The Best American Poetry

Sharon Dolin: Baudelaire, Taleb, & the Aphorism

view through the poplars

"Machinery will have so much Americanized us, progress will have so much atrophied our spiritual element, that nothing in the sanguinary, blasphemous or or unnatural dreams of the Utopists can be compared to what will actually happen."

That statement was written 150 years ago by Charles Baudelaire in an unfinished work published posthumously in 1887, 20 years after his death, and translated by Richard Howard in a little book called Intimate Journals. Merely change the word "machinery" to "technology" and it sounds fairly accurate.

Compare it to this contemporary aphorism by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Lebanese, educated in French schools in Lebanon and at the University of Paris as well as in the U.S.) from his recent aphorism collection The Bed of Procrustes:

"The book is the only thing left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad."

I only realized how strong the pull of the marketplace is when even I was tempted to allow ads on my personal blog Whirlwind in order to make some money. Thus far, I have resisted the call.

I came to France (and the Basque Country) to continue my work on aphorisms. And, of course, I felt I should read some collections by the French, especially since it seems, according to Alfred Corn, that the French were the ones who began to treat aphorisms as witty, pithy statements.

The problem I have with some of Baudelaire is that he is so often interested in shocking us out of our bourgeois propriety. And that is the most dated and least shocking thing about him. As when he starts off on the first page, declaring:

"Love is a liking for prostitution. There are no pleasures, not even noble ones, whose origin cannot be traced to prostitution. . . . What is art? Prostitution."

Are you beginning to yawn?

"Commerce is essentially satanic."

Only a deeply religious man could seek to offend the pious by talking of Satan. (moi)

[Though, now, since I have had a night without internet service and thus time to ponder, I wonder if Baudelaire wasn't right after all: that even my contemplation of allowing ads on my site wouldn't be a kind of prostitution. . .]

In a future post, I'll talk about one of my favorite French aphorists, Edmond Jabes, an Egyptian Jew by birth.

I'll leave you with one sketch for an aphorism (an aphorism for me encompassing the personal "horizon," which is part of the etymology of aphorism, as in setting boundaries [see my little essay ])

Today on my bike, I rode by Avenue Monplaisir, but I knew if I stopped, I would not find it. Is that my fate: to knowingly (or, perhaps, unknowingly) be passing my pleasure by?

THE MOODY TEMPLE and A HUM-DRUM NOT KNOWING by John Hennessy

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

Psalm on Sifnos

By Stephen Yenser

One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.

One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.

    Like this poem by Stephen Yenser, a straight-razor-witted fellow Hellenophile I got to know on a visit here several years ago, the island is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. From the ferry, Sifnos looks denuded, its smooth volcanic peaks all sun firing across a yellow skull. Disembark, though, and you begin to see that flora here is cunning, vines shifting along every available crack in stone, tamarisks lining the beach, olive trees low and orderly up on the terraces digging their roots deep.

    The people living here are pretty clever too; over the last five thousand years they’ve developed an architecture and agriculture to survive in style. Their houses are all clean lines and square angles, a series of unfolding cubes, thick-walled to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and painted uniformly white, shutters a limited variety of blue, green, brown, and pink. The blue and white domes of churches—one for every day of the year, one for every sixth Sifnian—speckle each inhabited hillside. Shrubs, vines, and fruit trees surround the buildings: lemons, limes, oranges, figs, pomegranates, mimosas, almonds, cascading bougainvillea, shady grape arbors, banks of flowering capers and night-blooming jasmine, enormous geraniums, and on and on. Beyond the limits of each town there are farmers’ fields, orchards, and pastures, chickens pecking, goats grazing, the odd cow, pig, or sheep poking, donkeys, horses and mules performing their tasks or stalling in attitudes of sublime passive aggression.

    And of course there is the sea. Visible from virtually every inch of this island. It’s kind of blue.

