Of October and Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe wrote more -- no surprise there of course -- and better about October than anyone.

One passage in particular surfaces with this month every year.  Here it is.  As we shall see, it is more accurately considered a "scrap" or "extract than a passage:

"All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken."

You can find those words, as many doubtless have today, on most of the "quote sites."

These are sites that, not incidentally, don't cite -- none of the quotation aggregators I looked at offered any citation other than Thomas Wolfe's name; nor did any of them indicate or even suggest that that this quotation was not only lifted out of context -- they all are, obviously -- but also out of a much longer sentence.

 To do the citation work the quotation sites are too lazy or sloppy or both to insist upon, the words are from Of Time and the River, published in 1935 as Wolfe's immense second novel. (A variation of the passage appears in Wolfe's short story "No Door," drawn from a draft manuscript for what became Of Time and the River and other books.)

 I say published as, because Of Time and the River as published did not reflect Wolfe's intention or, it has been suggested, his actual accomplishment.

Working with Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, Wolfe reluctantly in the act and bitterly in retrospect saw his vast scheme for a cycle of novels reduced to his first -- Look Homeward, Angel, published six years earlier -- and Of Time and the River, which would be presented in print as the sequel to Angel.

But not just the plan for a novel cycle was altered. The editorial process saw the novel's poiont of view shifted from first person to third, and Wolfe's nonlinear approach to time as filtered by memory rebuilt into a straightforward A-B-C chronological structure. Such an approach would have seen Proust's Recherche ending with its narrator retiring to bed following a straightforward  lifetime of experiences presented one after another.

Even as published, Of Time and the River is far more than a sequel or continuation if Angel, though how much more it had been before editing is hard, and even heartbreaking, to say.

Look Homeward, Angel had been subjected to similar, though less severe surgery than River experienced. But careful scholarship and hard work on the part of Matthew Bruccoli recreated Wolfe's original of Angel, restoring close to 70, 000 words of text, and shifting, in some places dramatically, the nature of its narrative.

Published in 2000, O Lost, Wolfe's preferred title, the novel gives both the opportunity to experience Wolfe's own novelistic intentions and vision, and also to dispel the widely-held (still!) contention or belief that he was an unconscious, uncontrolled artist, a savant at best, an oaf with pretensions at worst (Ernest Hemingway, ungenerous of other writers in the best of circumstances and moods, called Wolfe the "L'il Abner" of American letters), unpublishable at all without editorial supervision and, yes, intervention, the more Draconian the better..

O Lost shows that even in his twenties Wolfe knew what he was doing, and more importantly for a novelist of such ambition, what he was trying to do.


We do not have, evidently, the same sort of opportunity with Of Time and the River's original manuscript. The great stacks and stretches  and packing crate of manuscript that were to have formed other volumes of his original cycle -- part of which was called The October Fair -- were, after his death in 1938, re-shaped, adapted, even rewritten (and added to) by another editor. The October Fair, for instance, was transmogrified into portions of The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, with characters re-made, structure radically altered, new passages actually written by the editor, an editorial approach that was, in the opinion of historian and Wolfe biographer David Herbert Donald, "both from the standpoint of literature and ethics, unacceptable."


So we will likely never know precisely what Wolfe accomplished in the manuscript that became Of Time and the River.


Yet even fashioned -- or carved or shaped or hewn: all of these words, and similar others have been used, usually with a hint or outright sniff of derision -- into something traditional enough in form to be considered commercially publishable, Of Time and the River remains magnificent. I believe it to be, along with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!one of the 1930s' two greatest American novelistic achievements, which to me  places it, for all of its flaws as published, among the greatest of all American novels and for that matter not just American.


Wolfe is less well known or read today than his contemporaries Faulkner, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, though his accomplishment is as large or larger, and his ambition came close to being matched only by Faulkner.

Thomas Wolfe wanted to capture it all -- the nature of experience and of the human consciousness which permits and enhances experience both in the fact and in the memory --in a new and original prose, an approach to the nature of the novel that was -- or would have been if published -- revolutionary and, perhaps ultimately subversive of traditional form and structure. Certainly he was subversive of the severe, but also severely limited, aesthetic that has dominated literature and particularly literary criticism since Henry James. It is an appealing and in many ways admirable aesthetic, one which well-adhered-to can produce great art, but one which only obtains if one is judging (or for that matter writing) fiction created within its admitted constraints.

Bringing that aesthetic to bear upon Wolfe's achievement is to mis-read both his text and his intent, and to do so profoundly. This sort of misreading has beset any number of our greatest novels, from Moby-Dick in advance of Wolfe, to Jones's From Here to Eternity, Nabokov's Ada, Mailer's Ancient Evenings, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Wallace's Infinite Jest after him. Such books -- crossing the seas one could add War and Peace, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, and Proust's Rechere itself -- demand of the reader an abandonment of expectation equal to the writer's abandonment or subversion of forms and formalities that would limit or obviate the vision being captured, the art being created. This is a demand that some readers will accept, critics rarely, and academics almost never.


The editorial, or more accurately, publishing aesthetic -- or something -- that Maxwell Perkins and, after Wolfe left Scribner's for Harper's (in no small part over the editing of his work), Edward Aswell, committed (sic) against Wolfe's vision was, as Gore Vidal noted, "as if Leaves of Grass had been reshaped by John Greenleaf Whittier."

That sort of reshaping, on a far smaller scale, is what the search engines turn up when their algorithms are charged with finding "Thomas Wolfe + October."

The quote sites' scrap or extract again:

"All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken."

