goddamn funny?”

No doubt the title of the essay, “The Wound,” is meant as a metaphor for the traumatic effect of this experience on the then five-year-old author. But could it have really been so traumatic as to etch it onto his immature mind in such perfect detail for all of these years? How his brother was holding the trailer door open, gripping his stomach? How Teddy was grinding his teeth, growling, tossing the bucket into the dirt? How Teddy jerked the reins and said exactly the words “You think this is goddamn funny?”

Perhaps. But I seriously doubt it, if only based on my own memories of being five years old. Or rather memory. All I have from that age is one fleeting image of lying down on one of those woven cotton mats for a nap in kindergarten. The next memory I retain (and a more traumatic one) is from two years later, running from our duplex after getting into a fight with my mother (over what I have no idea), punching my fist through the front picture window, and fleeing down the alley, only to finally, at the end of the block, see the blood dripping from my hand. What happened after that, I don’t recall. I do, though, still have a scar on the back of my right hand.

Again, perhaps Starke has a more vivid memory of his childhood than me (and, I suspect, you). But my guess would be that he would explain his narrative as being “true to the spirit of the experience,” as most writers, teachers, and students of literary nonfiction would probably agree. Reality – and thus “the literature of reality” – is elusive in memory. Recall is selective (personal) from the outset. And over time it foregrounds and suppresses, smooths and roughs, illuminates and obscures. The literary (or creative) of nonfiction is the aesthetic embellishment of memory, of experience, true not just to the spirit of the experience but more important to the point of remembering – and relating – the experience in the first place.

Snow Storm

I ventured out this morning for my daily four-mile sojourn at the height of this morning’s snow storm, perfect weather – 26 degrees, no wind, a heavy light snow. Quiet, little traffic, few others out, the occasional whiff of wood smoke. It’s one of my favorite times to be out walking. Of course, I’m sure that some who happened to be looking out their windows and saw me, bundled and trudging through the blizzard, thought me mad. Certainly my wife did as she asked upon my return, snow falling from my cap, ice caking my beard, if I had “really been out in that.” Yes, I had been out in that, through that. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I can understand why European Christians chose the cold blanket of winter to celebrate their savior’s birth (despite all evidence that if it happened at all, it happened in the heat and dust of summer). Winter may well be a conventional symbol for death, but for me, especially when I can enjoy the comfort of a heavy snow without (as today) being required to drive in it, the season becomes wonderfully enlivening.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snow-Storm"

Christmas Tree

We put up our Christmas tree last night. By “we” I mean, of course, my wife. For our nearly 25 years of marriage, the putting up of the Christmas was more or less a family affair. When the kids were still living with us, we would all head out to the tree lot to find the just perfect tree. (One year we actually went to a tree farm in the fall, marked our tree, and then returned a couple of weeks before Christmas to cut it and transport it back to our house. Why we only did that once I don’t recall, though I imagine it had to do with differences of opinion, cursing, and threats of an angry Santa.) When the kids were gone, my wife and I continued to share the responsibility of selecting the perfect (at least on the lot) tree. But once home, our responsibilities diverged: I was the one who would haul the tree from the car into the house, saw off the trunk and trim the lower branches to fit the stand, position in the house (floor or table), and string the lights aesthetically around the outer branches. My wife would clear the corner or table for the tree, hold the door as I brought the tree in, retreat to some distant vestibule as I struggled and sweat and cursed to fit the tree in the stand as straight as a crooked trunk could be, and then return to adorn the tannenbaum with the mass of ornaments, mostly personal, not commercial, we’ve collected over the decades. And I would offer encouragement, sitting in my chair, drinking a beer.

Three years ago, we entered a new, more enlightened era – we bought an artificial tree. By “we” I mean, of course, I. What a revelation! No more traipsing through the frigid night of the Christmas tree lot, no more hauling the tree in from the car, sawing off the trunk, trimming the limbs, muscling it into the stand, trying to get it straight. Note that all of these tasks were mine before. Now all that’s left to me is the stringing of the lights, offering encouragement, and drinking beer. And last year I had the brilliant idea of just leaving the string on lights on the tree – no reason to take them off – so my only obligation to the ritual (though the residue of the tradition remains) is to drag the tree down from the attic and place it on the table. And have a beer.

O Christmas Tree! O Christmas Tree!
Thy leaves are so unchanging!