The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • Robert Bly’s Greatest Hits

    Selected Poems, 1986
    A “best of” anthology of a kind, these are really good poems—and the mixture of work sheds light on Bly’s stylistic and topical meanderings. You’ll find “Counting Small Boned Bodies” and other lamentations on Vietnam, as well as more than a hundred examples from three decades of work. The prose poems from This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977) are beautiful and show off Bly’s command of the unwieldy form.

    Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973
    To understand how Bly got to be so Blyish, look back to some of his earlier work. His third poetry collection is filled with vigorous incantations on the good, the bad, and the ugly, and it is punctuated with a long discourse on the Great Mother. The essay makes a good primer for Iron John and The Sibling Society.

    The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, 2001
    This is Bly’s most recent collection. If you’ve joined the current Rumi rediscovery trip, you’ll have a better appreciation of why Bly seems to be jumping all over the place—that’s part of the beauty of this old Islamic form (ghazal). He’s trying to get your head to stretch some great distances, to make those “psychic leaps.” Even without knowing anything about the Battle of Ypres, you can easily appreciate Bly’s incredible energy, insight, and wit.

    A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988
    This is a highly readable collection of essays that offers up “the philosophy of Robert Bly” in less than one hundred pages. He explains his connection to Jung and gets into the feminine, masculine, and then some.

    The Sibling Society, 1996
    It’s an artful diatribe on our moral decay and the dominance of American popular culture. But unlike other polemics of this ilk, Bly digs deep and blames our own selfishness for squandering the knowledge of how to live in community. The result: permanent adolescence. Be prepared to look in the mirror.

    Iron John, 1990
    Read it and you’ll be able to start an argument at nearly any party. If you want to understand it, though, you may want to take a few classes in psychology, mythology, classics, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and men’s studies. It’s heavy stuff, and it’s very easy to get lost in the forest. Bly is extremely blunt and often his take on male-female relations can sound harsh toward women. No good pickup lines here. We’re supposed to embrace our differences before we can enjoy our sameness. For some that’s not so easy to swallow.

  • Repetition Compulsion

    “We have to speak up about this war. Now we don’t even count the bodies. We only count the American bodies. Woo-hoo. That’s even more self-obsessed. We kill hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis, and we don’t pay any attention to how many there are. We don’t call up the hospitals; we don’t call up the morgues. Let’s count the Iraqi bodies over again. Maybe we can bring them over to this country. Prop them up at some of Bush’s speeches, so we know what the money is going for. Americans want their money’s worth.

    “It’s so interesting that Canada doesn’t have anywhere near our percentage of murders. Why is that? Maybe it’s because we were the ones who had slaves and killed the Indians. After the civil war, we let men go and some went west. Martine Prechtal has said that many of these men had untreated trauma just as many Vietnam veterans had. Imagine what that was like after the civil war. Unbelievable, the brutality of that. We sent them right out West, where they became the Indian fighters. We have the stupidity typical of a country that doesn’t realize what the killing of war can do to a human being. We just send them out. That’s called the repetition compulsion. We have to look for more Indians and kill them. If we didn’t learn anything from the first killing of the Indians, every ten or twelve years we have to do it again. Bush, of course, that coward, was never in the war at all; he sneaked out. It’s not as if you have to be in a war to want the repetition. Now repetition is built into the American culture.

    “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake this country has ever made. The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism. I’ve translated much Islamic poetry and I admire the Islamic culture. We have no idea how great their poetry is, but you’re also looking at a social culture frozen by the mullahs, frozen in the eleventh century. That’s the worst thing we could possibly do, to get into an antagonistic relationship, and that is exactly what Bush did. Bush Sr. was intelligent enough to pull back and not go on towards Baghdad. There’s nothing we can win in this war. Our new war is a war against the terrorists, but Bush Jr. has created ten thousand new terrorists.

    “Bush and Wolfowitz and Cheney are repetition compulsion people. It’s wrong to give into them. We have veered off our own path completely. We’re pouring billions into Iraq, and Oregon has just taken nineteen days off the school calendar.

    “Lincoln and Douglas had debates. They’d go on for four hours in the afternoon, then they’d take a break and come back for two hours more in the night. You could say that people in the audience were watching them speak to see if their words fit their bodies. Is this the real person? But on television no one is real. They’re all being someone else. The entire American nation has lost that ability to decide if those words are genuine. That’s why Bush won the election. He never would have gotten near winning an election in the nineteenth century. They would have seen immediately that his words and his body don’t fit.”

