Bookshelf — My Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on January 1, 2024 by Tim Porter

If you scan the list below, you will see a wide range of fiction (I only read four non-fiction works) that can be more or less divided into three parts – well-known literary-ish novels I’d never read (“The Lying Life of Adults,” “Rabbit, Run,” “The End of the Affair”); newer popular works (“Small Mercies,” “Crook Manifesto”); and audiobooks, which are exclusively crime, and mostly by Michael Connolly (background noise for the gym).

As I have since the pandemic (remember that?) when I told myself to take more reading risks, I reveled in the discovery of writers who fall outside my previously narrow comfort zone, among them: Elena Ferrante, (more) Rachel Cusk), Rabih Alameddine (amazing), and Eudora Welty). Their work widened my world view and heartened my belief that in reading we can find the humanity that is too often hidden amid the atrocity and hatred of our times.

I only dropped out of two books, of which the biggest disappointment was “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck, which I’d looked forward to because I’d loved her previous work, “Go Went Gone.”

People ask about favorites, a list I find hard to delineate because my tastes vary so much. For me, reading is all all-you-can-eat buffet: who’s to say if the mountain of mashed potatoes is better than the thick slabs of sliced roast beef or the gurgling vat of mac and cheese? Still, one must choose, so in lieu of favorites, I offer some of the books that most delighted or surprised me:

Non-fiction: “On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey” – Paul Theroux, a marvelously descriptive and insightful road trip by a septuagenarian explorer through our complex southern neighbor.

Fiction (in no order): “My Monticello” (a magnetic mirror on the world); “The Wrong End of the Telescope” (phenomenal); “Signs Preceding the End of the World” (the bizarre realities of the US-Mexico borderlands); “The Swimmers” (beautiful simplicity); “The Sentence” (I hope to read all of Erdrich); “Small Mercies” (powerful); “The Great Believers” (so real); “Train Dreams” (a tasty morsel); and “Ask the Dust” (more John Fante, please).

Finally, for me audiobooks are mostly filler, but one set of them made me realize I’ve been overlooking one of the world’s most popular authors: The “Mr. Mercedes” series by Stephen King. Good writing, great storytelling. (The trilogy also includes “Finders Keepers” and “End of Watch.”

The List, 2023:

1.     The Feral Detective – Jonathan Lethem
2.     Hell of a Book – Jason Mott
3.     The Black Echo – Michael Connelly *
4.     Ill Will – Dan Chaon
5.     The Black Ice — Michael Connelly *
6.     When the Killing’s Done – T.C. Boyle
7.     Northern Spy – Flynn Berry
8.     The Concrete Blonde – Michael Connelly *
9.     Nightmare Alley – William Lindsay Gresham
10. The Last Coyote – Michael Connelly *
11. The Survivors – Jane Harper
12. Chances Are … – Richard Russo
13. Trust the Plan, The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America – Will Sommer
14. My Monticello – Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
15. The Searcher – Tana French *
16. The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
17. Trunk Music – Michael Connelly *
18. On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey – Paul Theroux
19. The Poet – Michael Connelly *
20. The Wrong End of the Telescope – Rabih Alameddine
21. Signs Preceding the End of the World – Yuri Herrera
22. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee *
23. The Swimmers – Julie Otsuka
24. Since We Fell – Dennis Lehane
25. Angels Flight – Michael Connelly *
26. Telephone – Percival Everett
27. Ladydi (Spanish) – Jennifer Clement
28. Dead Lions (Slough House #2) – Mick Herron
29. A Darkness More than Night – Michael Connelly
30. Kudos – Rachel Cusk
31. The Children Act – Ian McEwan
32. Kindred – Octavia Butler
33. I Will Find You – Harlan Coben *
34. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
35. City on Fire – Don Winslow *
36. City of Bones – Michael Connelly *
37. An Unnecessary Woman – Rabih Alameddine
38. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler *
39. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
40. Ask the Dust – John Fante
41. This Dark Road to Mercy – Wiley Cash
42. Lost Light – Michael Connelly *
43. Real Tigers (Slough House #3) – Mick Herron *
44. The Sentence – Louise Erdrich
45. Giant – Edna Ferber
46. Spook Street (Slough House #4) – Mick Herron *
47. Murder on the Red River – Marcie R. Rendon
48. The Narrows – Michael Connelly *
49. Empire of Wild – Cherie Dimaline
50. The Closers – Michael Connelly *
51. Small Mercies – Dennis Lehane
52. Crook Manifesto – Colson Whitehead
53. London Rules – Mick Herron *
54. Am I Alone Here – Peter Orner
55. Kairos – Jenny Erpenbeck **
56. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty
57. Parrot in the Oven – Victor Martinez
58. Joe Country – Mick Herron *
59. Mystic River – Dennis Lehane
60. The Lost Daughter – Elena Farrante
61. War Trash – Ha Jin
62. Echo Park – Michael Connelly *
63. No One Will See Me Cry – Cristina Rivera-Garza
64. Train Dreams – Denis Johnson
65. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
66. Mr. Mercedes – Stephen King *
67. The Lying Life of Adults – Elena Ferrante
68. Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann *
69. The Dog of the South – Charles Portis
70. If I Survive You – Jonathan Escoffery
71. All the Sinners Bleed – S.A. Cosby
72. Finders Keepers – Stephen King *
73. Old God’s Time – Sebastian Barry
74. Chain Gang All-Stars — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
75. End of Watch – Stephen King *
76. Bluebird, Bluebird – Attica Locke
77. Fear is Just a Word – Azam Ahmed **
78. Among the Bros – Max Marshall
79. The Lincoln Lawyer – Michael Connelly *
80. A Line in the Sand – Kevin Power
81. The Lost Americans – Christopher Bollen
82. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
83. Heaven, My Home – Attica Locke
84. Slough House – Mick Herron *
85. The Power of the Dog – Don Winslow
* Audio
** Did not finish

Bookshelf – Rabbit, Run, John Updike

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Tim Porter

Since I am of an age where secrets have long lost their utility, I am only somewhat abashed to admit that until now I’d not read any of John Updike’s “Rabbit” novels. Blame this oversight on, first, the ignorance sired by youthful arrogance and, then later, a senescent narrowing of perspective.

“Rabbit Run,” the first of the quartet, arrived in 1968 to both coy acclaim and snooty dismissal (a “shabby domestic tragedy” croaked the New York Times, despite being “artful and supple”). At the time I was a truculent teenager awhirl in the rejection of everything conventional, so I knew nothing of Updike and could have cared less about the angst of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The second novel, “Rabbit Redux,” came out in 1971, still before maturity bloomed in me. And, by the time “Rabbit is Rich” (1981) and “Rabbit at Rest” (1990) appeared, I’d cast Updike onto the dusty reaches of my father’s bookshelf, like Cheever, Roth, and Bellow.