Which words and the cadence in which they are embedded doubtless offer some comfort and reassurance about time and its passage, some pleasant images of the season. Just the sort of thing to fit into a speech or mount on a bulletin board in a classroom or a bordered box at the head of a newsletter. Of course, having found the scrap on a quotation site, the speaker or teacher or newsletter writer will attribute the words to Thomas Wolfe (likely some will make a leap and attribute them to Tom Wolfe) without mentioning Of Time and the River. The scrap will serve its comforting or reassuring purpose.


The actual passage, as it appears in the published novel anyway, places those extracted words precisely where they belong, in the midst of something entirely different. They are a portion of chapter XXXIX, the opening of the novel's "BOOK III: TELEMACHUS." The chapter begins on page 325 (of 912) of my Scribner's edition, a bit more than a third of the way into the novel.

The chapter begins with a traditional, even cliched ("painting the air") invocation of the month and its transitions:

October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: burning the thick green on the mountain sides to massed brilliant hues of blazing colors, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow and delight---and with October."

One could be reading Francis Parkinson Keyes or -- to draw from Wolfe's native region -- Jan Karon.

Within two paragraphs Wolfe makes clear that his protagonist, Eugene Gant, has returned home following the death of his father. The next few pages explore both that death and the month, passages alternating between straightforward and conventional description ("The ripe, the golden month has come again" and "The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses" and similar descriptions) and darker streams of death-haunted, father-haunted consciousness. The quotation marks are Wolfe's, indicating that Eugene is thinking and giving voice to his thoughts; the ellipsis is Wolfe's as well:

"October has come again, has come again , has come again . . . I have come home again and found my father dead . . . and that was time . . . time . . . Where shall I go now? What shall I do? For October has come again, but there has gone some richness from the life we knew, and we are lost."

As the chapter proceeds, the rhythms and the repetitions deepen and darken under Wolfe's hand; the omniscient narrative voice all but vanishes. We hear Eugene Gant speaking his thoughts as he lies in bed in his mother's house. We begin to approach the comforting and reassuring scrap the quote sites offer (it begins the fourth paragraph below).

But now we approach it not via a search engine's guided reductionism and a quotation site's extraction, but via a great artist's guiding hand and eye and mind. Comfort and reassurance are not among the qualities he is guiding us toward as he brings the chapter to its close, and in doing so brilliantly launches the third segment of the novel's long search for the meaning of time and experience and memory, and the consciousness that shapes all three.

There are traditional and conventional October images here -- but only if you extract them. In their proper place, they become something else, both counterpoint and commentary, in a passage that is neither traditional nor conventional, any more than was its author, his vision, his intent, and his accomplishment:


Only the darkness moved about him as he lay there thinking, feeling in the darkness: a door creaked softly in the house.

"October is the season for returning: the bowels of youth are yearning with lost love. Their mouths are dry and bitter with desire: their hearts are torn with the thorns of spring. For lovely April, cruel and flowerful, will tear them with sharp joy and wordless lust. Spring has no language but a cry; but crueller than April is the asp of time.

"October is the season for returning: even the town is born anew." he thought. "The tide of life is at the full again, the rich return to business or to fashion, and the bodies of the poor are rescued out of heat and weariness. The ruin and horror of the summer is forgotten---a memory of hot cells and humid walls, a hell of ugly sweat and labor and distress and hopelessness, a limbo of pale greasy faces. Now joy and hope have revived again in the hearts of millions of people, they breathe the air again with hunger, their movements are full of life and energy. The mark of their summer's suffering is still legible upon their flesh, there is something starved and patient in their eyes, and a look that has a child's hope and expectation in it.

"All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken--all things that live upon this earth return: Father, will you not, too, come back again?

"Where are you now, when all things on the earth come back again? For have not all these things been here before, have we not seen them, heard them, known them, and will they not live again for us as they did once, if only you come back again?

"Father, in the night time, in the dark, I have heard the howling of the winds among the great trees, and the sharp and windy raining of the acorns. In the night, in the dark, I have heard the feet of rain upon the roofs, the glut and gurgle of the gutter spouts, and the soaking gulping throat of all the mighty earth, drinking its thirst out in the month of May---and heard the sorrowful silence of the river in October. The hillstreams foam and welter in a steady plunge, the mined clay drops and melts and eddies in the night, the snake coils cool and glistening under dripping ferns, the water roars down past the mill in one sheer sheetlike plunge, making a steady noise like wind, and in the night, in the dark, the river flows by us to the sea.

"The great maw slowly drinks the land as we lie sleeping: the mined banks cave and crumble in the dark, the earth melts and drops into its tide, great horns are baying in the gulph of night,  great boats are baying at the river's mouth. Thus, darkened by our dumpings, thickened by our stains, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all life, all living, the river, the dark immortal river, full of strange tragic time is flowing by us---by us---by us to the sea.

"All this has been upon the earth, and will abide forever. But you are gone; our live are ruined and broken in the night, our lives are ruined below us by the river, our lives are whirled away into the sea and darkness, and we are lost unless you come to give us life again.

"Come to us, Father, in the watches of the night, come to us as you always came, bringing to us the invincible sustenance of your strength, the limitless treasure of your honesty. the tremendous structure of your life that will shape all lost and broken things on earth again into a golden pattern of exultancy and joy. Come to us, Father, while the winds howl in the darkness, for October has come again bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life and the great cargo of the men who will return. For we are ruined, lost, and broken if you do not come, and our lives, like rotten chips, are whirled about us onward in darkness to the sea."

