For the New Year: Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones

Falcones, Ildefonso. Cathedral of the Sea. Black Swan, 2009.

Have you figured out your New Year's Resolutions yet? Have you made a list? Do you have good intentions but a lack of energy? I have been thinking about resolutions for the past few weeks, and rather than the usual diet- and exercise-themed stuff, I think I've settled on a more general plan. I want to live more mindfully. This would cover the healthy lifestyle genre since there's always something more I can do in that department. Usually at this time of year I make noise about wanting to read more, but I already read more than most people I know. What I'd like to do in 2018 is to read more mindfully, too: take more time to select good books, savor them, look up unfamiliar vocabulary words and concepts, and understand the author's motivation for writing the book. It takes SO MUCH work to write a book that I feel I owe it to an author who has written something worthwhile and meaningful to get the most out of it. I'd also like to write more reviews of books on Amazon--those mean a lot to authors.

Speaking of books that are meaningful and worthwhile, I just finished a rather long novel which left me continuing to think about its characters and location. The book is Cathedral of the Sea and it was written by Ildefonso Falcones. In its original Spanish, it was a huge hit in Europe. The cathedral in question is Santa Maria del Mar in the Ribera neighborhood in Barcelona, which turned out to be the focal point of my two-week stay there this summer. I fell in love with that cathedral and wrote a lengthy essay about it and its main character and the barrio around it while it was being constructed and what it is like now. Our tour guide recommended this novel to us inside the cathedral, and I scribbled the title and an approximation of the author's name in my little notebook. I found an English translation in a nearby shop.

The main character of the novel is Arnau Estanyol. We meet his parents before he's born and learn about medieval customs and laws of the peasant folk and then the urban citizens when Arnau and his father move to Barcelona. Arnau is enamored of that cathedral, and it becomes a focal point for him, too, throughout his life. This cathedral, in the Ribera district, was built by and for the working class people, many of whom carried huge stones across the city on their backs from a quarry on a mountain called Montjuic.

A bastaixo depicted on the door of Santa Maria del Mar

These laborers were called bastaixos, and they also unloaded cargo from ships at Barcelona's port. Arnau spent some time as a bastaixo as a young man, and cultivated work ethic by emulating his favorite colleagues. Despite his best intentions, he finds himself with jealous enemies and challenging situations, and the novel stays compelling throughout its 751 pages. (No kidding.)

This is a book to savor and to read mindfully. There's plenty of medieval history in there, plus well-developed characters for whom the reader grows to care deeply. When I finished the book last week, I was sorry to have to leave that world created by Falcones. How often does that happen when one finishes a novel?

Here are some more of my photos of Arnau's cathedral to help you daydream about Barcelona...

The front doors with bastaixos above

Inside the cathedral

The Rose Window

Pews

Chapel

The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer has emerged as one of my favorite writers and speakers, and he's an inspiration for me in both areas. He writes about travel, but in a cerebral way that gets readers to think about what they are thinking about while they are traveling. The book I'm recommending this month is a little one by Iyer from the TED Original series: The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.

It might seem counter-intuitive for a travel writer to write about going nowhere,

but not for Iyer. He's not walled up in a tiny hut like Hildegard of Bingen. He actually goes places and sees people but more for meditation than sightseeing. He's exploring his mind rather than unfamiliar scenery and terrain.

I found myself recently craving literal 'stillness' because of a painful bruise on my side that I acquired during a slapstick-worthy fall. I read Iyer's short book about Stillness while I was being still. How clever am I? I thought of other kinds of stillness: I decided not to travel this year. I've been traveling a lot lately and I want a year to be home and still. I want to think about where I've been and mindfully write about the experiences and what I learned and what I was thinking about. Of course that's not literal stillness, but I kind of stillness of the mind. I took a couple of walks over Thanksgiving weekend, before I took the epic tumble, and I found myself thinking about where I was walking, what I was seeing, and my memories of those places with no distractions or worries from my everyday life. I had a Thanksgiving dinner to prepare, assignments to grade, and a hundred other things to do, but I was nicely focused on my walks. I was in the moment.