An advantage of advanced maturity (there are not many) is the ability to do an accounting of the errors of the previous decades and, if lucky, rectify them, which I have done in a small way by reading and being amazed by “Rabbit Run.”

The novel ranks high in many academic curricula and is therefore endlessly analyzed, so I have nothing sagacious to add to what is already written about Updike’s commentary on the constrictions of religion, the expectations of male responsibility (leading to the subsequent belittling of female agency), and the mendacious myth of the post-War American Dream. The non-scholastic word that does come to mind, though is: rubbernecking – because following Harry Angstrom as he careens from one emotionally chaotic soap bubble to the next is like seeing a train wreck in slow motion: both fascinating and horrifying.

Rabbit Angstrom is a detestable protagonist, pathetic, whining, exploitive; thoroughly unlikable. The highlight of his short life was being a high-school basketball star in the working-class suburb of a modest American every-town. At 23, married to a woman he thinks is stupid, the father of one child with another on the way, and employed as the salesman of the MagiPeel kitchen gadget, Rabbit’s disenchantment with every aspect of his life causes him to shed his leash and flee in search of …. well … what? Not being a man of more depth than the agility needed to pivot and launch a jump shot, he has no idea what he wants. As he tells a clergyman who tries to lure him back to the flock:

“If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s the one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead. … but I tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere beyond all this (he gestures around him) there’s something that wants me to find it.”

Domesticated man searching for meaning in life. Enough to launch a thousand books.

Rabbit’s selfish boorishness is tough to take a times – not again! I gasp – but Updike’s wonderful writing more than offsets the unpleasantness of this man/boy-on-the-run. Updike writes with such precision that his words fit like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Unlike so many contemporary novels, which (to me) feel loose and in need of several more drafts, “Rabbit, Run” is tight. No words are out of place, no dialog added for padding. Here is an example:

“His car is waiting for him on Cherry Street in the cool spring noon mysteriously; it is as if a room of a house he owned had been detached and scuttled by this curb and now that the tide of night was out stood up glistening in the sand, slightly tilted but unharmed, ready to sail at the turn of a key.”

Please excuse my longer-than-usual scribbling, but I felt I least owed Updike a few extra words for having ignored him for so long. I am, however, thrilled to discover him. As I soon as I finished “Rabbit, Run,” I ordered the next three.

Bookshelf — The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy

Posted on December 1, 2023 by Tim Porter

Despite being, as the title declares, a man of omniscient vision, Saul Adler manages to live his rather truncated and self-consciously disengaged life without every becoming himself.

From the opening of the book, when Saul is struck by a car on London’s Abbey Road and then hours later kicked out of his girlfriend’s bed after he asks her to marry him, he is a man in flight – fleeing from intimacy, seeking what cannot be had, indulging in pleasures that consort with pain.

A professor of history whose field is the communist countries of Eastern Europe, Saul is a cipher, an androgynous wraith of a man berated by his father and bullied by his older brother for being a “Nancy boy” and told by his girlfriend, “You are much prettier than I am.” His beauty attracts men as well as women, but it alone cannot sustain relationships that wither for lack of emotional commitment. His girlfriend, a photographer, tells him, “You were so detached and absent, the only way I could reach you was with my camera.”

The story begins in 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall – a moment critical to the narrative – and leaps to 2016, when another car accident in the same place (the crosswalk immortalized by the Beatles album cover) sends Adler somersaulting through his memories, a jumble of conflated moments lacking a cogent timeline. His life of flight becomes a free fall.

This is a beautiful book, exquisitely written, and loaded with trenchant dialogue, both spoken and heard through Saul’s introspection. The story is intimate, but not idle. There are many surprises, but Levy delivers them slyly. If you read “The Man Who Saw Everything” looking for the blow of a hammer you will miss the sting of Levy’s stiletto.

Finally, about the ending (without giving it away): the last few pages are among the most moving I’ve ever read, forcing a reader to turn toward a mirror and ask: Who am I?

My Oaxaca: La Troca

Posted on November 28, 2023 by Tim Porter

Nothing says rural like a cast-off truck. Doesn’t matter if it’s a rusted dually in Texas, a well-weathered flatbed in Montana or – in this case – the cab-end of semi sitting askew on a Mexican ridgetop.

My first, and only, photojournalism teacher, a wonderful photographer and an even better human being, Fran Ortiz of the now defunct Hearst-version of the San Francisco Examiner, used to tell us wannabe phototoggers: Be sure to look behind you.

That’s what I did on a winter day in Teococuilco de Marcus Pérez, Oaxaca, where I’d gone to photograph the quinceañera of a lovely set of twins, the daughters of this truck’s owner.

Everything in front of me was loco – a tent the size of a soccer field, a stage holding a dozen musicians, a plastic dance floor lit with color lights, a dozen tables of food, towers of cases of beer, parents, godparents, relatives, five hundred of the town’s residents, and, of course, the two beaming señoritas, who achieved fifteen years during COVID and had to wait a full year more in order to have their day.

Behind me, it was the full opposite, nothing but tranquilo: the serrated crest of the Sierra Norte, dots of distant villages, and the sky dressed in its own extravagance, as if it knew it was party time. And a truck.

Bookshelf – A Line in the Sand, Kevin Powers

Posted on November 25, 2023 by Tim Porter

They say all combat veterans bring some of their wars home with them. In the case of Arman Bajalan, an Iraqi translator for U.S. forces who is relocated to Virginia after his family is killed, he arrives on American soil not only burdened by the war but still actively pursued by it.

What transpires is one of the better crime thrillers I’ve read all year, a slam-bang mélange of greed, guns, and blood populated by well-drawn characters who only risk losing their authenticity when so many bullets fly and blades slash that you begin to wonder: Really, do people actually do these things? And then you realize: Of course they do, this is the U.S. of A., where shooting first is a common go-to option.

The plot spins around Bajalan, a witness to a horrific atrocity in Mosul, and includes murderous mercenary soldiers aka “private defense contractors;” Catherine Wheel, a Norfolk, Virginia, detective whose youth has faded but her passion for justice has not; her partner, Lamar Adams, new to the shield and still imbued with military manners, such as calling his partner ma’am; a troubled young reporter (the most cliched of the bunch); and a crusty-but-benign motel owner who takes young Bajalan under his wing and stars in a Taratino-esque shootout scene that will make a great cameo for some aging Hollywood star. (Stand by, Liam Neeson.)

