Life as a Terrorist

by William T. Vollmann

It's been a long time since I've heard anything from William T. Vollmann, an author I've been following since I was eighteen.  For a while there, he was publishing books almost as quickly as I could read them, but he's published nothing since his Imperial.  This article is his first in Harper's in over two years, so it made me very happy to see his name on the cover (alongside Nicholson Baker's - it's like this issue was written just for me).

In this article, Vollmann recounts the experience of acquiring, and reading, his FBI file.  Well, 294 out of at least 785 pages of his file, much of it padded with duplicated papers (although not consistently redacted ones).  When I saw what the article was going to be about, I wasn't all that surprised that Vollmann would have an FBI file.  After all, as a young man, he travelled with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and has reported in his own unique style from a number of the world's more anti-American regions.  He also once resuced a young girl out of prostitution in Thailand.  To my mind, these are some of the things that can lead to problems with a spy agency.

What I didn't expect to learn was that Vollmann was once considered as a suspect in the Unabomber case.  Sure, over a thousand people were considered, but the FBI went so far as to put his home under surveillance at one point.  That's the kind of thing that rattles you, when you learn it about yourself, I'm sure.

Vollmann's writing is as clear as ever.  He develops compassion for the agents who wrote about him, even imagining that one of them may have fallen in love with him (a very common occurrence in his writing).  It also helps explain his difficulties in crossing the border back from Mexico, which he talks about in Imperial.  His story has some pretty clear connections to much of what is happening in America in the area of government surveillance, and is very relevant, and alarming.

Taddle Creek No. 30

Edited by Conan Tobias

One sure sign that summer is on the way is a new issue of Taddle Creek, Toronto's best literary magazine. Behind it's lovely cover, this issue contains four great pieces of fiction, and some other cool stuff.

Dani Couture shares an excerpt (of a novel?) called 'Salt', which has a young woman struggling to reconnect with her absent mother after her death.  David Ross's story 'No Blood' is somewhat similar, in that it's about a man who is struggling to reconnect with his own past after learning that his childhood babysitter has died.

'The Canadian Grotesque' is a strange story by Michelle Winters, about a woman who is cheating on her husband with a man living (or squatting) in a house hidden in a ravine.

Andrew MacDonald's story 'Four Minutes' is probably the one that is going to stick with me the longest.  The protagonist is involved in helping his developmentally delayed twin sister to have her first sexual experience with a man in similar circumstances.  It's both straight-forward and kind of creepy, and MacDonald handles it all perfectly.

Among the fiction, there is also an interesting piece of reportage about the two men who now own the bulk of the film collection that the Toronto Reference Library discarded a few years back.  I can completely understand the temptation to take ownership of such an eclectic and unmanageable mass of cultural heritage, and would probably feel as equally overwhelmed by the task of cataloguing and housing it all.  Maybe Nicholson Baker would take it...

I rather enjoyed looking over the covers of past issues of Acta Victoriana, the literary journal published by the University of Toronto's Victoria College.  The covers do a terrific job of chronicling the changes in choices of graphic design among probably pretentious students over a period of a hundred years.  Cool stuff.

And then there's Dave Lapp's 'People Around Here' strip.  It's always the part of the book that I most look forward to reading, but half the time that's just because I know it's going to annoy me.  Once again, Lapp doesn't tell a complete story in his first page, instead giving us the beginning of a conversation wherein a guy (Lapp?) recounts being solicited by a strange woman on the street, who manages to con a cab ride home out of him.  I don't need to know if the guy ended up sleeping with her, but I would have liked to have seen him get to the part in the talk where he tries to justify his actions to his friend.

Anyway, if you live in the Toronto area, go buy this magazine.  It's good.

Taddle Creek No. 29

Edited by Conan Tobias

It's always cause for excitement when a new issue of Taddle Creek shows up in my mailbox.  I like supporting this most local of literary magazines (although I feel that they are really relaxing the rules around where contributors have to live, and have stopped including the specific neighbourhood of residence in each author's bio), and am always rewarded with some very good fiction, and some decent comics.

This time around, the best piece in the magazine by far is Emily Schultz's 'The Side Sleeper', a fictional portrait of a woman who moves through life lying and stealing from just about everyone she meets.  She's found a new man, who she is happy to spend her nights with, but she's already back to her usual habits of deceiving him, and swiping objects from his home.  This is an excellent story.

