17 January, 2011

Winter Wonderland

The 1996 ice storm took out power across Kansas City for days. Not only were lines and transformers down, an inch-thick armor of frozen water toppled whole trees, which barricaded suburban streets with their dendrite forms. Roads were encased for blocks on end. For many, escape from their homes by car was impossible. Not that most risked road travel, given the conditions. Public Works trucks canvassed nonstop with salt and sand, but fighting the storm's effects proved a Sisyphean task. In their desperation, gas and electric companies had to enlist out-of-state assistance to do triage on the extensive damage. For thousands, life came to a standstill.

Warmth drained quicker than expected from the suburban three-bedroom my roommate and I — both seventeen; both precociously independent — shared. As the last sunlit hour slipped away, there was no indication we would have heat restored that night. Houses on the next block still had power, though, and this observation led us to believe a hot deep-dish might await intrepid souls hardy enough to make the half-mile journey east, to Torre's Pizza. Neither my roommate nor I wanted to sit around eating a cold dinner on such a night, candlelit or otherwise.

We slid into layers of sweaters and coats, and extinguished the near-bonfire of illumination by which we'd been reading in the living room. As Aaron, my roommate, crowned himself with his brown old-man hat, he joked, "Just so you know, if it starts to look like we won't make it, I'm hungry enough not to have qualms about resorting to cannibalism."

"That's no good," I said, covering my grimace with a scarf. "I'm hardly a meaty Brazilian soccer player."

"With all that time in front of the computer, I'll bet you're like veal."

"My stomach's growling. Let's go before this gets all Donner Party-freaky."

We were sobered by the state of things beyond our door. The spangled surface of everything was blue with the city's faint lambency, and alive with sound — the collective groans of miles of ice-weighted objects being pulled earthward. Had we held perfectly still awhile, the stinging flurry from the sky might have encased us as it had all else. Moving quickly through it as we did was to witness a rare beauty, like traversing the interior of a diamond.

Some parkour got us over and through the labyrinth of creaking branches obstructing the end of our block. After that, it was a more conventional walk down a wider, flatter route to the welcoming yellowed glow of Torre's. It seemed other neighborhood residents had the same idea for dinner; my famished friend and I pushed through the front door, frozen faces first, into a round of cheery hellos and not a few jokes about being fellow survivors of the winter apocalypse. For everyone's dedication to local business, drinks were on the house: iced-down sodas and tea, but still.

The next morning, Aaron and I built a fire pit in the backyard. The wind had stilled in the night, leaving something easily mistakable for warmth as we squinted against the brilliant daylight, toting scrap two-by-fours from the basement. With some newspaper and an old broom — voilĂ !: flames by which to cook. Aaron retrieved chairs off the patio; I raided the quieted refrigerator for perishables. We never ate such a breakfast as that. Omelets full of onions and fire-roasted tomatoes and peppers, fried potatoes in little pools of butter, a half-gallon of milk to wash it down with, and, later, coffee made from billy-boiled water poured oh-so slowly through our coffeemaker's detached basket of grounds. We ate and drank it all outside, in the crackling whiteness, like we were the last men alive. Nothing echoed, every sound an unfamiliar intimacy, the clinking of our forks nearer than I've ever heard, and our food magically better for that isolation.

For lunch we roasted Hebrew National hot dogs and drank mugs of rich cocoa with a flotilla of miniature marshmallows, sitting in our chairs and watching steam almost crystallize as it rose from our beverages and mouths alike. Neither of us spoke. Off in the distance of a neighboring yard was a cardinal, pecking at seeds in a feeder, and we watched him until something unseen and silent startled him away.

Regarding the light switch with a kind of mistrust, on the third day's return of electricity, Aaron said, "There's something to that, reading by candlelight. We should keep it up for awhile — the fire, all of it. Let's just unplug some of this stuff and go on living without the modern conveniences."

His naive enthusiasm was infectious, I'll admit. So we did it. But of course, amid the neighbors' resumption of their usual activity, it couldn't last. Snowblowers tore at the air. Nearby traffic hummed. After sunset, streetlights dug pits in the darkness. The cardinal made his home in some far-off tranquil field that only those with wings could reach.

01 January, 2011

The List: Reading a Cut Above, in 2010



Although stocked more completely than one might expect of a prison library, Crossroads has precious little of the literary material I prefer. It was some time ago that I pulled the last enticing book off the selves here. For years, I have kept a list of authors and titles of books I intend one day to read — culled from choice reviews and the recommendations of friends. It's a long one. Shortly after the DOC policy change I wrote about, I compiled, at a certain someone's ingenious suggestion, a short version as an Amazon wish list, so that those who asked about sending books in the past could now know which books I most desired. It took only a couple of months for that list to dwindle and require an update.

Bypassing the deliberately difficult process of requesting titles for the librarian's next order has yet to lose its edge of excitement. Like a starving man invited to a sumptuous banquet, I have been consuming more than I'd have thought possible, and savoring every delectable moment. So, for graciously helping appease my hunger for the written word, I want to thank the following individuals.

In no particular order, much gratitude goes out to Little Miss Sunshine, Graham P., Matt C., the Wicked Witches of the West, Tom at Prospero's, Josie S., Jen J., Jim at The Hot Air Quarterly, the nameless stranger at Crazyhorse, my dearest Mum, the Skeptical Juror, Lynn A., the fine people of The Sun, and the mysterious few whose names did not appear on their orders for me to acknowledge.

Now, here's my better-than-usual year in books.

* * * * *

Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys

Mark Garvey, Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's Elements of Style

Gary Krist, Extravagance

Pierre Laszlo, Salt: Grain of Life

Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes

Fracis Flaherty, The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies

J. Bennett Allen, The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Byron Case

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

Patrick Süskind, Perfume

Jesse Ball, The Way Through Doors

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life Ivan Denisovich

Thomas S. Kane, The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing

Richard Adams, Watership Down

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Rick Moody, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions

Sol Stein, Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

Thomas Pychon, Gravity's Rainbow

Steven Weisenburger, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources & Contexts for Pynchon's Novel

Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian • Dead Eye Dick

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Jessica Anthony, The Convalescent

Hansjörg Schertenleib, A Happy Man

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Mary Oliver and Robert Atwan (editors), The Best American Essays 2009

Liane Holliday Willey, Pretending to be Normal: Living with Asperger's Syndrome

J. Bennett Allen, The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Cory Maye

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

Michael Adams, Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made

Bill Brown, Dream Whip No.14 [Note: this publication may techincally classify as a zine, but it's nevertheless perfect-bound, bears an ISBN, and represents 336 pages of some fine, thoughtful travel writing.]

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

J. Bennett Allen, The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Cameron Todd Willingham

Charlaine Harris, An Ice Cold Grave

Jim Carroll, The Petting Zoo

Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser (editors), It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure

Robert Graves, I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54

Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

Zadie Smith, White Teeth