So, thinking, feeling, speaking, he lay there in his mother's house, but there was nothing in the house but silence, and the moving darkness: storm shook the house and huge winds rushed upon them, and he knew then that his father would not come again, and that all the life that he had known was now lost and broken as a dream.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that.

Golding Voyage

Late last night I finally made my "big winter book" decision, and chose William Golding's To the Ends of the Earth, a trilogy collected in a single volume.

When I came across the book I felt certain even before taking it from the shelf that this would be my cold weather read.

For one thing, the work was new to me. I've never read any of the three novels. Despite the many familiar books calling out to me to be re-read, I found myself in the mood for something new, albeit by a familiar and well-loved writer. Golding, that bleakest of English novelists, has never disappointed me and two of his books, Pincher Martin and, above all, The Inheritors are books I turn to often; The Inheritors is rarely far from my desk.. I have a fondness for The Spire, as well, and of course Lord of the Flies.

Yet I had little knowledge of his maritime trilogy and was unaware until this morning that it was made into a Masterpiece Theater series a few years ago, but I never saw it, nor remembered hearing of it. I was glad of that -- I always prefer to read the original before seeing the adaptation.

All of which is well-beside the point. It's Golding. I knew I would be in good narrative and philosophical hands.

The trilogy is the story of a voyage, a journey from England to New South Wales on a vessel whose better days are behind her. The story is told in the first person -- in the form of journal entries -- by Edmund Talbot, a well-born young man bound for an administrative posting.

The narrator is no seaman (especially in the heaves of the opening pages!) and is a passenger aboard the ship, not a member of its crew. It will be interesting, I suspect, to compare Talbot's sense of life at sea -- and Golding's presentation of it -- with Patrick O'Brian's novels of professional seamen.

Finally, as I didn't discover until after I had chosen the book, and begun it, the first volume, Rites of Passage won the 1980 Booker Prize, edging out Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, one of the great novels of the last century,  my favorite novels of all time, and a perennial all-season candidate for my re-read list. I almost took down the Burgess yesterday.


But it was the Golding that I chose last night, and it was the right choice..

Fittingly enough for a literary voyage, the weather began to shift here not long after I selected the book, temperature dropping, winds rising, skies graying.

Rough seas ahead, no doubt, and no doubt gloriously so.

Like the narrator, I'll send dispatches as able.

New Year's Read

I've always used at least part of the long New Year's weekend to think about the books I want to read in the next twelve months. No less this year than others, and since the weekend extends through a Monday I've stretched the process, enjoying every moment of it.

My favorite part of the process is selecting the "big" books I want to lose myself in during the depths of winter. The curl-up-and-burrow-into-the-story books that make raw winter nights such excellent islands of reading. (And chilly early mornings, too, when a quick dash to fill the mug with steaming coffee or tea is followed by an equally quick dash back beneath the blankets for just a few more pages.)

Snow days are the best of all -- with sleety days only slightly behind them. 

So I prowled my shelves last night both before and after midnight, and have continued to prowl and ponder all day today.

I had thought for awhile that my top pick for the winter's first big book would be a revisiting of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I haven't read in over a decade, and which has been calling to me for some time.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted to save Marquez for warmer months, to read him in the shady glade near the garden on a sweltering day, maybe with a beer or two chilling in the creak near my garden chair.

 So I have continued to look, considering both old favorites that I haven't read in years -- Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Oates's them, Bellow's Augie March from the century just past, James's The Ambassadors, Stendahl's Charterhouse of Parma, Dickens's Bleak House -- as well as some of the big books that I have yet to read at all -- Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, Bolaño's 2666, Styron's Set This House on Fire.

So many books -- so little winter!

I'll make my decision sometime tomorrow (I hope) -- and would welcome any suggestions from anyone who also shares the sense that cold winter nights and warm long books are made for each other.

Kathleen Stein

There were moments in nearly every conversation with Kathleen Stein when you could sense that she was on the brink of saying something -- or not saying it -- and was weighing the words she would use, or not use to make a point or launch a critique or deflate a pomposity. Or just let things go.

Letting things go was not Stein's style. Generally, she chose to speak up, and when she did her words were always well-chosen, with attention paid to specificity if not to tact.

But that didn't matter -- she was not being rude. There were points to be made, not points to be scored, and that very crucial difference set Kathleen apart conversationally as surely as did the quality of her arguments, her insights, her mind.

Kathleen died instantly last Sunday, in a fall during one of the hikes that she loved.

Stein, during her long -- epic! -- tenure as staff writer at OMNI, became one of the very best writers on science, and particularly neuroscience, in the country. Her stewardship of the magazine's legendary interviews is the prime reason they are legendary.She followed science with the assiduousness of a good reporter, and pursued its explication for general audiences with the enthusiasm of an evangelist.

Which last is a strange, but deliberate choice of words -- Kathleen had less use for or belief in anything supernatural or mystical than anyone I have ever known. She was a rationalist and an articulate one, who did not tolerate the word "nonbeliever" because it implied that there was something she chose not to believe in. Which she knew there wasn't.

She came to science writing and editing, the old-fashioned way, working her way toward her own best metier
one story at a time, in various fields.

She was a rock journalist for awhile, and a good one, writing for Circus, Creem, and others. Lester Bangs referred to her as "Kathi" Stein, but she used another variant spelling when, as Cathi Stein, she wrote Elton John: Rock's Piano Pounding Madman in 1975, when Elton"s and Stein's careers were both relatively new.

How she hated to have that little book mentioned! But she hated it with a twinkle -- which she would deny existed -- in her fierce eyes. It was an honest piece of work-for-her, quickie paperback dues-paying by a  journalist headed for other things.