  • Robert Bly: The Dude Abides

    In his seventy-seven years, he has established himself as a world-class poet, teacher, social critic—and founder of the controversial “expressive men’s movement.”

    Standing in his studio—a nineteenth-century stable behind what was once a lone farmhouse atop Lowry Hill—Robert Bly is surrounded by books, papers, and icons. This is a monk’s cell. In one nook stands a simple bed. There is a prayer room, where gatherings of chanting and drumming are held for a regular group of initiates who sit cross-legged on Persian carpets.

    Bly himself is a tall and solid man. On these wintry days, you’ll find him cloaked in an enormous overcoat and black ushanka hat. He looks like a bear just out of the forest. Though he’s just embarked on his seventy-seventh year and his thick hair is frosty white, he displays a youthful vigor that reminds you he has lived a very active life.

    Like the heroes of so many fairytales he has told, Robert Bly is an archetype in his own history. Such mythic journeys require tasks that prove fortitude, and Bly has duly tilled the soil, fought with dragons, and lived as a hermit. He is legendary for banging down institutional doors and tackling giants. As an outspoken poet, philosopher, and societal gadfly, he has written the laws of the world as he sees them, and he’s gotten himself into plenty of trouble for it. Most people are more familiar with Bly’s opinions than his poetry. Many don’t know much of either. It’s not easy following his mystical lead. Yet his longevity and conviction have earned him the begrudging respect of many critics, even on the nasty battlefield of literature.

    As a studious pupil of many teachers, he learned the scholarly ways. He has been a supplicant in the church of Jung and knows the songs of Abraham, Muhammad, Shiva, and Odin. Bly has faced his share of demons along his far-flung path. Today he meets with me between his engagements as a still-active writer, speaker, and babysitter for his nineteen-month-old grandson.

    Although he is an accomplished poet, a renowned translator of poetry, and a National Book Award recipient for his 1967 collection The Light Around the Body, Robert Bly is probably best known for his role in the men’s movement. It has been a long path, but suffice it to say that by the eighties, Bly’s studies of Freud and Jung and the world at large had led him to see the struggle of human consciousness as the result of a breakdown of our masculine and feminine sides. Not only were they at odds, they were largely lost. He took up these themes in his writing and in his activism, and in so doing he became the subject of at least as much ridicule as admiration.

    Bly’s work with the men’s movement was inspired by his previous exploration of the Great Mother as a poetic theme, and by watching his two sons confront the cruelties of life. “My daughters were older than my sons. Daughters have a self-regulating mechanism. But sons are a problem. The world has so cuffed them about with such fantastic cruelty that becoming an adult male is a huge problem. Once I was with a thousand men at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. I had an idea that overnight we cut up like two or three thousand pieces of red cloth and then I said, ‘I’d like all of the men here who have a wound on their body to tie a piece of cloth around their wound.” Bly shakes his head in sadness. “There were men with eight of those ribbons on their bodies. Motorcyle crashes, fights, war, everything.”

    The “father consciousness” needed tending, Bly decided, and masculine roles were rooted in violence. “It’s easier to socialize a young man into being a warrior than to be a father. You can do that in the Marines; men are geared for that in some way. But to socialize them into being fathers is a different matter.” Bly started the Minnesota Men’s Conference in 1984 near Sturgeon Lake, mixing teachers, poets, psychologists, and musicians. “In the seventies we were doing workshops with men and women. I’d always used the story theme of fairy tales, which is the old Jungian way to do things—but when I decided I wanted to teach a fairy tale to men, I didn’t have any. I read through the whole Grimm Brothers and finally found ‘Iron John.’ It is clearly a way of a man overcoming his shame. After all, he’s in the bottom of the lake.” Thus the “Expressive Men’s Movement” was born. When Bly put his work into book form in 1990, Iron John became an instant bestseller that inspired a competing reaction of acclaim and disdain.

    Feminists were livid. Women Respond to the Men’s Movement, edited by Kay Leigh Hagan, collected several highly charged reactions from writers of merit, including Bell Hooks, Laura Brown, and Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver expressed dismay. “When I try to understand the collection of ideas and goals that has come to be called the men’s movement, what disturbs me is that it generally stands as an ‘other half’ to the women’s movement, and in my mind it doesn’t belong there. It is not an equivalent. Women are fighting for their lives, and men are looking for some peace of mind.”

