mysteries, foreign and domestic, physical and digital

After reading Stieg Larsson's trilogy of crime novels, detective novels, mystery novels, after enjoying the conundrums and the dangers and the answers, I've spent the summer reading Norwegian (Jo Nesbo) and Swedish (Henning Mankell and Hakan Nesser) and American (Richard Stark) and Dutch (Janwillem van de Wetering) and Irish (Benjamin Black -- John Banville) mysteries.


I love the stories.


I love the problems posed and exposed.


I love the fact that in every case the world turns from the inexplicable to the explicable. There are answers. And the detectives and inspectors and constables figure things out rationally, skillfully, certainly.


They are, of course, as the genre demands, precariously fallible. Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo's inspector, is an alcoholic and lonely man. Quirke, the Irish inspector, is lonely and alcoholic. Nesser's chief inspector Van Veeteren really wants to be a bookseller. And, oddly enough in this genre, Stark's Parker is himself the criminal for whom the reader identifies.


The closure in every case is like the closure afforded by a slot machine when the triple 7's line up. It's satisfying. And it's a lure for suckers who want to believe that closure is the essence of both arche and telos in human history.


In this context, my favorites of the bunch (all of which I like, with the exception, perhaps, of the conservatively tinged Henning Mankell stories) are the Dutch constable and inspector Grijpstra and de Geir, and their boss the Commissaris. The latter has to keep dipping into hot baths to ease pains in his legs. The former two are easy going Dutchmen who, after capturing an escaped prisoner, commit to bringing him good cigars in prison because they're not really sure he is such a bad person. There's not much gunplay, not much testosterone, just a lot of paragraphs like this one from "The Corpse on the Dike": "The commissaris nodded. He had stopped going to parties ten years ago, when his rheumatism had begun to change from an occasional twitch of pain to a worsening and continuous feeling of hot needle pricks. He had never regretted his decision."


Good people. Good stories. And what's so bad about slot machines anyway, as long as it's clear from the beginning that they will win all your money in the end?


Finally, in an earlier post about Scott Carrier's e-book "Prisoner of Zion," the book that enticed me to buy a Kindle and then to buy Benjamin Black's mysteries as Kindle books and to read them on the little machine, I mentioned my ambivalence about e-texts.


Now, when I look at the beautiful tower of mysteries I've read this summer, when I hold the sets of books from Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Holland, and America, the combined titles in the e-reader don't seem very satisfying, even though I enjoyed the actual reading.


A pretty girl who naked is, is worth a hundred statues. 
e.e. cummings

A POEM OF TITLES: ALEX CALDIERO

I have often thought that a simple list of titles of the books my friend Alex has written, in the order, for the most part, of accident, would make a good poem. Here's testing that hypothesis:

COW

BIOTEXTS


TOY BLOOD


IN TONGUES

VARIOUS ATMOSPHERES

THE MAP OF THE WINDS


LUCRETIUS AND THE WIND


IT RAINS EVEN ON WHO'S WET

SELECTED EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF THE GREEN LANTERN

A STORIA DI MASTRU VASTIANU AROUZZU / THE STORY OF MASTER VASTIANU AROUZZU

SEVEN BOOKS OF LOVE

BOOK IN FIVE SETS

5 FIVE POEMS

POEMS 98

POEMS 99

CORRIGENDA

FOR THE HOUSE

X-ING THE CALENDAR

OUR PRIVATE WORDINGS

AFTER THE TREE HAD FALLEN

THE LAUGHTER THAT WIL WAKE US ALL

SONNU A CULURI / DREAM IN COLOR

NOT DREAMING NOT DREAMED

IMPOSSIBLE INSTRUMENT

WITH VOICE MIXED

OR, BOOK O' LIGHTS

ILLEGIBLE TATTOOS

WAY AFTER BASHO

ISLANDER

A PART

I AM NOT ONLY*

*only Bruce Conner did not say this.

POETRY IS WANTED HERE

FROM STONE TO STAR

HISTORIES

RESPONSES

SOME LOVE

PINOCCHIO POEMS

BODY/DREAMS/ORGANS

ANXIETIES & CHEMISTRIES

PHILOSOPHERS STONED

SONOSUONU

THE FOOD THAT FITS THE HUNGER

LIKE WATER

EATING BREAD

SPHOTA PROBE

ARSE

POET

ICUS

and finally, for now, with the option of adding new titles as I find them, etc.