And then I read the little Pico Iyer book and thought about all these ways to be still and how important they are as I was sitting as still as possible. And I was still as I contemplated the gentle photos by Icelandic photographer Eydis S. Luna Einarsdóttir which separate each of the book's sections. You may be thinking that I've spoiled the fun of reading a short book like this meant to be read in one sitting (according to TED). I haven't, really. TED wouldn't have any thing to do with puny ideas that could be spoiled in a simple blogpost, and there's no way my words could come close to stirring up your mind as Pico Iyer's words will. So read this worthwhile book, and watch this worthwhile companion talk:

The Pine Barrens by John McPhee

I was never a scientist. I was only briefly a science student because it was required. Nonetheless, one of the most critical life-changing events of my teenage life happened because of a research paper assigned by a high school Biology teacher. All of the students in the class were required to write a research paper about the Pine Barrens region of our home state of New Jersey. My friend and I did not know how to approach this, so upon arriving at the Hamilton Public Library we mustered up courage to ask the reference librarian. Of course we expected her to be mean, aren't all librarians? We were so young. That librarian took the time to show us how to look up newspaper articles in the New York Times Index (big red books) and The Reader's Guide to Periodic Literature (fat green books). I had no idea that the library saved old issues of magazines and newspapers and could retrieve them if you asked for them with the titles, dates, and volume numbers listed in the big red and green books. This was huge. "Not all of the newspapers and magazines will be in print," she probably said, and I can make an educated guess about this because I've been teaching library patrons about these mysteries of knowledge for 25+ years now. "The newspapers and magazines we don't have in print will likely be on microfilm, like The New York Times which we have back to its beginning." I remember being stunned. We looked up the Pine Barrens, found the dates and pages we needed, and the librarian taught us how to use the giant microfilm readers similar to the one Brick added to his family's living room decor on the TV show, "The Middle."

The librarian had helped other students with the Pine Barrens topic, so she was able to recommend a compelling read about the region by author John McPhee. The Pine Barrens (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) was the first nonfiction book that wowed me to the point of wanting to be a nonfiction

writer myself someday. First I had to study Music Theory and Library Science, and then I finally got around to advanced study in Creative Writing. (I received my MFA in July.) But anyway, THAT BOOK is so compelling that I bought my own copy with my allowance and savored it. McPhee told us about a certain treefrog that only lives in the Pine Barrens, and how the cranberries grow there in bogs where they are harvested by local residents called Pineys. Pineys work "the cycle" which is a string of jobs relating to the Pine Barrens environment including cranberry harvests, blueberry harvests, and sphagnum moss collecting. (Both berries grow well in the sandy soil of that region.) It was fascinating then and it is still fascinating now. The book might be somewhat dated, but it is still in print which should tell you something. McPhee's writing style includes interviews with experts on whatever topic, and I can imagine him asking at the conclusion of an interview, "Who should I talk to next?"

Read the book. I wouldn't steer you wrong, would I?

The reason The Pine Barrens is on my mind is that John McPhee, a Princeton native, has just released a book called Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, (also Farrar, Straus and Giroux) in which he writes about writing. I love reading writing about writing. I'm savoring each essay, reading slow. Slow reading. Savoring. The second essay included, to my delight and fascination, a story about McPhee when he was preparing to write The Pine Barrens, and I hadn't formulated my nonfiction research organizing strategy yet, but oh how I wish we could have collaborated on that book!

that Pine Barrens book, and he didn't know how to go about it. There was so much information, coming from research, interviews, and observations, that he put himself flat on his back on a backyard picnic table and just thought about organization and about all that research. After a few days he figured out a strategy to mold all that information into a logical story, and he got up off the picnic table and went to his typewriter to write it. (Yes, he did leave the table to eat and sleep he assures us.) This fascinates me because it is a story about how a favorite author wrote one of my all-time favorite books. It delights me because I'm teaching an actual 3-credit nonfiction writing course next semester on how to organize research for nonfiction prose into a coherent story. I was 5 when McPhee was writing The Pine Barrens, and I hadn't formulated my strategy for organizing research for nonfiction yet. What an interesting conversation we would have had!

Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II

James Tobin. Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II. Free Press, 1997.

I thought the tip-of-the-iceberg perspective I would use for the World War II project I'm working on would be a comparison of what was going on overseas and how the home front coped with the results of the war and the absence of their loved ones. Unfortunately, that strategy is still too large for a ninety-minute lecture, so I contemplated and I brainstormed, I watched videos, and most importantly I kept reading. I learned about war correspondents, and Ernie Pyle in particular, and became fascinated with that writer who we don't hear much about anymore.

In his time he was wildly popular. He joined the guys on the front lines in Egypt, Italy, France, the Pacific theater, and places in-between. The violence he witnessed took its toll on his mental health but he soldiered on, only occasionally returning home to check on his wife, Jerry, who was also battling depression. This biography follows Pyle through his 44 years and supplies

samples of the war writing that made Pyle famous. Ernie Pyle described his columns as written from "a worm's eye view," meaning that he wrote about the experience of the infantry guys with whom he toured the war. There are occasional profiles of officers, but mostly he wrote about the enlisted men he knew well and shared their feelings and post-war aspirations with the world in his columns. He was everyone's friend and everyone's hero.

Ernie Pyle walked along the beaches in Normandy the day after D-Day and took in the sights as he stepped over bodies and parts of bodies. His resulting columns, though, described the equipment and vehicles damaged and left behind. This was for the benefit of the people at home who would soon find out that they had lost sons, brothers, and fathers and didn't need to know exactly, in gory detail, how they died. Learning about the broken vehicles and equipment littering the beach gave them an idea of the magnitude of this battle and how bravely their loved one fought.

This fantastic book pushed me over the edge of fascination with Ernie Pyle into obsession with this talented, original writer. Author James Tobin did his research and paints a complex portrait of Pyle the man, Pyle the innovative writer, and the phenomenon he created at home and on the front line. Oh, does this sound like a commercial for the book? I hope not, but it probably does. What I would like prospective readers to know is that this book is an effective and compelling way to learn about that huge war that affected almost everyone on the planet. I had a father and six uncles who served in various branches of the military. They all came home, but didn't talk much about the experience except, in the case of my father, to identify photographs and a few artifacts without much story. Even by the time I came along, twenty years after this war, my father wasn't sharing war stories. This book filled in some gaps for me. At the same time it enlightened me about the writers, photographers, videographers, and cartoonists who did their part by informing the troops and the public about the war in a time before Twitter, the World Wide Web, and even TV news.

The Best American Travel Writing 2016

Bill Bryson and Jason Wilson, editors. The Best American Travel Writing 2016. NY: Mariner, 2016.

Do you know about the "Best American" serieses? There's an annual Best American Essays, a Best American Science and  Nature Writing, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and my favorite, Best American Travel Writing. Reading these collections is a great way to sample authors (if you like the essay, investigate the books they've written or look for more essays), and keep up on current writing in your favorite literary genre. I have a stack of Best American Travels (and the occasional other genre) at home, and while I can't claim to have read them all, I've read parts of some

and all of others. Part of the beauty of anthologies for me is that I feel no reader's guilt for not reading the whole book cover-to-cover. I preorder BATW  every year because I love reading travel essays, I write travel essays, and the series editor, Jason Wilson, was my writing mentor while I studied for my MFA in writing. His introduction to the collection is always fun to read, and without a doubt the guest editor's introduction or foreword will be quality writing as well. This year's guest editor is the hilarious Bill Bryson. And then I savor each and every essay. Even if I wasn't travel writing myself, I would be enamored with these essays. Who doesn't want to learn about places they haven't been?

