It's Christember!

Jangle Bells, Jangle Bells

Thanks, Cracker Barrel!

Nothing says "Welcome to Fall" like a display of Christmas decorations in September.

Forget Halloween. Forget Thanksgiving. Just go straight to Santa.

Ho ho ho.

All By Myself: Felicity Aston’s Epic Journey into the Heart and Psyche of Antarctica

Felicity Aston, Arcticnaut

As someone who considers themselves a bit of an Antarctic buff — having written extensively on leading figures from the golden age of Antarctic exploration, I am often asked if it’s a place I’ve ever been. I have not. Well, people ask, don’t you want to go?  Surely, they think, someone with such an abiding obsession about a geographic locale would want to experience it firsthand. The answer is no. Nope. No thanks.

I am in fact horribly sensitive to the cold and don’t think I’d last five minutes on the planet’s bleakest and most inhospitable continent. Oh, they reply, clearly disappointed and puzzled. Perhaps they wanted someone more willing to risk life and limb in pursuit of their topic, because we like to live vicariously through the gung-ho type. That way, we can ponder how an ordinary human being could possibly survive conditions, journeys and self-imposed hardships that beggar the imagination.

They would have a completely different and far more fulfilling conversation with Felicity Aston, an English lass who pluckily decided to become the first woman in the world to ski, by herself, across Antarctica — and lived to tell the tale.

Epic selfie

That tale is told with compelling aplomb in her memoir Alone in Antarctica — a to-the-point title if ever there was one. Not more than a few pages in you realize that she not only accomplished a feat of astounding stoicism and endurance, but that she’s a darned good writer too. As she takes us along on her perilous expedition, she shares details about the unique geographies and weather conditions she encounters along the way with fluid, sensory language. Of the mountains, for example, she says “Those at the back were chiseled into spires that stretched for the sky while at their feet smaller hills and nunatuks crowded together creating an overlapping pastiche of rock and ice. The rise and fall of the saddled ridges and lower summits resembled the regular ridge and scoop of a scalloped shell.”

All frozen up

This memoir is also noteworthy for the intimacy with which the author invites us into her head, which we soon discover is the really dangerous terrain. It was the “isolation,” she says, she found “far more terrifying than the temperature.” The mental landscape and the hazards it poses when one undergoes such a journey alone is a remarkable account of self-examination and discovery. The end of the earth is a long way to go to find the end of your rope, but hanging at the end of it is wisdom that cannot be gained otherwise.

Get it here: Amazon

It was possible to follow Aston’s journey in real time with the internet, as she updated her progress via satellite phone to Twitter. I kept up-to-date through Facebook, and distinctly remember the frustration she expressed as she waited out bad weather before she could begin, and again at the end, when a remarkably moving bit of video footage was posted to let us all know she’d made it to her destination, Hercules Inlet on the Ronne Ice Shelf. With the camera up close so all we can see is a tight shot of her face, Aston struggles to come to terms with her historic achievement, shedding tears of what feels like sheer relief while she waits for the plane to come and pick her up from the ice.

Aston’s obsession with Antarctica, a place whose allure has drawn her to dwell in its remoteness many times over the years, is one in which her interaction with the land is repeatedly erased. The blank canvas upon which she treads retains no footprint, no physical memory of her passing. This has always been the case. Those explorers who fought to imprint themselves upon the land — Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Mawson, Fiennes et al. — also had to do so from a distance, in ink on paper. Their accounts have inspired me as a thinker and writer, and this book does too.

I will always be grateful that someone else has braved the cold to report back on what it’s like to be truly alone, so I don’t have to be. Aston has taken a page from the old boy’s books and made Antarctica her own.

Felicity Aston's WEBSITE.

Some of my other writing on Antarctica from The Paris Review. 

Oh, Snap!

Three cheers for Baby George’s official portrait! Hip Hip Hooray!

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the legit, official first portrait of England’s future king and his happy parents.

But, you say, it’s a rubbish photograph! It’s a bit blurry and poorly lit and the one dog’s nose is cut off and William’s got a funny mouth and the other dog’s looking in the wrong direction entirely! You might also note that the proud mother is holding her swaddled in fact a tad awkwardly, and that the second in line to the throne is wearing jeans (!), has his shirt unbuttoned and has his hand on his wife’s ass!

