THE INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS and A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE

I have been remiss.  I wrote about LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE by Roberto Calasso for the Los Angeles Times but it has not been published.  I have been reading and reading as… but until this have not been able to over-come the enervating feeling of why…

The INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS (Şeylerin Masumiyeti)  by Orhan Pamuk… (Abrams, NY) I had begun to write this in longhand and as I was now typing I realized innocence is not an aspect of an object--- one assumes a physical aspect--- as innocence and its partner guilty can only be applied to the actions of a human being possessed of the ability to tell right from wrong, good from evil. 

How is that for traditional theology and I assume even philosophy?  Probably something or other…

THE INNOCENCE OF OBJECTS Is a picture book with text describing the establishing and the contents of a museum that was derived from Pamuk’s novel of good recent memory: THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE.. and of course he has done what I can well imagine is the desire of every novelist… to physically incarnate his mental, his dream creations… even Nabokov composed as we all know the screenplay for LOLITA

The book is beautifully produced and is quite faithful to the Turkish original that I purchased on Istiklal Cd. in Istanbul this summer when I was there with my son… however the great cemetery near Eyűp was more enticing than this new museum for this visitor and I prefer to turn the pages of the book then to have visited it…  museums have to age, have to fall apart a little to be really interesting and that is what I liked about the archeology museum near Topkapi…  it had the just right amount of abandonment to invoke past.

The most perfect tour of torment for a soul sent to Purgatory for wanting to be modern and up to date would be to find him or herself condemned to endless have to talk through MOMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim museums in NYC…looking at each and every object over and over again.

Of course Pamuk’s museum has two competitors that I can think of the Watt’s Towers and Howard Finster’s PARADISE GARDEN… and they both have the advantage of actually being built by their creators whereas poor Pamuk had to pay and pay and pay to have his museum built, though since he was spending his own money…

He mentions Sir John Soane’s museum in London but that museum is free.  Mr. Pamuk’s museum charges an admission fee.  Howard Finister’s Paradise is also free as is the Watts Towers.  However if you bring along a copy of THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE you are admitted as if only right and proper.  I do hope there is a gift shop with the necessary t-shirt which I hope is free of a portrait of the author. 

But a book like this finally only works if it recalls memory within the reader or viewer.  Exhibit 24 worked best for me.  “The Engagement Party” and on the opposite page postcards of the Istanbul Hilton…  there on Cumhuriyet Cad…  of fond memory in 1967  when I went to visit Peace Corps friends… no…not that path, right now.  I do remember how Turks dressed up to go there while the Americans went casually as if going home…  we took it all for granted and… now of course there are books about how the international style architecture was a form of cultural imperialism etc… etc...  when I went there in 1985 we only looked it as if had become a little shabby while today  it is where lower ranked salesman are stored when visiting… and beyond whole new developments of the present and the grim future.

                                     NEWS FROM THE FUTURE

From JOHN JORDAN.

“The narrative of modern so-called Irish fiction in English is:  James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Aidan Higgins, Desmond Hogan while slightly in-shore reside three joyfully sullen islands:  Francis Stuart, Ralph Cusack and Thomas McGonigle”

From Frederick von Saar.

'Kaasaegne nunda nimetatud Iiri Ilukirjandus inglise keeles narratiiv on: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Aidan Higgins, Desmond Hogan, kuigi veidi-kaldal elavad kolm rõõmsalt laubal saared: Francis Stuart, Ralph Cusack ja Thomas McGonigle'

A PLACE AGAIN A PLACE MAYBE

FIVE

The reason for opening with these two photographs is that I am reading Yves Bonnefoy's THE ARRIERE-PAYS, published by Seagull Books.  A beautiful book of prose and full colour illustrations.    

A book of meditations for want of a better word  on a place, a place where one discovers the self, the place not known, probably unknowable, yet we receive hints and these hints disappear, a book to go back to and back to and to read and to read...unlike the books that accumulate in beach houses never to be re-read.  But more than that, of course

        Here is Bonnefoy:  "...that is what I dream of, at these crossroads, or a little way beyond them--- and I am haunted by everything that gives credence to the existence of this place, which is and remains other, and yet which suggests itself with some insistence even.  When a road climbs upwards, revealing, in the distance, other paths among the stones, and other villages; when the train travels into a narrow valley, at twilight, passing in front of houses where a window happens to light up; when the boat comes in fairly close to the shore-line, where the sun has caught a distant windowpane (and once it was Caraco where I was told that the paths were long since impassable, smothered by brambles), this very specific emotion seizes hold of me--- I feel I'm getting close, and something tells me to be on the alert.  What are the names of those villages over there?  Why is there a light on that terrace, and who is greeting us, or calling us, as we come alongside.  Of course, the moment I set foot in one of these places, this sense of 'getting warm' fades away.  But not without it intensifying, sometimes for as much as an hour, because the sound of footsteps or a voice rose to my hotel room, reaching me through the closed shutters..."

