The Colour Out of Peru

Strange goings on in the mountains of Peru:

A meteorite has struck a remote part of Peru and carved a large crater that is emitting noxious odours and making villagers ill, according to local press reports.

A fireball streaked across the Andean sky late on Saturday night and crashed into a field near Carancas, a sparsely populated highland wilderness near Lake Titicaca on the border with Bolivia, witnesses said.

The orange streak and loud bang were initially thought to be a plane crashing. When farmers went to investigate, however, they found a crater at least 10m wide and 5m deep, but no sign of wreckage.

The soil around the hole appeared to be scorched and there was a “strange odour”, a local health department official, Jorge López, told Peru’s RPP radio.

Later the farmers complained of headaches and vomiting. Police who went to investigate the crater were also stricken with nausea, prompting authorities to dispatch a medical team that reached the site today.

“The odour is strong and it’s affecting nearby communities. There are 500 families close by and they have had symptoms of nausea, vomiting, digestive problems and general sickness,” said Mr López.

At least 12 people were treated in addition to seven police officers who required oxygen masks and rehydration.

The farmers expressed fears that what appeared to be chunks of lead and silver around the site could contaminate the soil.

Sound familiar? Maybe this will goose your memory:

Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.

Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum’s house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark’s Corner. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum’s tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum’s house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum’s than it did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter’s general store at Clark’s Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner’s in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum’s ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses - of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.

“The Colour Out of Space” was my first H.P. Lovecraft story, and I’m happy to say it warped me for life. I first came across Lovecraft’s name in a book called Horrors! (I remember it as being written by Peter Haining, but I can’t find it anywhere on the Web) that rated him at the top of the heap alongside Poe and Machen. I started with the two Lancer paperbacks: The Colour Out of Space and The Dunwich Horror. By happy coincidence, a publisher with the unlikely name of Beagle Books started publishing “The Arkham Edition of H.P. Lovecraft” in suitably bizarre looking paperbacks, and I was off and running. Or slithering, as the case may be.

Not drowning but writing

Back in 1996 I had a little jolt of surprise when I opened Paris Review and saw a short story by Junot Diaz called “Edison, N.J.” — because, to overstate the obvious, how many times does Edison, N.J. get mentioned in the Paris Review? It was a good story: smart young man adrift in his own life; working class, making a living criss-crossing New Jersey and installing pool tables; Dominican background filtered through American pop culture. A few months later, Diaz’s fine debut collection, Drown, was published to great acclaim, and I interviewed him for the local print — he had, after all, grown up mostly in Central New Jersey and gone to Rutgers University. A certified Local Author, even if he was living in Brooklyn at the time.

It was a fun interview, but Diaz was obviously a little disoriented by the attention coming his way — Newsweek had dubbed him one of the Hot Young Something Or Others of 1996 and everyone was waiting for him to finish his first novel, which at that time was going to be called The Cheater’s Guide to Love.

A year went by, then another — no novel. At a party, I ran into a young woman whose first story collection had just been published to great reviews, and she idly mentioned teaching creative writing along with Diaz in a college course. When I quizzed her about what Diaz was up to, she said he was doing research on Dominican soldiers in the Vietnam War. That must be a tough subject to research, I said. She cocked a smile and suggested that was the whole point: Diaz was using the research to keep the world at bay until people stopped bugging him about his next book.

It would be easy to snark and make fun of the sad problems of the young literary lion — boo hoo, too many great reviews, poor thing has to write his followup, publishers and institutions waiting to shower him with money, what a terrible burden. But I believed it. Diaz went from obscurity to literary fame at an age when most artists are still licking themselves into shape, and I find it perfectly understandable that somebody with lots of talent but unsure of his next step would want to tell the world to get the hell out of his face, though maybe not in so many words.

Diaz has finally published his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and that conversation about the defensive uses of research came back to me as I read this Bookslut interview:

I’ve heard it said from other writers before that research is more fun than the actual writing. But I’m kind of this crazy history person — I basically knew all the texts that I needed to read for this book, so what ended up happening was I would just find myself going, “Hey that reminds me of something on page 70 of this one monograph I have, so let me go dig through and find the reference.” And so it was kind of like, I had this enormous amount of historical knowledge in my head and nothing to do with it. It was more like reverse engineering. The book sort of gave me the map work and the instructions of what to cherry pick.