Those other things could have been anything -- Stein was interested in all of it, and could write well about any of it.

At OMNI she turned her interest in everything into writing, and editing, pieces on everything -- neuroscience was her passion, but she was a grand generalist, and could write as well about the broad intersections of science and culture, as she could about the minute and minutely specific details of cortical structure.  

It would be nearly a third of a century before her next book, The Genius Engine: Where Memory, Reason, Passion, Violence, and Creativity Intersect in the Human Brain and this time the byline was:

By Kathleen Stein.

Damned right -- and a damned good book it is, a careful, and carefully written, examination of the prefrontal cortex.

 The last time I saw Stein in person, she joined my son and me for a beer on a gorgeous New York Saturday afternoon, four years ago this week. We spoke often -- though not, now, often enough -- on the phone, but being with Stein in person was a richer wonder, one that I always looked forward to, even when I saw her nearly every day at the office.

That Saturday it had been a few years since I'd seen her in person, but she was still Stein -- how could she not be -- and in the course of a couple of hours the three of us spoke of many, many things.

At one point, we were talking of Norman Mailer, who had died just a few weeks before, and Stein said that his death felt "like one of the foundational pillars of the universe had been removed."

I feel that way now, about her, about a universe without her.

As I understand things, it was probably an injury to the prefrontal cortex that killed Kathleen last weekend. And if so, one can imagine that final instant of her consciousness being pure Stein, observing as she died the effects of gravity upon her own cortex.

That's too facile, of course, and far too easy a search for some comfort. Kathleen wouldn't have allowed me to get away with that, were she here to glance at this piece.

But she's not. 

 

I will miss her for the rest of my life, but I will also for the rest of my life be grateful for the pleasure and the privilege of having known Kathleen Stein.

Joanna Russ

Sad news this morning, with word that Joanna Russ has died.

Although she published relatively little fiction in the past couple of decades, and was never prolific, there was a decade or so, from '68 to '78, when she was producing some of the most challenging and well-written SF in the world. Her best work included the novels The Female Man, the remarkable And Chaos Died, Picnic On Paradise, We Who Are About To, and shorter works including "Souls," "When It Changed, "Poor Man, Beggar Man,,"  every one of which worked beautifully as fiction and as science fiction, a tough double-act from which she never flinched.

I taught The Female Man in 1976, and can still, 35 years later, recall both the excitement and distress the students expressed, often simultaneously, at the unflinching challenges that novel offers. The richness and rigor of Russ's imagination, matched and even exceeded by her gifts both with prose and dialectic made that novel one of the outstanding accomplishments of the 1970s. It was an audacious and substantial novel then, and remains so today.

The first Russ I read were some early Alyx stories in Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies, and bought the Alyx fix-up, Picnic On Paradise when it first appeared, as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1968. Russ and Alyux turned "heroic" fantasy" on its head even as the success of Conan reprints was beginning to spur much of heroic fantasy's long and ongoing retreat into pulp cliche and convention.

Joanna Russ was a stern and tasking critic as well, a scholar and a playwright.

But it is as a writer of fiction that I will best remember her, and it is with her fiction that I will, a bit later today, curl under a tree and do just that:

Remember her.

Blue Aronica

A bit of background, in the interest of truth-in-reviewing -- Lou Aronica is a dear friend of many years. We've worked together,  we read each other's work, we're open and blunt when criticism is called for, despite which we get along beautifully. I saw an early draft of Lou's new novel awhile back, and Lou nods, nicely but unnecessarily, to me in his acknowledgements.

That bit of history is not intended as a caveat: buyers of his Blue need no warnings other than to set aside a few undisturbed hours. Blue will not let you put it down.

Like all good fiction, Blue asks "What If?" Because Blue is a fantasy novel, the question carries implications larger than this reality. There are several of these questions, each carefully placed, elegantly asked, in the novel:

• What role do our imaginations play in our creation of the world we live in, as well as the worlds we imagine?
• Are there times when the worlds of our imagination become not merely distractions from the problems we face, but also crucial elements of our survival?
• Is the appeal of the fantastic -- of fantasy itself -- dangerous? How easily a devotion to an imagined place of our creation become more real than the world we must live, and die, in?

But the largest, and most moving of the questions that propel Blue's narrative, and raise its already high narrative stakes to even higher emotional ones, is this:

What is our responsibility to our children and to both their imaginations and their understanding of the often harsh nature of the world we've brought them into?

It's a question that every parent faces, sooner or later, and most of us face it in moving, sometimes shattering, but still mundane contexts: children grow up and move away, marriages dissolve and families are separated, time passes and with its passage come changes.

Some parents, tragically, face the question more ultimately: children die or are killed, or are otherwise lost in ways that alter forever both the parent and, often, the parent's memories of the time before tragedy.

What Lou Aronica accomplishes in Blue is to take this basic, and universal, question, wed it to a beautifully realized and absolutely believable fantasy plot, and somehow explore the theme on both levels, deeply examining the natures of parenthood, loss, responsibility while also unveiling -- and deeply examining -- a wholly believable and self-consistent imagined counter-world which is faced with its own version of the questions confronting the novel's protagonist.

The treatment of that protagonist, Chris Astor, is what grounds Blue in our real world, and at the same time enables the transcendent vision of the counter-world, Tamarisk, to be equally grounded for all of its fantastica. Chris Astor is a good guy, a guy who understands the nature of responsibility and takes it seriously, particularly  his responsibilities as the divorced father of a teenaged daughter. Becky, at fourteen, is the center of his life, a center from which he feels increasingly estranged. Chris knows that he can be a better man than he is, though is uncertain how to become that better self. He knows as well that he's been better in the past.
  
