Fit for Kindling

I don't own a Kindle, but I downloaded the Kindle app for my iPod Touch and have purchased and read a couple of novels since doing so. (One of the advantages the iPod and iPhone have over the Kindle itself is that their screens, while tiny, are backlit, making them ideal for bedtime reading.) For someone who loves books as physical constructs — I can still recall the intoxicating, ink-on-paper smell of my first paperback copy of the Silmarillion — the experience of reading an eBook was less soul-crushing than I'd imagined it would be. I'm excited to see what a company like Apple might do with the concept (rumors in the Mac world suggest that Steve Jobs will be launching a computer "tablet" to compete with both netbooks and the Kindle early next year). But, aside from Amazon.com's recent public relations faux pas, there are lots of reasons to wonder if the brave new world of eBooks will be all that brave after all. In today's Slate Farhad Manjoo studies the clouds looming on the electronic horizon.

*Edit: An earlier version of this post predicted that Apple would introduce its tablet computer this fall but the latest rumors suggest a spring 2010 launch date is in the works.

Maine Ghost Towns

Much of the action in The Poacher's Son takes place in the lost villages of Flagstaff and Dead River, near present-day Eustis, Maine. Today, these ghost towns lie at the bottom of Flagstaff Lake, but in the book I've spared them that fate and imagine what they might be like if they had survived into the present.

In 1949 Flagstaff and Dead River were evacuated. Buildings were either relocated or burned to the ground. The following year, the Central Maine Power Company constructed a hydroelectric dam at Grand Falls, creating a shallow, sprawling impoundment throughout the Dead River valley north of the Bigelow Mountains.

For a close-up look at what this area of northwestern Maine looked like before the flooding of Flagstaff click on the map at left.

Maine Guide Tip

Every week, I'll offer some wood wisdom gleaned from Registered Maine Guides I've known.

Up in Smoke

If you light a campfire and the smoke hangs close to the ground, it's usually a sign of unsettled weather moving in and an increased probability of rain. Low pressure prevents the warm air from rising into the atmosphere. During periods of fair weather, with a high pressure system in control, smoke will rise directly into sky.

A Moveable Text

As a Hemingway aficionado (that's a word he brought from Spain into our English lexicon, by the way), I've been fascinated to watch the tempest in a teacup that's boiled up around the newly edited version of his posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast.

First a confession: I love the 1964 edition of A Moveable Feast. I doubt I'm the first person to have brought a paperback copy with me to Paris so I could seek out the various locales mentioned in the book. Yeah, I know a lot of the story is made-up. And I suppose I should be bothered by the nastiness of so many of the anecdotes concerning Gertrude Stein and Ford Maddox Ford. The problem is that book is just so fucking funny. The chapter "Scott Fitzgerald" is, without question, the most hilarious thing Hemingway ever wrote.

A Moveable Feast was published a year after Hemingway's suicide, and there's long been a dispute about how "finished" the book was before the old man swallowed his double-barreled Boss shotgun. Mary Hemingway, the author's fourth wife, insists it was virtually complete. And so, too, does Hemingway acolyte and biographer A. E. Hotchner. The problem with this argument is that publishing is a process that starts with the creation of a first draft and continues through the galley proofing and jacket design stages right up to the moment that the newly printed book comes off the bindery. Hemingway participated in none of these last steps, so it's hard not to affix an asterisk next to A Moveable Feast in the author's canon. (Some of the other posthumous books, The Garden of Eden and True at First Light, are in my opinion nothing but Barry Bonds-sized asterisks.)

That said, I agree with Hotchner that for Hemingway's grandson to re-edit the book to make his grandmother, Pauline, a more sympathetic figure in the narrative is bad literary form. I fully understand the grandson's familial and financial motivations — and Scribners' impulse here is even more tran$parent. But as a reader, who has devoured several Hemingway biographies, some of which reek of hero-worship and others of which drip with contempt, I will tell you that I wasn't waiting around for a "restored edition" of A Moveable Feast. The record has been set straight elsewhere.

Is re-editing a posthumously published book a high crime against literature? I'd call it more of a misdemeanor. And, whatever else you want to say about the decision, on the tackiness scale it doesn't come remotely close to this.

Rereading Hemingway

I owe my fate, in part, to Ernest Hemingway. Without him I would not be the writer that I am, or for that matter, the reader. I would not believe in the importance of serious fiction or in those charged moments when we discover ourselves in a book.

At twenty-one, like so many undergraduates, I wanted to be a writer. I was, then, an English major at Yale with a taste for pulp. I liked science fiction and fantasy: stories at a far remove from my life. One September afternoon, when I could no longer bring myself to study Milton, I went to Cross Campus Library to look for something fun to read. On a whim, I brought A Farewell to Arms home with me. Lying on my bed in the shifting, green light that filtered through a wind-blown maple outside my window, I opened the book and began to read:

"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves."

This was writing unlike any I had encountered. The language was spare, yet resonant. If I closed my eyes, I could see the river, see the troops marching beneath the trees

Reading had always been a means of escape for me. Hemingway offered an alternate model. He wrote from the principle that he must cause the reader to share an unnamed emotion, whether love, loss or fear. This, he asserted, is the essential transaction between writer and reader. If the writer does not write truthfully, from experience, the reader well be diverted but not moved, and a chance at communion will be wasted.

I put down A Farewell to Arms changed. I wanted to reach others as Hemingway had reached me. To do this, I realized, I would have to face my experience. I could not look away.

A year and half later I was back in Maine. I had spent the time since graduation in Hollywood with nothing to show for the experience except debts.

Then, on Memorial Day, 1988, I went hiking with two friends in the mountains of Grafton Notch State Park. That night, while camped near the summit of a wooded hill, we were struck by lightning. The bolt hit a fir-tree at the edge of the clearing and traveled through the roots. I received a severe shock and a burn the size of a quarter on my side. My friend, sleeping in a tent nearer the tree, was not so lucky: the current nearly electrocuted him. We were miles from the nearest road, one thousand feet up. I spent five hours alone with my friend, thinking he would die, while his brother fetched help.

My friend did not die. But he spent a week in the hospital, and doctors told us that his heart had stopped when the lightning struck. He recovered fully, except that he had no memory of that night. I, however, could not forget it.

After the accident, I came home and began to reread A Farewell to Arms. I recalled a paragraph in which the narrator described the experience of being wounded by mortar fire:

"Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh—then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake

Again and again I read this passage, so close was it to the sensation of being hit by lightning. There were differences, yes; I was never seriously wounded, but I had come close to death, and the emotion was the same. It was as though I had discovered the transcript of my own trauma.

A Farewell to Arms is not a perfect book, nor is it my favorite among Hemingway's works. Still, it represents for me the necessity of serious writing in our lives. Emotion speaks to emotion. Art communicates before it is understood.

I learned this anew when I tried to write an account of my experience and found that, unconsciously, I was borrowing Hemingway's language. It couldn't be helped. By then it was my language, too.