NPR has an excerpt up of Notes From No Man's Land by Eula Biss. What's really interesting is that she writes eloquently about the history of telephone poles and then, slowly, builds to their use in lynchings. Here's a bit:

Lynching, the first scholar of the subject determined, is an American invention. Lynching from bridges, from arches, from trees standing alone in fields, from trees in front of the county courthouse, from trees used as public billboards, from trees barely able to support the weight of a man, from telephone poles, from streetlamps, and from poles erected solely for that purpose. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, black men were lynched for crimes real and imagined, for whistles, for rumors, for "disputing with a white man," for "unpopularity," for "asking a white woman in marriage," for "peeping in a window."

The children's game of telephone depends on the fact that a message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will get distorted at some point along the line.

Notes was already on my radar as a must read and now I am doing my level best to hold off until the summer before I buy a copy. This is exactly the sort of history that so impresses me - the way ordinary things are juxtaposed with drama in a way that is wholly unexpected. Sarah Vowell often does this with humor, It seems that Bliss does it with great empathy. Can't wait.

This collection is just another reminder of why I follow the releases of Graywolf Press so closely. Last year I raved (more than once) about Terese Svoboda's Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a combination of military history, family memoir and meditation on research methods that blew me away. It's one of the more quietly intense and "searching" titles I've read in ages. Svoboda asks questions that no one else has asked and the reader becomes just as consumed with finding answers as she did. I loved it.

I recently finished another Graywolf title, The Next Rodeo by William Kittredge's about growing up in eastern Oregon and his own changing views of the west. This one started slow for me and honestly I wasn't sure that I would like it. But Kittredge is so unsparing of his own feelings - so determined to admit how his view of the land was wrong and how the way the people he loved damaged it because they thought they could - they thought they were doing the right thing to tame it - he just pulled me in. It's odd because he's not a big apologist; he's not asking for forgiveness and he's certainly not throwing his rancher father or grandfather under the bus in the name of political correctness. But he does say that the long held myths of the west have so corrupted our vision of it that we destroy it because we believe the stories even in the face of an overwhelmingly damaged reality. I found myself turning down the corners of one page after another (bad habit) and thinking, remember this - remember this - remember this.

He made me think of Florida and Alaska; of so many people who cling to what they know are lies just so they don't have to face the truth. The Everglades will survive, the river will survive, the beaches will survive, the wolves and the polar bears and the Porcupine Caribou herd and on and on and on. They will all be there tomorrow because they were there yesterday. If we say if often enough then it will come true, right?

There were orange groves in my hometown when I was growing up and whales offshore and beaches as far as the eye could see. They were all there once; if I close my eyes I can see them still. As long as I keep my eyes closed, they are there forever.

Graywolf Press you break my heart with your books, but man how much I love you.