Nine years ago. Chris saw five-year-old Becky through a life-threatening illness by creating, with her. Tamarisk -- a place they could go and not have to face the world of doctors, treatments, fear, death. Tamarisk was their world, Chris and Becky's, something so special and vivid and idyllic that it took on a life of its own.  

Now, after a divorce that flowed in large part from the opposite of idyllic Tamarisk -- the brutal honesty, expressed angrily out children's earshot, that a child's desperate illness and its strains can impose on a marriage -- Chris is cut off from Tamarisk  and, increasingly. from his daughter. Aronica's use of that opposition is superb, as is every one of the novel's oppositions and parallelisms, which are always effective and never strained. The opening scene, a divorced father fast-forwarding through old home movies, watching time speed up even as it passes into the, well, irretrievable past, is heartbreaking and beautiful, closing with the TV screen, like Chris's life, going blue.

It's a pleasure to read Aronica's prose. He is always clear, telling his story in a style and with language that invites the reader in, welcoming them and keeping them welcome from one well-realized scene to the next, whether the scene takes place in this world or in Tamarisk. Only occasionally does Aronica over-explain or over-describe his character's feelings and thoughts, the rare missteps the more noticeable for their rarity. Most of the time his characters speak for themselves, in sharp and believable dialogue that's notable for its avoidance of the cloyingness that too often harms father/daughter stories. His mastery of point-of-view ensures that readers experience each character as a separate and memorable individual; whether that individual lives here or in Tamarisk, their motivations and insights are believable and consistent.

A pleasure as well to encounter a deeply imagined fantasy world that doesn't re-use the same old small furry creatures in Thomas Kinkade houses. Instead, Tamarisk is a refraction (sic) of our own world with its problems and challenges, as well as a reflection of Becky and Chris. Whether or not Tamarisk is real, the world becomes as real for the reader as for Becky and Chris.

That Aronica makes every bit of this seem absolutely effortless is a testament  both to his obvious skill as a writer -- there are half a dozen aspects of this book, beginning with the creation Tamarisk itself, that are exceptionally difficult to accomplish, much less accomplish as well as Aronica does here -- and to the integrity he brings to, and invests in, his material.

Blue is a novel about love, love of father for child, child for father, love of life, love of imagination, love of nature.

It is also a major and ambitious fantasy novel -- that also works beautifully well for the rational among us as a serious psychological, and metaphorical, investigation of the appeals of fantasy -- that one can hope is the first of many novels of many different types.

Wherever he goes as a writer -- which is wherever he wants to, although it's hard to imagine him writing ReturnTo Tamarisk, or The Winds Of Tamarisk -- Lou Aronica has given readers a wonderful experience that can be read on many levels, but an experience that above all reminds readers of the joys of parenthood, and the ways in which those joys so often exist alongside, and sometimes exist more deeply because of, the loss of childhood that parenthood itself in so many ways and, like Blue, on so many levels, inevitably and inexorably requires us to confront.
 

BOB

Bob Guccione died yesterday.

For six years and a bit I would see Bob several times a month, and sometimes several times a week, staying often at the homes he and Kathy Keeton created, both in Manhattan and Rhinebeck, dining with them equally  often, often on Bob's pasta.

They were my employers, of course, during the years I edited OMNI, but away from the offices they were more than cordial friends, generous in conversation and eager to laugh. The many kindnesses they extended to me and especially to my wife had far less to do with business than with their natures.

Bob will be remembered always and inevitably -- and of course accurately -- as the man who reinvented and in many ways re-directed the course of adult magazines, built a great fortune and lost it, indulged his desire for both fine art and fine, in their own way, gaucheries, equally exuberant about both.

He was, I believe, a shy man in many ways. Not a hermit or recluse as he was sometimes portrayed. He simply had the resources (and how!) to create for himself environments in which he was so comfortable that there was rarely reason for him to leave.

One memorable night, though, I persuaded him to join me, my brother, Harlan Ellison, and Ellen Datlow for a meal in Chinatown. Hong Fat's, I cannot imagine, ever had a livelier table or a more wide-ranging conversation. I believe Bob enjoyed himself as much as anyone there.

He enjoyed as well, our back-and-forths over the magazine and its direction. OMNI was in so many ways Kathy Keeton's province that Bob's contributions to it, other than the magazine's at the time innovative design,  have tended to be overlooked. But he was always interested in what was being covered and the covers themselves were his domain. The insides of the magazine he left to those of us who worked to assemble it every month. He and Kathy would set directions they wanted to see explored, make requests that a topic be covered (often in depth)

Even as his and Kathy's enthusiasm -- and credulousness -- for UFOs and their (they believed) occupants'  purposes in visiting (they believed) Earth grew during the last few years of OMNI's print existence, they never once interfered with so much as a single skeptical sentence inside the publication.

Of course, Bob's less skeptical nature made for occasional schizophrenia when the covers and the cover lines occasionally expressed an enthusiasm for the possibility of  "aliens among us" that OMNI's writers and researchers -- and certainly not its editor -- failed to share.  Not the first time a publisher's packaging was designed to sell editorial material that didn't quite (to say the least) match his beliefs. It is to Bob and Kathy's credit that they understood this, and understood as well the need for the magazine to follow a more rational course when exploring phenomena. We laughed about it sometimes, and they stood always behind our editorial policies, whatever they personally believed.