SMELLS

I use the word "smells" instead of the word "scents" because it feels earthier to me.

Years ago, on an airplane headed to Europe, lonely and erotically charged, I smelled the lime on my fingers and wished for the smell of something quite different.

This morning, driving down the hill from Woodland Hills to Salem and then to Spanish Fork, I thought ahead to where there had been a dead skunk on the road the day before.

I want to smell that, I thought, and rolled down my windows.

Wanted to smell a skunk?

Yes, to smell something real, something pungent.

The skunk smelled, if not delicious, strong! I took a deep whiff.

Minutes later the wonderfully malodorous smell of cow shit.

And then the sweet smell of hay, freshly cut alfalfa hay, the last cutting of the year, the aftermath.

As I pulled onto the freeway I rolled up the windows, happy.

Writing/Living

Woke up this morning from dreams, various dreams, that featured creative, stimulating joint work and play. I think they were responses to a remarkable and generous email from my son Sam, a senior history major at Utah State University, currently studying the history of the French Revolution with a student of Robert Darnton.


Sam wrote:


I wandered into the special collections in the basement of our wonderful library, fumbling with my words and sweating - nervous from the cleanliness and order of the place. The lady at the desk helped me learn how to fill out a request form (I'd assumed it was like the bank where deposit slips are just formalities that the teller always fills out for you - incidentally if you still fill them out prior to a transaction, you are living in 18th century France) and checked my backpack into a locker. You can't take notes with pens, so I put them away and borrowed a pencil. After waiting for two minutes I was handed a fresh copy of the Fall 2011 edition of the journal "Dialogue - A Journal of Mormon Thought." I sat and read for 30 minutes. I enjoyed seeing Scott Abbott written across the top of each page, with the title "Immortal for Quite Some Time" next to it. The narrative jumps right to the point with a series of breathtaking sentences about Uncle John. Letters from his mission follow, with Dad's feelings and emotions and confusion and logic pouring through the pages. The most piercing letter was a long apology John made to Grandma and Grandpa about how he hadn't lived up to the abilities he had, but was lazy and confrontational for no reason. Dad's desire to talk to John, to talk about all the things they never talked about, to love honestly and let all the familial formalities we cling to drop to the ground and just be there for each other made me shake and almost cry. And it just ends, leaving me in the spotless basement next to a king's throne of a chair with a huge beehive carved into the top of it and a display of the skull of Old Ephraim - the biggest bear on record in Utah. It just leaves me alone, so connected to Dad and wanting so much more. . . .


The Dialogue essay is part two of a series, part one published in the Spring 2011 volume, part three to appear next year, part four still to be submitted. [Links to ugly but readable versions of the first two parts HERE.]


Sam read a conversation I had with my brother John, a written conversation based on letters he wrote and my thoughts as I read them. We couldn't have a spoken conversation because John died 20 years ago.


But Sam and I can have conversations; and we're both hungry for them. His response and my surprised and grateful counter-response have me thinking, in my dreams and again this morning, about why I write.


I write to figure things out, to deepen my response to things and to people. I write because I want to enter into conversation with readers. I want, as Sam wrote, to be connected . . . and wanting so much more.


Especially with my children. With my partner Lyn. With friends.


Wanting so much more.

Fall Skies: Utah Valley

Who Am I?

The other day my daughter Maren and grandaughter Kylie walked into my office while I was taking photos of books on two of my shelves.

I'm thinking about who I am, I explained. The things I have collected and treasured over the years surely tell something about who I am. And I have a lot of books. These two shelves have mostly books of philosophy, I said, and I've always been interested in philosophy.

The first shelf has an odd set of juxtapositions: the Frankfurt-School Marxist Adorno cheek-to-cheek with St. Anselm and St. Augustine, who is right up against Barthes.

Am I simply interested in anything I come across? Yes, it's true. Over time, it's true. Taste changes. Focus changes. But the interest in ideas is constant, be they religious or anti-religious or simply and aesthetically literary. I would read Augustine today for his take on the nunc stans, but not on God. And Adorno is fascinating for his negative dialectic, but not for his mistaken diatribes against jazz.

Buber's I and Thou / Ich und Du will always be important to me, in part because a fellow Mormon missionary in Germany, Cole Durham, gave me the German edition with his recommendation and led me, perhaps, into my first philosophical reading. Cassirer became interesting as a philosopher of language as my studies took me in that direction. Cavell I discovered through Richard Rorty. And Deleuze and Guatari and Derrida came with graduate studies in the late 1970's.