Many of the other excellent stories were incredibly short, often only one page in length.  This includes great tales by Tony Burgess, Alexandra Leggat, and Gary Barwin.  Stuart Ross's one-pager is classic Stuart Ross, if you like that kind of thing (I don't think I do).

In terms of longer pieces, there is a nice one by Zoe Whittall which is narrated by a girl whose father was just arrested for his improprieties, and by Jessica Westhead, who shares a story about a family gathering at a Chinese buffet.

Marguerite Pigeon writes an interesting story about a woman who meets her double one day on the street, except unlike the narrator, this woman has a child.  Matthew Firth's story is about a Canadian man living in Scotland who can't handle his upstairs neighbours, a pair of Greek brothers who like to wrestle with each other.

In terms of comics, Joe Ollmann gives us 'Movie Night', about his relationship with his son, and Jason Kieffer provides his recipe for do it yourself nude pickling.  I think the nudity is optional.  Dave Lapp writes about the first engagement ring he ever bought, and also provides us with a collection of his recent Biblical drawings, which are rather strange.

There is also an interview with novelist Grace O'Connell (who is adorable), and a piece on the design elements that the cartoonist Seth incorporated into his wife's new barber shop in Guelph Ontario.  There is also a great deal of poetry to read, and enjoy.

In all, a very worthy magazine, and well worth the $6 you will pay for it on the stands.

Taddle Creek No. 28

Edited by Conan Tobias

From the very nice Ethan Rilly cover through to Dave Lapp's visit to the Toronto Humane Society comic strip at the end, this is a quality issue of Taddle Creek, my favourite Toronto-centric literary magazine.  Which actually makes it my favourite Canadian literary magazine.  Although, in the interest of fair disclosure, the only other Canadian magazine I read is Spacing, and while it's great, it's not the least bit literary...

Anyway, this issue opens with a strong story by Stuart Ross about a man who wakes up while on a family trip to Black Creek Pioneer Village to find the place completely abandoned.  I haven't been to Black Creek in probably 25 years, but much of it came back to me while reading this story, and it reminds me that this is probably not somewhere I want to go.  That is one of the better features of good literature.

Kevin Chong's story 'Professions' is the strongest in the magazine.  Julian is a young lawyer who accompanies his fiancee to a ski chalet with her family, a group of upper class liberals, with whom he has no end of problems.  I love the scene where the brother takes Julian to task for having an iPhone, and then whips out his clunky FairSmart, the phone "made in Denmark from recycled materials by an industrial design collective with the help of at-risk youth and sex workers leaving the trade who are paid a living wage."  Brilliant stuff.

Sara Heinonen contributes a story about teens on the verge of going off to university that helps show the effect of underemployed parenting on the next generation, and Stacey May Fowles writes a strong story about dangerous flirtation at a cocktail party.  There is also a tough little comic strip by Nina Bunjevac about the politics of lesbian friendship and depression.

The magazine also has a nice little piece about author Lauren Kirshner, and another on the fading villages of Digby Neck in Nova Scotia.  There is an article about the changes in TTC street signage, and about an artists collective that decorated phone booths in the city to make an artistic point.  My favourite non-fiction piece in this issue is Sarah Gilbert's short article about attempting to access the beautiful art deco restaurant in Montreal's Eaton's store that has been boarded up for years.

In all, another very good issue of a very good magazine.

The Cheater's Guide to Love

by Junot Díaz

 Another Junot Díaz story so soon after the last one?  That works for me.  Díaz has never been a particularly prolific writer - there was a gap of eleven years between his first collection of short stories, Drown, and his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so seeing him up his output in the lead-up to his new collection, This Is How You Lose Her's release, makes me happy.


In 'The Cheater's Guide of Love', Díaz's narrator (when they are all named Yunior, are we to assume that it's always the same guy, or are these different characters?) is suffering from a break-up.  The dissolution of his longest and best relationship really is his own fault - his fiancee discovers proof that he's had about fifty sucias over the six years of their relationship.


The story runs through the first five years after the break-up, as Yunior goes through bout after bout of depression, becomes an obsessive runner, and then a yoga fanatic when an injury puts an end to his running.  His weight fluctuates, as do the quality of the relationships he begins with other women.  The only constant in his life is the loyalty of his friend Elvis.


