Books of Interest

American Places: Encounters with History

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:46:06 -0700

This is the only book included here that I have not completely read - but I will. In fact I think I’m going to bring it along with me on the trip. This book was recommended to me by a history professor who was at one time a graduate student of the book’s editor, William E. Leuchtenburg at the University of North Carolina. There are nearly thirty contributors, each a historian who writes about a place in America from a historical and personal perspective. Appropriately enough, the first essay examines the place in America that is a different kind of place: cyberspace.
As the trip progresses and I read further into the book I’ll have more to write on this but I’ll make a point of visiting the places written about here when the opportunity presents itself.

Killing Yourself To Live: 85% of a True Story

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:13:46 -0700

I thought about not including this book. Its premise seemed a good. Klosterman gets an assignment in his job as a writer at Spin Magazine to visit various sites around the country where rock stars have died tragically. I was less than enthused by Klosterman’s execution though. I didn’t read the article he ends up writing for Spin but my impression from reading the book is that he had very little to say about these various sites and what they may mean. In fact it actually seems like he has no idea what to say at all about it. It’s too bad because the book is at its best when he writes about music. A good deal of the book though is devoted to ruminating on his love life, stream of consciousness detours and the squeezing in of pithy pop culture remarks.
So why did I include this book? A couple reasons. First off, I did read the book and that’s important not only because I want some acknowledgment of my effort but also because if the book was truly awful I wouldn’t have been able to finish it. That has to say something. Maybe you’ll read it and enjoy it.
I also included it because I realized that the author managed to write a road trip book from the perspective of someone traveling alone, completely stuck in his own mind. And that’s what happens a lot when you’re traveling alone. You relive old relationships and conversations and you begin to take on an inflated sense of how interesting you and your thoughts are. I know I do and I think this book is proof that Klosterman does too.

Into the Wild

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:53:48 -0700

John Krakauer is a fantastic writer. The first time I picked this book up I read it in a day. I just couldn’t put it down. Same goes for the other book of his, Into Thin Air. I haven’t seen the movie yet but I’m interested to see it. The book is about Chris McCandles, a young man who upon leaving college cuts contact with his family and gives up all his possessions. McCandles finally makes it to the wilderness of Alaska where he plans to live off the land for a time. This is where his body is eventually found.
One joy of the book is Krakauer himself. He’s part detective, guide, and narrator to McCandles story, but also his own. He explains early that the story of McCandles adventure and death fascinated him, in part because he saw so much of himself as a young man in McCandles.
Part of the story of Chris McCandles is the response to his life and death. Was he a frivolous, immature kid who got what was coming to him? Or was he a modern day Henry David Thoreau? What’s undeniable though is the guy absolutely went for it in life. He really does some remarkable things in his travels. One of the things that always stuck out for me for some reason since the first time I read the book was the family’s regret that they didn’t let him bring the family dog with him. They thought that if he’d have brought his dog with them then he wouldn’t have taken so many of the chances he took. I don’t plan on taking a fraction of the chances McCandles took but the question of to bring a dog or not to bring a dog comes up in these books. For Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, it was a must. For Least-Heat Moon it was a negative. For me, I’d like to but I’m concerned that when I stay at people’s houses it would be a problem.
Anyway, I’ll put something up about the movie after I see it but the book gets high praise from me.

QUICK THOUGHTS ON THE FILM

I recently watched the film on DVD and thought well of it. It’s pretty true to the book. From a storytelling perspective this was not an easy film to make work. As I mentioned above, large swaths of the book veer into areas other than the story of Chris McCandles. The film approaches the story in the form of vignettes. There’s not a traditional arc in each vignette, rather it’s what I’ll call “slice of life” with each vignette a kind of reenactment of McCandles time with a particular group in a particular place. Krakauer’s voice is gone and in its place is an occasional narration from McCandles sister. More than the book, the film emphasizes the family’s dysfunction. I give the parents credit for that because they played a major role in in getting the film made. To allow themselves to come out looking pretty bad in places I thought was a really tender tribute to their son.
I’ll finish this by saying I thought the use of the zoom was kind of curious, that Hal Holbrook is particularly good, and I really thought Eddie Veder’s music brings a lot to the movie.