Amid the fun, there is a subliminal, serious message if you choose to listen: That war long ago ceased to be a matter of territorial aggression; it is now an international business. Says a congressional aide to a reporter: “The borders that matter now aren’t between countries. They’re between tax brackets. Global citizens. Ultra-high-net-worth individuals. Someone’s from Iraq. You’re from Virginia. So what? The real countrymen are the guys with fifty million, a hundred million in assets.”

Makes sense to me.

As for the story itself, it goes fast, has more than one true surprise, and never loses its way. I suspect you might guess the end (I did) but doing so will do nothing to diminish the delight of following Powers’s twists and turns.

Bookshelf – Among the Bros, Max Marshall

Posted on November 24, 2023 by Tim Porter

There are few combinations more morally toxic than youth, money and testosterone, especially when inflamed by the debauchery that universities tolerate at fraternities under the guise of tradition.

The behavior of frat house bad boys was once limited to the hijinks of “Animal House,” whose motley miscreants stopped at toga parties, shoplifting, and a Mrs. Robinson moment involving the lascivious wife of Dean Wormer.

These days, in an America plagued by drug abuse (legal and illegal), on campuses defined by economic elitism, and throughout a digitized world where the dark side of humanity lurks only a click away, binge drinking, brutal (sometimes fatal) hazing, and persistent stupefaction are as common among the Greek campus community as coats of arms.

This is the world Max Marshall found in 2016 when he began reporting a story about a “small-time” fraternity drug dealing ring at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. To his surprise, he found a massive interstate web of drug trafficking that involved millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of pills like Xanax and Oxycodone, bricks of cocaine bought from a Mexican cartel, and a murdered student.

Once, says a writer quoted in the book, a “bro” meant “a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts and a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men.”

The dope-dealing bros of Kappa Alpha dressed in polo shirts and pastel shorts. Imagine Tony Soprano’s crew as Andover grads clad in Ambercrombie. They flouted the law and flaunted their audacity. Children of entitlement, their creed was (to borrow from the New York Times): “We will behave badly, and we will get away with it.”

Marshall graduated from Columbia University in 2016, the same year police arrested the ring. His youth and his background as a fraternity member (Delta Sigma) no doubt helped him gain access to the incarcerated kingpin, Mikey Schmidt, as well as to dozen of former College of Charleston students and frat members who in interviews portrayed the campus as “a country club for rich New Englanders.”

Marshall’s reporting is thorough and detailed. He puts you in the frat house, and what you see ain’t pretty. At times, though, he is too thorough. Some pages seem compiled from what we old-time newsies called a notebook dump. Facts make the story, but more of them doesn’t always make a better story.

Still, Among the Bros held my attention and it might hold yours as well if you’re wondering what the incoming generation is doing with the mess we’re leaving them.

What Remains – Helena

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Tim Porter

Helena was a heroin addict who lived in a modified shipping container in Reykjavik, Iceland. I met her some years ago while photographing folks who lived on the fringes of the country’s overly orderly society.

As most Islanders do, she spoke English, but her accent was American, a gift from her father, with whom she’d lived for a while in San Diego, California. The details of our conversation elude me because I was making photos as we talked, but I do know she spoke about the beach and the Southern California warmth and her hope of returning someday.

As you see, Helena had an open, adolescent face, one dotted with acne, anchored by a strong nose and adorned with large green eyes that alternated between lively and vacant. Atop her head was an unruly collage of yellow and orange hair going dark at the roots. What the photos don’t show is how Helena moved constantly as she talked: her arms intertwining around the torso, her hips arcing left and right, her waist bending forward, each motion a nervous punctuation. She smiled readily, then frowned just as quickly, displays of emotions in motion. She posed for camera at times, imitating what she’d seen, but she couldn’t sustain the façade.

I’m not sure Helena ever understood or cared why I was there, not that it mattered. For her, I was a diversion. After that hour, I never saw her again nor do I know what became of her. I could find out without much difficulty, I suppose, but I’m not sure I want to. Most young drug addicts face hard futures. Once people are broken, it’s hard to put them back together.

For me, what remains of Helena are the images. This is what photography does: preserves a micro-moment, and an incomplete one at that. The image lacks sound and movement, and any emotion it might convey is second-hand at best. What was seen is all there is.

Bookshelf – “If I Survive You,” Jonathan Escoffery

Posted on November 9, 2023 by Tim Porter

As a man of the Anglo-Saxon-mongrel variety, I never had to worry about identity. Sure, in the working-class, industrial city where I grew up we kids would ask each other What are you? But whether we answered Irish or Italian or Polish there was never any doubt what we were: White.

Such certainty eludes Trelawny, the protagonist of “If I Survive You.” The son of Jamaican immigrants he traverses childhood to adulthood afloat in a sea of swirling colors and cultures. In a Miami high school, he is too brown to hang with the Blacks, too mono-lingual to hablar with the Latinos, and too Yankee – meaning adverse to speaking the island patois – to other Jamaicans. In a Midwest college, amid a cloud of pink-toned classmates, he is “unquestionably Black.”

His older brother, Delano, tells him: “You’re Black, Trelawny. In Jamaica we weren’t, but here we are. There’s a ‘one-drop’ rule.” But then a white co-worker, after making a racist remark, says to Trelawny: “What do you care? You’re not Black. You’re Jamaican.” Suddenly, thinks Trelawny, “Black Americans are the only Blacks. Blacker than Africans. Black in the (lowered voice) bad way.”

Escoffery places Trelawny’s personal journey amid a prism of stories about the searches of life: Cukie, a friend of Trelawny’s searches for his father, only to find that truth can lead to betrayal; a tragedy gives Delano one more chance to follow the ambition he abandoned for more pragmatic pursuits; a mysterious middle-aged woman, smitten with love, wishes to weasel her way into the old-folks home where Trelawny works.

Again and again, “If I Survive You” returns to Trelawny’s relationship with his father, a general contractor who dotes on Delano and sees his younger son as weak and adrift, an affront to his immigrant mindset that places survival about all else.

Trelawny does indeed wander. Booted from father’s house, he moves into his car, and uses the perception that “every light brown thing in Miami is exotic” to entice female tourists with “colonial desires” to take him back to their hotels, where he will have a bed for the night. He cycles through jobs both tedious and perverse (punching a woman in the face for an art project, watching an affluent white couple have sex). Through it all, he seeks to make peace with himself and, at least inwardly, with his father.

The New York Times called Escoffery “a gifted, sure-footed storyteller, with a command of evocative language and perfectly chosen details.” Dead-on right. There are not many pages in “If I Survive You” that lack a savory turn of phrase or a piquant observation, many of them about Miami and its environs, an extra treat for those of us who, rightly or wrongly, see South Florida as the slightly off-kilter uncle in the American family.