                                                               TWELVE

Bonnefoy is on a journey, Italy, France, Greece, eventually in memory to Armenia... but the place first took shape in a book read in childhood, long remembered, but now lost... don't we all have these books?

                                                              FOURTEEN


The whole of Bonnefoy’s book is summed up, “I sought my true place, on this strange earth of ours, so prompt to satisfy my desires and yet so mysteriously disappointing.”

But where?: “it is the context of these undisciplined speculations that Italy became a part of the arriere-pays, and the place where I most abandoned myself to the dream.

In truth, I did find it hard going when he takes us into a discussion of dream.  I do not read about dreams.  Someone said once about dreams: that is why a shrink charges so much, nothing more boring than listening to a dream…

However Bonnefoy is aware of this and backs away all the time from dream, “I have resolved nothing , which can explain why I have remained a writer, writing being the wood that piles up as the fire starts to catch, in the smoke.  But one or two things I have understood… it consists in not forgetting the here and now in the dream of elsewhere, in not forgetting time, humble time as it is lived through here among the illusions of the other place, that shade existing out of time.

Yet always mentioning great artist ending in his listing Caravaggio…”and next to these, who have lifted off the tombstone from the imagination, there are others, crreators of great art also, divided within themselves, discouraged but still tenacious, not without the suffering which Baudelaire knew to be the illustre compagne, the noble companion, of the beauty be most prized.."

                                                                    SIXTEEN

Bonnefoy ends his book with an evocation of Armenia based upon black and white photos of Armenian churches he remembered  seeing as a child and this thought about black and white photographs:  "I had the impression I had already  visited these churches, among their mountains, because the black and white  established a continuity with other memories from those ‘profound years’, reminiscences that seem to spring from ‘before we were ourselves.”…

                                                                      SEVENTEEN

The reason, by now you might be asking for those two photographs: taken in Deddington, near Oxford, Sunday afternoon in August, while taking a walk, while visiting the Oldfields... just stopped as Bonnefoy before certain paintings in Italy... a place, not the Mascot Dock in Patchogue, n

not, not, late night  walking across the Galata Bridge in Istanbul... or in Kyoto or in Dublin...  in Dublin...

a picture saturated with memory of after the pubs eating on the way home... now forlorn only because of memory

                                                                    SEVENTEEN

When John O'Brien discovered that I was heading to Cape May, NJ for a week with extended family he sent this message:  

AND IN 10, 15 YEARS, THERE WILL STILL BE THE BEACH, THE ENDLESS WAVES, THE SAND: ANDWE WILL NOT BE... A FADING MEMORY, REDUCED TO LITTLE STORIES, ANECDOTES, SEMI-ACCURATE, TWISTED TO MAKE THEM BETTER ANECDOTES, BUT THEN ABOUT PEOPLE (US) THAT NO ONE REMEMBERS, JUST NAMES IMAGINARY PEOPLE WHO ONCE WERE, STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE WHO NOW THEMSELVES WORRY ABOUT HOW THEY WILL BE FORGOTTEN.

I suspect O'Brien is echoing Sorrentino... but I know when my son was talking about his 20 and 20 and 20 plan...20 years in industry, 20 years in a university and then 20 years teaching in a school like the school he went to Groton...I knew I would be there possibly only for the start of his first 20 year plan...

as when  we were at the beach  in the late afternoon...  that time around four when people are beginning to leave the beach...

                                                                SEVENTEEN

I have with deliberation said nothing about those pictures from Deddington.

SHITSTORM FOR JACK KEROUAC'S COLLECTED POEMS

FIVE  

Another beginning.  I was writing to the publicity guy who does the Library of America that he had better get ready for a shit storm when the Library of America publishes the COLLECTED POEMS OF JACK KEROUAC.  There will be great squeals of disgust, accusations of pandering, the question of standards, how could you when you have not published… all the rest of it.

