November 23, 2015 Issue

Kathryn Schulz’s "Writers in the Storm," in this week’s issue, tracks what she calls “the over-all decline of weather in literature.” She writes, “While meteorology was advancing, then, the role of weather in literature began to decline.” This doesn’t mesh with my own reading experience. My favorite books brim with weather:

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. [Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989]

The day was growing overcast, and we walked out of the woods and headed toward the Meadowlands despite Victor’s misgivings. [Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands, 1998]

Woke up in brilliant sunshine in the shaking train, going through the Rocky Mountain Trench, as it is called, a long straight fault valley on the west slopes, with snow ranges on either side, an area where they were building a road in 1960 – but still no road. [Edward Hoagland, Notes from the Century Before, 1969]

The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. [John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977]

On sunny, crystal clear mornings in the fall, when it is possible to see into the water, he gets in one of his boats and rows out into the flats and catches some river shrimp. [Joseph Mitchell, The Bottom of the Harbor, 1959]

Afternoon light, clinging to the land, seemed to flee to the snowy sky as twilight drew on. [Verlyn Klinkenborg, Making Hay, 1986]

The wind is steady out of the east, a strong breeze of maybe thirty to thirty-five. [Anthony Bailey, The Outer Banks, 1989]

The cabin emerges silently up ahead in the blowing snow as the storm closes in. [Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, 1986]

The rising sun shot hard, bright beams straight down the canyon east to west, bleeding in a muscular heat. [Sallie Tisdale, Stepping Westward, 1991]

But the boat was safe here, displaced from the world in its cocoon of fog, and I was glad to stay. [Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau, 1999]

My list could go on and on. Schulz’s theory is too sweeping; her definition of literature is too narrow. She fails to consider the many splendid nature and travel books in which weather is central.

December 5, 2011 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Aleksandar Hemon’s "Mapping Home." At first, I thought it was going to be about Hemon’s return to Sarajevo after the war, and his account of the people and places he rediscovered, and the memories that came to mind – a sort of variation on A. J. Liebling’s great Normandy Revisited (1959), which I’m currently reading. The first part of Hemon’s piece is a form of nostalgia trip. At one point, he says:

I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage – during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

The second section of “Mapping Home” is my favorite. It shows Hemon, in his mid-twenties, before he left Sarajevo for Chicago, when he worked as a film reviewer and columnist, walking Sarajevo’s streets, seeing, looking, reflecting. He says:

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city.

That last phrase (“for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city”) is inspired! It deepens Hemon’s theme. “Mapping Home” is not just a memory piece; it’s also about using our senses to create a definition of space. Reading Hemon’s piece, I was reminded of Sallie Tisdale’s brilliant “In The Northwest” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991), in which she talks about the word “chorophiliac,” which means “place-lover.” Hemon is a chorophiliac. His choro is Sarajevo. He says:

I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphorically, I was placed.

“Mapping Home” deepens even further when Hemon shows how Chicago eventually became his choro, too. During his early days in Chicago, he was, he says, “a tormented flâneur.” He says:

In my ambulatory expeditions, I became acquainted with Chicago, but I did not yet know the city. The need to know it in my body, to locate myself in the world, had not been satisfied.”

It wasn’t until Hemon settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater that he started to feel “placed.” One of the highlight passages of “Mapping Home" is Hemon’s vivid description of how he gradually started feeling like an Edgewater “local.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar.

Little by little, Hemon started to feel at home in Edgewater. He says, “I discovered that in order to transform an American city into a personal space you had to start in a particular neighborhood.”

I’m attracted to pieces about place. I’m doubly attracted when they’re written at street level by a writer addicted to walking. Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” is such a piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

Interesting Emendations: Sallie Tisdale's "In The Northwest"

The world described in Sallie Tisdale’s great “In The Northwest” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991) is a world of sensation, seen and described with love and precision:

On sunny days clouds cross the mahogany-colored hills nearby, sliding over the scrubby land like the shadows of huge coasting birds.

The narrow road was a wet black ribbon, like a cooper’s slat, between endless cone-shaped trees.

The bowl of the ladle tingled against my teeth; the water was as cold as ice, and as clear and clean as the high note of a trumpet.

The delicate rose-red lace of the young birch buds hung in halo.

A bridge in a certain light, a glass-walled skyscraper catching sun have a kind of organic virtue, and clear-cuts on a sunny day, from the heights, are warm and brushed to the tender, bare uniformity of suéde.

The Scott was low from a dry winter, the great humped stretches of basalt warm from the sun and smelling of mud and fish.

One of my favorite passages in “In The Northwest” occurs during Tisdale’s vivid recollection of a camping trip that she and three of her friends went on in the Siskiyou Mountains when she was sixteen:

The night leaned in, strong; the firelight was hot and yellow. Outside the flickering dome of light was a soft, sooty dark, and the furry trees were flung in black relief against the sky. We cooked egg noodles in Campbell’s tomato soup and passed a bottle of brandy around. The sweet tomato sauce on the buttery noodles was a feast, the cheap brandy was hot and sharp, and we sang softly what ever came to mind. We huddled under our parkas in the rain, not bothering to crawl into the wet tent, and water fell from our hoods and dropped hissing into the fire. My friends’ faces were shadowed, and their words rose up from under the shelf of coats.

What a limpid, ravishing, sensual piece of writing! I devour it! Interestingly, there is another published version of this passage. You can find it in Tisdale’s book Stepping Westward (1991). It reads as follows:

There were four of us, and the night leaned in, strong; the firelight was hot and yellow and close. Outside the flickering dome of light was a sooty, soft dark. The night was like water to wade through. The furry trees were flung against the sky in black relief. We cooked egg noodles in Campbell’s tomato soup and passed around a bottle of brandy. I remember this now as though I stood outside the light alone watched, and wished I were there, too, by the fire. The sweet tomato sauce on the buttery noodles was our feast, the cheap brandy was hot and sharp, and we sang softly whatever came to mind. We huddled under our hoods in the rain, not bothering to crawl into our moist tents, and water fell off the lids of our hoods and dropped hissing into the fire. My friends’ faces were dark and shadowed, and their words rose from under the shelf of coats.

As you can see, the book’s “the firelight was hot and yellow and close” becomes, in the magazine, “the firelight was hot and yellow”; the book’s “The night was like water to wade through” is deleted from the magazine version; the word order of “sooty, soft dark,” in the book, is changed to “soft, sooty dark” in the magazine; the sentence “The furry trees were flung against the sky in black relief,” in the book, is, in the magazine, joined with the previous sentence and changed to “the furry trees were flung in black relief against the sky”; the word order of “passed around a bottle of brandy,” in the book, is changed, in the magazine, to “passed a bottle of brandy around”; the sentence “I remember this now as though I stood outside the light alone watched, and wished I were there, too, by the fire,” in the book, is deleted from the magazine; “and water fell off the lids of our hoods,” in the book,” is changed to “and water fell from our hoods” in the magazine; “My friends’ faces were dark and shadowed,” in the book, is changed to “My friends’ faces were shadowed,” in the magazine.

I’m assuming the book version was written first, and then edited when it was turned into the magazine article. Tisdale obviously liked her original version well enough to retain it for the book. Both versions are wonderful, but I prefer the more compressed New Yorker piece; it seems more poetic. Comparison of the two versions is a lesson in artful pruning.