Bookshelf – Old God’s Time, Sebastian Barry

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Tim Porter

Pro tip: When an epigraph cites the Book of Job, you know there’s suffering ahead.

Tom Kettle is the Job of Dublin. A decorated detective with the Irish national police who arrives at retirement not with the joy of an ex-cop looking forward to unburdened days, but bereft of all that he loved and ladened with sadness. Tom is awash in the wake of tragedy, at times so immersed he cannot distinguish the ache of memory from the pain of reality.

What scant solace Tom manages to find during his retreat to a granny flat in an ancient castle, disappears like sea mist in the night sky when he is drawn back into an old case involving sexual predation and perverted priests. Suddenly, he is deprived of what to him is “the whole point of retirement, of existence – to be stationary, happy and useless.”

But Old God’s Time – the title referring to a period beyond memory – is not a cold-case yarn as such (even if it were, it would be lifted beyond the normal realm of the trope by Barry’s lyrical and poetic writing, occasionally liberated from form, occasionally punctuated with the vocabulary of quotidian brutality). Yes, Old God’s Time, is a mystery, but the unraveling of secrets only serves as the vehicle for Barry’s deeper investigation, that of the enigmatic completeness of love and the bottomless whirlpool of loss.

Within these emotional swirls, where what is true and what is imagined intertwine, Tom struggles to find firm footing. He harbors dark truths, about himself and about his late wife, June, who he loved more than life and who, afflicted by her own haunts, “had survived everything but survival.”

In the end, what saves Tom from the bleak remains of his life is the embrace of a simple fact: of all that he’s done, of all the villains he’s dealt with, of all the erosion of his faith in human nature, he wants only one thing: “to be a believer again, in something.”

And what is that? “His life, his little life?” he thinks. “The fog edged away from the shore of himself, the sea opened like a stage in a theatre, the helpful sun burned in its element, there was a truth told to him, a truth, in his curious age, in his palpable decay, that there at the heart of it, there at the heart of it, forever and always, as June.”

Old God’s Time demands patience. Go too fast and you’ll miss Barry’s lingering eye. But bide your time, wrestle over the meanings of Tom’s untethered drifts, and be rewarded by an ending that accelerates as the cold case melts in a furnace of truth.

Bookshelf –All the Sinners Bleed, S.A. Crosby

Posted on November 4, 2023 by Tim Porter

When I read S.A. Crosby’s breakout book, Blacktop Wasteland (2020), the wild ride with Beauregard “Bug” Montage thrilled me. Then came Razorblade Tears (2021) and the ride slowed to a slog. Was Crosby a one-hit wonder? Was he mired in a sophomore slump?

All the Sinners Bleed (2023) provides an emphatic answer: the slump is over!

As good as Blacktop Wasteland was – and it was a fun romp through the underbelly of backwoodsy Virginia, labeled by those who label such things as a prime slice of Southern Gothic — All the Sinners Bleed is better. It is darker, it is more violent and perverse, and it confronts head on the double helix of white supremacy and religious fundamentalism that forms the DNA of the American South. Cosby has hocked his funny in exchange for substance.

All the Sinners Bleed is a mature work, deep with ideas and populated with (mostly) fully realized characters. If Cosby can stay the course he could become to Virginia what Dennis Lehane is to Boston: an unflinching mirror.

The story is straightforward: Titus Crown, an ex-FBI agent, comes back home to rural Virginia, runs for sheriff and wins – the first Black man to wear the star in the county. His jurisdiction is a quiet one. Crime tends toward drunken brawls, trailer-park beatings, and dope-dealing, much different than the domestic terrorism cases Crown was involved in as a G-man.

A school shooting changes all that, and Crown’s keep runs red with blood. To stop the killing, Crown must dodge the crossfire between the demands of local Black leaders, the threats of entrenched white powerbrokers, and the fire and brimstone promised by fanatical ministers. It is within this vortex – good vs. all forms of evil – that Crosby excels and lifts All the Sinners Bleed above the ordinary.

Crosby, showing deftness, weaves history into the story – the lengthy shadow of slavery; the racial riots of 1919’s Red Summer; the Bible-thumping hypocrisy of Flannery O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted” South – and then flays the institutions formed from those values, to whom big, Black, by-the-book Sheriff Titus Crown is an affront to all they hold dear.

The book is not perfect. Toward the end, Crosby rather hastily knots up some loose plot lines, but that sort of finish-line rush seems common in thrillers and crime novels. However, once Crosby breaks the tape, he redeems himself with an ending that will be perfect in the movie that surely comes from the book.

So I forgive Crosby for his last-hour sprint – not that he needs nor has sought my pardon – for I, too, was reading with speed, caught up in the whirlwind of the story.

Dave Mitchell, R.I.P.

Posted on November 3, 2023 by Tim Porter

Dave Mitchell became a hero to we young news-sters in 1979 when his tiny weekly newspaper, The Point Reyes Light, took on the “violent drug rehabilitation cult Synanon” and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Dave once worked for the San Francisco Examiner, where I also mainlined ink for a number of years under the management of Will Hearst. Dave, though, was too much of an iconoclast for a corporate newsroom and he eventually returned to the Light, where he continued to afflict the comfortable until he sold the weekly in 2005.

Some years later I also left daily journalism to return to my first love, photography, and when I got the chance to photograph Dave for a regional magazine it was a thrill. I photographed him in 2003 outside his home in Point Reyes Station, California.

Dave called it #30 a few days ago.

New York Times obit

Bookshelf – Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Tim Porter

In the borderlands of the West – America’s south and Mexico’s north – reality is fluid: much is not what it seems, permanence is an illusion, and culture and language are trafficked as commonly as contraband.

The monied North hungers for labor and drugs and flat-screen TVs assembled at sub-minimum wages; the impoverished South, conquered and corrupted, huddled in tribes held together by blood, fear, and power, feeds the northern beast, both willingly and by necessity.

In this thin, magical novel (2009), Yuri Herrera distills the complexities of the American-Mexican symbiosis into the clarity of a single purpose: self-preservation: the North to keep what it has, the South to survive what it doesn’t.

It is a story set against archetypes: the Village, the Little Town, the Big Chilango; gunmen named Thug .45 and Thug .38 for their favored weapons; the “top dogs,” the caciques, Mr. Double-U, Mr. Aitch, Mr. Q, whose favors carry indebtedness. Two-dimensional places and figures, they are stand-ins for the stereotypical American perspective of the lands to its south: dusty, dangerous, and dismal.

Within this anonymity lives sharply defined Makina, a fierce, independent young woman from the Village, a human switchboard who take calls and passes messages, connecting the North and the South. She speaks the local lingo (an indigenous dialect), anglo, and the latin (Spanish), and “knew how to keep quiet in all three.” Makina enforces a set of rules that gain her the trust of all:

“You don’t lift other people’s petticoats.
You don’t stop to wonder about other people’s business.
You don’t decide which messages to deliver and which to not.
You are the door, not the one who walks through it.”