    Activist Hattie Gossett was perhaps the most reactionary, when she spat, “Well, what do they mean? What’re they going to the woods for then? Oh? Really? Sensitive? Does that mean they’re against rape now? When they come back from the woods do they issue statements against child abuse, wife battering, incest, lesbian battering? Do they pledge that, the next time one of their street-corner or health-club buddies is running off at the mouth about how he snatched him some pussy then kicked that bitch in her ass? These guys who paid all this money to go to the woods with what’s-his-name, will they silently organize a small group to take their brother for a little walk and show him some tongue- and penis-restraint exercises guaranteed to permanently clear his mind of all thoughts of ripping off pussy, or bitches, or kicking ass?”

    Susan Faludi swung back hard in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. She painted Bly as a particularly fiendish perpetrator of the suppression of feminism, calling him the “general of the men’s movement.” She wrote, “The true subject of Bly’s weekends, after all, is not love and sex, but power—how to wrest it from women and how to mobilize it for men.” Her tome dedicates several pages to what today seems a hateful attack.

    Bly looks quizzical and a little sad. “The women thought that the men’s movement came up to try to combat feminism. On the contrary, it was like a planned growth. It appears at a certain time. A tree doesn’t grow up because there’s another tree nearby. It’s got its own growth pattern. Women used to think of me as a huge enemy and attack me all the time. But now I find that a lot of women stop me in airports and tell me, ‘I’ve been reading Iron John. I can’t tell you how helpful that is in dealing with my own male side.’”

    Whatever the verdict, the hubbub brought Bly a measure of celebrity that still lives. The highly respected Bill Moyers produced A Gathering of Men for PBS, bringing Bly and his Wild Man into our national living room. Spin-off books by spin-off Jungians, shamans, and visionaries flooded the media. A cottage industry of men’s conferences of innumerable stripes flourished from church basements to Fortune 500 boardrooms.

    Dialogue was lost in the shouting of standard-bearers who had climbed into their opposing towers. Even politically motivated Jungians pecked at Bly’s interpretations as conservative. People took from Iron John whatever suited their own agendas. Feminists who were nervous in 1990 could point by the middle of the decade to scores of highly conservative and chauvinistic new men’s groups. It doesn’t take a psychic leap to guess that organizations like the Promise Keepers drew some of their energy from what Bly had started. Even worse, Iron John made for some of the best lampooning material in years. Men crying en masse, drumming, and chanting; it was all so easy. The image of a herd of naked white men plunging through the forest still comes to mind.

    Yet, fourteen years later, Iron John’s drum can still be heard. Bly offers a grandfatherly smile. “The Minnesota Men’s Conference will celebrate its twentieth year in September. I think men have been helped somewhat. I was over at Powderhorn Park one day and I saw a lot of men there playing with their sons. My wife said, ‘That’s part of the work that you and the others did, that many more men are taking part in raising their children.’”

  • Will Steger’s Greatest Hits

    1944
    Will Steger born and raised in Richfield, the second of eight children

    1959
    Steger, a freshman at Benilde, buys a motorboat and, with his brother, drives it down the Missippippi–and back

    1963
    Steger devises a kayak trek to the headwaters of the Yukon River. It involves a long portage—over the Rocky Mountains

    1967
    Steger graduates from St. Thomas with a degree in geology

    1970
    Steger moves permanently to his Ely property and teaches outdoor skills

    1982
    Steger makes his first major dogsled expedition in northern Canada

    1986
    In his first professional expedition, Steger leads the first dogsled team ever to reach the North Pole

    1988
    Traverse of Greenland is the longest dogsled expedition in history

    1989
    The Traverse of Antarctica is the first dogsled team ever in Antarctica

    1997
    Steger’s last polar expedition—solo from North Pole to Ellesmere Island—is aborted

    2003
    Arctic Transect

    Follow the new expedition at www.PolarHusky.com

  • What’s a “Transect”?

    Mille Porsild agrees that the life of an explorer can seem awfully selfish. “You think about it all the time, leaving your loved ones behind,” she says. Most of Porsild’s immediate family is halfway around the world in her native Denmark. But some of them are right here: Her husband Paul Pregont and, arguably the most important part of the team, their thirty sled dogs. Like most modern explorers, Porsild and Pregont wrestle all the time with balancing a spiritual love of wide open (empty) spaces with a professional calling to educate and interact. The trick, of course, is finding a way to make a living doing both. To that end, they founded an online adventure education program called NOMADS.