    Our arrival on Sifnos was a happy accident. In the summer of 2000, we found ourselves between apartments—Sabina Murray, Nicholas, our first child, two years old at the time, and I. In September we were to move into free housing on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover, where Sabina would serve as writer-in-residence for three years, but until then we had nowhere to go. We looked into summer sublets and seasonal rentals in Boston, Maine, southern New Hampshire, the Jersey Shore, all places near friends or family, but found nothing we could afford. It was actually cheaper, in the last years of the drachma, to go to Greece for a couple of months, than to stay in any of those local places. We moved around the Aegean that summer, but Sifnos was our favorite spot and we continue to return there when we can.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

    Our apartment on Sifnos abuts the grounds of the chapel of Panagia Ouranofora, once a temple to Apollo, the god from whom our town, Apollonia, the island’s capital, takes its name. Lengths of marble column and fragments from the walls of the temple have been integrated into the more modestly designed church, and ancient marble blocks still provide a few of the long steps up from the steno, the path that cuts between a block of terraced white Cycladic houses and Mamma Mia, the popular Italian restaurant next door.

    I feel deeply moved by this site; I’m at home here.

    But why?

Preview from Paris: Michael Gorra's "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece" (by Alice Kaplan)

Last week I was wandering around the giant warehouse of a bookstore on the rue de Rennes called the FNAC, and in a fit of nostalgia I found myself  face- to-face with the “Literary Criticism” section.  It was a sad moment.  On a whole floor bursting at the seams with novels from every continent, histories of every century, sociology, religion, political theory, and you-name-it---and in the country that has inspired countless budding literary critics the world around….Literary Criticism got two small book cases. They looked embarrassed, those two minuscule towers wedged between two other bookcases labeled “Biography” and “Literary History” (and literary history turned out to mean textbooks designed to prepare French students for their various state exams).  This Literary Criticism section was nothing to shout about.  It had some recent editions of Blanchot, a translation of David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction; books by the 17^th century scholar Marc Fumaroli, and almost everything by Antoine Compagnon, a brilliant writer, but alone on that shelf in thinking about how criticism has evolved and what it might mean today.  Also, mis -shelved but inviting, Eric Fottorino’s exposé of his years as writer and editor in chief at Le Monde:  Mon tour du "Monde".  Some good books, some great books, some enervating books, but they added up to nothing-- no sense of a movement, no collective energy.

All of which made me reflect on the state of literary criticism in general.  The last big thing in France, before cognitive science at least,  was called “genetic criticism.”  By comparing manuscript variants of masterpieces on their way to being published, genetic critics hoped to discover something really interesting about literary creation.  These genetic critics had the following intuition:  Maybe what the French theorists meant in the 1970s when they announced the death of the author was not so much that the author was dead but that the book was alive!  And if you could get as close as possible to whatever set of choices constituted the making of a book, you would have committed an essential act of criticism—and gone one better than interpretation.

You have to be a pretty serious nerd to love genetic criticism. Whereas Michael Gorra has taken the same insights as the genetic critics, the same scholarly finesse,  and created a book that is an adventure from beginning to end. His meditative and deeply pleasurable Portrait of a Novel : Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece cured my melancholy over the state of criticism by page xxiv—and I hadn’t even started the first chapter. I’m reading galleys, and his book is going to be published at the end of August.  Dear Reader, order it!   

Gorra has invented a genre that ought to catch on among literary critics in search of a method:  the biography of the novel.  It’s not obvious what the biography of a novel  should entail,  but the first thing Gorra does is to show us James’ Portrait of a Lady as it has always been for him—a living, breathing miracle.  There are the essential things, beautifully done…. Where James was when he wrote Portrait of a Lady, his state of mind, his family and friendships, the places he traveled and how they expanded his vision, his drive, his talent, his limits and his secrets. He revisits the trampled ground of James’ “sources,”  rejecting the literal-minded source hunting that made people like Barthes and Blanchot want to kill off author studies in the first place. 