Makina’s mother sends her North to search for her brother, and there, on the far side of the river, she finds herself entangled in the amorphous nature of the region and its people, both white and brown:

“They are homegrown and they are anglo and both things with rapid intensity; with restrained fervor they can be the meekest and at the same time the most querulous of citizens, albeit grumbling under their breath. Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of new people. And then they speak. They speak in an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it’s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable.”

The story is too compact to reveal more, but the depth of Herrera’s perception is unlimited. Signs Preceding the End of the World is a marvelous ode, lyrical at times, hard-edged at others, to the incessant river of language, ideas, and bodies that flow across “la frontera,” impeded by government, exploited by mafia, but as impossible as the tide to stop.

It is one of the most compelling books I’ve read about trans-border culture – and more timely now than when it was written.

Note: Herrera’s remarkable use of language reflects the supple nature of border culture. He plays with known words and creates new ones. Language becomes identity. Should you read the book, be sure to read also translator Lisa Dillman’s comments following the narrative.

Bookshelf – On the Plain of Snakes, Paul Theroux

Posted on April 30, 2023 by Tim Porter

This is a book of wisdoms, large and small, about the charms and challenges of Mexico, about the rewards of travel and spontaneity, and about the fierce headwinds of aging, which, unless leaned into, will blow you over.

Paul Theroux, icon of the open road, aficionado of the untrod trail, decides in his mid-70s that instead of going gently into whatever the good night might bring he will follow Kerouac, Lawrence, and Lowry into Mexico, where age garners reverence instead of disregard. “Más sabe el diablo por Viejo, que por diablo,” states a Mexican saying that captures Theroux’s attention. “The devil is wise because he is old, not because he’s the devil.”

“In the casual opinion of most Americans,” says Theroux, “I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his degringolade.

“Naturally,” he continues, “I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgment.”

Alone at the wheel of his car, Theroux begins at the border, where in some places a tall steel wall rises and in others nothing more impedes passage than barbed lines of wire or a thin strand of river. He ignores all advice about safety (“everyone will give you ten reasons for not going”) and crisscrosses the political boundary that promises hope to some, but also delivers suffering and death to many others: Calexico to Mexicali, Nogales to Nogales, Naco to Naco, El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, even Laredo to Nuevo Laredo, where bullets fly as narcos kill each other and whatever innocents impede their trade.

Theroux observes, interviews, and engages – with refugees, migrants, journalists, and Trumpista Border Patrol goons. What results is perhaps the most accessible and three-dimensional report I’ve read about this 1,900-mile strip of borderland, where headlines often take precedence over humanity.

As he heads south, through more narco-lands, into the heart of Mexico City, onto Oaxaca (the city) and Oaxaca the Zapotec coast, and finally into the Zapatista compounds of Chiapas, Theroux wields the same observant eye, curious mind, and welcoming heart to immerse himself in experiences unavailable to less adventurous travelers. Theroux is both an old gringo – and a bold one.

As an American man of Theroux’s vintage, and as a cross-border “gabacho” with deep personal and professional involvement in Mexico, I loved this book in part because many of Theroux’s conclusions about the mosiacal mess that is our southern neighbor match my own.

Chief among these is his idea of “mundo Mexico” – Mexico as its own world. “Mexico is not a country,” he writes. “Mexico is a world, too much of a “mundo” to be wholly graspable, but so different from state to state in extreme independence of culture and temperament and cuisine.”

True that. When friends ask me upon my return from Oaxaca, where I am doing non-profit work, How was Mexico?, it is question that demands another interrogative: Which Mexico? Because, as Theroux demonstrates at depth, the Mexico of the Sonoran Desert is not the Mexico of the Colonia Roma, and the Mexico of the impoverished and besieged Mixteca is not the Mexico of the empowered and enriched Monterrey. Separated by distance, dollars, and dialect, these disparate Mexicos share little more than a national identity (in some places very little of that) and one other thing: the inveterate institutional and social dysfunction rooted in corruption, tradition, and self-preservation that both Theroux and I believe defines how Mexicans live.

“Mexico,” writes Theroux, “is a country of obstacles, a culture of inconvenience.” These obstacles range from “mass murder to serious hardships to mundane inconveniences.” Forty-three university students disappearing, nearly non-existent medical services for the poor, sporadic roadblocks by striking teachers, nurses, or garbage workers.

A land of obstacles. I’d not heard the country summarized with such precise succinctness. It is exactly that – which is why family and loyalty trump everything in Mexico because when no institution can be counted upon, blood and “confianza” matter most.

There are moments when the book lags (an academic pondering on Mexican writers, for example), but they are sparse. They can be endured or skimmed, but they are mere obstacles, inconveniences, that do not detract from Theroux’s telling, which is as rich and as complex as his subject matter.

On the Plain of Snakes is essential reading for anyone desirous of understanding modern Mexico.

***

Addendum: The title – On the Plain of Snakes – comes from the name of a rural village Theroux passes through, San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca, in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. Coixtlahuaca means “plain of snakes” in the Nahuatl language.

Theroux points out that “the most important pre-Hispanic deity in Mexico” was Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, and that the Mexican flag, which features an eagle and a snake, suggests that snakes are evil and eagles are virtuous. But, he says, quoting a Mexican writer friend, “The truth is more complicated than that. The eagles soar in the sky alone, but we Mexicans share the land with the snakes.”

Bookshelf – Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Tim Porter

What most surprised me in this thorough, readable biography of the narcissistic, bullying charlatan who captured the White House and then held the nation hostage for four years is how surprising I found his political success at the time. Had I been paying attention, as Maggie Haberman had through most of her career as a reporter in New York City and then in Washington, D.C., I would have seen Donald Trump coming – and so might have enough others to thwart his rapacious intentions.

It seems almost redundant to use the word revelatory to describe any book about Trump because he himself is an open book. As Haberman writes, he treats everyone he knows as “a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling. He works things out in real time in front of all of us.” However, Confidence Man is filled with revelations, at least for those us who never saw an episode of “The Apprentice”:

The decades-long ties between Trump and the political puppeteers he employed as president such as Roger Stone and Paul Manafort (both convicted, both pardoned).
Trump’s lifelong habit of deliberately exploiting hate and controversy: “I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” And: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. I want them to suffer.” Thus answering the question: Is he the way he is by choice? Yes, partly.
His instinct to simultaneously bloviate and obfuscate is purposeful: “Whatever complicates the world more, I do. It’s always good to do things nice and complicated so that nobody can figure it out.”