    In the past, explorers simply found someone with deep pockets to sponsor their treks. But in the modern age, especially as sponsorships have dried up along with record-book opportunities, they often fund their projects through teaching, lecturing, writing, or some other form of motivational soapboxing. Many though, like Porsild, Pregont, and Steger, are actually teachers by training and temperament. Ironically, they go into the wild specifically to connect with students around the globe—the children at the other end of the satellite uplink.

    In fact, the expedition itself may be the easy part, compared with the heavy burden of Transect’s educational mission. The expedition has an education director. He is Dr. Aaron Doering, a University of Minnesota expert on instructional systems. Doering is more educator than adventurer—this will be his first major expedition. But he lends real brainpower and technical skill to the team. He and Pregont will manage all the technical hardware and software that allows the team to connect, through Porsild’s curriculum, with millions of schoolchildren who will follow the expedition on the Web.

    The team has two main missions—one educational, the other scientific. In addition to the extensive curriculum in social studies and geography, they’ll conduct some hard science designed to confirm the reality of global warming and climate change. “We’re actually working with NASA to ground-truth the information they have about snow depths and UV radiation,” says Dr. Doering. He explains that some recalcitrant politicians still claim global warming is speculative, because no one has taken measurements on the ground in these remote locations. This expedition will help put to rest this insidious form of denial.

    There are two other members of the team. Hugh Dale-Harris is a Canadian explorer and educator with much experience in the Nunavut region. The youngest member of the team is Eric Dayton, a gifted young adventurer who has partnered with Steger many times in the past. Dayton’s father, Sen. Mark Dayton, has been a longtime friend, supporter, and tent-mate of Steger’s. The three have made numerous trips together, including a memorable trek in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The younger Dayton graduated this year from Williams College and has already shown signs of political mettle. Having spent a season working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, he recently made a few phone calls and secured the final round of funding for Transect—money the expedition desperately needed to make it back next spring. “It was the first time I’ve had a team member pick up the phone and get funding like that!” says Steger. “He’s an amazing young man.”

  • Will Steger: The Rakish Interview

    You’re the greatest living explorer, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Peary, and Amelia Earhardt. Now you’re heading back to the Arctic.

    I see dead deer everywhere, their yawning red abdomens, stiffening legs, their black eyes. It’s one of the hazards of driving around Ely on opening weekend. I went literally to the end of the road in northern Minnesota, to the homestead of Will Steger, and I found hundreds of men already there, in the woods, in blaze orange. With high-powered rifles.

    An outdoorsy guy from the city starts to develop a neurotic view of wilderness, that it’s growing too scarce, that the cities are too crowded and they’re spilling over. An outdoorsy guy from the Range laughs and says relax. You can go days—weeks—without seeing another soul up here. It’s still possible to get lost in this world. Even with GPS and cell phones and Gore-tex, nature is a dangerous thing. Somehow that’s reassuring.

    Still, everyone around here knows where Will lives. He is a legend and a local hero, even if he is a bit of a lefty and a treehugger. Even the rednecks can appreciate what Steger has done in his decorated career as an arctic explorer. Later, sitting with Steger in the Ely steakhouse among quietly gawking admirers and spoiling roughnecks alike, I am not surprised to learn that Steger has never been in a fistfight in the forty years since he moved to Ely from Minneapolis. He is not surprised to hear me ask it.

    There is no other way to describe Will Steger than to say he is a sort of self-taught Zen master. His life in the harshest climates seems to have softened his soul like the silkiest chamois from deer hide. He is a modest and compassionate man, a natural leader with brilliantly disguised management skills and a mind for a million details. And somehow he seems not to have aged in his twenty-year career as a professional explorer. The skin on his face is taut, the crow’s-feet around his eyes have been there since his thirties, his body is lithe and powerful.

    Steger shuffles around his property in an unspeakably filthy mountaineering jacket, his long hair feathering into a kind of salt-and-pepper halo. Iron Will has been unofficially retired from exploration since 1997, when he aborted a solo trek that would have taken him from the North Pole to Ellesmere Island, towing and paddling a kayak sledge. After the rescue ship was called, he told himself he’d never return to the Pole. He’s been hanging out on his property ever since. Until now.

    And what a property it is. Today, it stretches to three hundred acres and includes numerous cabins, a sauna, a boathouse, a lodge, a guesthouse, and countless barns and shops. It is, as they say, entirely off the grid. Solar panels and wood stoves provide for the most quotidian needs. But there are numerous gasoline-powered generators, and a recently installed satellite uplink for serious Internet access available for moments like this—when the homestead is buzzing with volunteers, staffers, and expedition members. In a sense, this is precisely what this place was built for. What the man himself was built for.