Here’s one of a thousand sentences I love in Portrait of a Novel;  it’s about the way James  channels his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Venice suicide into  a rush of short stories--  “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle,”  “The Jolly Corner, and “The Friends of the Friends.” :  

A solitary man, a sympathetic woman:  it’s as though James were shaking the dice of character, and       rolling them again and again;  different combinations of the same two pieces, chronicles of  could-haves and should-haves and even second chances.

Gorra has found a tantalizing structure that allows him to go back and forth between James’ life, the scenes of his writing, and the development of his characters-- especially Isabel, the centerpiece--who all emerge here as they should:  more real than their sources.  There are places in Portrait of a Novel where Gorra gets so close to the making of Portrait of a Lady, he actually crosses over from literary history into the interior of James’s consciousness.  The interior world that Gorra imagines, and that we come to inhabit,  is so plausible, so true to life,  that his Portrait of a Novel becomes a novel—a masterpiece of critical imagination. 

 

 

 Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel:  Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. 384 pages.   W.W. Norton. August 2012.

APOLLONIA: Greetings from Sifnos by John Hennessy

 

 SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

Greetings from Sifnos, Greece, an island in the Western Cyclades, quiet sibling to the flashier and better known Santorini and Mykonos.  Before I arrived this summer for my tenth return trip, like everyone else I was worried about the economy. How were my friends and acquaintances here handling the Draconian austerity measures Germany insists on imposing? Would Greece quit the Eurozone, default on its loans, return to the drachma? Part of me certainly hoped so: to this outside observer, the currency switch in 2002 had always seemed much better for the rich, worse for the middle and working class, another way for the wealthy to loot the country—as their American fellows do. (Don’t tell me about Greeks evading taxes until Mitt Romney, who may be our next president, releases his tax records.)  In 2002, prices of everyday goods and services soared to fit the Euro, but wages for workers stayed low, still tied to drachma rates.

The tourism industry took a hit then, too, as fewer middle class Europeans could afford the hotel rates and meal costs, the hikes in airfares and airport security fees. Athens and the islands were quieter. Even the backpackers from the Antipodes and North America stopped coming in their high-spirited droves, seeking out cheaper beach spots in Turkey and Vietnam.

While international tourism had begun to pick up again in the last ten years, Sifnos is close enough to Piraeus—three hours by high speed ferry—to be popular with Greeks, especially wealthy Athenians. Last summer you noticed their absence, despite the many French (more posey swan-dives from the rocks, less bouzouki-driven pop music, no p.d.a.) who seem to be trying to take their place. Clearly it wasn’t this clan of French who coined the phrase joie de vivre. Although I felt positive about sticking to my plan to return to Greece, no matter what happened in the election on June 17th and its aftermath, part of me worried I’d fill with self-reproach: What kind of opportunist takes a vacation in a country on the brink of fiscal collapse?

But I find instead that as you move away from Athens, particularly Syntagma Square, ground zero for the protests against the austerity measures, people are reluctant to talk to visitors about the suffering. Even my good friend Helena, who is sorting out her mother’s finances, came home from a meeting with the tax officer mostly keeping mum. She did say that she’ll try to sell some property, that the real-estate tax hikes are ridiculous, impossible to meet. But what’s really killing everyone right now is the fee schedule for electric service, which takes a page from the loan shark’s book: every six months everyone—no matter how little electricity one consumes—has to pay a “connection fee”; collecting revenues through utilities is yet another way to make the working and middle class pay, another way to avoid the graduated income tax—which puts the burden on the rich. Helena mostly hinted at this with a series of small jokes and ironic nods, and I filled in the gaps. Hardly what we’d call in New Jersey, where I grew up, complaint.

Greece will survive. Chin up. The sense I get in the Cyclades is that after more than four thousand years of negotiation, of colonizing and being colonized, withstanding attacks from within and without by Ionians, Samians, Minoans, Romans, Venetians, Ottomans, Nazis, bankers and every other form of pirate, they must be right to be if not optimistic then stoic. That hasn’t stopped me from asking questions, of course.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

     From all of the news articles I’ve read lately, three documents have helped me understand the political/economic situation in Greece these days, and here they are:

 

Arianna Huffington’s New York Times editorial from May 13, 2012, “Greek Tragedy”:

(Huffington makes clear that the Greeks refuse to mortgage the future of their children, so the austerity measures will never be acceptable to most of them. Read this article and then consider our willingness, in the United States, to allow our children, our young people, our college students, to go fifty, one hundred, even two hundred thousand dollars into debt before they receive their degrees.)