Over the years after the magazine closed I remained in touch with Kathy, and had a long visit with her not long before her own death. I saw Bob around the time I departed from the company, and was touched by the appreciation he expressed for my years with OMNI and General Media, and his enjoyment of them. I felt the same way.

Bob would have been 80 in a couple of months, and while his last years saw him dealing with both health and financial challenges, they also saw him happily remarried and able, I understand, to devote more time to his own painting, which had been his lifelong ambition.

I will always see him in that fine kitchen on 67th Street, testing the pasta and his sauce, signaling that both were ready, inviting us to adjourn to the table where who knows what would be discussed.

Snow Gives Way To Spring And...

Blackberries Soon!

Water Clock

Lesson d: if you're going to include chronology in a frozen pipe post, make sure your blog settings reflect the time zone you live, post, and deal with frozen pipes in.

Does now.

Lesson C For Cool (I'll Say!) Clear Running Water

The third lesson , evidently, is to write a post about bonehead mistakes that resulted in frozen pipes.

Even as my post just previous went live, the house was filled with the sound of running water.

Nice sound.

Pipes At Peace

A quarter year since here last, and among my resolves two days ago was to better attend to the cultivation of Cultivating Keith.

This morning gives me an opportunity to do so, although not quite the opportunity I'd anticipated.

This particular post, for instance, is being written in-between sessions of thawing out frozen pipes -- pipes frozen despite what I thought were vigilant and disciplined efforts all night long to keep them clear. I ran water full out, and then left water running at a strong trickle, and made it through the night with good flow.

Then: the mistake.

Sun fully out, 8:30 in the morning, I decided to close the faucets.

Ooops.

Took only half an hour or so, but what a half hour evidently.

No flow.

So I have been warming the pipes where they join the house, and warming myself in-between sessions (fireplace helps; Wild Turkey in coffee helps more) outside.

Lessons learned late include: a) when it's this cold and you have flow, don't relax; b) when it's this cold and you don't have flow, reflect in the cold on lesson a.

Goodbye Ukrop's

I made my last weekly stop at Ukrop's Friday, my shopping colored as it has been for the past month by the melancholy that accompanied the announcement of the store's October closing.

That closing took place yesterday afternoon.

Now the rhythms of my weekly trips to Roanoke will change, and I'll miss the cheerfulness and sheer pleasantness of Ukrop's. I've never enjoyed a grocery store more.

The ppostmortems exploring the store's failure have tended to focus on the chain's Sunday closings and lack of alcohol sales. Maybe so.

But what's been missing from most of those postmortems in the papers and on TV, has been the enjoyment that so many of Ukrop's customers felt when shopping there. Clearly there weren't enough customers, but those did shop at Ukrop's took pleasure in it.

Some of that was the quality of the store's food; prepared foods, meats, and produce especially stood out.

Some of it, though, was the sense I got in conversations with other customers that we wanted to be there. Many of us went out of our way to trade with Ukrop's, and for some items paid a little more (though less of a markup than at some specialty stores still in business).

I got the sense as well that the store's employees wanted to be there too. Glad to have jobs in this economy, they seemed particularly glad to have these particular jobs with this particular company.

The ambiance of the Ivy Market store played its part as well. Layout and especially lighting were warm and welcoming, softer and at the same time more illuminating than is typical of grocery stores.

That illumination shined with sadness on Friday -- so many of the shelves were already bare, and would not be re-stocked.

Over the past two years, I felt good when I entered Ukrop's and was generally smiling when, after shopping and, more often than not, enjoying a conversation with store employees and other shoppers, was smiling broadly when I left.

Except for this past Friday, when I didn't have a smile in me as I left Ukrop's for the last time.

Straight To Hot

Not even a chance
To more than glance
At gentle Spring
Before Summer Heat
Settled in.

E-Trash Elimination

Up early and out with 20 years' worth of electronic accumulation, now happily delivered for recycling:

11 computers (9 desktop, 2 laptop)

5 printers

18 phones and 11 answering machines (the farm was prey to power surges when we first moved here)

1 stereo

3 boom boxes

1 scanner

4 VCRs

14 keyboards (occupational hazard)

7 remote controls

1 DVD player

3 USB hubs

2 ZIP drives and an external CD-ROM drive (2x! A speed demon!)

all now deposited at our county's first (of many, one hopes) e-trash collection day.

Felt good.

Electronics are lighter today than most of boat-anchors I hauled to the recycling station.

And now my house is lighter than it was just yesterday.

A bit lighter, anyway.

No Stopping That Man Dan

Dan Smith is at it again, and we're the better for it.

Having gone on at some length about his sterling qualities as writer, editor, and man (qualities absolutely undetectable at first and maybe even second glance at his... time-honored features) I'll spare the personal praise now, and say simply that if you're not reading his blog, fromtheeditr, you are missing one of the liveliest soapboxes around.

Dan's always a good writer, but I think he's as surprised as anyone at what a natural blogger he's turned out to be.

Actually, I'm not all that surprised: Blogs are just right for holding forth, and work best when you've got something to hold forth with (and do so forthwith!)

Dan's got plenty of somethings: experience, attitude, insight, opinion (and how!) and a well-developed sense of both justice and service.

He's also funny as hell.

Check out Dan Smith's fromtheeditr when you get the chance. You'll enjoy yourself and you'll make Dan's blog a regular stopping-place.

And don't miss Valley Business Front, the business (and much more) magazine that Dan and Tom Field started a few months back, and which has gone, in those same few months, from being an ambitious approach to regional business (and more) publication to being a must-read ambitious regional magazine.