2- My first question why did the Library only do one volume of Kerouac’s prose focused upon ON THE ROAD  THE DHARMA BUMS< THE SUBTERRANEANS, TRISTESSA, LONESOME TRAVELER  when  to be complete there is an immediate need for all the other prose books:  BIG SUR, MAGGIE CASSIDY, SATORI IN PARIS (the most under-rated of K’s books and the saddest) PIC (the most daring) and all the rest.

7- It is my firm belief that ON THE ROAD is the equivalent to Melville’s MOBY DICK.  ON THE ROAD is the singular American novel of the 20^th Century as is MOBY DICK of the 19^th Century.  Tim Hunt has begun the intellectual and academic job of building the case though readers in every country of the world have done the job for him in the sense that it is the one novel read in nearly every language of the world by those who read in those individual languages who really read.  No other American novel can make that claim.

4- So, the real scandal of the Library of America is why have they not published Melville’s collected poetry?  Of course as Geoffrey O’Brien--- Editor in Chief of LOA--- has told me,  That book will be published but  just not in our lifetimes.  A reason, I would think,  to live on into…

67- So, while we wait for the remaining prose book of Kerouac from LOA we have the Collected Poetry… and down here on East First Street that is cause for celebration.

9- After T.S. Eliot’s opening line to The Waste Land, April is the cruelest month… and Ezra Pound’s opening  line to Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, For three years, out of key with his time…  I have quoted Jack Kerouac’s  TO EDWARD DAHLBERG.  Don’t use the telephone/People are never ready to answer it./Use poetry.  (Sadly there has to be a note as to why EDWARD DAHLBERG is/was)

78- And  I carried for years as a bookmark a card with Kerouac’s  WOMAN.  A woman is beautiful/but/you have to swing/and swing and swing/and swing like/a handkerchief in the/wind.

85- I turn the page in the collected poetry:  GOOFBALL BLUES:  I’m just a human being with a lot of/shit on my heart.

6- Or:::: OLD ANGEL MIDNIGHT::::  Friday Afternoon In the Universe, in all directions in & out you got your men women dogs children horses pones tics perts parts pans pools palls pails parturiences and petty Thieveries tat turn into heavenly Buddha--- I know boy what’s I talkin about case I made the world & when I made it I no lie & had Old Angel Midnight for my name and concocted up a world so nothing… 

  

39- From Uncollected Haikus  The sound of silence/is all the instruction/you’ll get

43- Years and years ago I remember in embarrassed naivety NOW  talking with Julian Green in Paris who had envied my being an altar boy as we sat In his elegant rue Vaneau apartment and him in the French Academy and me a little drunk—that special academy---  and me talking about Jack Kerouac who Green had heard of but who thought that the mixing of Buddhism with Catholicism un-necessary and yet I thought it important enough to mention to Green, about who Kerouac was and is still the most important American writer who happened also to be a Catholic who believed with the necessary belief of Green’s Idealized  Italian painter who never asks why: what’s the point, since only belief matters… and years later Green finally told me the real truly, finally something and which scandalized the pathetic agnostic, atheist  Guardian readers where I published this profile/interview with Green---  something Kerouac knew: when  I asked Green in his 90s what he had to look forward to, replied:  Purgatory and I know JK was seeking that in the final stupidity of his alcoholism, though …

44- The story of man/Makes me sick/Inside,outside,/I don’t know why/Something so conditional/And all talk/Should hurt me so./ 

I am hurt/I am scared/I want to live/I want to die/I don’t know/Where to turn/in the Void/and when/to cut/Out

45- My only problem with the LOA editon:  they disgraced the cover with a quote from the consummate fake Anne Waldman who has made a huge living by parading about with the mere rotten flesh of Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs hanging off her skirt.

57-  from MEXICO CITY BLUES:   1, A home for unmarried fathers.

                                                                2. Well, that about does me in./I've packed my bags and time /Has come to start to heaven.

                                                                3.  Love’s multitudinous boneyard/of decay.

SIX    

Another beginning .  The other day for fifty cents I bought the April 1966 mass market paperback of Jack Kerouac’s DESOLATION ANGELS published by Bantam for 95 cents.  FROM THE INTERNATIONAL UNDERGROUND OF THE BEAT GENERATION.  On the cover stark black and white figures of six humans, centered upon a bare-chested man and a woman seen from behind wearing only a bra, positioned on top of what might be the Washington Square Arch...