Just before I began reading Best American Travel Writing 2016, I read a writing craft essay by Ann Hood about literary first lines in Tin House’s Writer’s Notebook II. She describes a first line as a hand extended by the writer to the reader. That’s a genteel way of thinking about a hook! I picked up Best American Travel Writing 2016 and studied the first lines in that collection. I chose my favorites, not necessarily by my favorite authors:

Dave Eggers: “The year I turned 43, I woke up one morning and thought it would be a good day to go to Hollister.”

Pico Iyer: “The foreign has long been my stomping ground, my sanctuary, as one who grew up a foreigner wherever I happened to be.”

Helen MacDonald: “I’m walking beside a hedge of tangled dog roses in a nature preserve in eastern England, toward a hide, a building whose purpose it is to make me disappear.”

Jeffrey Tayler: “Tens of thousands of dragooned serfs perished while draining the swamps to lay the foundation of St. Petersburg, and residents like to remind visitors that their city, enchanting though it may be, ‘rests on bones’.”

Eggers and Tayler’s lines simply intrigued me, Tayler with fanciful language and Eggers with a familiar (but not really) place name. Iyer’s idea of the foreigner connected with my own self-diagnosed outlier status. MacDonald’s hide reminded me of the hides on my favorite birdwatching trails and how tempting they are to stand in and not be seen. All four authors put out a hand and drew me in.

Reviewing the lines after reading the essays, I noticed that my list of favorites had altered slightly, influenced by the stories they evoked in my mind. For example, Thomas Chatterton Williams’s line, “My father, a bookish black man old enough to be my grandfather, grew up in Texas while it was still a segregated state.” On the surface, this line gives us information about the essay: they are black, from Texas, and his father is much older (like mine) and remembers that state when it was much different. That’s a lot of information for one sentence. After I read the essay and realized that his ‘expert’ was Jake Lamar who I know (another writing mentor), I was very interested in the story. I’m not black, or a man, or living in Paris, but I feel like I have a good idea of what it must be like from reading this essay.

Here’s my assessment from this informal first-line study: before reading the essays, I liked best the first-lines that pulled me in with imagery, fanciful or familiar. After reading the essays, I still liked those, but appreciated the first-lines that signaled the content of the essay to follow. Some did both. I want my first lines to do both.

My other takeaway from this collection is a broadening definition of ‘travel’ writing. I think of a travel story as the recounting of a trip with a beginning and an end. Perhaps the writer includes the ‘getting there’ and the ‘going home’ or perhaps not. The protagonist in William Finnegan’s “Off Diamond Head” moves to Hawaii with his family as a child. I enjoyed the surf talk, related to the ocean’s moods, and appreciated the use of TV show titles to set the time. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had gone to a place and were going to be left there. It was more of a story of a sense of place than a travel story. This is not a bad thing as it made for a contrast to the essays about a finite trip. I’m intrigued—can I do this? Can I write about a place that I don’t actually leave at the end and call it travel? 

Pico Iyer’s “The Foreign Spell” is the most perfect essay in the collection. I bestow this honor based on his elegant writing and the piece’s satisfying form, but most of all because of his thorough explanation of his concept of being foreign. I get it and I can relate. Helen McDonald’s “Hiding from Animals” is my first-runner-up. I wrote this in the margin: “I wish I wrote this.” She thoroughly described the joys and frustrations of watching animals that I feel out in nature with my camera and binoculars. She transported me to my favorite spots. 

As a person who is known to do a bit of research and inflict it upon my readers, I appreciated the researched meat that D.T. Max added to “A Cave with a View” as he balanced the old and new in Matera. Tony Perrottet amplified his story “Darwin’s Forgotten World” with research throughout. One of these days I’ll read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but until I do I’ll be needing some explanation. Perrottet supplied that and more. Related to research is authenticity which seems to be Patrick Symmes’s concern in “Peak Havana.” He made it clear that what we see in the travel literature is not exactly an accurate portrayal of the real Cuba. I would like to see for myself.