John Lanchester’s New Yorker Comment from June 18, 2012, “Greece vs. the Rest”

The third document is an email I received from an old friend who, among other things, is a Hellenic Studies professor:

“The situation in Greece is unbelievable and I avoid Athens at all costs.  I just moved back to the US after living in France for four years, during which time I went to Greece often -- but for most trips I flew direct from Paris to Crete and didn't stop in Athens at all; I gave a lecture at the U of Athens a year ago and the only people on the streets after 10pm were junkies and homeless immigrants (many whole families).  Nothing really good is being written on "the crisis" in English, partly since it's breaking news and partly since the English press is just reporting from afar (and mainly just replicating the AP wire version of events).  One of the grimmest aspects for me is the rise of the Golden Dawn, the fascist right wing party that used to exist mainly in the Diaspora (it was really strong among Greek Americans in Astoria) but now is popular in Greece, too.  There is a strong xenophobic thread in all Greek society and it isn't at its best right now.   In my view (which is the minority one) they should get out of the Euro, exit the EU, and figure out how to be less dependent on tourism.  But I don't think any of that is going to happen.”

François Hollande Gets Real [by Alice Kaplan]

François Hollande was calm and presidential on French television yesterday. Speaking of his function rather than his person, he suggested that the President of the Republic must soothe, conciliate, and compromise.  In a world where denial is the common currency, the way he explained the French economic disaster was reassuring:  “There are three figures that everyone needs to keep in mind: national debt at 90% of the GDP;  unemployment at 10%;  a deficit of 70 billion euros.”  

What it will take to balance the budget?  Not austerity, but rather “l'effort juste.”  Words still mean a lot in this country, words and symbols. "L'effort juste", “effort with justice”, means that cutbacks will aim to be fair.  No sales tax increase for example.  There’s an echo too, that my inner French student wants to hear, of “le juste milieu”:  just the right balance. Hollande has taken a 30% salary cut and so will the heads of the state owned enterprises.  

And indiscreet tweets from his entourage?  “It will not happen again”-- cela ne se reproduira plus.    His most demanding listeners bristled when he referred to his partner by her first name --“Valérie.”  Wasn’t this too personal  for a president who wants to keep the private private?  True, a note of tenderness slipped into his voice, personal tenderness.  But I can’t imagine him having said “Madame Treirweiller.”  This is territory deeply foreign to Americans, we who are used to our politicians with spouses attached to their coattails.  Deeply foreign and instructive.   There’s a lot of talk about a “normal” presidency: no hyped up schemes, no bling bling, no constant changes of course.  FDR in 1933. 

And so around midnight, French men and women, and a few assorted beasts, gathered on the widest streets in viewing distance of the  Eiffel Tower to watch a fireworks display that was effortful, not austere.  I made my way to the avenue de Breteuil with other wanderers; it’s never as jammed with people as the Trocadéro or the rue saint Dominique.  Still, I always remember how Henry Miller described it in Tropic of Cancer: “that open tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil which at ten o’clock in the evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes one think of murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of human drama.”  Last night, from 11:30 to 12, the streets were packed and the people were silent, hypnotized by the shimmering iron lady and her multi-color crackle and pop.

Finally, is it my imagination, or are Jack Russell Terriers everywhere  in Paris since The Artist won an Oscar?  Pictured here is a Jack Russell with his companion,  a wire haired fox terrier.   Uggie from The Artist and Milou from Tintin watching the fireworks on the Avenue de Breteuil, Paris, July 14, 2012.

