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in dreams we overcome the limits of gravity and fly but my flying dreams were never like this in mine there is no fear just the ecstatic release an exalted sense of freedom combined with the drug of a new kind of power over my body i think we want to know that someone somewhere is trying things like this though we may not want to experience the direct rush and mortal risk ourselves skateboarders snowboarders skiers surfers parasailors stuntmen race car drivers but these aren t things you just do they require years of training and work just to get to a level of competence that allows you access to the experience animals don t do this it s our higher brains that are to blame in space weightlessness is the ultimate light headedness this is probably what attracts people to computer games as for me i was never even able to turn cartwheels at 6 4 i learned to dunk a basketball my sole physical feat in my work i once met a professional stuntman who had done all the stunts on the television series sea hunt with lloyd bridges he was a textbook case of all the different kinds of injuries you can suffer by trying the impossible what are the survival advantages of these kinds of feats reality is greater than our dreams frederick sommer posted by curtis faville at 7 12 am 1 comment sunday april 21 2013 salter s all that is i ve spoken before on this blog about the novelist and short story writer james salter in the gallery of heroes any book by salter is for me an occasion an event an opportunity to celebrate salter s life has a dramatic shape beginning almost by accident with attendance at west point and a 12 year long career as an air force pilot seeing action in korea during which he managed to complete two published novels based on his service experience he abruptly switched direction resigning his commission and starting a new career in the motion picture business which lasted over a decade his first published novel the hunters 1957 had been adapted by hollywood this included script work and even an independently directed film three 1969 during which period he managed to complete his first substantial book a sport and a pastime 1967 before finally abandoning hollywood altogether since then his production has continued sporadically with two short collections of stories and two more novels light years 1975 and solo faces 1979 that last work had an interesting germination working on the script of downhill racer 1969 the idea of writing a similar treatment for redford led to a parallel narrative of a mountain climber since that book appeared salter had produced some travel journalism and an autobiographical memoir burning the days 1997 but nothing substantial salter in middle age now after a fallow period of about 25 years his sixth novel appears not sure of what to expect i responded to the advance publicity with some excitement and read the book straight through something i rarely do especially with a writer whose prose i enjoy savoring like salter it may be that this is salter s easiest book the prose flows effortlessly and there is less density it is in many ways the most traditional of his novels less poetic more straightforward story telling more event less impressionistic description more accessible to the average reader it may be that when you tire of a writer whom you ve always loved before it s something in yourself that has changed a sport and a pastime is without doubt a young man s book though salter was 42 when it was published it seems the romanticization of a much younger sensibility many of the same kinds of themes that he first explored in a sport were continued in the next two novels and which reappear here again in the new work above all salter writes from a man s point of view all the women in his books are beautiful it seems and the affairs they have are often if not usually with older men heterosexual calisthenics is celebrated with uninhibited gusto in his fiction so that the more of his work you read the more likely you are to feel that this is an aspect of his character rather than the testing of limits sex is among the most difficult things to write effectively about and salter has mastered it but what always made his work interesting to me was its style the effortlessly deft metaphors the shrewd pacing the triple edged ironies and its majestic sadness as elegant as a crumbling french chateau but in the end you realize that what makes great stories isn t the detail the graceful sentences the attitude of an omniscient narrator laying out scenes it s the ability to make powerful actions turns and dilemmas in the lives of characters we are persuaded to care about contemporary photo in salter s new novel we trace the life of philip bowman a wwii veteran who finds a life in the new york publishing world this is clearly a world that salter knows with some intimacy though the interior concerns of editing and making books isn t his focus here it s merely a platform for accessing the upper middle class world of the rich new york culture european cities and the beautiful and seductive and available women who people it one could say too that one meets here rather the same kinds of people one finds in the fiction of marquand auchincloss or even o hara though their versions are always less poetic and they d probably not credit the romance that salter sees in them here for the first time salter traces a single life end to end and for the first time we see him addressing the implications of a life devoted to the selfish dissolutions of those who live for pleasure for the transitory indulgence too we begin to see an underlying distrust of women which was probably always present in his work though disguised by the lavish charm of its surface this is a novel of some 300 pages and at the end after a life of failed relationships with a series of fascinating women we feel with the narrator that bowman s life has been a tragedy in a sport and a pastime the central character a young american pursues a french girl through an erotic tour of france we never learn much of either one of these people who seem like stand ins for our vicarious curiosity it s much the same in solo faces we re seeing life through the eyes of a young intense man with a single minded devotion to a physical test in all that is the saga begins during the end of wwii as the navy steams towards okinawa and the final great battle in the pacific but we aren t concerned with bowman s war experiences only what will happen to him in the future almost by accident he falls into the publishing business and begins the first of a series of intense relationships a marriage to a self involved blonde patrician ingenue from the prosperous horse farm country of virginia which ends in a mutual loss of interest as the decades pass bowman encounters one after another of these ravishing women each of whom seems at the time to offer the ultimate fulfillment by the end of the book all these relationships have come to nought unlike the earlier narratives in all that is we trace the hero s whole life eventually at the threshold of old age with the ultimate foe death in the earlier books the male testing has an heroic quality a challenge that each protagonist meets with confidence and aplomb in all that is there are no such rigorous tests only the ineluctable progress of failed encounters peripheral characters curve into the orbit of bowman s existence but they