There's no stopping Dan Smith, and it's fun to watch the irritation experienced by those who've tried.

Beginning Bellow

As the great generation of post World War II American novelists inevitably and inexorably dwindles, the opportunity to consider careers in toto exerts its own inexorable and (for me anyway) probably inevitable appeal.

And the appeal for me at the moment is to view those careers from the inside, by starting at the beginning and working my way, book-by-book through works first read long ago, and almost undoubtedly read out of sequence of publication.

This winter I turned to Saul Bellow, and began where, in print at least, his novelistic career did, with Dangling Man.

With Bellow, the begin-at-the-beginning reader is fortunate to have the first couple of decades of his career in two Library of America volumes. Beautifully printed and bound, conveniently sized, the volumes also reflect Library of America's commitment to producing the most accurate versions of the books themselves.

With the first of its (so far, but only so far, one hopes) Saul Bellow volumes, Novels 1944-1953, I was reminded by the volume title itself that while Bellow is (rightly) considered one of the half dozen or so key American postwar novelists, his career began while the war was still being waged.

That beginning, Dangling Man, is set in the United Sates (Chicago, of course) during the war. During, in fact, the narrator's wait for induction into the army: The arc of the novel is that wait; the novel is written in the form of diary entries.

It's an effective form both for the philosophical explorations Bellow pursued throughout his career -- the narrator, Joseph, is well-read; books, their promise and their limitations (as well as Joseph's), inform many of the entries -- and for propelling a narrative that isn't driven by plot. The book is essentially plotless (like life).

Casting the novel as a diary frees Bellow from building a cohesively plotted architecture of incidents and scenes (though there are plenty of each, some memorable) and enables the focus of the book to be Joseph's exploration of his identity, personally and philosophically.

The approach works well, though some entries demand some lenience of disbelief from the reader: though Joseph is not a novelist some entries run for several pages, complete with dialogue (in a party scene, dialogue from a fairly large number of characters) and novelistic descriptions.

Re-reading Dangling Man forty years after my first (and previously only) time with it offers certain pleasures of perspective. When I first read it, late in the Sixties, Bellow's most recent novel was Herzog (1964). At least two other major novels, Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) and Humboldt's Gift (1975) and several close to major novels, not to mention nonfiction, stories and novellas and a Nobel Prize lay ahead.

That first reading of this first novel, though, came when the only other Bellow I knew was Herzog. Seize The Day (1957) and Henderson The Rain King (1959). The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and The Victim (1947) lay in my future, as they had in Bellow's when writing Dangling Man.

But even then and knowing only a few of his works I could see, nascent, many of Bellow's preoccupations, themes, and tones: Isolation, dialogues with the past and with one's self, troubles with women, engagement with and rejection of classical literature and philosophy, the costs (on many levels) of urban life, and others (though not Bellow's lively comic side: Dangling Man is, like its diarist/narrator, essentially humorless).

Looking at the book now, almost four years after Bellow's death, I find Dangling Man to be more compelling than I recalled, the diarist's wait -- not quite anticipation -- for induction and his emergence (sic) into a larger world giving a sense, wholly exclusive of the novel itself, of Bellow's own steady, day-by-day, page-by-page wait for his own emergence.

That emergence came with Augie March close to a decade after Dangling Man, and the third novel in the Library of America's first volume of Bellow. If I stick to my plan of reading may way through Bellow I will get to Augie...

Sometime. Rereading an author's work, all of it, in order of composition, is itself the work of a fair amount of a lifetime, and there are other writers I wish to approach the same way.

For now, though, I've begun Bellow, and recommend Dangling Man and its author to you, as well.

Woods, Snow, Silence, Love

It's been years since our last real snow here, but the wait was worth it. I don't know that I've ever seen a prettier snow.

Three days later and the ground remains covered, though tomorrow's temperatures will see to that. Until then, though, it's lovely, and enough snow remains to muffle even the sounds of its falling from the trees.

The drive, steep and shaded, remains covered as well, which means the car remains parked at the top of the ridge that runs along the edge of the farm

Walking to and from it through the woods that cover the slope of the ridge reminds me, every time, of just how much I love these woods, this land, and just how deeply that love can be renewed by seeing the land and the forest through new eyes.

Eyes squinting, just a bit, against the glare rising from the snow.

Editor Retiring -- But Not Shy!

My friend Dan Smith retired yesterday, and celebrated his birthday at the same time.

Then he got right to work on a brand-new project.

Considering how hard and constantly Dan's worked as a journalist and editor over the last four decades -- and then some -- there isn't a lot of surprise to this. He's spent the last twenty years editing the Blue Ridge Business Journal, a publication serving southwest Virginia, each page reflecting Dan's standards and integrity, providing its readers with news, features, opinion and attitude that equaled any such publication anywhere.

Every two weeks Dan produced a paper that was always lively, that took stands, that shared insights, and that reminded us that business is only part of life: Dan's book reviews ranged across everything from ancient history to contemporary fiction and most categories in-between. Rare enough for a business paper -- and increasingly, alas, any paper -- to carry book reviews, the Journal under Dan was absolutely committed to them.

He's just as committed to helping young writers become better writers. I've watched him work with dozens over the years, making the best of them better and then helping them get better still.

Dan always goes out of his way to credit the freelancers who provided the bulk of the Journal's copy; those young writers are a big part of his legacy.

Not that he'd use a word like legacy. Dan is not one to rest on his laurels, or to rest much, period. He's always looking for the next story, the next book to read, the next person to tell about that story, or that just-read book.