Reading Camus in Algeria Today. Alice Kaplan blog#2

After my lecture at the Glycines, a university professor talked about what Camus means to Algerians today.  What she said may have been familiar to everyone in the room, but it  was completely new to me:

“It’s true that Camus was banished for a long time, by critics, readers, etc.  I don’t think it’s The First Man that brought him back.  It was the situation, the terrorism we experienced in the period we call our civil war (1990s).  A lot of Algerians realized then that there might be a parallel, that they were in fact a little like those French Algerians from before, from the 1950s and 60s—Algerians whose stature as Algerians wasn’t being recognized.   And so they started to reread Camus from that perspective.  Those Algerians in the 1990s recognized themselves in Camus—whose Algerian dimension was denied, whether it was in his novels, in his refusal to take a position or in the positions he did take— the constant vacillation, the hesitation, the not being able to figure out what is going on or take a clear position.  Since we were experiencing those same hesitations, we read him again in a new way.  There were a lot of bridges.  I remember how we felt threatened in our Algerian identity [by Islam fundamentalists]:  what, we were supposed to leave Algeria now?  We’re as much Algerians as they are!   It was a scandal!  Also there was the question of exile: people were  leaving the country and they were criticized.  Had they done the right thing?  Did they have a choice?   That new identification still doesn’t mean that Camus has finally been accepted as an Algerian writer.  Last year there was a kind of triumphant cancellation of a caravan that was supposed to tour the country with readings of Camus.  But that project was almost immediately cancelled, for reasons no one understood.  There was a lot of opposition. And that was shocking.”

She reminded the audience that Feraoun, the father of Algerian literature, quoted Camus’ The Plague in the epigraph of his first novel, Le Fils du pauvre. 

It’s going to be impossible to convey in this blog what it felt like listening to N* .speak about literature.  I learned later that her husband had been murdered during the dirty wars, one of 100,000—and that she had never left Algeria. Afterwards I thought, if it had been an American event, she might have stood up and told her whole life story and not said much about Camus.  And instead, here, Camus was a way of thinking about real life.

Alice Kaplan guest blogger on Algeria at 50.

Am writing from my room in the Glycines study center, where the sound of honking cars and screaming people  is keeping me awake at 2 am. Tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, the fronds on the several miles of palm trees planted along the highway into town from the airport that have been wrapped tight against their trunks, will finally shake their booty.

In this country where a liter of gas costs less than a mineral water, there is too much to say and not always a good way to say it. Here was the running joke at dinner tonight, in an outdoor restaurant high above the monument to martyrs: so what does France really have to show for its fifty years of independence ?

The Greek Tragedy: It's Different This Time [by DL and friend]

A friend who plans to spend Christmas and New Year's in Greece files this report on that beleaguered and financially challenged nation, the ancient homeland of Periclean democracy, Sophoclean tragedy, Ariostophelian comedy, the Parthenon (left) and Doric architecture (the model of the neo-classical facades that the great capitalist financiers favored), Plato, Aristotle, Achilles, Odysseus, Penelope, Orestes, Electra, Oedipus, Antigone, Teiresias, and the goddess Athena. -- DL

