The Man Who Sailed His House

In the October issue of GQ, on newsstands now, Michael Paterniti tells the story of Hiromitsu Shinkowa, who drifted into the news last March. Two days after the Japanese tsunami, Shinkowa was discovered nine miles out to sea, alone, on the roof of his house.

Castaway narratives are a venerable sub-genre of nonfiction, even now, in the 21st century, when shipwrecks are far less common than they used to be. What distinguishes Paterniti's story from more conventional disaster narratives is its interiority. He gives us the sublime nightmare of the tsunami, but only to prepare us for the solitary trial—the guilt and regret and heartbreak and fear—that Shinkowa experiences during the two days he spends alone and adrift.

From the sea, Shinkowa fishes what he thinks of as "gifts"—a futon, a tatami mat, a marker, a comic book about superhuman soccer players. With the marker, on paper torn from the comic book, he writes messages to the living, which he scrolls into plastic canisters, also fished from the sea, and lashes to himself with string. Here in the order he wrote them are the words he thought would be his last.

On March 11, I was with my wife, Yuko. My name is Hiromitsu.

I just want to report that I am still alive on the twelfth and was with my wife, Yuko, yesterday. She was born January 12 of Showa 26.

SOS

I am sorry for being unfilial.

I'm in a lot of trouble. Sorry for dying before you. Please forgive me.  

Cushman Time Machine to Old New York

The Daily Mail this week posted a slideshow of color photos of lower Manhattan taken in the early 1940s by Charles Cushman. Cushman's camera was state of art for the time, and the result is a peculiar kind of anachronism: The images look much more recent than they are; what most obviously dates them are the abundance of hats, the abundance of boats in the river, and the abundance of wood (wooden baskets, wooden pushcarts with wooden wagon wheels). Those ephemeral artifacts measure time precisely. Rich material for archeology of the ordinary. (via Brain Pickings)

Julian Barnes's "Shipwreck": Disaster & Art

Last week in Ann Arbor and again today, home in New York, I thought of "Shipwreck," a chapter in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I was first introduced to the chapter and the book seven years ago by the writer Eileen Pollack, and I've taught it in nonfiction classes a few times since. Tonight I went back and read "Shipwreck" for the first time in a while.

Barnes published it  in The New Yorker in 1989 as a short story, but it could easily have been called an essay--or a history. Let's call it a story in two parts. The first part artfully but dispassionately narrates the wreck of a French ship, the Medusa, in 1816. A taste:

By misfortune, they had struck the reef at high tide, and, the seas becoming violent, attempts to free the ship failed. The frigate was assuredly lost. Since the boats it carried were not capacious enough to contain the whole personnel, it was decided to build a raft and embark upon it those who could not be put into boats. The raft would then be towed to the shore and all would be saved. This plan was perfectly well laid; but, as two of the company were later to affirm, it was traced upon loose sand, which was dispersed by the breath of egotism.

Before those "two of the company" are rescued from their hellish raft,  a great deal of dying and a fair portion of cannibalism has taken place. It's a masterful, suspenseful bit of narrative history, this first part, but what keeps me returning to "Shipwreck" is the second part of Barnes's story, a sort of making-of documentary about the famous painting, by Géricault, that the wreck of the Medusa inspired.

Nostalgia, Progress, and Michigan

Headed to Ann Arbor tomorrow to spend three days at the University of Michigan, where I spent two unusually fruitful years almost a decade ago. During those two years I wrote my first long piece of narrative nonfiction, an essay about traveling around the rust belt with a botanist turned tool collector named Tom Friedlander, whom I hope to see later this week. An adapted and abridged version of that essay appeared last spring in the Work issue of Lapham's Quarterly. Because I'm in a Michigan state of mind, here's an excerpt from the long version, "A Romance of Rust: Nostalgia, Progress, and the Meaning of Tools," which originally appeared in Harper's:

Southeast Michigan can be beautiful in leaf or under snow, but that winter it had hardly snowed at all, and the Friedlanders' nature sanctuary was a desiccated, khaki-colored wasteland. The silver blimp of a propane tank glowed between the bare branches of bushes planted to obscure it. Behind the house, where corn once grew, an ocean of goldenrod—still brown and dormant—stretched to the woodlot on the horizon. On the way to the tool barn, we passed the greenhouse Tom and Martha had built out of corrugated fiberglass. Two plastic barrels full of frozen rain stood sentry beside the entrance. Inside I could discern the shadowy forms of succulents (one of Tom's previous taxonomical obsessions) weathering the hostile biome in balmy serenity.

Although there was a barn-sized barn on the property—a dilapidated cavern full of owl shit, darkness, and mildewy hay where Tom kept the antique tractor he used to mow paths through the goldenrod in the summer and plow the driveway in winter—the prefabricated steel structure in which he stored his tools was scarcely bigger than a two-car garage. We entered through a side door, stepping awkwardly over three metal spheres huge as medicine balls while fluorescent tubes flickered on overhead.

Teju Cole on the Insular City of the Manhattoes

"This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had a scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night. All was quiet and lights called from the Jersey Shore across. A pair of joggers sailed softly toward me, and past me. Along South End, facing the water, there were rows of townhouses, small shops, and a little, round gazebo choked with vines and bushes. Out, ahead of me, in the Hudson, there was just the faintest echo of the old whaling ships, the whales, and the generations of New Yorkers who had come here to the promenade to watch the wealth and sorrow flow into the city or simply to see the light play on the water. Each one of those past moments was present now as a trace."

—Open City

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.