    Sitting in the middle, at the highest point of Steger’s rolling, rocky property, is “The Castle.” It is a Gothic, Cinderella edifice built with raw timber, glass, and granite, with flying buttresses, balconies, cupolas, and a riot of copper-plated dormers. The physical reality of this building—so nearly complete, in its twentieth year—goads Steger. It represents the hard reality of a dream he’s had since his first polar expedition in 1986: To not only go into the wide open spaces and conquer them, but to bring people of the world together. Never has that vision and mission felt more focused than now. As an educator, scientist, explorer, and writer, Steger is absolutely convinced of the reality of global warming. He’s just as convinced that a quick and effective response is not merely possible; it’s the only morally responsible thing to do.

    Last year at this time, Steger was feeling restless. He’d written four books, he occasionally lectured, but he pretty much lived in isolation at the end of the road. He’d seen the Internet coming for years, and saw the brilliant possibilities it offered. At the same time, he was increasingly disturbed by global warming, now an established fact that only the most stubborn and selfish politicians deny.

    Meanwhile, the growing field of adventure education intrigued him. In 1999, Steger was approached by Dr. Aaron Doering, an education professional at the University of Minnesota who specializes in information systems. At the same time, Paul Pregont and Mille Porsild were in touch. Down in Grand Marais, they’d founded NOMADS and PolarHusky.com, an online education program connected to their dogsled expeditions. The four discussed the possibility of a new expedition. But funding was scarce. They came close to landing a major sponsorship from Coca-Cola, but it all fell apart after September 11th. By spring of 2002, it looked like a bust.

    Then last December, Steger was in Minneapolis for the holidays when he accidentally bumped into another legend of exploration, the trans-global cyclist Dan Buettner. Their brief conversation was the final, decisive push Steger needed to go ahead—with or without the funding in place. He realized his restlessness of the previous year had had a purpose. On a personal level, he wanted to get back on the ice and into the headspace of a long arctic expedition. On a professional level, he wanted to prove what could be done with all the modern tools of adventure education.

    Arctic Transect is a massive educational undertaking—as much an epic classroom curriculum as a dogsled adventure. An estimated ten million children from kindergarten to twelfth grade will be tuning in on the Web. This kind of approach is not new. NOMADS has been doing it with dogsleds since 1999. Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen had online components on their last two expeditions. Dan Buettner’s most recent exploits have been webcast through ClassroomConnect.com. In fact, way back in the dark ages of 1997, Steger himself had one of the earliest satellite uplinks to the Internet on his solo North Pole trip.

    Arctic Transect will travel 3,000 miles through five communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The expedition leaves Yellowknife on December 15 and arrives next spring at Pangnirtung, Nunavut, on the Arctic Ocean—with any luck, before the ice begins to break up. Transect’s mission is to show how connectivity is changing our world—both for better and for worse. But the real goal is not the Arctic Ocean before the ice breaks up. It is human understanding before global breakup.

  • Tears of a Clone

    All in all, I’m pretty happy with the procedure. What they don’t tell you is that it’s basically having a kid, even though the kid is you. They all make it out to be a “perfect genetic copy,” they get all lathered about “genomic imprinting.” Yeah, but it’s a DNA snapshot of me in a sagging diaper. Me with a relentless stream of snot coagulating around my nostrils. Me at two years old. The terrible twos. With all due respect, I’m cute, but not that useful at this age. So far, the only “bioethics” issue has been whether I should spank me or not.

    If I’d stopped to think about it, it would have made sense. Did I expect a mid-level manager in an oxford to jump out of the test tube? Now, of course, I realize I can’t even use the little guy as an organ donor. His tiny liver couldn’t handle a single four-day weekend in my body. God knows, his kidneys and bladder work beautifully—too beautifully for my worn-out valves and distended sphincters and whatnot.

    There are many aspects of childhood that I am not keen to relive. It is irritating to have people mistake me for a girl again. I will not put one of those pink bows on my bald head just to appease the gender-obsessed. Strained beets have, in the mists of time, lost whatever appeal they once held for me. I am thankful that I will not have to re-endure Barry Goldwater; but that’s cold comfort with chicken pox and mumps to look forward to again.