There are many books in print about Trump’s White House tenure, but of the few I’ve read – Bob Woodward’s Rage and Peril among them – Confidence Man tells the story of the craziness and immorality that characterized the period in the least breathless way, relying as it does on the solid reporting that won Haberman a Pulitzer, and, more importantly, wrapping all the self-serving shenanigans and the sideshow of characters in the context of Trump’s fundamental yearning to be recognized and rewarded.

In a post-presidency interview, Trump exposes this need, which Haberman describes as “for people to know who he was, and not merely to be rich.” He tells her: “The question I get asked more than any other question: If you had to do it again (run for president), would you have done it? The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”

Sadly, the nation is not yet done with Trump. Even if he can’t rise out of the muck of Mar-a-Logo to despoil once more the Oval Office, he has sullied the American democracy with a stain that won’t be removed in the short term.

To Haberman’s credit, she acknowledges that despite her formidable reporting she cannot answer the question: Who, really, is Donald J. Trump? “I spent the four years of his presidency getting asked by people to decipher why he was doing what he was doing, but the truth is, ultimately, almost no one really knows him. Some know him better than others, but he is often simply, purely opaque, permitting people to read meaning and depth into every action, no matter how empty they may be.”

Trump remains afoot. We are forewarned.

Good News about Getzamaní

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Tim Porter

Thanks to the generosity of many of you last summer, 10-year-old Getzamaní Hernández Rodríguez, of Oaxaca, Mexico, who was born blind and autistic is now receiving the education and therapy she needs.

Getzamaní, who lives with her parents and three siblings in a humble home of tin and wood, is benefiting from three sessions a week with a teacher who focuses on basic skills such as opening containers and using buttons and zippers, as well as giving Braille lessons to Getza’s mother, Edith.

Once a week, a pair of physical therapists work with Getza on movement and understanding the position of her body so that some day she will be able to walk with a cane. A speech therapist will also soon be added to Getza’s team.

Until this point, because of the lack of public services for persons with disabilities in Oaxaca, Getzamaní received only sporadic education. In order to even obtain that, her mother had to take her – and the other children – across the city every day to a public school. The cost of transportation was bankrupting the family. Now, with Getzamaní at home, her older brother, Neftalí, and younger sister, Ruth, can walk to neighborhood schools. The financial relief for the family is immense.

Thank you again for your contribution to Getzamaní’s life. For anyone who did not get a chance to donate, I will be asking again next spring.

Abrazos a todos – hugs to all.

Tim

[Show as slideshow]

Birthday Advice

Posted on August 11, 2022 by Tim Porter

Today is my birthday. I am almost a quarter of the way into this new century after having been alive for more than half of the latter one.

A recent podcast tipped me to a list of gained wisdoms compiled by Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly on the occasion of his 70^th birthday. Herewith, I offer my own list. As always, your mileage may vary:

Never be ashamed of borrowing a good idea, but always hat-tip the source.
Take credit for your successes and responsibility for your losses.
Eat a good breakfast.
Make time to be with friends.
Make as much time to be alone.
No matter how smart you think you are, it’s not enough.
Everything breaks, including people.
Nothing you’ve fixed, whether it’s a software conflict or an education system, stays fixed forever.
It’s likely that many people think more highly of you than you do of yourself.
To keep your body alive, walk; to keep your mind alive, read.
No win is worth hurting someone.
Take care of your teeth.
You will never feel as old as your face looks.
The past is gone. Get over it.
Being successful often depends more on where you were born, your economic level, and your race than how hard you worked. It’s a lottery.
That said, work hard. It feels good.
Learn another language. It will change your life.
When someone speaks to you in their second, or third, language, listen closely. This person is doing the work.
Resumes are useless.
Always listen to your gut – even if all it tells you is that it’s time to eat.
Sleep more rather than less.
If you get the upgrade, take the window seat so no one climbs over you while you sleep. If you don’t, take the aisle so you have the extra legroom.
Good shoes are worth the extra money.
No one cares about your version of God.
If it seems too good to be true, it is.
When you interview someone for a job don’t ask them what they’ve done, ask them: What do you know how to do?
Failure is an option.
Don’t eat crap food.
If you’re an addictive person, get it out of your system when you’re young. Aging is hard enough without a habit.
Don’t lie – especially not to yourself.
If you say you will do something, do it – whether it’s make a phone call or love somebody.
Keep children in your life. They don’t need to be yours.
Stuff is fun, but it’s just stuff.
Learn how to do something really well that is not your work.
Sometimes pain is nothing more than a reminder that you’re alive.
When given a choice, take happiness.
Apologize as needed.
Hug whenever possible.
When you’re talking to someone from another culture and don’t understand them, chances are they don’t understand you either.
Success cannot be sustained simply by doing what made you successful.
Yes, young people don’t know what you know, but neither do you see as wide a horizon they do.
Inexperience is a teaching opportunity.
If you have more than you need, start giving.
After a conversation with someone, if you don’t know more about that person that when you started then you didn’t ask enough questions.
Why is more important to understanding than who, what, when, or where.
Eat food that seems weird to you. At least once.
It is not necessary to like everything – books, music, food, whatever. Not everything is for everybody.
A good sunrise can erase a night of bad dreams.
Stretch.
If you mother’s alive, call her often. She won’t always be there.
Take nothing for granted.
No one likes a complainer. If you need help, ask. Otherwise, work the problem.
A smile is the best greeting.
Please will open almost any door; thank you will keep it open.
Try before you buy.
Everyone is dealing with something you know nothing about.
Kindness multiplies.
Aging requires you to ignore your body most of the time, except when its most critical. Learn how to tell the difference.
When you’re young, take chances; when you’re older, use the lessons learned from those chances.
Don’t assume that everyone – or even anyone – thinks like you.
Learn the names of as many plants and animals as you can. You’ll feel smarter when you’re outdoors.
Have a bad habit that doesn’t hurt anyone else (mine are tortilla chips).
Words have consequences. Choose with care.
Children believe what adults tell them. Honor their innocence.
What happened yesterday does not have to happen again today. Change is both possible and inevitable.
Listen more.
You have no control over what other people do – even if those things make you feel terrible. Your only choice is to do things that make you feel good.
Having money is better than not having money, but sometimes the greatest rewards come from doing something for free.
Look out the window each morning. What you see might be your last day alive. Then get going.
Tell someone you love them every day.
Say something nice to everyone you meet. Small talk produces big rewards.
Be grateful you’re here – at any age. So many aren’t.
Don’t look back. It’s what ahead that matters.

Let’s Give Getzamaní a Future

Posted on July 28, 2022 by Tim Porter

Getzamaní Hernández Rodríguez is 10 years old. She is blind and autistic. She needs special schooling to live an independent life. Without our help, she is condemned to a life of poverty and dependency.