I mention this because there are no longer mass market paperback that are actually literary and readable.  I was forced to live in exile that early Fall of 1966 in my parents’ exile in Menasha, Wisconsin.  In  the city next to Menasha, Neenah was a large smoke shop and bookstore with many racks of paper backs and it was likely that this book would have been there. 

All of that has been wiped away.  The Signet and Bantam Classics, the Avon Books, books that would introduce South American literature to a mass audience… and make no mistake about it these pocketbooks, were published for a mass audience.  

At one moment, now long gone, some people thought that the masses wanted to read literature.  That has changed and now those people, those masses  talk about liking the books that I like to read, my books, my library and they are talking in reality about a range of books from James Patterson to Jonathan Franzen… and if you think there is a difference between Franzen and Patterson you are not really reading these words… and it could be Franzen is a pen-name for James Patterson…

A TINY HOLDING ACTION AGAINST THE...

ONE

From the shelf,   TRIPTYCH  by Max Frisch.  I had read it when it first came out in 1981 as a partial commentary on the death of Ingeborg  Bachmann and so focused on the third section.  This time it was the opening part that caught me.  A man is talking to a widow in a cemetery chapel.  He says, “He had a good death. Today not many people nowadays have the good fortune to die at home, and seventy is a good age, after all.

The widow sobs as the funeral guest stands helplessly beside her; it takes her some time to get a grip on herself again.  WIDOW: I can’t really take it in.  I still see him. Sitting there is his chair.  I can see him. All the time I can hear what Matthis is thinking.

There is no protection against feeling something when reading such sentences… with a birthday two years shy of 70 arriving in October.  That was Sunday afternoon.  But Sunday night I happened upon a criitical book I had forgotten  I had on the Russian writer Andrei Bitov:  ANDREI BITOV THE ECOLOGY OF INSPIRATION by ELLEN CHANCES  I am sure you know his great novel PUSHKIN HOUSE, the one Russian novel that might compete with Bely’s ST PETERSBURG, with Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, a book belonging to literature and not to publicity--- as I am told Russians say to distinguish such books from the equivalent of the rubbish written by, in the American context,  Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison---  books not  of the passing season… but in the critical book I was reminded of  Bitov’s travel books and in particular the ones devoted to Armenia and Georgia. Published as one book by FSG,  A CAPTIVE OF THE CAUCASUS  containing :  LESSONS OF ARMENIA  Journey out of Russia   and  CHOOSING A LOCATION  Georgia Album.

                I had been given the book back in 1992 but had not read it.  I didn’t get the first sentences of each of these books within A CAPTIVE  OF THE CAUCASUS:  FROM THE AUTHOR:  LESSONS OF ARMENIA  Journey out of Russia TRANSLATING PAST TO PRESENT  On the first page of this book:::::: I was thirty years old, the entire Soviet regime was preparing for its fiftieth anniversary, Russian Christianity had not yet reached its millennium and the Armenian Christianity had already celebrated a millennium and a half.    From the second book within A CAPTIVE OF THE CAUCASUS:   CHOOSING A LOCATION  Georgian Album.  There is a quote from Lermontov and then THE PHENOMENON OF THE NORM   When you try to prove that something is something, you lose it completely. The plot of a book possesses the peculiarity that it must be concluded.  Having entered into it you cannot exit via some other labyrinth.  Do a thing once, and you’ve gained experience; gain experience and it immediately proves unusable.. .

TWO

I had totally forgotten these other books by Bitov and in particular the one about Georgia   from which in that cliché, in fact I had   I came back from on 22 June 2012.. now, so far into the past it might as well have been a century ago… but I am well aware of the slippage and  had found a way to restart  the book I have been writing about going about Bulgaria two years ago:  the new version begins:

EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS

to quote: and if it is to be another seventeen years before my next visit:  the place was Istanbul but I am tempted to think of other cities I might have  named, as if the actual city mattered--- a change of mood you will notice, a hint of optimism, seventeen years, another visit, I will be 57, my life nearly at its end--- if my parents are to serve as a model--- possibly dragging along some awful child, who will not want to be here, I could probably sell him or her if there is still a market for white children, would anyone be the wiser, when back in New York City--- though the irony is I will have come back here only a year later with the woman who would be the mother of the now 21 year old son I was traveling with and now I am on my way to 68 and to think—in another 17 years: 85 years old…the prefatory paragraph done and now the warning.