Since I spent time with first lines, I made sure to note the best last lines and conclusions. Alice Gregory gave us a personal revelation in “Climb Every Mountain,” and David Rowell admitted that actually playing the hang was not all he imagined it would be in “Swiss Dream.” Helen McDonald’s nature-watching ending finished off that piece nicely for me, encouraging the reader to slow down and spend the time to appreciate nature. The most powerful ending for me is Justin Nobel’s in “Growing Old with the Inuit.” After a deft synthesis of his journey, the unfamiliar culture of Inuit aged, and his quotidian experience with his grandfather he ends with:

We are holding hands on the couch. I want to carry him up a holy mountain, abandon him on an ice floe, stab him in the heart, but I don’t have the guts. Those days are indeed over. There will be no ring of rocks, and everyone has forgotten their favorite tool. These days, the world over, we die on our couches.

You should read The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. NY: Penguin, 2012.

This is the kind of book I like to read slowly and savor. Macfarlane’s descriptions of walking and thinking inspire me to think about thinking while walking. There’s a tradition of this throughout history, but until Macfarlane’s book I hadn’t put the pieces together: Australian Aboriginal Songlines, the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost’s ‘talks walking’, and as I read elsewhere recently, Ludwig van Beethoven working out musical composition while walking. I do it, too. I think about problems that need solutions, or how I’m going to frame a piece of writing, or how I’m going to start a difficult conversation. Maybe it’s the act of walking that gets the blood circulating or the oxygen powering the brain.

Macfarlane’s walks are trail walks, and usually in the United Kingdom. His descriptions of the geology and geography sent me to my reference shelf more than once to look for maps, definitions, and photographs of things like chalk. He walks on chalk, gneiss, flint, silt, snow, and ice, and is conscious of every surface under his feet. He describes how footprints in the snow rise up as the wind blows the loose snow away from the solidly frozen prints. Wow.

My best walks are on sand, at the beach where I walk barefoot except in the coldest weather. Macfarlane discusses walking barefoot and the sensuousness of it. You feel the trail underfoot and remember it differently, he says, than if you walk it in footwear. I think the most compelling part of the book for me was his description of walking next to the 5000-year-old footprints preserved in the silt. My beach walks send my brain in three directions: what I’m seeing at the moment (birds, boats, people); memories of ‘talks walking’ with people (my father, cousins, nephew, old boyfriends); and the history of this favorite beach (whaling, World War II, the opening of the ferry).

Macfarlane considers water paths, too: sea routes. These are traveled by sailors over and over, and they share information about hazards and storms. People along water routes share culture, too. I’m reminded of the towns and cities on the Danube River and how musicians have traveled the river for centuries sharing tunes (a kind of oral history), techniques, instruments, and notation more so than with musicians further inland. Wolfgang Mozart was dissatisfied with his hometown of Salzburg and floated south on the Danube to Vienna where he thought he would have better opportunities. Gustav Mahler was moved north on the Danube by Emperor Franz Joseph so that he could raise the standards of the Vienna Court Opera. There are many such connections between the cities on the Danube water trail.

I was wondering in the first few chapters when this book might have been written. I was reading on my Kindle, and I’m not as adept as I should be flipping around on that thing. So rather than walking over to a computer to look up the publication date that I hadn’t noticed thus far, I challenged myself to look for clues. I pictured a thin, fifty-something, English professor in an Argyle vest, smoking a pipe while walking the chalk trail in the 1930s. Soon I encountered references to Guns N’ Roses, Antiques Roadshow, and the movie Matrix. The book was published in 2012 when the author was 36. Aside from those references, though, I contend the stories and descriptions in this book could have taken place anytime in the last century. The nature experience is pure, without interference from popular culture or current events.