Most of the research that I did was on a lot of the nerdy stuff. I had mostly packed that, more than any of the history, into my head pretty tight. But there was a bunch of nerdy stuff I had to go back into. I had to actually watch some of the movies that the narrator and the protagonist were obsessed with, so I found myself watching a lot of crazy movies . . . things like Zardoz, which is like one of John Boorman’s early films. I found myself watching Virus, which is this really crazy American-Japanese production. You know, I found myself reading The Lord of the Rings three times back-to-back. I would finish it and start it again and finish it and start it again. It’s so I would have it fucking locked in my head in the way the narrator and protagonist would have it locked in their heads, you know? There’s a lot of crazy stuff. I went back and had to read all this H.P. Lovecraft and all the E.E. “Doc” Smith Lensman books. I found myself really just doing a lot of fucking nerdy reading. Again I can’t stress how easy the history stuff was. I have a good memory for historical marginalia.

Okay. Dude needed to spend a few years renting movies like Zardoz and reading Fantastic Four comics so he could get Galactus down right. Whatever. Kidding yourself is only one of the skills necessary to completing a long writing project, as long as you actually do complete it. Diaz got his novel done, and judging from the reviews he did it well. Can’t wait to read it.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Diaz and I have at least one thing in common: we both consider college the start of our real lives. Here he is talking about our mutual alma mater:

Oh, I’m a Rutgers grad. I’m a Rutgers boy. I went to Rutgers from 1988 to 1992, a long time ago, but that was before colleges turned into corporations. It was madness. They hadn’t figured out yet to lock us down, and I swear to God that things were as crazy as they are now, but I was like, “Kids, man, you have no fucking idea how over-patrolled you guys are.” They didn’t even notice us, dude. College was like some empty space. I was always obsessed with Rutgers, and I’m kind of like the Dominican version of Sonny Werblin, you know? Any chance I get, I fucking talk about Rutgers. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, I will not lie. From the neighborhood I came from, I was literally intellectually starving. I was an incredibly bright kid outside of Perth Amboy, and going to Rutgers was sort of like someone who never had vitamin C their whole life. They’re dying from fucking intellectual scurvy and rickets, and somebody gives them a fucking orange. It changed my life.

Very well put. Can it be long before the Rutgers alumni association starts hitting Diaz up for appearances and events? 

A work of arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt

Geez, how could I have failed to observe National Talk Like a Pirate Day? With only a few hours to go, I repair the omission with this video clip of “Pirate Jenny,” one of the greatest songs from one of the greatest works of musical theater, The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Personally, I prefer the Manheim/Willett translation, but what the hey.

Alternate history

I had a great time with Michael Chabon’s last book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, so I’m anxious to get my hands on his new one, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is set in a world where Israel was smothered in its cradle and the Jewish homeland is a bleak patch of real estate in Alaska. Over at Dissent, Chabon explains the whole alternate-history to Jon Wiener:

Jon Wiener: You say it’s a fact that FDR suggested Alaska as a temporary homeland for the displaced Jews of Second World War Europe. I never heard that before.

Michael Chabon: It wasn’t F.D.R. himself, it was Harold Ickes, his Secretary of the Interior. The proposal was couched in terms of exploiting the Alaskan territory and its resources, the huge untapped wealth up there. We need people up there. Nobody really wants to go up there. Where could we find some people who would want to go up there? I know: there are these millions of people in Europe now who are clamoring to get out, desperate to get out; why don’t we kill two birds with one stone and let them go there? But we won’t let them go anywhere else, and they won’t be granted any kind of permanent residency status. When the war is over, they can go back.

JW: How far did this Harold Ickes proposal get?

MC: It got to Congress. A bill was introduced in the Committee on Insular Affairs, I think it was, where it died. There was very strong opposition from the establishment in Alaska. Alaskan lumber and mining and other interests were dead set against having this unwashed immigrant population come in and sully this pristine wilderness.