As is usual with a Díaz story, there is an abundance of Dominican slang and permanently adolescent men.  His stories are always very entertaining, and this one is no different.

Monstro

by Junot Díaz

 Junot Díaz has made a name for himself by writing perceptive stories about characters that have a certain geekiness to them (such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), but before writing this story, he'd stayed away from genre writing.

Monstro is a science fiction horror story, set in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the near future.  It is narrated by Dominican-American student at Brown, who has returned to the DR with his ill mother for the summer.  Bored, he starts hanging out with Alex, a school-mate who lives a privileged life in both countries.  Alex has a large circle, including the girl Mysty, who utterly captivates our narrator, who is not used to travelling in such circles.  They spend their summer hanging out and partying, and the narrator steadily works his way closer to the aloof and difficult Mysty, who has no interest in him.

While this is going on, a strange new disease breaks out in Haiti.  People have a strange, fungus-like substance growing on them, and they begin to merge into one another.  They also linger endlessly in a near-death state, and regularly let out a loud wail in unison.  No one knows what the disease is, and Díaz keeps returning to it and its progress while still keeping the focus on our narrator.  Eventually, other, stranger things begin happening in Haiti, leading to violence, and the eventual intervention of outside military forces.

Basically, this is an 'end of the world' story, and a tale of unrequited love, combined with Díaz's own brand of Spanish and futuristic slang.  It's endlessly readable, and whets my appetite for a new Díaz novel.

Black Box

by Jennifer Egan

This year's New Yorker summer fiction issue (which came out a few weeks ago - I'm behind on things once again) has a 'science fiction' theme, although it is full of stories by writers not normally associated with that genre, like Jennifer Egan.

Egan's story, 'Black Box', works on a number of levels.  To begin with, it's written as a series of short instructions, none longer than a Twitter posting.  The story is then divided into 47 short chapters, which can consist of as few as four of these 'tweets', to more than ten.  Consequently, this story looks very unique compared to most other pieces I've read in this magazine.

The instructions are designed to assist their recipient, a 'beauty', in her mission to infiltrate a crime or terrorist organization in the south of France by getting close to her 'Designated Mate', a violent man.  The nameless beauty (the instructions are written in second person, and addressed to 'you') is part of a new movement of citizen heroes, who volunteer for dangerous work out of a sense of patriotism.  The 'beauty' is outfitted with various hidden devices, such as a recorder in her ear, a camera in her eye (complete with flash), and a data port in her foot.  She is also trained in survival techniques, such as 'Dissociation Technique', and the 'Primal Roar'.

The story unfolds through these instructions, as our hero makes contact with her prey, and is later escorted with him to a remote seaside location, where he meets with another man, before she creates a distraction so she can photograph some drawings, and that has a number of consequences.

Egan gives us a James Bond like story, but without the egotism and identity of the hero getting in the way.  There are cool gadgets, mysterious evil-doers, and a palpable sense of danger.  Written in a more straight-forward way, this could have been a good story, but in Egan's hands, it's much more than that.  Egan's writing first caught my eye in this magazine, with a short story that was a part of her terrific novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I'm now more curious than ever to read more of her work.

Citizen Conn

by Michael Chabon

Bless Michael Chabon for using his fiction writing to address historical wrongs in the comic book industry.  His excellent novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay examined the injustices heaped on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster through the lens of Kavalier and Clay, a pair of Jewish boys who created The Escapist, the world's best-known superhero.  They were cheated out of their rights to the character, just as were Superman's creators. 

Now, in Citizen Conn, a short story published in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago (I've fallen horribly behind in my magazine reading), Chabon turns his gaze on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

The story is narrated by the female rabbi at Zion Pointe, an assisted living centre for 'independent' seniors.  Resident in the complex, and suffering from incurable bone cancer, is Mort Feather, an elderly artist.  The rabbi doesn't know who Feather is, but her husband, a man who has never abandoned his love for old comics, does.  Feather is the creator of a number of Golden Age characters who he then, with his partner Artie Conn, revived in the Silver Age to great success and acclaim. 