<<<<
       There are at least two ways of looking at the presidential election in Greece on June 17. The most obvious is that the election of New Democracy's Antonis Samaras (30% of the vote) was a complete disaster in that it basically extends the policies that led to the current crisis, and this despite the fact that Samaras's platform was indistinguishable from the Pasok platform (13% of the vote) until it became obvious that the Syriza antibailout platform (27% of the vote) was too popular to simply dismiss. This in turn led to references from New Democracy about "amendments" to the current bailout program, which has done so little for Greece, the rest of Europe, and the world. However, to my knowledge, no specific amendments have been proposed. . . .
       Syriza and its candidate, Alexis Tsipras, have a more sanguine view, one exemplified by the parties in Athens on Sunday night when Syriza learned it had come in a fairly close second -- and articulated by Tsipras a few days later in an interview with Reuters (during which, incidentally, he made no reference whatever to the chortling heard from the G7 summit when those august heads of state learned that Samaras had won the election. That chortling was echoed, no doubt, by the EU finance ministers in Luxembourg last Friday). Tsipras and his party believe that the bailout program is doomed and that the new government doesn't have a chance of staying in power. Syriza is ready to take over and reject the bailout, and Tsipras expects this to happen soon rather than later. Anyone who thinks he's being overly optimistic would do well to study the map of Greece in the Wikipedia entry for the June 17th election in Greece, remembering always that capital Athens is more like New York than Washington and that no Greek feels any further from what is happening to his or her country than any other Greek. It's a result of living on 6,000 islands.
     Yes, it will take Greece a long time to recover, but — longer than it took to recover from the Venetian and Turkish occupations? From the savage civil war after World War II? I doubt it. These are tough people who know in their hearts that it's better to be a truly sovereign state than to be bullied and slandered by Angela Merkel, not to mention the European Central Bank and the IMF. That map of Greece in mind, it can only be a matter of time before Greece defaults on its debt, drops the euro, and starts printing and coining drachmas. Samaras might conceivably keep his job is if he were moving in that direction. But his backers (I almost wrote "his bankers") wouldn't like that, he wouldn't like that, and besides, Tsipras is already there.
>>>

The "Soupe au Pistou" Challenge [by DL]

Can you come up with a better recipe for soupe au pistou than this one or that one?

Which do you favor, the Epicurious recipe or Mark Bittman's in The New York Times?

A friend is going to the south of France, and our conversation prompted my recollection of this wonderful soup as served in Vence and other such places in the alpes maritimes just north of Nice. -- DL

Further Adventures in the Jell-O Belt [by Rebecca Lindenberg]

            In the beginning of the film Napoleon Dynamite, the credits come up as a collage of weird culinary Americana – ketchup and tater tots, mustard and corn dogs, peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, cheeseburgers and mayonnaise, nachos studded with black olives.  Plate after plate appears on a background of maroon shag rug, then baby-blue carpeting, then avocado green linoleum, and so forth.  Blast from the past, bomb shelter fare, served in rooms decorated in a similar idiom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        Set in Preston, Idaho, where writer-director Jared Hess grew up, Napoleon Dynamite comes right out of the Mormon Corridor, the so-called “Jell-O Belt,” that spans a certain area of America’s Intermountain West.  It sort of radiates outward from Salt Lake City, Utah, reaching deep into Idaho and into Wyoming, very slightly into Colorado, trickling a little ways down through Arizona and then hopping by patches all the way down to certain parts of Southern California.  This exceedingly beautiful part of America includes the surreal red rock deserts of Moab and Monument Valley, the sublime limestone cliffs of Zion and St. George, the lava-rich soils and aspen forests of the Grand Escalante, the eerie stillness of the Great Salt Lake, the rangey splendor of the Wasatch and Uintas, the windy high plains and ranchlands around Rock Springs and Laramie, the stubborn fields and pastures of Idaho all the way up through the formidable Grand Tetons.  It’s dominated by some of the most beautiful and various and mysterious country in the world.  The poet James Galvin, who has a ranch in Wyoming, has at times written about this land, the people who live there, its weather and its other weathering forces – a different portrait, perhaps, than Napoleon Dynamite.  He writes in “Ponderosa,”

 

                                                                        The bolt

came down like knowledge, but the tree did not explode or burn.

                                                                              It

Caught the jolt and trapped it like a mythic girl.

                                                                Its trunk was three

Feet through

            lightning couldn’t blow the ponderosa into splinters,

And couldn’t burn inside without some air.

                                                                A week went by and we

Forgot about it. 
But lightning is a very hot and radiant girl.  

                                                                            When

Heat bled out to bark, the tree burst into flame that reared into

Silence under a cloudless sky.