JW: I get the picture.

MC: So the man who was the nonvoting delegate of the territory of Alaska, but who nevertheless had some influence, spearheaded the opposition in committee. The bill was quickly defeated and never made it onto the floor.

JW: However in the book –

MC: Yes, in the novel, this delegate was dining at Hogate’s seafood restaurant in Washington, DC, an establishment once famous for its rum buns. I remember eating them myself as a kid, and they were quite delicious. He drops one of his rum buns when he’s coming out of the restaurant. In his haste to get it, he chases it into the street, where he’s run over by a passing taxicab, and killed. In my story this bill is passed and becomes law and the Jews are admitted. They come in several waves, first in 1940, and then after the war more come, and then many more in 1948 after the collapse of the state of Israel. Israel collapses partly because the United States, having done this grand gesture, doesn’t feel the same sense of guilt and the same pressure to do something to help the Zionists in Israel. Therefore the fledgling state of Israel is overwhelmed and defeated, and after that a lot more refugees come to Alaska.

I’m a sucker for this kind of alternate-history story: my favorite is Pavane by Keith Roberts, a 1969 collection of subtly linked novellas set in an England where the assassination of Queen Elizabeth in 1588 has allowed the Catholic Church to crush Protestantism and remain in control of Europe and the New World.  

On the air

Another round of book promotion is on the horizon. I’ll be a guest this Friday, Sept. 21, on Wakeup Call, the morning news program on WBAI (99.5 FM). I’ll be talking with host Mario Murillo at 7:30 a.m. about my book The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway, and my Wednesday, Sept. 26, appearance at the Brooklyn Historical Society related to same.

Verse visa

Just a reminder, good people, that the great Robert Pinsky is headlining the tenth anniversay edition of the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival, which is set for Friday, Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m. in the quaint riverside burg of Frenchtown, N.J.

It’s been a great pleasure for those of us who know the organizer, Nick DiGiovanni, to see this idea of his blossom into an annual cultural event. And I do mean “event,” because year after year he’s been able to bring in some true heavyweights from the land of verse: Louise Gluck, Paul Muldoon, Gerald Stern, Diane Wakowski and others. In addition to Pinsky, there will be readings from other regional and local poets, and a theatrical performance by River Union Stage based on one of Pinsky’s poems.

I’ll run the full announcement below, but here for your listening pleasure is Pinsky reading “ABC.”

Now then:

Three-term U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky will be the featured poet at the 10th annual Delaware Poetry Festival to be held Friday, Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m., at the historic Old Stone Church in Hunterdon County.

Mr. Pinsky kicked off the poetry festival as featured reader at the inaugural event in 1998. The festival has since featured an impressive roster of distinguished poets, including former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Gluck, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Paul Muldoon, National Book Award recipient Gerald Stern, and award-winning poets Thomas Lux, Stephen Dobyns, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Diane Wakowski, as well as dozens of New Jersey and Pennsylvania poets.

Mr. Pinsky served as U.S. poet laureate from 1997 through 2000. As poet laureate, he started the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans from all walks of life have shared and recited their favorite poem in recordings and in print anthologies.

Mr. Pinsky is the author of six acclaimed books of poetry, including the most recent, Jersey Rain. His collection The Figured Wheel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. His most recent chapbook, published last year by Sarabande Books, is First Things to Hand.

Mr. Pinsky’s books about poetry include Poetry and the World, nominated for a National Books Critics’ Circle Award, and, more recently, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. His translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation.

Mr. Pinsky is poetry editor of the online magazine Slate. He has appeared regularly on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” and writes the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post. He was elected in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Threepenny and American Poetry Review and in the Best American Poetry anthologies. A native of LongBranch, and a graduate of Rutgers University, He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

Mr. Pinsky’s hour-long appearance will also feature a theatrical presentation, based on a Pinsky poem, by River Union Stage.

Books by Mr. Pinsky will be available for purchase and autographing at an informal gathering after the reading, courtesy of Borders Books and Music in Flemington, N.J.

