Chatter

The road to Heaven is drawn in pen and ink

Posted on by Brian Hall

In eighth-grade art class, when our teacher told us we were going to “do a unit” on pen and ink drawing, I envisioned a farmhouse under a spreading tree, with a rail fence and a country lane receding into the background over the brow of a hill. But our teacher wanted us to work from a photograph, and I didn’t live in a farmhouse, or on a lane, I lived in a three-bedroom Dutch Colonial in a well-tended suburb. My parents didn’t go in much for taking photos, but we did have one of our front porch, and since the banisters and newels repeated simple patterns that I could use as a crutch, I chose that. I hatched here, cross-hatched there. There was a curved element somewhere that I spent a lot of time on, hatching and cross-hatching, trying to get it to look three-dimensional. It wasn’t very good, but nothing I did in art class was very good.

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HO train set

Posted on by Brian Hall

Sure, we had one. My siblings and I got it when I was maybe eight. We had just enough tracks to make an oval with a siding, or a figure eight. We had a New York Central engine and a coal car, a boxcar loaded with finest quality Lehigh portland cement, a tanker carrying hydrocarbon rocket fuel (how cool is that?) and, of course, a red, red caboose.

Being the family nerd and control freak, I was the one who mainly played with it. From plastic model kits I made farm buildings, mills, depots, factories, stations. I didn’t go in much for houses. I couldn’t construct a landscape—I assembled the tracks and dispersed the buildings on the pinewood floor of an upstairs hall and always had to put everything back in boxes when I was done, because of foot traffic. I never made up stories about the workers or the train passengers, I just arranged the buildings in different configurations, then drove my Matchbox cars down the notional streets. (Later, I turned into a novelist attentive to structure and weak on plot.)

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Better living through mathematics

Posted on by Brian Hall

I used to have insane completionist fantasies. At eighteen, when I first entered the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, I thought how great it would be to start in the northeast corner of the top floor and read everything until I reached the southwest corner of the basement. Widener Library holds 3.5 million books. Less delusional, but still impractical—considering what a slow reader I am, and how many different subjects are always simultaneously attracting me—when I get interested in a writer, I want to read all their books in the order in which they were written. For example, I would love some day to read Nabokov’s Ada, a favorite of my older daughter, but after reading Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin years ago, I became “interested” in Nabokov, which meant I had to start at the beginning. With breaks of months or years between books, during which I’ve continued my glacial progress through other writers’ complete oeuvres, I’ve now read all nine of Nabokov’s Russian novels, but I still have two unread English-language novels between me and Ada. Every now and then my daughter asks me when the hell I’m going to get around to reading this book she’s been urging on me for a decade.

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Getting a severe bookburn

Posted on by Brian Hall

Chris Holmes, chair of the English Department at Ithaca College, was stuck at home like so many other people in the early days of the pandemic, so he decided to start a podcast featuring chats with authors. It’s called Burned By Books (I’m trying to think of a witty comment channeling Heinrich Heine, but can’t come up with anything. “In the end, we’ll get burned by people?” Nah.) He’s up to seventeen episodes now, and it’s a pretty wonderful collection of intelligent conversations with thoughtful writers. I tried to be thoughtful, too, when he talked with me last week. I hope Chris continues for years and becomes an East coast version of Michael Silverblatt. That would be one partial solution to the world’s problems: more Michael Silverblatts!

photo credit: Ben White / Unsplash

Thomas’s mill

Posted on by Brian Hall

The reason Denmark shows up in two of my novels is that I have a friend there, whom I first met thirty-nine years ago in Greece. I had been cycling solo for nine months, and he was cycling with his partner, and I shamelessly threw myself on the two of them because Christmas was three weeks away and I didn’t want to spend it alone. Ten years ago, when I was writing early notes for The Stone Loves the World, I consulted with this friend on Danish windmills, because I already knew that I wanted my character, Thomas, to be living in one. My friend knows a lot about Danish mills, because he knows a lot about pretty much every aspect of Danish culture and history. He showed me photographs and diagrams of various examples, and recommended that I visit a couple of refurbished mills in the vicinity of his home.

The mill that I fell in love with, however, was one I glimpsed from the deck of a ferry as it was passing the small island of Hjortø, off the southern coast of Funen. The mill was a dark shell without sails standing at the edge of the sea, separated from the rest of the island by a marsh. I could barely make it out in the gloomy rainy weather—it looked like a lighthouse pretending to be a mill, or a mill quixotically trying to behave like a lighthouse. The thing was tiny, but in its sepulchral lonesomeness it seemed grandly romantic.

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Massing books to good effect

Posted on by Brian Hall

There’s a fine new book-browsing and -recommendation site called Shepherd, currently in its beta phase. The idea behind the site is that authors are invited to pick any subject they want, then recommend five of their favorite books that deal with that subject. The subjects can be extremely specific, and they random-walk all over the map, which is what makes the site so much fun to browse—and so reminiscent of getting those out-of-the-blue but perfect book recommendations from friends. I contributed a list of titles about exploring the galaxy, and you can check it out here.

photo credit: Alfons Morales / Unsplash

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Posted on by Brian Hall

The first time I saw the City of Tomorrow I was five years old. It was 1965. I had been taken by my parents to the New York World’s Fair. I sat next to my mother in a plastic molded chair on a conveyor belt in GM’s Futurama and watched the City float by like a dream. Its projected date was 2024. It was everything I wanted, but I didn’t know why.

The second time I saw the City of Tomorrow I was ten years old. I must have chattered—I was always a chatterer—to my parents about my hazy five-year-old memories, because for Christmas that year they gave me The World of Tomorrow, by Kenneth K. Goldstein. This 1969 volume in McGraw-Hill’s “International Library” for young readers borrows heavily from GM’s Futurama installation for its photographs and illustrations.

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