Conn continues to visit Feather, who refuses to see him.  Slowly we learn that after Conn signed away rights to their characters in exchange for a pay-out in the late 60s, the partnership between the two began to fail, with Feather eventually being fired from Nova Publications, and Conn being recognized sole creator of much of their joint work.  Sound familiar?

The story follows Conn's attempts to reconcile with Feather before his disease takes him, and is quite touching.  It's a shame that the person Conn was based on never made the same attempt. 

Chabon is an excellent writer, and I appreciate his work in dramatizing the stories of an industry I dislike as strongly as I appreciate some of the work it has produced.  I would love to know what Stan Lee thought, if he read this.

Los Gigantes

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

I was first introduced to the work of T. Coraghessan Boyle in my final year of high school by a teacher who used his short stories to teach writer's craft.  In the almost twenty years since then, I have read almost a dozen of his books, and have always enjoyed them, although I often find his short stories to be better.  Partly, that's just because I prefer short stories these days anyway, but still...

Los Gigantes is a great example of Boyle's sense of humour and weirdness.  It's set in an unnamed Latin American country, and stars a man who is unnatural in his height and his strength.  He and other large men have been recruited into the military to aid in the President's eugenics program.  They spend their days mating with equally large women, as the President hopes to build an army of giants (there are also rumours that elsewhere in the jungle he has small people working at breeding a corps of perfect spies - within a couple of generations, they are expected to be little larger than a housecat).

While this all sounds great - especially when the President's former pastry chef is hired to prepare the meals, our giant soon chafes (literally and figuratively) under the regimen, and begins the first of a series of escape attempts.

This story is great.  It's a good example of Boyle's ability to identify a theme, get in and start messing with it, and get out again in a matter of pages.  His writing is always taut, plausible, and often skewering.  I should get back to reading some of his newer books...

Homeless in Sacremento

by William T. Vollmann

In this lengthy article, Vollmann addresses, as only Vollmann can, the issue of homelessness in America today.  He starts the article by discussing the problems he has had with people choosing to camp in the parking lot adjoining his home.  Being William Vollmann, and therefore a soul of heart-breaking gentleness and need for approval, he is reluctant to run these people off his property, or erect barriers to make it harder for them to camp.  Instead, he puts up with having to wash excrement off his doorstep, and the occasional act of minor vandalism, not to mention the threatening presence of the authorities.

From here, Vollmann begins to examine the Safe Ground movement; a concept whereby groups of homeless set up orderly, safe camps in national parks or out of the way places where they hope to remain undisturbed by the authorities.  Again, in typical Vollmann fashion, instead of simply visiting these places, he makes a habit of camping in them, living and eating with the inhabitants on a sporadic basis over many months.

Through his experience, we are given a window on a group of people who defy the usual image of the homeless.  These are not depraved, insane individuals (but for the very rare exception), but are instead people who have slowly found themselves in this unfortunate situation.  There is no pointing of fingers; I expected at least one diatribe against sub-prime mortgages, or the other typical evils of American finance, but this is nowhere in evidence in this article.

What there is, instead, is an abundance of beauty.  Vollmann portrays people at their kindest, and takes pains to also paint a portrait of the natural beauty with which they surround themselves.  There are a few typical Vollmannesque diversions, such as his discussion of the nature of dogs, and how homelessness brings out the best in them, but for the most part, this is a more restrained (and perhaps space-conscious) Vollmann than I'm used to reading.

I believe that much of the first half of this article appeared in his book Poor People, but I enjoyed reading it again, especially in the context of the latter part of the article that deals with Safe Ground.  In all, this is a balanced piece of reporting, that does not pretend to have any solutions for the problem of homelessness.

The Apostate

by Lawrence Wright

This has to be one of the best articles I've read in the New Yorker in months.  Lawrence Wright, in twenty-six full pages, thoroughly examines Scientology.  The article is centred on Paul Haggis, a filmmaker who has recently decided to leave the church after some thirty-four years in the organization.

Wright does not limit his reporting to Haggis's story though.  Instead, he digs into the history of the religion, the myths surrounding its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and layer upon layer of hypocrisy and deception.

Again and again, we read stories of Scientologists being assaulted by David Miscavige, the head of the organization.  We also learn about people held in confinement for years on the Gold Base, the headquarters of the Sea Org, the militant branch of the faith (where teenagers sign billion-year contracts to work for slave wages).

