Archive for May, 2010

The story now is not of blustery explosion but of a beautiful desolation caused by veritable storm fronts of billowing ash. Ash everywhere. In my socks. In David’s eyes. In the air filter of our rental car. Black and deceptively gorgeous, the ash, when airborne, brought visibility on roads down to near zero and is going to make me blow black snot for some time to come.

Flying over Greenland on a fight to Europe: not unusual. Not unusual, even, to see curious, remote, ice-scarred landscapes. But I was looking at this scene through my three windows in seat 2F (I’m convinced: best seat on the entire plane, an IcelandAir 757W) for some time before something made my scalp feel kind of funny.

It never got dark on our flight. We skirted the very edge of the curved track of sunlight across the planet. These mountains slipped below us at a time difficult to pinpoint, but it must have been something around three in the morning locally. OK, so picture this.

I was sitting on the starboard side of a plane flying roughly east. Thus, I was looking out of a window on the right side of the aircraft: looking south. Note the direction of the shadows! I’d been awake a long time and I was confused and time was loopy, but I was pretty sure of the various cardinal directions. The sun was coming from the north. How could that be?

David, slumming it back in 17F, was noticing the same thing. He was busy discussing the vagaries of BitTorrent with his young, Norwegian seatmates. One of them, Wilhelm (the first Wilhelm I’ve ever heard of who wasn’t also a Kaiser), was taking five iPads back to the mother country. They were all spellbound.

Later, David and I put our heads together and figured it out. We were far enough north that the sun, on the other side of the planet, was spilling over the top of the North Pole.

Union Station (Amtrak), Portland, Ore., May 26 Everything has started lopsided, with the little tragedies and surges that underly the best and the worst journeys we take. Is David’s lost wallet an Ill omen or a charm? David doesn’t lose wallets. But his is most certainly missing, and now he is missing; I am sitting [...]

Using tips from veteran flight attendant blogger Heather Poole (@heather_poole) as outlined in The New York Times, along with a few tricks I kind of made up as I went along, I pulled off what I think is a significant coup: I am going to travel around Europe, for nearly a month, through several countries, with nothing but a carry-on and a shoulder bag.

Emerging, slowly, from the kind of sensual shock a month in Europe can do to a visually- and culturally-obsessed human like myself. Iceland, Ireland, France, England.

Trying to capture what I can and show it to you. It might be dull, but I hope it will be occasionally pretty. Join me?

See all Europe 2010 items

Everything in the past month or so has been intensely back-to-back. Work (invigorating but consuming), travel (invigorating but consuming), human companionship and family obligations (invigorating but consuming; think “cooking for 12″ and you’ll get the idea). I just got back from Chicago, a 4-day weekend with my mom and sister as part of celebrating Mom’s 60th birthday (back in January). It was a totally great way to spend Mother’s Day.

Weather, however, was a bit on the grim side. This shot was taken toward duskiness from the 96th floor of the Hancock Tower. I am always amazed by one singular thing in the Midwest: the water in Lake Michigan is always so jewel-toned and breathtaking.

I chose not to correct for the window reflection in the top right; that’s mostly laziness.

Found a brief breath of free time to go out to the (Columbia River) Gorge this weekend to see some friends at their very, very nifty place in Lyle, Washington. Blustery and dramatic weather. Wildflowers. It was a good time. Except, perhaps, for poor John, who had to endure such torture!

Brady Udall is trying to stay out of the way. His new novel is about a Fundamentalist paterfamilias with 28 kids and 4 wives, naively blundering into motley hijinx and hatching adolescent longings for the boss’ wife, backing himself into a web of lies and an imminent family showdown that builds up for most of the book’s nearly 600 pages.

In a world with so many characters and so much potential for emotional damage, Udall steers the narrative ship by removing himself from the thread: the momentum of the whirling plot creates its own little galaxy and he remains predominantly hands-off with his three main narrators (Golden, the patriarch; Rusty, the uncharismatic and totally sympathetic, ignored kid; Trish, the youngest and most, frankly, dull of the wives).

Of course, this is fiction, so beyond noting the naturalistic style of writing, claiming that Udall is not present is fallacious. But what he bends backwards to do, with eerie success, is the avoidance of even the literary equivalent of an subtle eyebrow raising: never once does the remotest sense of moral judgment leak into the book that isn’t a product of a specific character’s outlook.