Riding Toward Everywhere

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:25:35 -0700

What: The writer recounts adventures past and present train hopping throughout the western United States with a friend, while ruminating on the personal, the national, and the metaphorical.
Before the road trip there was riding the rails. Today, riding Amtrak hardly gives one the feeling of freedom, but train hopping? Now we’re talking. I’d love to go train hopping but for the fear I might get murdered (never mind how dangerous the physical act of hopping a train is) and Vollman’s account does nothing to dissuade me of all the dangers. But therein lies what this book is about.
I learned of Riding Toward Everywhere when I heard the author, William T. Vollman, interviewed on radio. He’d explained that it’s a personal philosophy of his to do things he afraid to do and he’s always afraid to hop a train. I also enjoyed his unapologetic response to all the people who called in to complain that he was, in effect, advertising something dangerous.
I’ve thought a lot about this book since I finished reading it and I’m still not sure what to say. It gives a pretty good account of what it’s like to ride the rails and the reader gets a glimpse of a whole class of people that we barely see in our regular lives. Some of his descriptions of the scenery - scenery that’s unique to riding the rails - is quite beautiful. Vollman though is working through a lot personally in this book and as a reader you’re not completely sure what. There are moments in the book when he’s writing about America and you get the sense he’s really writing about himself, and vice versa. He hints at this in the beginning:

“My critique of American society remains fundamentally incoherent. Would I really have preferred my grandfather’s time, when Pinkertons were cracking Wobblies over the head, or my father’s, when Joe McCarthy could ruin anyone by calling him Red? All I know is that although I live a freer life than many people, I want to be freer still; I’m sometimes positively dazzled with longing for a better way of being. What is it that I need?” 5-6

Riding Toward Everywhere isn’t just the title of the book. It’s a kind of metaphysical search for, as Vollman puts it, “candy mountain.” It’s the itch you can’t scratch, the thing that you know is there but can’t see or touch. It’s freedom. Or maybe it’s freedom that allows you to get to candy mountain. Riding the rails is very dangerous, but in overcoming both its challenges and his fears it seems for a time to get Vollman that one step closer to being “freer still.”
Usually when I write these book introductions I avoid reading reviews. It can be a big help but because I’m not reviewing these books per se and I hope to keep things less authoritative I didn’t want to be influenced unduly. I snuck a peak at a couple brief reviews of this book and they seemed to be big fans of Vollman but less enthusiastic about this book. I don’t want to give the impression the book didn’t get good reviews - from the blurbs on the book jacket it did - but I bring this up because I think in its own way this book is remarkably ambitious. The more I think about this book the more I think it’s about freedom - the desire for freedom, the need for freedom, the attempts at achieving freedom, the things and people that get in the way of freedom, the personal notions of freedom and the impossibility of freedom. The reviews I peaked at seemed to find the book a little unfocused and not as hard hitting as some of his others. That may be, but there’s still plenty in this book to enjoy and marvel at.

Essay: The Ballad of Route 66

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:51:36 -0700

What: Christopher Hitchens rents a Corvette and drives Route 66 from Illinois to California.

If you know who Christopher Hitchens is, the above sentence is about all the description you require of this Vanity Fair essay from November 2002. If you don’t think you know Hitchens, you still might. He’s the lumpy, acid tongued British guy (although he’s an American citizen now) often filling the role of talking head on any number of political talk shows. He usually sticks out on those programs because he’s one of the few with the wit, intelligence, academic and professional background to make him possibly worth listening to. He’s a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, a prolific author, and is usually a visiting professor somewhere or other.
This particular essay is worth the read if for no other reasons Hitchen’s hilarious observation that driving a Corvette across the country attracts plenty of guys, but women? Not so much.
Because Hitchens writes on so many subjects with such comfort and ease in this piece, it’s easy to assume the essay is unfocused and scattershot. Going over it again though I see a very basic outline. He begins simply enough – with the importance of the number 66 and the most famous Route 66 song, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” He writes about the road’s history and current condition. He tells about his car, the Corvette. Then he begins his trip, making all manner of cultural, historical and political observations along the way. Some are quite funny, like when he says this about what he sees at the Grand Canyon:

“I saw, clustered around the telescopes on the rim, the largest concentration of that special tourist species – those who wear shorts and shouldn’t – that I have ever witnessed outside Disneyland.”

Up until the end, the piece seems a pretty simple travelogue, but he finishes with a flourish, merging the past songs of Route 66 with America’s history and contrasts them to recent songs of Route 66 and America’s present. His conclusion is that Route 66 couldn’t survive by being the authentic Route 66, so it had to become the fake Route 66, and even then, it’s nearing it’s end.
“All travel is saying farewell. Most voyaging in the United States has become either impossible (by rail) or a misery and humiliation (by air) or a routine (by roads with no individuality). No poet has yet attempted to say what this defeat means for the American idea. Bu the melancholy is all around us, transmitted on frequencies that nobody can possess.”

Reading this has convinced me to include another essay by a European intellectual named Umberto Eco. His long essay, “Travels in Hyper-reality” is about his visits throughout America and his observation that America is (at least at that time in the 1970s) fascinated with the fake – or rather that it’s fascinated with the authentic and the only way to give recreate the authentic is to create something fake. I’ll try to explain it on its own page. I don’t know if Hitchens was borrowing from Eco at the end, but his observations certainly reminded me of those made by Eco a few decades ago.