Much of what Wright reveals about Scientology is deeply bizarre, even to someone who has seen the episode of South Park where Scientology is eviscerated.  The intergalactic cosmology of the faith is ridiculous, but even stranger is the willingness of educated, talented people, to buy in to this stuff.  At the same time though, Wright makes some of the tenets of the faith, such as the way people can apply Scientology to disagreements and debates, fully credible.

I'm sure that the New Yorker is going to receive a lot of flack from the Church for printing this article, but I feel that in addition to being a stunning piece of reportage, it is important to expose this 'faith' for the cult that it is.

Taddle Creek #25

I love how I usually get a new issue of Taddle Creek around the time I always have a week off, so I'm able to devote enough time to get through the magazine in just a few sittings.

This issue doesn't have a unifying focus to it like last issue's 'Out of Towner' theme, but it is full of some good stuff.  Here's what I liked or found interesting this time around:

Kelly Ward's 'Stop Loss' is an interesting story about a woman who likes to hang out at a casino playing the slots.  She's hooked up with a guy named Dodds, who has a system, and is a full-time slot player.  This story encapsulates all the sadness that I feel would come with spending a lot of time at a casino.

Ethan Rilly provides a short comic called 'Ex Montreal'.  Rilly is the author of the comic Pope Hats, which I enjoyed a lot, but have never seen a second issue of (it's been a year and a half).  The comic in this magazine has a woman breaking into her old apartment in Montreal to have a look around.  It's good stuff.

'Our Many Splendoured Humanity', by Jessica Westhead, is an examination of neighbourly obligation, as seen through the prism of political correctness.  It's well written and amusing.

I was surprised to see an interview with Dave Lapp, the cartoonist behind Drop-In and Children of the Atom by Peter Birkemoe, the owner of the comic store I shop at.  Lapp talks about his 'Atom' work, and the way in which it helped him work through a difficult period in his personal life.  Lapp also has another installment of his 'People Around Here' strip in this magazine.  I try to like this guy's work, but somehow it always manages to annoy me.

One thing that's cool about Taddle Creek is the way they've started to run short articles and pieces about forgotten corners or aspects of the city.  Lauren Kirshner has a loving piece about the Sylvan, an abandoned low-rise apartment building in Dufferin Grove that, despite landmark status, is languishing under ownership of developers that want to turn it into condos.  There are some lovely photos accompanying this article, but I would have loved to see a few more.  Likewise, Conan Tobias has a short piece about horse fountains in Saint John.

There's a small portfolio of pieces by Blair McLean, a local artist who burns his images into wood.  There is also a short story by Stuart Ross.

The last story in the magazine is probably the best one.  It's by Amy Jones, and it chronicles the build up to and aftermath of the narrator's one-night stand with the headliner of a small-time rock and roll band.

This is always a worthy magazine to pick up.  I'm looking forward to the next one.

Youngthing

by Nuruddin Farah

I've never read or heard of Nuruddin Farah before.  From what I've gathered, he's a Somali novelist who has written a number of books.

This short story (with a nice illustration from Emmanuel Guibert), is set in contemporary Mogadishu, and concerns Youngthing, a recruit into the Shabab, the militant wing of the Union of Islamic Courts.  Youngthing failed as a suicide bombing candidate, and has instead been given the task of securing a house for the group to use against an expected intervention of Ethiopian troops.

Being uneducated and not very knowledgeable, Youngthing occupies the wrong house, which is already inhabited by an old man named Dhoorre, who is no friend to the movement.  When Youngthing's three bosses arrive, there is trouble waiting for just about everyone.

Farah's writing is nice.  He tells the tale in a straightforward way, but keeps shifting the narrator's perspective from one character to another, so we are given the fullest picture.  There are, perhaps, a few too many passages that exist simply to update the casual reader on what is going on in Somalia, but I suppose they are necessary.  I am interested in checking out more from this writer.

A Good Death

by William T. Vollmann

Vollmann's father died recently, and his plans to avail himself of Switzerland's liberal assisted-suicide laws were foiled by happenstance.  This led Vollmann to examine his (and many other peoples') beliefs about death, and the degree to which we should be able to influence when that inevitable event takes place.

In typical Vollmann fashion, he goes about his investigation in an equally exhaustive and scattershot way.  He interviews the local coroner, doctors, and representatives of various religions.  He goes to a funeral home in Mexico, and speaks to old people in poor rural villages.

