The View from Clay County

May 26, 2012 -- History rolls on at a memorial outside the county courthouse in Vermillion, South Dakota, where VFW Post 3061 will hold an observance on Monday.

Photo of the Day

May 16, 2012 -- Off Highway 19 and a bend in the Missouri River, South Dakota's corn is already enjoying the warmest year on record.

The View from Yankton

May 12, 2012 -- For the annual Humane Society fundraiser in Yankton, South Dakota, a rancher from Tyndall brings his menagerie: exotic pheasants, spitting alpacas, and a month-old, one-humped camel.

Bolaño’s Last, Great Secret

via The New Yorker and Jacques Henric

May 7, 2012 -- RBM has an essay on Roberto Bolaño and The Secret of Evil (April 2012) over at The Millions. This might be the great hypnotist's last original collection, and while it doesn't measure up to Last Evenings on Earth (2007), which followed Bolaño's posthumous debut in The New Yorker, there is plenty to behold. Along with a dozen sketches from computer files that publisher New Directions says he was working on at the time of his death, April's release includes longer stories that occasionally read as essays. Or is it the other way around? Here's more on that question from “Bolaño's Last, Great Secret.” The excerpt begins with a quotation from Bolaño's “Labyrinth,” whose narrator is preoccupied with a photograph.

"They're sitting around a table. It's an ordinary table, made of wood, perhaps, or plastic, it could even be a marble table on metal legs, but nothing could be less germane to my purpose than to give an exhaustive description of it." 

What Bolaño's last masterpiece does proceed to describe, with East Germanic voyeurism, is the web of relationships on display. Why? Because (1) unlike many tableside portraits in Paris, this image was not intended for a magazine spread; and (2) because, importantly, not everyone is paying attention to the photographer. Two of the women pictured gaze off-camera, in the same direction. They might be preoccupied with an object of affection and it's precisely this quality of deduction that fuels Bolaño’s narrative. 

What of the photo itself? Unfortunately for readers, it can't be found in The Secret of Evil. But it did appear in The New Yorker's publication of “Labyrinth,” spread right across the opening pages. What more can be said of the seated figures, we begin to wonder?

 To read RBM's essay in full, visit this permalink.

The View from DeKalb

April 1, 2012 -- Its Merits Recommend It, a 1999 mural overlooking downtown DeKalb, Illinois, reminds visitors of the region's history. A DeKalb farmer patented barbed wire in 1874. The mural's designer borrowed the title from an old advertisement for wire fencing. The state's official snack food? Popcorn.

Some Thoughts on the Ngram Viewer

Searching "lots of books," 1900-2000 

March 28, 2012 -- RBM will present "The Massacre in Magical Realism: Some Thoughts on Las Bananeras and the Ngram Viewer" at the 2012 Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media. The conference takes place March 30-31 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. RBM's paper explores the historicity of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude with help from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Google's Ngram Viewer, pictured above. An excerpt:

What’s seems worth noting, as this rumination's coda, is the near-absence of the events of December 1928 from this data set. Searching for  "banana massacre"  (and  "Santa Marta massacre," as it's also known), produces a flat line up until the late 1960s, when One Hundred Years first reaches audiences, then minor bursts of consciousness, or so it would appear, as García Márquez wins the Nobel prize in 1982 and finally reaches a far-flung literati. Soaring above this line, ever since the 1920s—up and down and up again, sometimes more than a dozen data points higher (we imagine) into all of literature—we find the terms  "Jallianwala Bagh massacre" (and  "Amritsar massacre," as it was first known). More bluntly, and as the closing chapters of One Hundred Years attest, it was the bananeras, not General Dyer's tangled villagers, who with the disappearance of a banana company disappeared from Western thought.

Moderating RBM's panel, which also includes criticism of newspaper op-eds and ethnic identity in poetry: Ibis Gómez-Vega, a novelist and professor of English at Northern Illinois. There's more information at NIU.edu/MCLLM.

The Post-Orientalists

Millenium Park's Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor, 2006)

Updated March 4, 2012 -- This year's conference and bookfair of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) concluded Saturday in Chicago after record attendance. The journal Brevity has been covering AWP's talk of nonfiction at its blog: everything from John D'Agata and "Exploding the Narrative Line" to Rebecca Skloot and "What’s Wrong with the Whole Truth?" Here's a dispatch by RBM from Thursday's "Creative Nonfiction and the Possibility of Post-Orientalist Travel Writing," a panel featuring five travel writers who part ways with Joseph Conrad and other Orientalists.

I’ll leave you with Oona Patrick, the Cape Cod writer who left the most lasting impression on this writer. Patrick calls her work a “cautionary tale” about her native Provincetown, where her Portuguese ancestors stepped off a whaleship from the Azores some 150 years ago. “You have a lot of guts to be here,” Patrick was told more recently, when the local showed up at Provincetown’s storied colony of (mostly visiting) artists. 

On Thursday, this soft-spoken woman in black delivered a biting critique of Cape Cod’s luminaries (Henry David Thoreau, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Normal Mailer, Mary Oliver, Mark Doty, Annie Dillard, the list goes on) and their descriptions of what is to many sacred ground. In concluding her remarks, Patrick singled out (perhaps unfairly) the following excerpt from Doty’s “Breakwater.” 

“Here, curving out to the farthest reaches, / the breakwater’s a causeway of huge stones. / Hard to think these were placed, / these drowsy, inland boulders / awakened, all century, by the seawater’s / moon-driven alarm. Who piled them, / one atop the other, / into this enormous arc?” 

“Who piled them?” Patrick repeated, incredulous. “They’re not crop circles!”

The full text of this post is at Brevity.wordpress.com along with RBM's "Three Cups of Veritas" (a review of Byliner.com). For another visit to Chicago's mesmerizing Cloud Gate, see "One Day in the Second City."

The View from a Little House

January 16, 2012 -- Snowfall at dusk obscures the shores of a silver lake outside a little town called De Smet, South Dakota. Nearby, a sign points 275 miles east to Laura and Mary Ingalls' birthplace in the big woods of Wisconsin; 12 miles southwest to Laura's golden years at the Brewster School; and 2.5 miles north to her first four years on Almanzo Wilder's claim.

Photo of the Day

January 18, 2012 -- A farewell message from a suburb outside Pierre, South Dakota, which is still recovering from its worst Missouri River flooding since 1952. Down the block, Lewis and Clark first came upon the Sioux Nation in 1804. Temperatures in the state capital are dipping below 0°F tonight.

The View from Highway 81

January 16, 2012 -- The view from U.S. Route 81 and the road to the Ingalls Homestead, a particularly storied quarter-section, like the one pictured above, outside De Smet, South Dakota.