I was going to devote this, my sophomore post to FictionFast2006, to my newfound obsession with the Bialowieza forest. I'd never even heard of the place before reading about it in Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, a big book of meditations on history as it is appears from the perspective of the forests, rivers and rocks in which events take place, and it's a reflection of Schama's own able communication of his passion for the place, which figures prominently in both his mother's and father's family histories, as well as my own general liking for groves and glades and old deciduous forests that I'm so taken with the desire to learn more about the place.
The first way in which I acted on this desire was, naturally, to see if Netflix offered a DVD of the TV program this book is meant to accompany. It does not; it appears no such DVD exists.
As this reading and Bialowiezamania predate my FictionFast resolution, I next turned to narrative film for more images (especially since some great ass had torn quite a lot of the color plates out of the public library's copy of Landscape and Memory) of the forest at least. Bingo! A big epic film of the poem Pan Tadeusz, which promised to be chock full of treeporn. It delivered.
But as I say; I was going to write about Bialowiesza, but that's before something truly wonderful happend.
Two days after my first post to this blog was my first trip to the library to bring in a wholly fiction-free haul (though I'm not yet done with Michel Houellebecq; I read several books at a time and must confess to a certain urge to make this, my last novel for months, linger a bit). The new books section had little to tempt me; the non-fiction titles tending towards the stuff-that-makes-me-roll-my-eyes like anguished parenting memoirs and cheesy self-help books, on one hand, and stuff-I'd-already-read on the other (recent "new non-fiction shelf" raves: a biography of Robespierre, Michael Pollan's big paen to elitist eating [that still has changed the way I eat, even though I'm a prole in the heart of prole-land] [though there is grass-fed beef to be had in plentitude, and trout, thank goodness], everybody's favorite sexy revisionist economics tome of the moment, and a look at the Gospel of Judas written by one of the powers behind the publication of the Nag Hammadi Library), which made me nervous.
I have a habit these days, though, of making the effort to actually keep track of books I hear about on NPR or catch interesting reviews of in Arts and Letters Daily online or the handful of magazines to which I subscribe (Reason, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, City Journal and Bookmarks, currently -- the former two because I couldn't afford to subscribe to the Economist, the latter because Amazon.com recommended it. So far I'm not too impressed with Bookmarks, but I've only had two issues) and use my copious but sporadic downtime at work to log on to my local public library's online category and get the call numbers for same, so choice number one was easy: Thomas Power's Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies. Not a new book, that, but one I'd often noticed on the shelf while grabbing other tomes to feed other obsessions like water issues.
Schama has proven an even more engaging read than he has been a TV presence and so Volume 2 of his History of Britain (I'd just turned in Volume 1) was another easy choice.
That was only two, though, and while I still had Houellebecq and a locally published history of a mining ghost town in Western Wyoming at home, I have a sort of silly and neurotic need to have a formidable stack of library books next to my easy chair (extra silly when one considers that I also possess a considerable private library of my own, last count well over 1000 volumes of everything from Attic poetry to college physics to the complete poems of Hart Crane to an ever-more-complete collection of Horizon magazines from the 1960s, the last, I maintain, in themselves sufficient to provide a pretty good liberal arts education to the reader willing to take in all they have to offer). I Needed More.
I'm not religious but I do occasionally send a grateful thought the way of the Angel of Biography (the Lesser Zadkiel, I believe he's called, from what I read in Robertson Davies) who, if he exists, is a disembodied spirt of great potency, goading hundreds and hundreds of first rate writers (and many more crappy ones) to take a good stab at writing accounts of each other's and others' lives for posterity. I even did my Senior Project on biography, focusing on good old Edmund Gosse (too bad by that time I was more interested in the father's pursuits than the son's but that's for another post). My local library has a nice big (relatively speaking) biography section that's always good for a read or two and fun to browse, laughing at the proliferation of hagiographies of halfwit politicians and sports stars, wondering if some day I'll be desperate enough to read any of the movie star biographies given my general hatred of the breed, nodding always at old favorites that I already know well and own like Mary Dearborn's study of Henry Miller, Victoria Glendenning's of Vita Sackville-West, Churchill's memoirs and Lord Byron's letters and good old Boswell and Plutarch and James Gleick and Saint Theresa of Avila.
Closing time approaching, I decided on a study of C.S. Lewis by William Griffin and Deirdre Bair's look at Anais Nin, the last turning out to be the best of the lot as far as my original purpose in starting the grand design of which FictionFast2006 is a part.
Nin is probably the most famous diarist in the world, and to write about her is to write about her diaries, her obsession with writing (and re-writing them), the question of how truthful she was (or anyone is) in them, the phenomena of publishing them, diary diary diary, I wonder if the word does not in face appear on every page!
Next thing I knew, I had put the book down and picked up my own, a big fat journal I was given as a guilt gift about a year and a half ago but never touched. I seem to be keeping a diary again, and I have the writer's cramp to prove it! Which makes typing this blog entry slightly uncomfortable, but, as they say, oh well.
So FictionFast is off to a promising start.
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