Getzamaní lives with her parents, Edith and Juan Carlos, and her siblings, Nephtali, 11, Ruth, 9 and Elisa, 2, in a house made of tin and cardboard on the outskirts of Oaxaca, Mexico.

They are poor people in a poor land that does next to nothing to help children like Getzamaní. Only two public schools in the region address the needs of children of children like Getzaman. And they are full. Getzamaní’s mom must take her and the other children — because she can’t leave them home alone – across a sprawling city by moto-taxi and then on foot to a private shelter where classes in Braille and other survival skills are available.

Since Edith can’t work because she spends all day ferrying her children back and forth and waiting for them, the family routinely runs out of money to pay for transportation.

But there is a solution.

Getzamaní can study and receive speech and occupational therapy at home through private teachers. A couple of hundred dollars a month will pay for classes in Braille and other subjects and therapy, the latter to help Getzamaní become more independent – to dress and feed herself and to not have to rely on someone to help her use the bathroom.

If you give $250, you will buy a month of education for Getzamaní. Your generosity will not only change Getzamaní’s life but that of her entire family.

Please help. Give a little or a lot. Whatever you can. One hundred percent of what you give will go directly to the family.

Whatever questions you might have, please message me here or at tim@timporter.com.

I thank you. Getzamaní and her family thank you.

Bookshelf — Tears We Cannot Stop, Michael Eric Dyson

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Tim Porter

When Donald Trump got elected president, friends who lived in other countries asked me what happened. How could the United States, they asked, elect such a mendacious, immoral con man to the most powerful democratic office on the planet? I didn’t have an answer.

Over the course of Trump’s four convulsive years, a torturous test of democracy that culminated in the madness of the January 6 riot in Washington, I asked myself the question again and again. There were, and there continue to be, plenty of theories, among them the economic stagnation of the working class; the arrogance of Hillary Clinton; and the generalized cluelessness among upper-crust Americans – the so-called elites – of the political tectonics at work in the nation.

There is one more factor, though, one which I’ve come to believe not only determined the 2016 election but underlies the accelerating rancor in the country, and that is race.

In the wake of the nation’s first black president, a Harvard-educated lawyer with a Harvard-educated wife, white Americans of moderate and lower income and education levels – which, of course, are linked – voted overwhelmingly for Trump, who shamelessly planted the seeds of his candidacy with his dog-whistling insinuations that Barack Obama was not a “real” American – not one of “us.”

Imagine, then, in the midst of a presidency rooted in racism – don’t forget Trump’s opening-day salvo about Mexican rapists – how timorous whites reacted to the sight of tens of thousands of black Americans protesting the police murders of black men and women by chanting “Black Lives Matter.” Gun sales rose nationally to record levels, conservative states made it harder for blacks to vote, and unabashed white supremacists ran for office and won (Marjorie Taylor Greene).

Yes, it is really about race. There are other culprits, of course, chiefly mind-warping religious dogma, but the specter of the United States become blacker, browner, yellower, or any shade other than white-ish frightens the living bejeezus out of many white Americans and drives them to embrace extremist thinking – such a stealing a democratic election.

The blood of racism courses through the veins of America. In Tears We Cannot Stop, Michael Eric Dyson uses the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., to time-stamp its origins.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King said. “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.” We are “perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.”

I came across this book, published in 2017, during my ongoing inquest into what happened to the America I thought I knew but clearly did not. Written as “a sermon to white America,” Dyson, a widely known author and scholar who also is a Baptist minister, says his intent is “healing our nation through honest, often blunt, talk” that “will make you squirm in your seat with discomfort before, hopefully, pointing a way to relief.”

As a preacher, Dyson is both frank and avuncular. Each stinging slap of truth about white racism, whether institutional such as hiring or housing discrimination, or individual such as white retail clerks who ignore black shoppers or white cops who brace black college professors in front of their children for being in the “wrong” neighborhood – comes with the salve of, not compassion, but understanding that centuries of racist messaging causes whites to act as they do. Dyson doesn’t excuse, but he does recognize the involuntary racial reflex, an unconscious response which, he urges, can be overcome with conscious effort.

Planted in the pew, I hung on Dyson’s words when, in the heart of his sermon, he writes about what it’s like to be black in America, even for a man of letters and financial good fortune like himself. He speaks of how he was raised, to defer to whites, to defer to police, to defer to any authority, subservience learned in an unwritten manual of survival in a white world.

The manual “tells you to make sure you lower your eyes, say yes sir, no smart mouthing, no anger, no resentment, just complete total compliance without a whiff of personality or humanity,” says Dyson, who then asks his white readers, “Ever had to endure that humiliation, my friends?”

No, I have not.

Even when, in my younger days, I had a few scrapes with the law and awoke more than once to a barred view, I never felt I shared the same fate as the black boys and men who occupied similar spaces in the same institution. I could not have articulated this then, but I see now how my whiteness elevated me to a rung above them. I was in a cell. They were a cell. But I was white.

A shameful perspective to admit to, but it was true then, just as it is still true now for so many white Americans. Not all. Not me. But many.

Like all good teachers, and preachers, too, I suppose, Dyson focuses me on my ignorance, a condition, I have found, that increases with age despite my best efforts to keep it in check. Near the end of the book, Dyson offers tonics for white Americans who’d like to detoxify themselves. One remedy is education. “You must educate yourselves about black life and culture,” he says. “Racial literacy is as necessary as it is undervalued.”

If such an education interests you, my fellow pale-skinned Americans, and I hope it does, add Tears We Cannot Stop to your syllabus.

Home from Oaxaca — Comforts and Discomforts

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Tim Porter

What strikes me when I return to California from Mexico is not the presence of affluence, but the extent of it, the width and breadth of the comforts and conveniences it buys, the immensity of the shopping areas and the efficiency of the paved corridors that connect them, the newness of the cars, the reality of their price tags – a $70,000 pickup! – the proclamation, both boldly advertised and silently intuited, that whatever you wish is available so long as you have the coin or the card of the realm.

There is also money in Mexico. Just two days ago, I watched a black Porsche Cayenne drive with Germanic haste down a 16th century street in Oaxaca. More widely seen are BMWs and Mercedes, parked in front costly hotels, watched with vigilance by uniformed men. But these are uncommon, rare birds in an environment of pigeons and sparrows: used SUVs, ancient VWs, and underpowered motorcycles with a baby on board, as well as a father and a mother. In Mexico, inequality is bottom-heavy; in the U.S., it is top-heavy.

