The Ruthless Imagination of a Child

As a few of my twitter buddies pointed out, this review of Steven Millhauser's new and selected stories by Salvatore Scibona is exemplary, an essay as much as a review, which is what the best reviews are. And it contains this exquisite little meditation on childhood:

Many of the stories are set amid the 19th century passion for sophisticated mechanical inventions that were revolutionizing daily life at the time. But for all the formal and historical erudition here, the stories maintain a saving innocence. They are immigrants from the country of childhood, where the imagination, seeing a thing repeated, wonders what would happen if it were repeated again, and another time, and again forever? What if the rain never stopped and it flooded the whole world?

They more or less beg you to ask them what they are about. They seem to follow an inverted motto: A story should not be, but mean. As to the aboutness, here's a stab: These are stories about the adult's experience of the life his childhood self continues to lead after he has grown up. The adult mind doesn't destroy the child's mind, but only subsumes it. The clockwork automatons in this book, and the ladders of light up which a character can climb into the sky, and the sometimes asphyxiating lack of adult passion - all draw the reader toward the ruthless imagination of a child. Everything moves very slowly. The future will never come. The speed of growing up, from the adult's vantage, is dizzying; from the child's it is glacial.

So while these stories don't aspire to the pleasures and agonies of a dramatic narrative - the tales of change within a comprehensible world that children ask adults to repeat for the same reason it comforts babies to be swaddled - they do aspire to that other moment of childhood: You were alone in the dark, your imagination demanding, What if ... and then what if ... and then what if?

Scibona was one of the fiction writers The New Yorker anointed in its 20 under 40 series last year. Read his story "The Kid"--available online to subscribers--and you'll see why he made the list.

Excerpt: Metamorphosis of Happenstance into Fable

The Australian has an excerpt from the first chapter of Moby-Duck.

Headed home to Zone C to inflate my Zodiac.

Cole on Sebald: "Why shouldn't an essay be a novel?"

Teju Cole, author of Open City, which I'm presently reading, compiled for the Guardian a list of ten novels "of solitude." Here he is on Sebald's Rings of Saturn:

A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas. Framed around the narrator's long walks in East Anglia, Sebald shows how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears.

I like that last sentence especially, though I'd quibble a little with the emphasis he places on "nothing but ideas." There are also in Rings vignettes, facts, a potted history of the silk-industry, a potted biography of Joseph Conrad. The ideas are the threads with which Sebald weaves together the factual debris he finds on his walking tour. They create patterns out of the entropy of history.

At some point I want to consider Sebald as a nature writer--a European nature writer. The contrast with American nature writing would be revealing, I think. As with John Berger (whose essay "Why Look at Animals?" was a crucial point of departure for many of my own thoughts on the bestiary of the imagination), the categories of natural history and human history are not in Rings of Saturn discrete. There's no hint of nature as timeless, apart.

Seaside Gothic: Wreckers and Robert Louis Stevenson

In England, the term for flotsam hunting is wrecking, a word that retains a trace of its piratical history. In The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Shipwrecks, Bella Bathurst reports that British shipowners of the age of sail lost 10 to 20 percent of their revenues to shipwrecks. That's a lot of wrecks, and on more dangerous stretches of coastline, villagers happily welcomed the booty that washed ashore with the cadavers of the drowned. In some cases wreckers were known to lure ships onto the rocks. Bathurst begins The Wreckers with a spooky bit of family history recorded by Robert Louis Stevenson, son of a lighthouse engineer:

The Best Beachcombing in Manhattan

There is one decent beachcombing spot in Manhattan, if you like your flotsam local: a 100-foot-long wedge of sand beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. You can only walk the beach if you’re willing to trespass, squeezing through a narrow opening in the balustrade. It’s not the sort of beach most people dream about. You wouldn’t want to sunbathe there, or walk barefoot. But I like it. It’s one of those accidental places that make the city feel a little wild.

A dozen years ago, I gather, this beach didn’t exist, making it the perfect beach for New York, capital of change and chance. It came into being when tides began depositing sediment behind a little pier built not long ago as a kind of scenic underlook, a good place to take snapshots guaranteed to resemble postcards, the great bridge looming in the background. At the northern end of the beach are the remains of a derelict pier, concrete posts topped by tentacles of twisted rebar. The sand at the southern end of the beach is silty. At the northern end it’s gravelly. A trellis supporting FDR Drive rises out of the gravel, and on the steel of the trellis some latter-day Hart Crane has spray-painted a couplet: 

DN UNDER THE BRIDGE

BIG CITY OF DREAMS.

In the Northeast U.S., Fewer Riddles on the Sand

In the vicinity of the insular city where I live, there aren't really any good beaches for beachcombing. In general, so far as beachcombing goes, the Atlantic Northeast compares poorly to the the Pacific Northwest. The Gulf Stream is largely to blame. Just look at it.

It firehoses up the eastern seaboard and then, right around Cape Hatteras, turns east and goes shooting across the Atlantic carrying long-haul flotsam with it (the beachcombing in Cornwall, England, is supposedly superb).  Here in the Northeast, except for the rare donation from the southbound Labrador Current (which originates in the Arctic) or from an errant eddy, the wrack on our shores tends to be local. Here in the Northeast beachcombing tends to be practiced by amateur naturalists on the lookout for seashells, pebbles, and the like, whereas in regions with plentiful flotsam and jetsam, beachcombing is more like amateur archeology. There is no Atlantic counterpart to Amos Wood's Beachcombing the Pacific.