The reader is introduced to some interesting people during the author’s walks. The poet Edward Thomas sounds like he was a difficult person to know, but he was a thinker and a walker. For him, paths “connected real places, led outward to metaphysics, led backwards to history and inwards to the self.” He’s on Macfarlane’s mind throughout the book, relevant to much of what Macfarlane is trying to express. Richard Holmes, a writer of biographies and the of world of biography writing, said that writing a biography resembles “a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s past.” Isn’t much research like that, though? His book Footsteps (1985) is now on my list. Eric Ravilious painted the chalk trails and much of the South Downs area of England, and in doing so Macfarlane says, supplied him with a mental landscape of the trails he was walking. A quick Google search revealed that Ravilious is quite popular in the UK with exhibits opening here and there and a long list of books about his paintings.

This book will stay with me for a long time. It was an enjoyable read on one level, but on another level inspired me to get out and walk and think. I believe I will not be able to take a decent-length walk from now on without thinking about Macfarlane’s book. I’ve been gushing about it to my thinking and walking friends. And as with most of my favorite books, it encouraged further reading on Edward Thomas, Richard Holmes, Eric Ravilious, even Robert Frost who made an appearance…and walking.

The Great Railway Bazaar

Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar. Mariner, 1975.

“Speed puts some people to sleep; others it makes breathless. It doesn’t enliven conversation. I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels.” (p. 291)

Paul Theroux wrote those lines on the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, Japan, towards the end of his four months on the rails in Europe and Asia. At this point, the reader is beginning to notice that

Theroux is travel-weary. Four months is a long time to be on a train, and that he had to arrange each leg of the journey as he arrived at each new destination have made the trip an adventure. He chats with people on the train, at the stations, and in the places he visits. The variety of people and places is truly a ‘bazaar,’ (a Railway bazaar), and this reader feels as if she’s simultaneously taken the trip with Theroux and time-traveled 40 years back in time. The journey is described in detail in The Great Railway Bazaar from 1975.

The quote above caught my eye and caused me to reflect on some train trips I’ve taken. Madrid to Granada, Spain: similar to Theroux’s descriptions in that the changing views out the window (weather, local clothing, city vs. country) contrast the train’s interior situations (characters, conversations, behavior, ambient light). My exterior view changed from urban to rural (with windmills and olive trees), and the scruffy interior of the train was populated by an assortment of travelers. There was a movie to entertain us (Theroux didn’t have movies!), and a dining car from which my companion brought me a surprisingly delicious ham sandwich. Most of Theroux’s rides were more colorful and exotic than this, but my experience helped me understand him. Towards the end of his adventure when he had become weary, he described the Japanese Super Express which blasted through dull suburbs populated by silent passengers. This train reminded me of the German bullet train on which I traveled from Cologne to Berlin, Germany, also through blah suburbs with travelers and commuters wrapped-up in their own work or reading. It was cool to speed through the country on such a fast train, but the ride did not supply much in the way of travel adventure. The Spain train had character.

In Spain, the train approaches the plain.

Theroux had ample time to come up with astute observations during his four-month trek. I copied six pages of interesting sentences that might be quotable in future train-themed essays. He’s quotable even when he gets cranky on the Trans-Siberian Express and has to walk through below-freezing temperatures in-between cars in order to get to the dining car three cars away. He has bad dreams and feels guilty about leaving his family so long: “Once I had thought of a train window as allowing me freedom to gape at the world; now it seemed and imprisoning thing and at times took on the opacity of a cell wall,” (p. 323).

On the last page he reveals what he has learned from the trip: “…the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows,” (p. 342). I thought that sentence was particularly interesting because Theroux writes both travel and fiction, and I wonder how he thinks differently when creating each.

I would not have been disappointed by his ending if he had left it at that, but the crafty Theroux then worked in the book’s first sentence as its last, about how he “seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” That’s true for me, too, and I would add that I have never heard a train song and not wished I was on it (with the possible exception of the Grateful Dead’s).