The answers he receives vary a great deal, and lead to many interesting ruminations on the nature of faith itself, and how different the United States is compared to Europe.  This is a very reserved and subdued version of Vollmann's usual prose, without the free association I've come to expect in his journalism.  The subject matter is something that many of us would rather avoid, but I think reminders like this have their place.

This is both a very personal, and universally relevant article.

The Warm Fuzzies

by Chris Adrian

The last of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" summer fiction series is one of the best stories of the last little while.

Adrian's story is all about Molly, one member of the Carter Family Band and, by definition, the Carter family, a large tribe of home-schooled Partridge Family wannabes, who sing and talk about Jesus on small tours of mega-churches.

Molly's parents almost always add one foster child, him or herself always black, to the mix.  Most of these foster children do not last long; the rest of the Carters are rarely able to remember them or note their passage.

When the story begins, Molly finds herself going through a number of changes.  She's developed a hard, cynical, and mean voice in her head which is able to see her father's sad and tyrannical idealism for what it is, just as she can see through the bitchy machinations of her older sister.  When Peabo, the latest foster arrival, comes on the scene, Molly finds him fascinating.  She begins to hold strange conversations with him through their tambourines (their instruments in the family's songs), and their relationship starts to become a little more than that of foster child and sister.

The story is quite amusing as it gives us a glimpse into the Carter family, with their visits to a church where every member of the family ends up speaking in tongues, to their elaborate family prayer rituals.  Adrian is non-judgmental in his writing, which makes his send-up of the family all the funnier.  Highly recommended.

On the Prison Highway

by Ian Frazier

Since I was little, I've found myself drawn to abandoned places.  It's hard for me to drive past run-down and empty houses on the highway, without wanting to explore.  I would love to go to a place like Detroit, just to climb through some of the buildings there, except fear for my safety keeps me from doing it.  As a teen, my friends and I frequently explored a closed brickworks and quarry (since revitalized as a farmer's market and green-living experiment).

So, there's a lot I can relate to in Ian Frazier's latest article on his journeys in Siberia (there was a two-part article published about a year ago), this time specifically hunting for abandoned lagers, or what we would refer to in the West as Gulags.

He does come across one, and his descriptions of it are lovely, sad, and very evocative of a horrible period of Russian history.  He follows his experience with a description of the growing popularity or nostalgia for Stalin among modern Russians, a strange phenomenon.

What I think attracts me to the idea of traveling through sites like the one he found, is that they are not sanitized through the act of historical interpretation.  He imagines the site turned into a museum, but I feel like that would cause me to lose all interest in it.  I have no desire to visit a place like Auschwitz, Choeung Ek, or that church in Rwanda with all the skulls, as they have been put on display, no matter how much they were also left in their original state.  But to wander through an abandoned lager, covered in snow, and with no one around, one would feel the weight of the history of the place in a much more visceral way.  I envy Frazier the experience.

Apparently, he has a book being released soon about these trips.  I should probably check that out.

Taddle Creek

Summer Number 2010

It's always a treat when a new issue of Taddle Creek, the Toronto literary magazine, comes out.  This summer, the people at the magazine did something a little different, breaking their injunction against non-Torontonian contributors, and decided to make an 'Out of Towner' edition, featuring a variety of work from places other than Toronto.

There is strong fiction by Michael Christie ('The Quiet' is about a teenage car thief),  Danielle Egan ('Strange Attractors' tells of a really bad trip a couple makes to the woman's parents' house, and the bizarre events that follow), and David Ross (who actually lives in Toronto).

There is a section of photographs depicting Saint John, New Brunswick in the sixties, before urban renewal made some drastic changes, and a cool profile of novelist Lee Henderson.  In addition to the usual comic page by Dave Lapp, there are comics by Jason Turner and David Collier.

My favourite part of the magazine was a series of short essays by Sarah Gilbert about the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal.  Gilbert lives in the area, and has been writing about the people that make up this community, which is in the early stages of gentrifying.  She does a terrific job of portraying people from different ends of the gentrification spectrum.  We read about the owner of Maple Leaf Hat and Cap, a company that has been there since 1930; the artist who has worked to protect neighbourhood trees from bicycle lock damage by planting around them; a recently deceased gardener who grew lemons, olives, and grapes in his backyard (and was a fixture of the community); and about the woman who has turned a vacant lot into an example of land art.  These profiles are quick yet detailed, and when read together, really give a sense of the place.