re so fleeting and typical that we hardly remember them they re types of people the kind the narrator dismisses as symbols or clichés of a certain class of privilege and presumption against the backdrop of salter s previous efforts here the routine of seduction conquest and aftermath begins to seem wearying and stale by extending the scope of the mythic quest into later life we re deprived of the luxury of romanticizing the physical sensual thrall of the male hero s pursuit of ecstatic self realization which may indeed be the secret trope by the end of the book we ve become accustomed to the let down and as each new affair begins we sense a skepticism a slim hairline fissure that will eventually develop into separation am i wrong in sensing a whiff of misogyny here at one point having been jilted by one of his flames cheated out of a house he paid for bowman later ruthlessly seduces her daughter then leaves the girl who must be less than half his age alone and penniless in a paris hotel room a finely honed revenge even as we see him do this we watch in disbelief as he glories in her beauty her vulnerability her trust for me that episode lies at the heart of the book s meaning in the context of the post war american excess of wealth and privilege and the over riding presumption of power and the aura of potency with which salter always seems to be preoccupied there is a self delusion which is almost unconscious authors get to choose their characters good or bad but reading salter s fictional narratives is like being inside a body that has little self consciousness other figures especially women after an initial flurry of interest seem hardly to matter for all the deft touches which i always appreciated in his work before i must admit that his characterizations lack a certain solidity we sense life s richness its fatal attractions its deep undercurrent of sadness and waste and there is always a dramatic awestruck aftermath of astonishment after beautiful scenes after sex after the triumph of a physical excitement but beyond that there is only jealousy envy contempt pity that the world doesn t live up to its billing to the protagonist s exalted expectations salter s heroes demand a lot of the world and though they may be courageous honorable and attractive they don t possess staying power and that s the message of all that is that a life devoted to the hedonistic model ultimately leads to dissolution and decay in a short note preceding the text salter writes this there comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real what this means in the context of salter s career as a writer is that as he approaches the end what endures is the record he has created through his work rather than any of the fleeting though endlessly seductive moments of a long life all that is addresses the riddle of mortality of that fulcrum which balances the attractions of pleasure and indulgence against the probable benefits of an enduring legacy salter set himself a high standard as a writer but in the end as e b white once said each of us who puts pen to paper writes of himself or as the poet charles olson said people don t change they only stand more revealed the young boy of a sport and a pastime has grown up has grown old as he looks back over his life the sexual conquests the physical testing the panoramic tapestry of the passage of time through the world laid end to end is studied and surmised the verdict is ambivalent as it must be none of us can be completely sure of what it all has meant was it all a dream if we could re write the story one more time could we make it all come out right or would that be simply another story another version of the great journey posted by curtis faville at 9 43 am no comments tuesday april 16 2013 toilet paper the over under debate of all the frivolities of modern culture one of the most intriguing is the debate about what the correct position should be of toilet paper rolls in surveys noted on wikipedia the over advocates always win out over the under faction but the difference is not usually very great more interesting perhaps are the reasons that people give for their preferences when i was growing up our family invariably loaded the toilet roll over when we visited other people s houses i often noticed that the rolls were mounted under and i was puzzled as to why this would be i think my parents believed that people who mounted it under were being pretentious as if under were a sense of exaggerated appropriateness perhaps what we would today call political correctness people who did under were more inhibited perhaps more embarrassed by normal bodily function who liked to conceal such things as much as possible going under meant a kind of subtly more faux polite attitude towards elimination and a moral unctuousness that was almost religious in its aspect since in our family priggishness was frowned on we tended to regard such behavior with private amusement on the one hand any earnest preference for one over the other might seem silly since the actual effect of the difference is inconsequential the social meaning of such distinctions is the subject of study by sociologists and psychologists who measure the significance of such choices as clues or symptoms of behavior towards a higher understanding of culture generally but the process has its amusing side since bathroom behavior and bathroom facilities aren t something people normally talk about the isolate opinions that people formulate on an individual level may tend to be eccentric or odd training and habit play a part but it s when people speculate about the coded justifications for preference that they may reveal things about themselves that they were hardly aware of of greater interest to me personally has been the evolving technology of public facility appliances the structure of bathrooms of toilets sinks soap dispensers and hand drying devices i seldom used such facilities when young except in school restrooms not many people rest in bathrooms which is why calling them restrooms is evasive something our puritanical ethos seems to demand the new brands of toilet paper dispensers seem to be designed to reduce the cost of paper usage as well as the frequency of servicing them the new ones i ve seen are variations on the example shown below they carry very big rolls but prevent the user from accessing them except from a thin slit in the bottom some have two rolls one on each side what they all seem to have in common is that the paper is much narrower than traditional paper rolls and it s not easy to pull enough out to accomplish the task i ve had fantasies of institutional toilet paper getting stingier and stingier until it s about an inch wide that would make using it nearly impossible which would seem to be the ultimate end of these new design trends also of course the paper is thinner than ever and even a bit rough this makes it difficult to break evenly and it tends to twist and it can t be folded easily all of which seems as i say very intentional they don t want you to feel comfortable using it that s the point don t use the toilet paper i remember reading an account once about w h auden who lived a life of noble poverty telling a visitor once seriously who was heading for the bathroom in his apartment only one section of tissue allowed soft paper products are one of the marks of a civilization we re blessed to have kleenex and soft toilet tissue to use in russia...