Arriving at home, I see the solidness of my house, the thick redwood beams that anchor it to the hill, the heft of the front door, heavy on its brass hinges, and, inside, the milled cherry planks that support the stuffed chair where I read greet my feet, when I have taken off the thick shoes that bore me through two flights, with a sleek coolness.

Around me is nearly everything I’ve accumulated over the decades, the photographs of Mary Ellen (now gone), the book by Mary Ann (as well), the paintings and the pottery and my own images from Oaxaca, and all the goodies of modern life: stove, fridge, cords that connect to computers and tablets and phones.

I could not tell you how all this came to be. There was no grand plan. Things happened, one after another, one day at a time. But this I do know: I am fortunate, wealthy with friends and family, and possessing enough financially that, while being almost penurious relative to the monied community in which I live, to feel abashed at times for having so much while many others, including the people I saw only yesterday in Mexico, have so little.

Despite being uneasy about my ease, I don’t want to abandon it. Habits of comfort are hard to quit. Spending so much time in Mexico has not made me want to be more Mexican; rather, it has made me more thankful of being American, a tarnished designation these days, to be sure, but still one that affords its bearer the chance of economic success and the right of democratic pluralism, as imperfect as both are in our times.

Before Covid, family and photography took me to Oaxaca. Both still do, but now I am compelled even more by the collision of the calendar, of my waning time, with an opportunity to put to good use what skills and scars I’ve gathered in service of a non-profit dedicated to education (Oaxaca Streetchildren Grassroots, oaxacastreetchildren.org).

I am admittedly late to this game, but apologies for the past don’t accomplish much. Instead, here in the present I say, Thank you – thank you to everyone who brought me here, thank you for believing even when I didn’t, thank you opening doors and inviting me through, thank you for seeing what I needed when I had no clue. I find solace in knowing you are the source of my comforts and in recognizing that my discomforts are of my own making.

As I age, I realize we have a choice – to remain in the past or to move forward, to walk toward the fate that awaits us all. I choose to walk. It is more comforting to be on the move.

Bookshelf – Circle Way, Mary Ann Hogan

Posted on February 21, 2022 by Tim Porter

A writer dies, her book is not done, her husband writes the final chapter

There is no more tenuous concept than time. Hours, days and years are inventions of man, an application of accounting and order to a life whose beginning is mysterious but whose conclusion is both clear and capricious.

Time, as a mechanism, constructs a façade of stability behind which extends a void that defies definition. What we call “today” is a random assortment of instances, each so infinitesimally transitory that we can neither immerse ourselves in them nor extract from them any indelible depth of experience. Tomorrow is perpetually beyond reach, unattainable, because it exists only in our heads. As soon as the rising sun cracks the horizon, tomorrow disappears under the onslaught of today. Our brains are wired for now; every instant of consciousness occurs today.

What remains is the past, a grand mausoleum of dismembered memories. This unkempt charnel house of fading images, distant conversations, and joys and pains exaggerated or tempered by time tempts examination, especially by writers and others who seek to make sense in their lives. But the past is not a single, definable entity of what was. The past consists of only what we remember, and even that is unique in quantity and clarity for each of us.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said the Greek. But what of the unexamined past? Should it be disinterred?

***

When Mary Ann Hogan and I met we were journalists, she a reporter for a big newspaper, and I the editor of a smaller one. I was arrogant, aggressive, and inflated with self-worth; she was everything that was the opposite: sweet, lovely, and brimming with talent.

I fell for her at once, charmed by her Irish eyes, galactic smile, and dulcet ways. But she was taken, by a lucky fellow I’d just hired, Eric Newton. So, I settled for friendship, and we three formed a youthful bond that endured as we aged.

Mary Ann died in 2019, claimed by rampaging cells. Dying is an untidy process that always leaves something – or much – undone. When the lymphoma took Mary Ann, she hadn’t yet finished the book that was to be the culmination of her life’s work, a memoir about losing and finding herself, about leaving and returning home, and about her father, the former literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. The book lacked a final chapter, which Mary Ann had planned to write after returning home from the East Coast to Mill Valley, California.

Before she died, Mary Ann asked Eric to keep her book alive, to make it whole and write the last chapter. In their decades as a couple, she the writer and he the editor, they regularly wove words together. Each nourished the other. So it was a natural thing to do.

***

In the book, Eric describes one of their final conversations:

The last time we went over the manuscript, after we finished, she just looked at me. It was not the please-grab-a-towel look but the deep-blue-sky look.

And she said . . . nothing.

Not a word. No need.

She was dying. We both knew what she was asking. I hugged her pages to my chest.

“You know I’ll do it.”

***

And he did.

The result is Circle Way, a lyrical, deeply personal, honest, and often whimsical collage of Mary Ann’s artful story-telling and her father’s poetic ruminations and ephemeral drawings. It is a three-dimensional memoir that presents the life of a writer shaped as much by what she overcame and what she accomplished as by what her father, despite his professional success, failed to do, which was to write his own book.

“In so many ways,” Mary Ann writes, “I am my father’s daughter. Self-made journalists, we. Introverts, lovers of books and wine. Sufferers of ‘flying thoughts.’ We once held prized newspaper jobs, writing for the masses. But we felt like impostors with nothing to say. At times I still do.”

Flying thoughts, swirls of emotions, the curve of life, the inward spiral, the outward gleam of the nautilus shell. This is the path Mary Ann followed, avoiding the straight lines, accepting the looseness of history and ignoring the conventions of time. She didn’t want to just tell a story; she wanted to tell a whole story, using what was available, what could be grasped, what could be disinterred, and what could be intuited from what she had seen and lived.

We all live with doubt about the rightfulness of the choices we make. Knowing what to do is often more vexing than the doing. Author Katie Kitamura, in her enigmatic novel, A Separation, writes a piercing line that is apt here: “People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment.” What Mary Ann allows us to see in Circle Way is a daughter’s recognition of her father’s discontent and how, using that perception as a beacon, she found a way to elude his legacy.

Acknowledging the prejudice of my friendship, as well as my reading of several versions of the manuscript, I can say Circle Way is a remarkable book. Or to say it in a manner that Mary Ann would approve, I saw the sausage being made and still found it delicious.

One final word: What Mary Ann did, and what Eric helped her do, was not just write a memoir, but create something uniquely personal. Anyone who attempts creative expression knows how difficult that is to do.

Mary Ann, the journalist, did not want to get scooped on the news of her death, so she wrote her own obituary, one about Mary Ann the writer. Here’s an excerpt:

“Mary Ann saw death not as an ending, but rather as the beginning of the final, infinite chamber in the nautilus shell of a creative life. . . .”

***

How to buy Circle Way:

Amazon

Bookshop

Tim Porter's Second Draft

Photography, Books, Journalism & Other Curiosities