The Delaware Valley Poetry Festival is presented in partnership by River Union Stage of Frenchtown and event founder and coordinator Nicholas DiGiovanni of Alexandria Township, a journalist and novelist. Funding is provided by the Hunterdon County Cultural and Heritage Commission and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. Use of Old Stone Church is courtesy of First Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Hunterdon County.

Admission is free but a $5 donation is recommended. Seating is limited and first-come, first-served. Old Stone Church is located on Route 519, Kingwood Township, near Frenchtown. For more information or to request arrangements for those with disabilities or the hearing-impaired, call DiGiovanni at 500-4000 or call RUS at 996-3685. Information is also available at riverunionstage.org .

Fun with polls

It’s time to vote on “the best movie one-liners ever,” or at least the best ones that Andrew Sullivan’s readers could find YouTube links for. The finalists are being chosen day by day, so here’s your chance to pick from the Monday one-liners. Personally, I voted for Goldfinger, simply because “Do you expect me to talk?”/ “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” was the moment the entire James Bond series peaked — it’s been a long, slow slide to the bottom ever since. During the weeks that Sullivan was compiling the entries, I was a little frustrated because ”You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried,” and “You don’t mess around with Fred C. Dobbs” were nowhere to be found on YouTube. So, the poll’s results will be hopelessly compromised by the absence of any of my choices, though that will not keep me from voting each day.  

Blue (Note) Monday

Whew, it wasn’t easy being a fan of Neil Young and Bob Dylan back in the 1980s. At least with Dylan there was some late-1970s warning of the trouble to come: the Vegasy-sounding Street-Legal (an underrated record much improved with age) and the cheeseball Bob Dylan at Budokan concert album made the subsequent Jesus-whooping and junky albums sound like the continuation of the downward spiral.

But Neil was on fire as he closed out the 1970s: after the mid-decade one-two punch of Tonight’s the Night and Zuma, he went from strength to strength, coming to a peak with Rust Never Sleeps and a tour that left fans rubbing their eyes (and ears) in disbelief.

And then came — what? Hawks and Doves? Re-ac-tor? Was he kidding? There were good songs to be found on Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’, but even diehard fans started signing off after Old Ways and Landing on Water. Subsequent revelations about Young’s overwhelming family problems and energy-sapping disputes with his record label made everything seem at least understandable, but when Freedom and Ragged Glory started everyone talking about a return to form, I felt that I’d already been burned enough times to justify taking my time checking them out. I’m glad I finally did, needless to say, but I’d come a long way from the days when I heard “Revolution Blues” on the radio and immediately hiked in the rain for a couple of miles to get my copy of On the Beach from my favorite hole-in-the-wall store on Route 4.

Anyway, during the tail end of his lurching, searching period in the 1980s, Young convened a horn section to play against his trademarked lumbering rhythms. The record, This Note’s For You, wasn’t so hot. (It’s a mix that’s never worked well for him on record, though he tried it again on Are You Passionate and Living With War.) But the tour — ah, that 1988 tour with the Bluenotes. Not only did Young find the right way to pit his ragged guitar tone against the precision of a crack brass section, but he also played some of the finest guitar of his life. If you don’t believe me, track down Kind of Blue, a three-disc bootleg that starts out like the Blues Brothers album you never wanted to hear again, then takes off into the stratosphere.

I mention all this because one of the standout performances on Kind of Blue is a lengthy epic called “Ordinary People,” which is included on the upcoming Neil Young disc Chrome Dreams II. The title itself is a tease for bootleg collectors: the original Chrome Dreams is one of those semi-legendary ’70s discs that was pulled at the last minute, with some of its songs surfacing on later releases. Rolling Stone has very obligingly put an audio clip of the performance on its Web site, and it sounds close enough to what I heard on Kind of Blue to make me look forward to next month’s release.

Blue Monday (Early Edition)

A long interview with Michael Gray, author of the superb new biography Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell. I was going to post this tomorrow, but the one-hour running time makes it more appropriate for a leisurely Sunday morning and a cup of coffee.

Glenn Danzig’s book collection

Christmas will be here before you know it. Could be some great gift ideas in here.