The Gift of Seeing What's There

From Robert Hass's "An Oak Grove," which appears in What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World:

One of the gifts people who teach can give to students is a sense of complexity, because desire tends to simplify what it sees. We are usually, left to ourselves, egrets fishing through our smeared reflections. Another thing teachers can give them is the gift of seeing what’s there. They can give them some of the skills of distinction, discrimination, and description and give them concepts of enormous power to refine and organize their seeing. Seeing what’s there usually requires patient observation and the acquisition of particular skills and disciplines—not that those things guarantee our seeing clearly or freshly. Often in both the arts and the sciences, we see what’s there in a flash, but it has taken us hours or years of patient labor to get there and then to name what we have seen. 

The Unknowns That Pull at You

From Nicholson Baker's short essay "Mowing":

Finding things out: there is an infinitude of things you don't know, but it's not a very interesting infinitude, because it has no grain. Only some of the unknown things, a much smaller subset, are things that you are aware of not knowing, and then within that subset is a smaller set still—the unknowns that pull at you. Curiosity is a way of ordering and indeed paring down the wildness of the world. Of all the unmown fields, all the subjects I don't know anything about, this one right here is the one I would like to pursue. Why? Because nobody else is, and because it happens to be whole if I pursue this topic, knowing that it is obscure enough that nobody would be foolish enough to duplicate my efforts. I will mow my own lawn, part of it, anyway.

Atatürk, Abridged

A sketch I wrote on request for the spring 2013 issue of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship house organ.

photo credit: Josh Neufeld

It was a weekday morning, still early, and when the busload of foreign journalists arrived, Ceremonial Plaza at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in Ankara was mostly empty, save for a sprinkling of tourists and a gaggle of schoolchildren on a patriotic field trip. The emptiness made the bombastic architecture feel slightly forlorn.

Guards in polished helmets and long topcoats with shiny brass buttons stood sentry on pedestals, still as toy soldiers, one gloved hand propped on a rifle, the other tucked neatly into the small of the back. The foreign journalists snapped photographs of them. Overhead the flag of Turkey made a red motion in the overcast sky.

Into the emptiness and monumental stillness there now came an excited disturbance dressed in black. He had a black ball cap on. A brown leather satchel was slung over a shoulder. He carried a pointer with a red ribbon tied to the tip. Black sneakers squeaking on the marble, he bustled into the midst of the foreign journalists, poking the sky with his pointer and waggling the red bow. “Come! Come!” he said. “We walk in a hurry way, because of time.”

Evan S. Connell: "This over here is a two-thousand-year-old tortilla maker"

Last January, Harper's asked me to eulogize the late novelist and essayist Evan S. Connell (1924–2013):

Last Thursday — January 10, 2013 — news came that one of the most singular careers in American letters had reached its last full stop. Evan S. Connell was found in his Santa Fe apartment, dead at the age of 88. He died alone, attended, one presumes, by the “cracked Old Mexican pots and mutilated statuettes” he collected — which is also how he lived and how he wrote: apart from his contemporaries, in the company of antiquities, as if he did not entirely belong to his time.

He twice traveled solo around the globe. In his writing, he roamed across continents but also across centuries. Time — its obliterating passage — was his great subject. It’s there at the very beginning, in the title story of the first book, The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories, published in 1957, when Connell was thirty-three. The art professor who delivers the eponymous anatomy lesson shows his students a Rembrandt portrait of a young woman: “He told them that some afternoon they would glance up by chance and see her; then they would know the meaning of Time — what it could destroy, what it could not.” We hear that note again in Connell’s debut novel, Mrs. Bridge,published in 1959. In chapter forty-nine, titled “The Clock,” the novel’s heroine seeks refuge in a stasis she mistakes for permanence: “Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, life itself was eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed.” . . . 

[The rest of the eulogy here]

Meanwhile, over at The Paris Review, Gemma Sieff, who used to edit the book reviews at Harper's, published a commemoration of her own and a sneak preview of her Paris Review interview with Connell, long in the making. The full interview, I understand, will be published this summer. One typically delightful exchange:

[Sieff:] Mr. Bridge copies out a love letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself, would have been merely to know my own shadow—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions.” In your poem Notes from a Bottle Found at the Beach in Carmel, you write almost the opposite: “Come with me or stay. I am full of dreams and charged with strange excitement. Although I am not at ease in this world, there is no one who can stop me.”

[Connell:] This over here is a two-thousand-year-old tortilla maker.

The rest of the sneak preview is here. 

"Giant Rubber Duck Found Deflated Under Mysterious Circumstances"

I swear to all monsters of god, IT WASN'T ME.

(Gawker has the details.) 

Gone Fishing

"Because, in order to accomplish the things I must do, I will have to travel a lot in the forthcoming years and face some other adventures. But that can't be helped. I have picked a hellish trade."

--Isaac Babel, in a letter to his sister, December 20, 1926

Bath Toy Lost at Sea Found in Brooklyn?

Artist and serious beachcomber Willis Elkins sends news of a discovery he made on the morning of August 30, along the shoreline of Kingsborough Community College, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn: A toy frog. And not just any toy frog. There's no doubt about it. That's a Floatee.

Compare for yourself. Here's a package of the toys:

Elkins writes, "I hardly believed it when I saw it, but instantly recognized the angular shapes I had seen in photos." He adds that it's "in fairly good condition, if we were to believe it to be an original from the infamous container spill some 20 years ago. There are no punctures, serious scratches or wear, and color is consistent throughout."

So is the frog an original from the infamous container spill? Or is it just a toy that some kid left behind on a trip to the seashore?  There's no telling. Could easily be the latter, and as Elkin notes, it is in dubiously good condition. We'll have to put more question marks on the map.  A number of correspondents have sent me pictures of stranded toys--for instance, of this duck spotted on Governor's Island (right).

But Elkins's frog is the first documented discovery of a Floatee on a North Atlantic beach I know of. A tantalizing one. I spent many hours beachcombing the New York City waterfront, and I'd given up all hope of ever finding one of the toys, and here one turns up in Brooklyn.