He's a fine writer, too; his memoir, Burning The Furniture, gives good picture of a life that in many ways promised not to last nearly as long as it has. (Dan learns from his mistakes; some of those, well-recounted in the book, were large and long-lived: Dan's ability to learn large lessons is at the heart of his own long-livedness.)

Dan's also one of the funniest people on earth. Presenting me with an award a few years back he remarked that, "Keith Ferrell is like a Marseilles whore: he comes in on time and his work's always clean." I laughed as hard as anybody -- and have taken the opportunity, more than once, to repay the favor. Dan can laugh hard at himself, too.

And he's nowhere near done with any of it. A mite too early to talk about that new project Dan's got in mind, but when the time's right I'll let you know -- if Dan hasn't gotten to you first.

And if you're in the Rocky Mount, Virginia area next Friday evening, August 8, stop by Edible Vibe ( a terrific restaurant/coffee shop in downtown Rocky Mount) come here Dan read -- he does that well, too -- as part of our 4th Annual Franklin County Library Book Festival. There willl be half a dozen writers sharing their work. You'll know which one's Dan because he's the one I'll be making the most fun of. The balloon goes up at at 6:30.

It's been my pleasure and, no exaggeration, my privilege to write a number of pieces for Dan over the past four years.

I was pretty well full-formed as a writer by the time I met Dan, but I still learned a few things from him, not least of them what a fine, fine man Dan Smith is.

I'm glad I know him.

Overview Institute Unveiled

A long day in DC yesterday, making the formal public announcement of The Overview Institute, an organization aimed exploring the ramifications, implications, and the possibilities for changes in perceptual and consciousness that arise (as it were) from our ability to rise from our planet.

The Institute is named, and its concerns and avenues of inquiry and speculation flow from, the exemplary work of Frank White, whose The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution marked, upon its publication in 1987, the first sustained and consistent attempt to examine how human perception is altered (and perhaps transformed) by off-Earth experience.

Frank's book was of (groundbreaking) necessity anecdotal -- reminiscences, accounts, insights from individuals who'd been to space, all of them at the time astronauts or cosmonauts. To those anecdotes Frank brought and brings his sharp analytical intelligence and clear, focused thinking.

An indispensable book, and one that has refused to release its hold upon the imaginations and scientific curiosity of those who've read it.

Twenty-one years later and the handful of people who's been off-planet in 1987 has now swelled to more than 500, a number that will itself grow dramatically as various private-enterprise human space transport enterprises come on-line over the next few years.

At yesterday's event we unveiled our Institute's Declaration of Vision and Principles as well the other members of the Institute's Core Overview Group.

Most importantly, we called for others to sign our declaration, and join us in exploring the issues, opportunities, and areas of scientific, cultural, artistic, spiritual, philosophical inquiry raised by the Effect's effects.

As Frank pointed out in his eloquent remarks, the Overview Institute doesn't have an ideology or agenda -- the implication of his work and findings is that 500, or 500,000, or 500,000,00 people experiencing the effect in orbit might well manifest 500,000,000 different personal responses to and manifestations of the experience.

What we're hoping to apply quantitative scientific methodology to is whether or not the Effect itself exerts measurable neurophysiological/cognitive effects on the brain.

But we're also quite deliberately seeking to engage the vision of artists from all media, cultural and thought leaders, activists, and above all interested individuals of whatever stripe and profession in exploring the question of just what space means -- and can mean -- to and for us here on Earth.

In my remarks I noted that it's now close to forty years since Norman Mailer launched his magnificent (if magnificently underrated) Of A Fire On The Moon with the words:

"Are we poised for a philosophical launch?"

As I said yesterday, and believe, "Now we are."

Take a look at our Declaration and, if it appeals, sign up for The Overview Institute (it's free.)

And tell others about it.

ARTHUR

The October, 1993, gathering of many of the world's leading AI and brain researchers, science journalists, philosophers and others in Cambridge, Mass., to celebrate the ongoing life and works of Marvin Minsky was an intellectual and social delight from start to finish, but one of the high points for all there was Arthur's telepresence.

He looked great, all smiles and good wishes, and it was a pleasure to pose one of the day's first questions.

I can't remember what it was I asked, but I'll never forget -- or want to -- Arthur's response as he gazed out over the packed house in full color from the big screen that dominated the stage:

"Hello, Keith, and let me begin by saying thanks so much for rejecting my latest article!"

Brought down the house.

I was at first chagrined, but realized as the day passed that Arthur's comment brought me a certain cachet -- "You really rejected an Arthur C. Clarke article?"

"Not up to our standards," I said, making sure my eyes were twinkling as I did so.

When I dropped Arthur a note relaying the fun I'd had his expense, he responded with a lovely funny note of his own, along the lines of how he was eager to help me get a good laugh.

But the best laugh I ever got from this man who laughed so deeply and well, came a few years later, after his investiture by the Queen.

Now that he was Sir Arthur, I wrote him, he could view his various wheelchairs and other devices as support mechanisms existing... Against The Fall Of Knight.

He wrote back immediately, certain that I could have heard his laughter all the way from Sri Lanka.

I have no doubt that I had indeed heard it -- and I hear that laughter now, and think of the joy and insight, the vision and inspiration, the provocation and speculation, the smiles and, yes, the groans at the puns he loved, the treasure shelves of fiction and the nonfiction.

Arthur brought all of this and more to so many millions of readers over the course of one of the great careers in the world of ideas.

And even better, one of the great joyous lives in the world of humans.