Vilem Flusser was a discovery one night in Bonn after an extraordinary film about photography and truth by the filmmaker Harun Farocki. In a bar after the film, Farocki answered my question about Derrida being a possible influence by stating emphatically: everything I know about photography and film I learned from Vilem Flusser.


No getting around Foucault in my time, nor would I want to. Besides the books, there was that ecstatic moment in the Woodrow Wilson auditorium at Princeton when he stood under the brilliant lights, his bald head shining like a saint's, and spoke about sexuality to a huge and worshipful crowd.


And Freud: I have his dreams every night.

Habermas -- so logical, so thoughtful, so harelipped, so damned admirable. Heidegger, on the other hand, is so slippery and so mistaken and so fraught with history and so ongoingly influential on me. Holzwege may be my bible. And the two, Habermas and Heidegger, conjoined by Hegel. Holy "h",s!

There's Kant in the middle, after Jung, who I don't like as much as the books would suggest. And Kierkegaard's "Either/Or," forever enshrined in my life by the dedication written by the college girlfriend who gave it to me: "When I'm loving you more than I can stand, all I can think to do is to give you a book." Fond erotic/philosophic memories.

Karl Marx behind a coil of barbed wire. Not entirely fair. I love the seriousness of his thought; and wish he had a funny bone. Alasdair MacIntyre gave me the German translation of his book; and once came striding into my office at Vanderbilt to congratulate me on the fact that my religion (his was Catholic) had just entered its Renaissance period -- proof being the New York Times front page article about the forger Mark Hoffman who had just been arrested for killing a Mormon collector with a bomb.

Leiris, Levinas, Levi-Strauss -- love those "L"'s.

Frau Lou! Nietzsche's lover (and Rilke's and Freud's). I've nestled her up against Nietzsche. And Martha Nussbaum! I've always been half in love with her (and the power and breadth of her thought), especially after she was such a thoughtful reader of my "Immortal For Quite Some Time."

Tillich is a remnant of my first philosophical ventures at BYU. Wittgenstein is a much more lasting influence, especially the idea of language games and truth relative to that sort of context.

The photos cut out lots of books to the left and the right, most notably Plato, who taught me about eros and philosophy, and those by Richard Rorty, perhaps the most influential of all these writers on me. I'd describe myself, I think, as a pragmatist in his mold.

In short: this is who I am. Well, part of who I am. There's also the mountainbike and the backcountry skis.

Not to mention my thoughtful and kind and beautiful daughter and granddaughter.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

CURRICULUM VITAE

Labor Day passes slowly, a day of indolence and jazz and reading and an early bike ride.


The day passes. The week passes. The summer passes. A life passes.

Rabbitbrush, Chrysothamnus nauseosus

Goldenrod, Solidago ?

Curlycup gumweed, Grindelia squarrosa

Sunflower, Helianthus annuus

How do we know it passes?


Things change.


For instance, for reasons I don't understand, the preponderance of late-summer flowers in our yard (almost all native, requiring no irrigation but what falls from our desert skies) are yellow.


Shorter days, slowly falling temperatures. Things change. And they keep changing. Relentlessly, if depression has its say. Invigoratingly, if melancholy is on vacation.


The course of a life.


The course of a story like the one Scott Carrier helped Najib tell (see the previous post).


In thought, in language, in memory, a life is, most simply, a narrative. And narrative, in whatever form, is motion. In a story even place is motion, as the flowerville blogger recently noted with reference to Horace & Handke.

Wild lettuce, Lactuca Virosa

My ride up Loafer Mountain this morning had its own curriculum. The first twenty minutes were a climb up the steep streets of Woodland Hills, our little mountainside town. There were neighbors to greet, out walking on the pleasant holiday. Deer slipped from the roadside into the oakbrush. Wild turkeys likewise clucked and galloped into the brush. There was no birdsong -- much too late in the season to get laid.


Finally the pavement ended and the switchbacks began to climb the mountain.


Like the days and seasons of a life, they are relentless, slippery with the late-summer dryness, sometimes treacherous, often exhilarating. They link one to the next and together they lift a rider high above the valley.


About a 2000-foot altitude gain in all. And every year it's a bit harder -- obviously a case of ongoing geological upthrust. 


From a spring ride up the same trail, a set of sweaty photos: