Sheltering Sky (1949) is a story about two Americans who escape from a life tied to expectations. Port and Kit are a married couple who will set off to reconcile an ailing love in the pale shadow of an unforgiving desert. These are Bowles’ two young travelers who will succumb to the siren-song of a distant adventure for its promise of renewal and rebirth:

Before I was twenty, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth… Now you know it’s not like that. It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs taste wonderful, and then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then you’re conscious of the bitter taste.

Like Port and Kit — the author Paul and his wife Jane were two independent, self-guided individuals whose lives overlapped. Married, but intimate with partners of the same-sex, they lived side-by-side. They too had extricated themselves from America and traveled through Africa to boil down life to its bare essentials:

How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: “Your life is so simple.” “Your life seems always to go in a straight line.” Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach. He felt that what they really meant to say was: “You have chosen the easiest terrain.” But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way — encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance — that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified.

Port and Kit are the two entirely unassuming and strangely naive characters Bowles will drive deep into the Sahara to wager a bet with nature: can they be reconciled amid that terrible heat?

Departing from Tangier, Port and Kit are still laden with the trappings of the America they have left behind — hand bags and travel chests, mosquito nests and bug repellent — and comically, they lug their luggage with them everywhere they go. Kit unpacks her things and sets them up in her room, just to feel as if she had arrived. Had Port led their adventure today, they’d be the ones outfitted with 80 liter backpacks and Lonely Planet guides for Morocco, Algeria and the Sahara, because you never know when you’ll need a hotel recommendation in the desert.

That question familiar to travelers — do we stay or do we go? — Port and Kit split. Port says yes when Kit says no. Had Port said no, Kit would have said yes. They are accustomed to disagreeing about trivial matters and agreeing about profound ones.

The trip is not without consequence. Port succumbs to diptheria. Kit has a mental breakdown and finds herself the subdued wife of an Arab desert herder. The nomad’s three other wives aren’t jealous, nor would they be, Bowles writes, even if they found out that this new arrival disguised to look like a man is the soon-to-be fourth wife. The cultural customs in the Sahara are different from what she might expect, had she ever expected to end up the wife of a nomadic herder.

In what is the book’s well-troweled and concrete moment, Port describes death as piercing the fine fabric of the sheltering sky. Few would say the sky protects. There is of course the snow, rain and sleet. Arguably, the blue orb above does little to block that oppressive, penetrating Sahara sun. The sky is anything but impermeable, opaque and hard-tack. Why then does Bowles use that word? In describing the sky as shelter, Bowles is alluding to the a-materialist philosophy. To Bowles, and like-minded men, the less you have, the more nature becomes. The sky is shelter abent a roof. Only a man with a sympathetic view of humanity would describe the sky this way.

Donald Miller, in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, writes about a family who can’t afford a house along a lake, so they buy the lakefront, and for two years, live happily in tents along the shore. To these happy-go-lucky few, the sky has the quality of protectress. Hemingway, for all his love of Africa, was happy to shelter beneath a canvas tent so to speak; his sympathies never extended to the natives.

If Paul Bowles chose to excise what he thought was excess — the cars, the babies — he did also with the kind of possessions coveted by creative types: book contracts, literary awards, and close relationships. Bowles lived far away from the New York literary society of his upbringing. (He trained with Aaron Copland and produced a great deal of music). After fifty years, he had written only four novels, all of them by 1966, and not one after the death of his wife in 1973.

The other American who garnered a reputation as a travel writer, Paul Theroux, described Bowles in a 2010 interview with The Atlantic as a man who was able to live and write (and smoke dope) only because he wrote for Holiday, the great old travel magazine. Bowles maintained a permanent address, the de-facto gathering spot for itinerant writers and playwrights, and later in life, strangers who wanted to interview him.

*Process* gives Sheltering Sky 7.5 out of 10. There are characters whose treatment could have been rounded out. Tunner, Port’s tag-along friend from New York, could have had a more central role. Port’s life-to-death journey through the Sahara might could have been described through the eyes of a man who knows Port’s history. Tunner has a filial attachment to the protagonist. It’s a shame Port has to die alone. His friend could have guided him through the fine fabric of the sheltering sky.

Tragically, those who take possession of things lightly can mistakenly do the same with friends. Since Tunner is the one most attached to their friendship, he alone will grieve the loss of the American couple who naively set out to let the desert teach them about human belonging.

I wanted the Ondaatje Road: the road that leads nowhere.

Telling for an author who confesses to begin a book with no sure sense of where it’s headed. In Ondaajte’s hands, a novel is more like a child’s kaleidescope than a traveling caravan. Both brim with detail and are perpetually in motion. Both are candied invitations for the curious to have a look inside. But only one leads anywhere. The other will only be rotated, and no two observers will agree on what has come into focus.

Ondaajte is a poet. Among his thirteen books of poetry, many were published prior to his debut novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987). Ondaajte is one of the few writers I can read mid-paragraph and be in no hurry for context. Master of writing as a plastic art, done by hand, *Process* gives him 8 out of 10.

Ondaajte’s work rests upon a childhood of intrigue in Sri Lanka, formerly a British colony. Ondaajte tells the story of the day his Father held up a train with his pistol, and demanded the conductor go back and forth just to please his whim. One can imagine the young poet, clinging to his bookbag, legs not reaching the floor, catching the stares of Sri-Lankans of a darker skin and bleaker prospects. That his father carried a pistol at all, and that he was so brazen as to delay a passenger train, says something about the place the family occupied in Sri-Lankan society:

The brushing of teeth, since he was a child, has always been for him an outdoor activity.

Such is the observation one would settle on through the window of a train, and carry with them as in their bookbag. The young Michael continued his schooling in England, and later settled in Canada among Toronto’s literati, far from a war-torn homeland.

He co-founded Brick, a magazine, and moved in and out of academia, ostensibly to support a family, and likely for the human contact by which a poet thrives. His is a rich, aesthetic and private interior life. As a poet is only at home in his native tongue, Ondaajte doesn’t so much write as he word-paints with English, a sensuous panoply derived from the minutiae of human observation. His African wonderpiece stands out.

The English Patient (1992) — according to Ondaajte — had its genesis in the lone image of a man falling out of the sky in the Sahara. Why did the plane crash? What happened to the pilot? All those things had to be uncovered or unearthed.

I fell burning into the desert. The leather helmet on my head in flames. They strapped me onto a cradle, a carass boat. I had broken the spareness of the desert.

Ondaajte is like his major character Caravaggio, a thief whose namesake is a nod to the Renaissance painter of muscled and earth-bound men. Look into Carravaggio’s paintings and you’ll find Ondjaate’s aesthetic — raw, untrammeled, passionate, dependent on human frailty — a curled toe, a lost finger, the inconsolate wale of a grief-stricken mother.

I picture Ondaajte as I picture Carravaggio — sitting in the penumbra of setting sun, alone beneath a plane tree, turning over a sprig of a rapeseed in a bruised palm. As the thief knows, the search is a risky one. Narrative may fall flat if it’s not determined in advance. Caravaggio loses his fingers when he’s caught stealing back a snapshot someone took of him. Ondaajte is on a search too, so it comes as no surprise that he lived in the Bellagio, along Lake Cuomo, not distant from the fictitious setting inThe English Patient. In all likelihood, he turned back flower heads.

Anil’s Ghost (2000) returns Ondaajte to his native homeland. The title character is a forensic pathologist. It’s her job to identify decaying corpses, while not losing her own identity amid traps of corruption, deceipt and death. As in the book, Sri-Lanka has been embroiled in a bloody, protracted civil war. His most recent work, Divisadero (2007), struggles to offer a premise, much less a central, unifying narrative.

Since the publication of The English Patient, Ondaajte’s novels show progressive signs of uncertainty. He seems to have given up on the novel as a valid genre for his search. It seems pure narrative is just not important to him. His first love, as a poet, has been language. But Ondaajte should know better. It’s the sensuous, erotic, and ephemeral experience a reader pines for — words are mere tools in the creation.

Mr. Ondaajte, I tip my hat to you, having first read you along a lone road in Catalonia, in a misted valley in Provence, and bedded in the Tuscan hill country. I carried your work in my saddle bags. Like Herodotus, I was a young traveler with a few pages of parchment. That  summer I lay at the side of a woman who would one day be my wife. I read you to her, before I won her to me. You were our haunted villa.

A climbing gym is a tough business. Open one in America, and you won’t be around for long. At first glance, it’s a trendy offer — urbane, physical, social and quirky. But a climbing gym is a poor business because of weaknesses in the revenue model.

For a business to work, income has to exceed expenses. For a climbing gym, sources of income include monthly membership fees, sales of chalk bags and shoes, and one-off entrance fees for day climbers. Expenses include rent, utilities, insurance, salaries and maintenance — such as for rock-features, plywood and ropes. Compared to a conventional gym these  expenses are similar. The difference is on the income side of the equation.

Climbing walls is a strenuous activity, best suited for bodies under 30. But young-adults have low discretionary income and can be scared off by long-term contracts. They will pay to climb, but occasionally, and only the door-fee. Thinking back to the climbing gym in my city, to get around these income hurdles the owner targeted groups, such as youth clubs or church organizations, because groups pay well and in advance.

Ceiling heights of 25-50 feet are common, so usually climbing gyms are built in warehouses. Tall, open and inexpensive space are tough to find, but not impossible. Old factories and empty buildings are usually in depressed neighborhoods, which might scare away car-pooling parents.

But more than anything, it’s certain cultural norms that make a climbing gym a tough sell. Americans are independent by nature and like to work-out on their own, usually on a fixed schedule. They will pay to go spinning, attend pilates, or jump-kick in groups, but most prefer a fixed schedule to build routine into their exercise. Climbing is not an organized activity. It requires a great deal of self motivation and coordination among at least two people — one to climb, the other to secure their partner’s safety. So most potential clients are eliminated because they won’t have a partner.

The climbing gyms I went to were dreamy, spacious places; order and predictability gave way to a freedom of movement in a vertical plane. These features appeal to adolescents, but adults are more demanding. Looking back on those gyms, now they seem worn-down, marginal places, impossible to keep clean. Climbing walls can still be found in student centers and retail outlets, but self-sufficient climbing gyms are a rarity.

One way a climbing gym could adapt to the cultural norms in America would be to rent space from an existing gym, such as in a converted raquetball or squash court. Patrons could sign up for one hour time slots, advertised as “climbing to cross-train” or “vertical stress-relief”, and target professional men and women, from ages 25-50. To cater to the well-heeled professional, the walls should be white (and so should the shoes.) The “rock-holds” should be placed in an ordered pattern to promote repetition. The safety system should be modernized to do away with the need for a partner. A “retracting-pulley” could take in rope as the climber ascended “tension-assisted”, meaning weaker climbers would be helped out.

Group classes could improve participation. The wall could be completed in a numbered circuit to give a sense of finish, redesigned into a electrifying pulse-pounding “circus-de-soleil” type of experience that allows a climber to move gracefully in 3 dimensions and command a premium from clients looking to build “perceived risk” into their workout. It could be done to music, although at present, a climber needs to communicate with their partner.

In Poland, a climbing gym might fare better. Poles tend to workout in pairs. They are leaner and walk a lot, which keeps their joints flexible. Poles are less interested in getting in a workout in and more interested in the social dimension of exercise. Here’s an example of how a business could be adapted to the cultural preferences of Poles. Children receive a great deal of attention and resources. But retails shops for kids are non-existent. The concept of a “baby shop” is still new.

An “Ikea for kids” ages 0-5 would do well in Poland. It could be part retail: strollers, diapers, baby food, and cribs; and part services: play classes, baby-sitting and kindergarten. Just as Ikea integrated shopping and eating to attract working couples who would otherwise have to cook, mothers can drop their kids off at nine and return at three to buy diapers, formula, toys, and books. The added-value is in making the drop off/pick up time more flexible than in an ordinary nursery.

I give this example as just one way in which a business could adapt to cultural norms. A climbing gym is fun, but it’s not a good business. Trends come and go, and climbing seems to be on the out, but escaping from the bounds of gravity could be rehabilitated by a savvy entrepreneur who finds a way to convince a Mom post-partum to walk up walls.

]]> http://parkersnyder.com/2010/05/02/innovation-climbing-and-babies/feed/ 1 http://parkersnyder.com/2010/04/21/her-pen-his-phalanx/ http://parkersnyder.com/2010/04/21/her-pen-his-phalanx/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:57:24 +0000 Parker http://parkersnyder.com/?p=134 Dorota Maslowska was just a baby when she published her debut novel, but a baby with a foul mouth and searing tongue, ebullient and unashamed. At the center of Snow White, Russian Red is her protagonist Nails, whose mother imports cheap cigarettes and whose brother hides away speed in the snack closet. Both potentially taming influences are absent from the novel during the weekend of its duration. The protagonist is on his own.

At the start, Nails has just tossed away his girlfriend, and we encounter him in a bar. He’s trying to assuage his grief with speed. From this point onward, Maslowska will take us on a protracted march through his turbulent mind on a drug-induced clown parade. Nails will suck down speed, violate and intoxicate, even urinate on a pair of canaries for no reason. In the plot point that seals his fate, he steals a pair of walkie-talkies from McDonalds.

The actions of Maslowska’s protagonist are inferred as much as described, and it’s hard to know what Nails is really doing. By the end of the novel, we’ll learn there is no Nails, just Maslowska playing puppet master with a protagonist by that name. After two days, he’ll have disintegrated and only she will remain.

In the novel’s most well articulated and penetrating  sequence, Nails will stick his cock in a sleeping virgin on the eve of the Assumption — August 15, 2002 — a day that’s celebrated because Mary is deemed too holy to suffer the grave. A day of longstanding tradition, Maslowska’s fellow countrymen will parade  red and white flags in a swell of national piety for the Madonna, and young people her age will walk halfway across Poland to visit the Black Madonna shrine at  Czestochowa.

The holy Mother is a religious symbol and a patriotic one, believed to have sustained the nation through various occupations and divisions by the Prussians, Germans and Russians. Honoring her is an act infused with patriotic zeal. Having the protagonist decimate a virgin on such an occasion is a way of rejecting the values of conservative patriotism.

The novel’s recurrent symbol is a plastic “Sztorm” pen, the plastic outer-casing through which Nails inhales speed. It’s no wonder she asks, in a question posed to reader, “Was the pen phalanx?” There is no Nails, just Maslowska rubbing her thighs on his teenage rope, a little shy and a bit angry, trying to give form to the underworld of men. The author is trying to resolve the shear animal in man with her fascination for his sex. Her pen is his phalanx in hand.

Maslowska is good at unwinding tension under the cover of novel to tell us what she really thinks of a certain track-suited, head-shaved, thoroughly Polish male. (Not much.) To the novel’s detriment, Maslowska can be a writer writing about the process of becoming a writer, which will be lost on readers who are not writers.

Maslowska injects herself into the novel twice. At first just in passing reference and later to confront her protagonist in the flesh. This time she’s a stenographer in a police station typing up Nail’s statement. There she’s subjected to the crass humiliation of her hero, though curiously, Nails has desecrated every female in the book but has no aggression toward her.

Here I find the act of self-insertion a reminder that she’s a young artist experimenting with words. There’s also an artist’s imposition going on here — and Maslowska is saying it takes the author to end the protracted explosions of her enfant terible. She’ll have to enter the text in person to do it. Of course, it’s convenient to write yourself in as the sympathetic centerpiece of an unsympathetic hero. (He is after all your hero. You created him). But is the mercy deserved?

*Process* gives it 6 out of 10 for what critics have been quick to point out: she’s a writer unconscious of being observed. Even though Maslowska’s skin-headed hero is both xenophobic and unnerving, as a running metaphor for her own fragmented experiences of youth, he works.

***

A book review of Snow White & Russian Red, 2005, by Dorota Maslowska, translated by Benjamin Paloff, [Wojna polska-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwony]

96

The Vistula flows backward today
From the shoreline of Gdansk
To the watershed of the Carpathian
Even her banks are weeping

For sorrow is a flooded field
For whom springtime will not come
The early shoots of rye retreat
Beneath the rising waters

Justice is the asking question
The why? The how? Why us?
In the mouths of half-mast fathers
And mothers with bleary eyes

Red & White today black-banded
What’s lofty rises half its height
Though unified in sorrow stand
Her mass of grieving mourners

Too early for the words to mean
But spring-time seems to say
Should ninety-six have to perish
May death bridge old divides

Be comforted, Polska, to know
The Eagle is not alone, nor will be
For as She stands for freedom
For freedom stands the world

***

Article on Lech Kaczynski from The Economist
Article I co-authored with Wojciech Kosc for Transitions Online
(Contact me for full text)

The main duty of the novelist is to write another one. Is that right?

Cannery Row (1945) is the story of a wayward,  wine-drinking vagabond, who takes up residence in the discarded hulk of a boiler, and the generous, learned Doctor, who attends to the sick in their homes. Steinbeck’s descriptions of the old wharf town left an indelible impression. At 20, I vowed that I’d go one day to California and hunt down Steinbeck’s old haunts. I’d be the casual traveler in his novel.

Standing on the doorstep five years later, I knocked on the door of Steinbeck’s old tenement house. The door was locked, but a kind woman saw me looking into the window, so she invited me inside. We spoke at length about Monterrey Bay and how the place had informed his social sensibilities.  She gave me a copy of his letters — Journal of a Novel: East of Eden (1969). I promised I’d study his work.

John Steinbeck’s literary success wasn’t a given He was born to middle class German and Irish ancestry, on the Pacific Coast, some distance removed from the agricultural valley that pinned the place setting in Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937). During the summers he’d till earth and plow fields and pick tomatoes, before enrolling in Stanford which he left without a degree. He moved to New York to make it there in literary society. He came back empty-handed.

Steinbeck was a war reporter–in both WWII and Vietnam. By the time of the conflict on the Vietnamese peninsula his political viewes had changed. Some say he turned his back on social liberal principles. To my mind, they had evolved to see the excesses of communism as a great threat to liberty. For supporting the war, he was known as a hawk to his contemporaries. Late in middle age, he traveled across America with his poodle named Charley. Some said he was setting out to dicover America. He wasn’t. He was going to tell it goodbye. For a life-long smoker, A stroke at 59 had heightened his sense of mortality. He’d write East of Eden (1952) for his sons, so they’d know where they come from and what they had meant to him.

A Master is in for the long haul — he published screen plays and novels at length during a publishing history of fifty years. To seek perspectives external to America, he traveled abroad to Mexico and the Soviet Union. About the latter he wrote A Russian Journal (1948). When he accepted the Nobel Prize he’d say, “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” This faith in mankind’s perpetual self-improvement is a virtue of a Master.

The controversy he stoked with businessmen and bankers over the publication of Grapes of Wrath was more than compensated by the equality of assignment he gave to each in his society:

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

*Process* begins a series on “10 Masters of the Novel,” to shed a glimmer of light on that delicious quandary–What makes a master? A good writer may be adept, specific, intelligent, rich, lyrical, pared back, transparent, acessible and so on. But this is the writing. What about the writer? Masters have what aspects of character in common? A Master perseveres, measures time in decades and progress in terms of moral development. In reviewing the Top Ten Masters of the Novel, these attributes seem to be among them all:

1. originality

2. humility

3. courage

ORIGINALITY - call it reason, insight or experience. It’s the capacity to say things new. Think of Leo Tolstoy’s capacity for observing human nature, or Ernest Hemingway’s capacity for observational detail. Some writers synthesize information–Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America or Thomas Mann in his novels of intellectual adventure such as The Magic Mountain. Masters seeks new angles, a bold style or curiosity in form. But there are limits to newness. The Masters pay heed to their predecessors, which leads to the next attribute of their character.

HUMILITY - modesty, moderation or self-control. The perennial novelist is a hard drinking, womanizer, or in the case of female writers, a passionate feminist. Is that correct? According to Flaubert’s admonition: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work,” a Master is concerned first with his own character to imbue his work with moral authority.  The masters eschews publicity and embrace independence. They give due to their predecessors and praise their contemporaries. They don’t retreat from society like JD Salinger but are rather like David Eggers, who turned quick fame into a literary society and published the work of other young writers. The Masters heed Cicero’s advice to be “a good man yourself and then seek others like you.”  The master has a gentle humility and a quiet self-deprecation, especially in old age, like the loquacious Samuel Clemens. Humility makes a small man great, which leads to number the next attribute of character.

COURAGE - the masters take risks and they fail often. In contrast to painters whose entire corpus could be surveyed in ten minutes from a large coffee table book, very little of what a writer produces will ever be read. Think of your favorite writer. What percentage have you seen? Think of all the notes, letters, corrections, drafts, and so on a writer puts to paper. Since so little will ever be read, Masters must persevere and press forward. Some are attacked, or killed for their ideas. The moral fiber of the Argentinian Rudolpho Walsh, or the publishing consistency of a young William Styron, or the raw unadulterated struggle of Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote Master and Margarita from memory after it burned, these are what the Masters have in common

“Top Ten Masters of the Novel” will be released once a month. When complete they will be collected on one page. They are selected in advance, so honorable mention can go to James Joyce, for linguistic invention, Umberto Eco for fiction as a platform for sholastic discussion, and Willie Collins for writing novels that freely cross genre.  The list is my own and reflects a preference for writers who 1. like to travel 2. identify as journalists 3. seek the truth 4. are quite singular and 5. who span language and culture.

IN DESCENDING RANK ORDER:

George Orwell, who died at 46, was best known for Animal Farm,  a political fable about a group of forward-thinking animals who wrest control of the farm from their owner.  Orwell’s novella (28,000 words) was rejected by three publishers because the Soviet Russia he wished implicitly to criticize was still as yet a British ally.

Old Major–a prize-winning boar–has a dream revealing a future in which animals have taken over the farm from their relentless taskmaster Mr. Jones. The ideologue Old Major inspires the others to revolution with a sing-song that goes:

Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland/ Riches more than mind can picture/ Wheat and barley oats and hay/ Shall be ours upon that day

Old Major dies but his battle message is picked up by Snowball and Napoleon, two pigs. Into the furry ears of the rabbits and the lazy minds of woolly sheep they foment their ideas about revolution. Not long after the  takeover, Napoleon usurps power from Snowball, as the heart of a pig is easily corrupted.

The farm’s various calamities are attributed to Snowball. He’s scapegoated for the failed windmill project and disparaged of the war wounds other pigs will claims were never really earned. Later Snowball will be written out of the revolution’s history entirely. In the “Battle of the Cowshed,” one pig will say, Snowball was really just an enemy spy.

The animals white wash seven commandments on the black tar of a nearby barn to shore up the moral foundations of their new society. These few and noble ideals are soon disregarded–the commandment, “No animal shall kill another animal” is changed to read, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.” Thus a select groups of pigs and their gang of guard dogs pave the path for the occasional bloodletting of the weaker animals.

At the start, they made a promise never to do business with humans. But by the end, Napoleon and his numerous litter have invited the adjacent farmers over to play cards and drink beer. When both man and pig pull an ace of spades from the pile, Orwell concludes,

“From man to pig, and pig to man, it was impossible to say which was which.”

Fast-forward some four decades, to the fall of the Berlin wall, when Animal Farm was made  required reading for high school students in Poland. Across the Soviet bloc, communists were losing their grip on power and their ideas were open to criticism. Because allegory is a shade away from commenting overtly on political matters, it’s a safe choice for a society in transition. In Poland, Animal Farm [Folwark Zwierzęcy] helped to prod the collective cows to action without having to point an incriminating finger at those still in power.

For its general accessibility and long shelf life *process* gives it [9 out of 10.] It would seem to me that Animal Farm deserves a contemporary reworking, an allegorical novella about the rise of China and the threat posed by its intolerance for human rights.