 

        There does seem to be something about the land in this part of the world that inspires mythic thinking, or at least otherworldly thinking.  The enigmatic rock formation from the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the bundle of hexagonal basaltic columns known as Devil’s Tower, an ancient volcanic plug (the volcano around it long since worn away) rising out of the flatlands of eastern Wyoming.[1] 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

         Much of this land was hard to settle, and harder still to scrabble a living out of.  So much so that a lot of it remains very sparsely inhabited.  Indeed, southern Utah was considered so barren and unnecessary (and its mostly-Mormon and otherwise Native American population so “Other”) that the U.S. government wasn’t too bothered about the fact that radiation and radioactive debris from nuclear testing in Nevada was blowing all over it – something Rachel Marston has been researching and writing about for some years.  By some accounts, Uncle Sam even encouraged the smallish population living around St. George at the time to go out of doors and watch the sky change from the nuclear tests, as the sometimes snowflake-sized ashes drifted into their towns, clinging to their clothes and curtains and porch furniture.  (Did the government know what the effects would be?)  Being, as a culture, generally trusting of authority, they did.  And a whole generation of “downwinders” suffered quietly together with the massive, unusual tumors and other forms of cancer that ravaged their communities. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Southern Utah, an arroyo near Monument Valley

        Sometimes, people settled this land because it was so barren, so desolate, so ignored and so ignorable.  In this same area of southern Utah, for instance, you’re more likely to run into individuals who belong to an FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints) polygamist community.  Some friends and I have rented a house near Zion in the past couple of summers, where you might just run into a group at the local Walmart or Costco, dressed in Laura Ingalls Wilder prairie garb, buying slats of boxed macaroni and cheese.  Much is being said about polygamy in the media these days, thanks in part to HBO’s Big Love and well-curated “reality” spin-offs like Sister Wives.  Most of what I know about polygamy comes from people who self-identify as victims of it, and I cannot do their stories justice here, so I will not elaborate except to say that, like anything, it’s not like they show it on TV.  For some information about an aspect of polygamist culture and practice that few people, even in Utah, have considered, watch Jennilyn Merten’s amazing documentary, Sons of Perdition.

             Rumor has it that polygamist culture games the government’s entitlement programs, since second and third (and subsequent) wives are, according to the relevant tax documents and applications forms, single mothers with a pack of kids and no job or income whatsoever.  Except that, if the polygamist lifestyle is anything like it appears to an outsider such as myself, they do in fact need those food stamps, and it’s not a scam.  I honestly just don’t know.

            But when we were at a grocery store outside of Washington, Utah, near the Nevada/Arizona/Utah border, and these women in long, high-necked and high-waisted gingham dresses were buying up the milk and the powdered soup and popsicles, we were standing in line behind them with tilapia and garlic and all of the mixings for strong margaritas.  And before I turned my attention to the prairie garb or the fact that one of them with three small children could not possibly have been eighteen, or whether they all might be married to the same patriarchal oddball, I thought:  “I’m kind of glad I’m not eating dinner at their house.”  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zion, Utah’s first National Park (1919) in southern Utah (in August)

         For awhile, I rode a Greyhound Bus every-other weekend from Salt Lake City to Laramie, Wyoming, through some of the most stridently tough and unpleasant territory in the Jell-O Belt.  Interstate 80 roughly traces other historically significant travel routes in the Western United States: the Oregon Trail across Wyoming and Nebraska, the California Trail across most of Nevada and California, and except in the Great Salt Lake area, the entire route of the First Transcontinental Railroad.  You meet a lot of interesting characters on the bus, before you learn to board with your headphones already in your ear-holes and pretend not to be able to speak English.  Or Spanish.  Or at all.  Of the various people who might sit next to you, the most desirable seat companions are a toss-up between college kids (also be-headphoned) and truckers deadheading back to Indianapolis or wherever they’re based.  In the latter case, they will cheerfully pronounce that the stretch of I-80 from SLC to Denver is the absolute stupidest leg of highway ever laid down – subject to constant closures, and as often as it’s for snowstorms, it’s for unbelievably high-speed winds.  Trying to drive a little Honda along that road is one thing – the wind blows so hard it seems to get under the wheels, so you’re almost aeroplaning from the lift and drag.  But the same wind fills up its cheeks and blows over tall semis, passenger busses, and as I once saw (blood and feathers all over the road), a long trailer full of chickens.