Just Kids

When reading is a priority you find yourself reading many books. Especially in pandemic times escapism seems to be the most important goal when reading. Looking at my shelves I can see many genre books waiting to be read: Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter, Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, Network Effect by Martha Wells… and the list goes on. We want space skyscrapers and long magical blades. Dragons, robots, nymphs. Anything but what is happening outside our front door where we dash around maskless neighbors like they are lumps of fiery hot magma.

There comes a time in all of this fantasy that one may tend to get burnt out. If you are a writer you will find yourself writing about things that could not exist on Earth’s terra firma, writing within a bubble on an astroid hellbent on crashing into a lunar ocean.

So we turn to a different TBR pile. Memoirs, biographies, science, nature. Instead of escapism one decides that they want reminders that the world, under all of this sickness and pain, is still a beautiful place. A place that has beauty in spades but we, if only for a moment, forgot. We’ve been sipping air through our masks and haven’t gotten the sharp scent of grass that had been our lifeblood. Learning tends to be its own kind of escapism. Especially when we can exit our own brains and follow the life of another.

This brings me to Patti Smith’s Just Kids.

I am not entirely sure why this book hit me at just the right time. I have always noticed that Smith had published books and it has always left me curious. Isn’t she a musician? When does she have time to write? This all through the lens of someone who didn’t know a thing about her. Now that I do, I understand.

Patti Smith was a poet before she was anything else. The fact that she came into music was merely a small twist of fate. Just Kids is not a book of poetry but it still reads like one just the same. The relationship between Smith and Robert Magglethorpe, the late renowned photographer, is unlike any I have heard or read before. Filled with love, frustration, friendship and, most importantly, trust. Just Kids is a look at two artists and how they bolster one another through each other’s creative endeavors. This fact alone is very inspiring to me. To me there is no greater love than helping another rise to their fullest potential, no matter what you fear about their art. It is selfless and beautiful.

Without giving anything away there is much heartache, as is in most of these kinds of relationships. But that doesn’t mean it ends on a negative note. Smith turns everything into poetry while at the same time never sounding pompous of over-elegant. Her prose, as I’ve found with nature writers like Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver, forces you to pay more attention to your world and your relationships. To love with reckless abandon when you have the chance. To make time for your art and to find the ones who see the spark in you and help keep it alive.

Learnin'

I hadn’t planned on it happening, but here we are my peoples. Maybe I had read so many fantasies and sci-fi books one after another and had figured “Hey, maybe I should start learning something.” Mind you, when you are reading Brandon Sanderson and N.K. Jemisin you feel like you are learning. If anything, how to be a writer. Or just bleeding green envy with every page turned.

It is typical of me to read some type of nonfiction along with a fiction title, giving equal time to each. But lately I’ve found that I want to sit down and spend time with cows and wolves and writers talking about writing. We readers go through phases, and this is just one of mine. We love when these phases happen because they shake things up and make us interested in things we may have only had passive interests in in the past. 

John Connell’s The Farmer’s Son was something that caught me by surprise. I was walking around my local Barnes and Noble when I found it. Granted, as I guiltily do, I was taken in by the cover. It is serene: an idyllic Irish landscape with perfect cows lying cozily hither and tither. The author photo was a scruffy younger man, not at all your average farmer. And it is true that he isn’t, just as the book isn’t your average autobiography on what it means to be in a family of farmers. Taking the mantel of farmer was not easy for Connell, having grown acquainted to an urban lifestyle in Australia and Canada before moving back home to Ireland. There was his contentious relationship with his father, missteps that lead to death of livestock, and other trials and tribulations that numbered more than bales of hay. The Farmer’s Son is a beautiful book about many things, but most interestingly about the collision of two different generations in a lifestyle that may seem to some as old fashioned.

I have been a fan of Lawrence Wright for many years. He is widely known via his groundbreaking novel about Scientology called Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. It was later made into an HBO documentary directed by Alex Gibney. He also wrote about the rise of Al Qaeda in his book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. As seems to be the pattern, this was made into a Hulu mini-series. I read his latest book, God Save Texas, interested first and foremost in learning about a state where I spent my childhood. Now that I live in California, you get a sense of how people see the Lone Star state: gun-hungry, right wing fanatics who are closed-minded and heavily against any and all government intervention. Wright, who lives in Austin, takes into account the history of the state, from the state’s break with Mexico, the Alamo, all the way to now. It is a state that has a heavy hand in politics. Wright takes a detour from his usual reporting style and writes in first person. He is a biased observer and he knows it. But he loves his state, for all its complexity and influence.

I am an unabashed wolf fanatic, which began after reading Nate Blakelee’s American Wolf: A True Story of Obsession in the West and led to as many nature documentaries about the wolf as I could get my hands on. Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s The Wisdom of Wolves about living among the Sawtooth Pack was another book that did nothing but elevate my low-key obsession. I am now only a little bit into Rick McIntyre’s The Rise of Wolf 8. He is a subject in Blakelee’s American Wolf because McIntyre was a part of reinstating wolves back into Yellowstone National Park. This was an outrage to local farmers who blamed wolves for killing their livestock, leading to their eradication years before. But as McIntyre and most experts believe, we live within the world of animals and should do our best to treat them like we would our neighbor.

And then there is Susan Orlean. Many may know her from her riveting The Library Book about the fire of the Los Angeles Public Library, thought to be arson. She brought her keen eye and hungry wonder to The Orchid Thief, a fascination about a man that started from a small clipping in a newspaper she read on a flight. From there she traveled to Florida and learned about the dark world of orchid collecting, and how those collectors fed their obsessions by acquiring the most rare and coveted flowers. A book about flowers in the swamps of Florida should not be this good, but this is Orlean. She will never steer you wrong.

Sometimes you have to read fiction. You have to escape, get lost in a space war here and there, climb on the back of an ogre, do some magic. Yet a healthy dose of knowledge never hurt anyone. Especially when it is a topic you don’t know much about. I know nothing about farming, but if The Farmer’s Son taught me anything—even if I didn’t ask—I know what a calf birth looks like. Knowledge, my friends. It isn’t always pretty.