Photographic enthusiasts among you might also sniff at the apparent lack of filters or Photoshop, which might have brought the color balance into harmony (especially those blues), and sharpened things up a bit.

In short, there’s a complete absence of thrones, gold-buttoned blazers, brooches, frills and frowns. It’s not very royal.

And yet it’s perfect. This is because it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a snap taken by a doting granddad of a young family who unlike the rest of us, know that their mugs are required for the rest of their lives to be published for all to see and not just limited to their Facebook friends.

Kate looks beautiful — a far cry from the official portrait that caused a furor earlier in the year when it was unveiled at the National Portrait gallery. Her smile seems genuine. The composition is quite charming, with the slightly naff Dad hoisting his wife in with his hand, their left hands mirroring each other. Even the dog’s off-camera glance tells a story, indicating that there’s other, more worthwhile things going on elsewhere.

This is a far cry from the excruciating first photos of William, which screamed discord and claustrophobia. Lord Snowden, a professional, remember, took this horrific picture back in 1982. Unnaturally posed, each hand looks as if it’d rather be anywhere else, baby Wills startled by the bright lights that wash all the cream and white into one big overexposed fog (against a completely blank background), and Charles and Di’s expressions revealing more about their impending marital woes than anyone knew. Diana’s smile looks like it was cracked for the camera, her watery eyes giving off a look of panic. Charles meanwhile can’t even manage a smile, looking about as forlorn as a man can get. He looks mighty uncomfortable with his shirt open, miffed perhaps that he’s been asked to dress down for the occasion.

Things weren’t so much better a little later on, when a completely unrealistic photo was staged on the lawn of Government House in New Zealand for the cameras. There the royal family sit on a rug, dressed to the nines, including their son — yes, son — in a peach colored frilly monstrosity of a romper. Well, big frills were in back then, as evidenced by his mother’s collar and hair. Charles sits apart from his wife and child, looking down at his heir with distant bemusement as if he’s wondering where on earth that thing came from and what happened to his life.

William looks like he’s ready to make a run from it all — and in releasing his version of a family photo (which, by the way he owns the copyright to), proves he made that escape after all. 

Living Off The Grid

Like me on Facebook! 

Now that I’m in the throes of promoting the upcoming publication of my second book, It’s Probably Nothing…, it’s become very clear, very rapidly, how important the internet is to sales.

When my first book came out ten years ago, there was no Facebook or Twitter. There was no Goodreads. Amazon was still sort of new and changed the price of items in your basket according to how long they’d been there, in a ploy to get you to buy them. Literary journals lived decidedly offline. People read actual newspapers instead of hitting up TMZ for news.

Become a fan at Simon & Schuster! 

No-one I knew back then had a personal website, and if you wanted to dabble in that sort of thing, you coded html by hand. It was all very rudimentary, and book promotion meant word of mouth and handing out fliers.

Today, you can find me at my author page at Simon & Schuster, my author page on Amazon, and my author page on Goodreads. You can become a fan of me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter. You can hit the first search result that comes up on Google, which is my website, and link to everything else from there. If you’re reading this, you have already come across my blog — but I have others too; three others to be precise, each with their own theme: Scott’s Last Blog, The Inky Jukebox, and Yuckylicious. You can find many of my published articles and poems online.

In short, I am all over the web. If you wanted to find me, I can be found.

That is not to say I am free and loose with my personal information, of course. You have to actually know me to get that.

Check out my Goodreads page! 

It is with some surprise then, that I still can’t find so many of my cousins in far-off shores or old school friends. Do they have jobs? Email addresses? Have they ever gone to college? Do they belong to any social media site anywhere? Apparently not. How can this happen? How can one live a normal life in this day and age and be hidden in plain view? Are they people who manage without a mobile phone or a laptop? How do they do their banking, pay their bills — and more importantly, buy their books?

I live in Pittsburgh, a city that has been nearly wiped clean of bookstores in which one can buy an actual book. We have a few Barnes and Nobles, and some outlying neighborhoods have a quaint independent store or two (I’m guessing here) that might sell books, and there are, it must be said, some university bookstores which have some things for sale that are not textbooks. But the reality is if you want to buy a book here, you do it online.