    The other day, I stretched the rules of “bring your son to work day” a little bit. It was a mistake. Jennifer in accounting said I did not look like me. “He must take after his mother,” she said. “That must be where he got those pretty blue eyes. Or maybe it was the milkman!” she tittered. I did not point out that my toddler’s corneas would be a perfect match for mine, if it came down to that.

    My friend Ted says I indulge the boy. Well, duh. He’s not my son, he’s not my brother. He’s me! Imagine my delight at getting to stay up as late as I want the second time around. Imagine the unvarnished joy I get riding in my own lap, getting to steer the Camry on designated residential streets. True, I have caved and bought myself a car seat and a bike helmet, but this is just to keep the neighbors off my back. “This is not actually my child,” is an argument I’ve found to be problematic.

    There are many advantages and efficiencies. When my younger self starts school, for example, there will be no need for school pictures. They would just be redundant. I’m sure I have most grades tucked away in a shoe box somewhere. While I didn’t have the foresight to hold on to all my baby clothes, I have started to stockpile my old double-vented suits and wingtips.

    One might think not having a unique identity would be a problem, but look at it this way: The little guy will never need to apply for a social security number or a driver’s license. On the other hand, I don’t suppose I can claim myself as a dependent.

    As a single working father of a clone, I find that people are sympathetic. The ladies at my daycare think it’s cute the way I speak to myself. “Time to change my diaper!” always brings a smile. “Boy, I’m smelling a little ripe!” And they think it’s charming that we have the same name—though of course he’s “the second.”

    If I had it to do over again, well, I guess I’d do it again and again and again. In a sense, no matter how many times I replicate my DNA, I’ll still be an only child, and that’s pretty cool. I’d hate to be a burden to my family. As I get older, I intend to take care of myself. An army of one.

  • Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake

    Australian novelist Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang was an inventive explosion of the myth of outlaw national hero Ned Kelly. He continues pulling at the loose, frayed edges of legend in Fake, a tale that plays off a real-life scandalous Aussie literary hoax. Carey’s con artist, Chubb, forges the life’s work of a fictitious working-class poet named Bob McCorkle to humiliate a rival. But things go terribly wrong. The rival winds up dead, and then … McCorkle shows up. Conjured out of thin air, apparently, by some unknowing magic of Chubb’s. He’s a tough, leathery creature who makes growly threats out of lines like “he’d never tangled with a poet before.” And he’s quite irritated with his creator. It’s a thematic shift not unlike what Charlie Kaufman did in the last act of the film Adaptation—suddenly, Carey’s story is a weird echo of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and an exploration of self-destruction and literary invention. Like Adaptation, Fake loses punch by never resolving the story it started telling, and that lack of cohesiveness makes the book feel about fifty pages overlong. Still, it’s an engaging and recommended read.

  • Mario Vargas Llosa, The Way to Paradise

    If you don’t like the society you live in, you can either try to change it or leave. In 1891, the painter Paul Gauguin left, fleeing bourgeois France for an existence filled with art and unashamed sensuality in Tahiti. In 1844, his grandmother Florita had embarked on a lifelong career of ardent political activism for workers’ rights and female equality. Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian grandmaster of letters, alternates chapter by chapter between these two divergent yet resonating lives, which somehow shared a common goal—building heaven here on Earth—if not much else. It’s a compelling pair of character studies, and we can’t help imagining that there’s a glimpse into what makes Vargas Llosa himself tick. His own attempts to combine careers as a civic leader and an artist have been disappointments at best; a failed 1989 campaign for the Peruvian presidency made him angrily declare that “literature and politics are mutually exclusive.” Sadly, he may be right.

  • The Best American Magazine Writing 2003

    In the publishing biz, excellence awards are often a travesty. If you win one, you’re brilliant. If you don’t, the judges are idiots. Just so, it’s gratifying to know that the American Society of Magazine Editors each year publishes a selection of what they consider the best magazine journalism of the previous year. We consider it a real service, and an exercise in transparency. If you browsed past them in their glossy form, here are Ian Frazier’s amazing story for Outside about icebergs and global warming; Michael Paterniti’s riveting exposé, in GQ, of a Nazi German book of anatomy illustrations; and Gary Smith’s dramatic reconstruction for Sports Illustrated of the rise and fall of George O’Leary, the Notre Dame football coach whose creative approach to résumé padding cost him his job (though of course he’s landed on his feet with the Minnesota Vikings.) Oddly, the best American magazine writing of the year does not include Top Doctors, Super Lawyers, or even a seafood lover’s guide to the Twin Cities, but you saved those issues, right?