A reader, and there is never a reason to write unless one expects to be read… I could find an ear, for sure, any ear and pour all of these words into that receptacle and have done so but that ear will surely die and then… a reader, should know, what follows is concerned with work and with a journey around Bulgaria and with why a few people were not with me and Piret as we made our way in June two years ago as we went from Sofia to Strazhitsa, to Veliko Tarnovo to Varna to Plovdiv to Sofia.

THREE

But this was written before I picked up Bitov, picked up the Frisch…  to be given such a book as Bitov’s to now read in competition with my memories of Georgia and Istanbul and indeed in Istanbul the appearance of a museum devoted to depicting the contents of a novel--- a fiction!!!--- by Orhan Pamuk…. And a museum with an illustrated guide book in which many of the exhibits are carefully and romantically photographed…  photographs of something made up…

FOUR

But reading books do add, the very best do not take away…only rubbish diminishes a person…I am not thinking of those simple books a person receives when he asks for the latest mysteries or she asks for the latest sci-fi books… or even the latest romance or cowboy books.. there is another class of books, far larger and more insidious that can only diminish a reader and you will know them if you read on the back of as I did the  galleys for Craig Nova’s THE CONSTANT HEART, to be published by a rather good publisher, this quote from the New York Times, “[Nova’s fiction] is so powerful, so alive, it is a wonder that turning its pages doesn’t somehow burn one’s hands.” 

For an author to take pride in such a reaction… and to allow it to appear on a book cover. 

Or,  a publicist wrote this about TRIBURBIA by Karl Taro Greenfield, “  Triburbia is an enveloping look at the lives and yearnings of a particular breed that will speak to anyone plugged into the contemporary zeitgeist.  An impressive, wholly original debut, it introduces a remarkable new voice…”  Greenfield has seen five other books published.

Why bother remarking on any of this?   

The first of August begins the silly season as the English say. Colonels in Somerset go into conspiracy mode and I added just after EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS a quote from a song by Zeki Müren:         

 seni gormem imkansiz imkansiz imkansiz
                                                                      ruyalarim olmasa

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ. Museums and Books as Cemeteries

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ

Museums and books as cemeteries

PREFACE

Lilia responded the other day to a beautiful black/white photo from Venice which I had put on Facebook of her (age 18) feeding pigeons in San Marco when we had left Sofia in April of 1968, “I remember being happy to leave Bulgaria but the black and white photograph makes me seem like I am dead…”

                                           -SEVEN-

Yale University Press by reprinting in a beautiful fat paperback an up-dated complete edition of the Diaries of WITOLD GOMBROWICZ has done a singular important, essential and remarkable job.  GOMBROWICZ in his diaries contradicts, stands athwart the constant infantilizing of the world.  The Diaries remind us what it is to think, beholding to no power other than the power contained in one human individual brain, a brain that does not forget, that owes nothing to any cause or any party or faction or group.  Free of the temptation of nostalgia in knowing that no time is better than any other time, Gombrowicz is as is said, his own man, “We are not, I said, the direct heirs of past greatness or insignificance, intelligence or stupidity, virtue or sin and each person is responsible only for himself.  Each is himself.”

No one reading this blog is likely to be unfamiliar with WG’s writings…  FERDURKE, PORNOGRAFIA…the plays THE MARRIAGE, OPERETTA… and so much more.  I have long been taken with WG’s idea that when I talk to you and you talk to me I begin to talk to the imagine that I have of you just as you begin to talk to the image I have of you and gradually it is those two images, those two inventions are talking and if one is able to step back one enjoys the comedy…

Here I think is a perfect example from 1953 while he is living in Argentina of what I go to Gombrowicz for:

I do not believe, therefore, that death is man’s real problem or that an art that is entirely permeated by it is completely authentic.  Our real issue is growing old, that aspect of death that we experience daily.  Perhaps not even growing old but the fact that it is so completely, so terribly cut off from beauty.  Our gradual dying does not disturb us, it is rather that the beauty of life becomes inaccessible to us.  At the cemetery I spotted a young boy walking among the graves like a being from another world, mysteriously and abundantly blooming while we looked like paupers.  It struck me, however, that I did not feel our helplessness as something categorically inevitable. 