Pre-order at Amazon! 

Which brings me back to my point: so much of what I am currently doing takes place through a screen that I am hoping multitudes of potential customers are looking at too. At the end of the day, more will be written in the service of promoting this book (which is excellent, by the way — you should buy it) than were written in the book. The aggregate of words heap up against it like snow. 

No Backbone

In other news... humans can now do this. Well, small female Chinese ones.

Quick! Touch your toes.

Quick! Touch the back of your head to the small of your back.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Verizon's friendly service staff

When a customer wants service — as in customer service — they would like to speak to a human being who understands their concern and can make sure it’s taken care of or directed to the right person and/or department. The customers of a large telecommunications company may have any number of reasons for wanting service, from questions about products to billing, to troubleshooting equipment, to repair.

But like many other large institutions with many customers, customer service has been outsourced to cut costs. It's expensive to employ knowledgeable and competent people to read or listen to other people with all their quirks and accents. This is why when you call your bank your call is handled by someone called “Steve” in India. Even this is preferable to finding yourself in conversation with a voicebot who requires you to state your case clearly and seeks to assure you it understands by repeating your words back to you. Increasingly, it’s why when you look online to find the number to call for a human being you find instead an automated customer service agent.

Verizon employs (as in uses, not pays), one of these. Anticipating squeamishness about typing questions in a blank type window, Verizon provides an array of computer-generated avatars from the shoulders up who actually blink at you as if they are listening. If you don’t like the first one which pops up you can change it to one you feel more comfortable opening up to. They offer five to cater to every cultural taste by blending a range of non-threatening, quasi-professional features and thus look far more like pixels than people. Their names, too are interestingly generic yet exude a distinctly Anglo-Saxon air: Amy, Jake, Lisa, Alex or Kate.

You’re invited to type in a question. Not a statement; a question.  It’s like playing Jeopardy. “Will the repairman you promised would arrive three days ago actually turn up or what?” is not considered a valid question, mostly because it’s too long, but also because the program cannot interpret anything other than keywords like “Tell me about high speed internet.” It’s also because the program does not recognize frustration or sarcasm, unlike actual human beings.

If your phone line is out of order and you would like it to be fixed (seeing as you’re paying for it and would like to make and receive calls), the avatar will be of no help to you, because let’s face it: they are simply sales reps disguised as customer service agents. In that case, Verizon provides you with a phone number to call. This is useful when your phone is not functioning. You’d think that a telecommunications company would figure that one out. But no.

If you borrow a phone and call this number it’s actually a dead end, much like the customer service avatar. No-one ever picks up. In the meantime, as you wait hopefully, you get the sensation that you are being subtly teased by the ringing phone which clearly does work, unlike your own.

So if you can’t write and you can’t call, how on Earth can you get their attention?

Despite all the avatars in the world, never fall for the illusion that this is a two-way conversation. They may be programmed to blink to suggest they can see you, but they can’t hear a damn thing. 

My Cherry Amour

Alas, I have had to come to terms with the end of what was once a beautiful relationship. For many years, cherries and I had an annual affair filled with passion during which time I devoured as many as I could before the season turned.

Holding a cherry to your lips, feeling the smooth, tight skin stretched over the yielding flesh, trembling slightly as it dangled from its slender stalk, before a tug with the lips pulled it into my mouth. The first squeeze of teeth releasing a rich squirt of juice. Using the tongue to extract the pit. Again and again.

But this year I have to admit that the noble cherry, for all its beauty, has proven to be a lover I have no stomach for. Literally. My human digestive tract has no means of processing the cellulose which forms their skin. Let’s just say that the undigested cellulose does not make friends with my lower abdomen.

The trouble is that otherwise, cherries are really good for you. Packed full of vitamins A and B, and anthocyanin — the stuff that makes fruits and vegetables dark in color and which acts as a powerful anti-inflammatory. The trouble with summer is that there is such a wealth of delicious fruit that it’s all I want to eat.

Every year I make a mental Note To Self when my belly becomes so bloated I feel like I could float away: maybe it’s time to end this affair. Fruit salad — goodbye. Clafloutis – farewell.

See you next year.