There's some other stuff in this magazine too, but that's what I liked about it.

The Dredgeman's Revelation

by Karen Russell

The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 slate of summer reading continues with this excellent short story by Karen Russell, author of a book of short stories and an upcoming novel. 

This story covers the months spent by Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss on a dredging operation in the Florida swamps in 1934.  Louis was 'born dead', and adopted into a farm family which mistreated him horribly before he fled at the age of seventeen, ending up in the Florida swamps and getting steady work at the height of the Depression.

Louis is an interesting character.  While everyone he works with hates the smell, bugs, and remoteness of the swamp, he finds endless joy in the landscape, and in the company of these rough and hard men.  Russell's prose is straight-forward and avoids overemphasizing the lifestyle; these are largely quiet people, and that comes through in the writing.

I see that Russell's other books are also set in the Florida swamps, and I'd be curious to read more of them.

Emptying the Skies

by Jonathan Franzen

I don't think of Jonathan Franzen as a journalist; in my mind, he's strictly a novelist, and so I was surprised to see him writing a piece about, of all things, the illegal songbird poaching industry of Mediterranean members of the European Union (I use this awkward description because it seems strange to refer to Cyprus and Malta as Europe).

In this lengthy article, Franzen accompanies members of the Committee Against Bird Slaughter as they tear up lime stick traps in the Cypriot countryside, wanders through the almost lifeless regions of Malta, and explores the backwoods (and backwards) regions of Italy.  I had never thought of songbirds as being an expensive meat (called ambelopoulia in Cyprus), but apparently this is an industry worth billions of Euros a year.

Franzen's article is clear and well-written.  He got attacked in Cyprus, although he ran while other members of his group got beaten up.  He also sampled the forbidden food, although to his credit, it brought forth more guilt than anything else.

This was an interesting article, portraying the EU in a different light than one normally sees.  You can detect a little bit of schadenfreude in Franzen's comment about how usually it is the European lecturing the American about ecological excess, but that little potshot can be forgiven, as this article helps raise awareness of this issue.

Also, I want to point out the lovely Adrian Tomine cover to this week's issue.

Be On Your Way

by Gideon Lewis-Krause

This was one of those news magazine articles that I start reading, with the expectation that I won't get more than a couple of pages before I skip over it and move on to the rest.  The prosaic landscape photos and lead-in copy about a pilgrimage being a 'life-changing experience' didn't grab me, but I've been having a lot of luck reading the San Francisco Panorama - the McSweeney's newspaper one-off, so I figured I'd give it a try.  I found the article, which clocks in at nineteen oversized magazine pages (not counting full-page photos), accompanied by a sidebar article that is another five pages, to be riveting.

Apparently, since medieval times, people have been walking the Camino de Santiago, an almost 800 kilometre (500 miles) journey across Spain, ending off at Santiago.  The author was invited by his friend (and author of the sidebar) Tom Bissell, to accompany him on the trip, which he was undertaking as part of his research for a book on the apostles.  Neither pilgrim has any religious leanings, and so the trip was more of an exercise in endurance and novelty.

Endurance is what it took.  Walking 20 - 30 kilometres a day can be very taxing, as Bissell quickly learned when his new hiking boots skinned his heels of all flesh.  Lewis-Krause writes of the journey, with it's endless hiking and nights in noisy, crowded albergues (think monastic hostel), in a series of diary-like entries, demarcating the events of each day in linear fashion.  The reader is able to see the two go through many different levels of despair and enjoyment, and gets to meet with them the other pilgrims on the journey.

The profiles that Lewis-Krause writes of his fellow travelers became the parts of the article that I read most eagerly, as I tried to figure out what kind of person would do something like this.  Of course, by the end of the article, I started to wonder if it was something I could survive.

The writing in this article is unfailingly honest, and frequently very funny.  The contempt that our two heroes had for people more fit than them was only overshadowed by their growing hatred of John Brierley, the man who wrote the guidebook they were consulting, and his tendency to wax poetic in a most irritating fashion.

At its core, this is a long piece of writing about enduring friendship, and I found it touching.