And I liked this feeling in myself at once.  I hang onto those thoughts and feeling that I like.  I am incapable of feeling or thinking anything that would compete annihilate me.  So that even here I followed this line of thinking which, because it derived from me, created hope.  Was it really impossible to bind old age to life and youth?  That artificiality, to which I am becoming more and more accustomed in man, that idee fixe, which grows so gradually and so reluctantly in me, the thought that the terrifying concreteness of our form is not the only possibility, makes the world supple.  If at one time I had believed that everything had already been said, today I am surrounded by endless combinations of ideas and forms and everything around me becomes fertile (Here I would like to note that I searched for a half hour for the sentence which will appear below because , as always, I am trying to formulate a problem without knowing whether a solution is possible and I did not really think the issue through at the cemetery.)

According to me, youth at the core of its spirit does not like its own beauty and defends itself against it, and that distrust of its own beauty is more beautiful than beauty itself and contains the only possibility of overcoming of the distance that kills.”

                                                       -NINE-

I have been transferring my little pencil markings from my battered hardcover editions of Gombrowicz’s DIARY to this new edition to which have been added  pages and the parts that were slashed in an now mistaken effort to not give offense to the communist bosses in Poland.

                                     

                                                          -TWELVE-

Are Museums cemeteries?  The more I think about this it becomes obvious beyond argument.  I was thinking of the Metropolitan in New York City, The  National Gallery in London, add any of the other big one… those large warehouses…

But then there are The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and probably near you too some variety of a museum devoted to “modern” art.  Also near you if you live in a large city is the Medical Examiner’s Office or the Coroner’s office… truth to say I see little real difference between these guys with their refrigerated shelving and the frigid rooms people hurry through at MOMA for instance in New York .

Recently at the Stein show in New York and one walks through rooms of Picasso and Matisse… and then on to the part of the museum with the 19^th century art that seems not to be “impressionist”

One wishes to lives another two hundred years and to discover that people then decide that Impressionism was just another peculiar episode in the history of art, a history… and just that word: history…

The large international art museums, the Met, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre seem to be always moving the paintings about:  paintings are not fixed to certain walls… of course in the Louvre due to the size of certain paintings this is not the case but still even there paintings move and then there are the constant temporary shows which seem always unnecessary in this age of easy travel.  Why shouldn’t people be required to just go to museums to see works of art rather than having museums mount these shows and show is the exact word… like Broadway show, like the times for showing the movie…

Of course we will hear of what a wonderful benefit it is to everyone to gather for a short period of time many works by a certain artist… or even more curious a curator will decided to stage an idea or a theme… and then gather from many collections…

Jacques Rigaut--- the discover of Lord Patchogue--- when he came to the US in the 1920  announced that he was a museum and preceded to reveal the treasures that he carried in his pockets, stored for safe keeping in match boxes… thus he established the pathetic uselessness of museums…  these vast overcoats if only they knew--- rooms instead of pockets stuffed with art…

All museums seem like supermarkets… but does one really have to go on?

The only movable show  I can approve of is when the Met puts up its Baroque Christmas tree, for that season, there midst looted medieval altar pieces… though I am going to the Met then to visit the memory of going there with my children…

-FIFTEEN-

Picture and word books about obscure places are always interesting, at least to me.  I have never exhausted the Salton Sea, Tombstone, Patchogue, NY, northern Wisconsin and from Nebraska University Press comes LIKE NO OTHER PLACE The Sandhills of Nebraska by David A. Owen.  Like many narratives of such places, there is the accident of arriving, the meeting with people and then the staying or the coming back… a modest book of a modest place--- twenty thousand square miles out there somewhere in Nebraska but then everything is somewhere out there when living in Manhattan, NYC.

The acknowledgments go on for two pages which seems a little much for a book of 145 pages and when I looked at the photographs… mostly pleasant snap shots of people met  but who one can imagine are now aging and some might be dead and others have the book put away somewhere not wanting to be reminded or if reminded… that was when…  but  the pictures of the  emptiness of the land, a land devoid of people  and even of animals, black and white, not posed, not shaped by some academic theory, modest, not done on glossy paper:  clouds and land with the absence of trees.  I would have been happy with just that as Owen goes astray when he takes camera inside and shows us details and in all those acknowledgements no a mention of Wright Morris who discovered and showed us all what he found inside in Nebraska.  But the last words from David A. Owen, “Once you are in Ellsworth, you are almost immediately out of it and back into the bush…”

Of course all places are like no other place.