Via Negativa

A freak snowstorm on Thursday night/Friday morning ripped down numerous, still-leafed-out limbs and some whole trees. We got up to five inches in Plummer’s Hollow, though the accumulation dwindled to almost zero at the bottom of the hollow. State College, which is roughly at the same elevation as our farm, made the national news. The damage was greatest on the trees with the largest leaves: oaks, maples, tulip poplars, and black locusts — the reverse of what tends to happen during icestorms that hit after the leaves are down, when oaks and tulips are among the most damage-resistant trees.

The storm left us without power for fourteen hours, and without internet and telephone for three days and counting. I’m typing this from a computer in my brother’s house in Tyrone. So how have I been taking advantage of this enforced separation from the internet?

• I’ve been getting some reading done. My parents subscribe to a few magazines, such as Newsweek, Orion, and the new weekly Christian Science Monitor, and this kind of reading is a fair substitute for a lot of what I’m used to reading online (though it’s frustrating not to be able to Google references for more information). It’s kind of like taking methadone to treat heroin addiction: it’s fundamentally the same substance, but without the high. Reading magazines, it’s more difficult to shake the persistent impression that you’re actually just wasting time.
• I’ve been checking the internet connection.
• I’ve been reading copies of American Poetry Review from 2008. Penn State Library discards its paper copies at the end of every year when they get it on microfilm, and a friend of mine who works in the library passes them on to me. I certainly wouldn’t pay money for APR, but it’s amusingly snooty and a good way to keep up with what’s going on in the U.S. poetry establishment. (In a year’s worth of cover poets, the only one who manages not to look like a dork is Stanley Moss, who posed for his photo leaning on a horse’s ass.) I’m surprised that APR keeps publishing in such a disposable format rather than putting full content up on the web, but poets are a conservative lot. The editor of Linebreak tells me that some of the poets they solicit work from refuse to submit to an online journal.
• I’ve been checking the internet connection.
• I re-read Every Day is for the Thief, Teju Cole’s novella. For a story without much of a plot, it was surprisingly re-readable. However, I did feel that he should have done more with the mysterious Ondaatje reader on the danfo. I hope she gets a more substantial role in the screenplay adaptation.
• I’ve been checking the internet connection.
• I also re-read another book by a blog buddy: Tom Montag’s The Idea of the Local. The essays about walking made me feel I should take up walking for exercise again — photography has made me such a dawdler! However, the weather has been cold or wet, so I didn’t actually go on any long walks.
• I’ve been checking the internet connection.
• I started a fire in the woodstove, something I rarely do anymore. I guess the flicker of flames behind isinglass were a substitute for the flickering light of a computer monitor. It made the house too warm, though, and I had trouble sleeping.
• I’ve been checking the internet connection.
• I read most of Lost Mountain, a searing book about mountaintop removal that’s been sitting on my coffee table for more than a year, alternately beckoning and repelling. Who wants to be reminded about where our electricity comes from, its terrible cost? But the book turned out to be very well written, and sympathetic in its treatment of miners, mining, and Appalachian culture. The cast of characters is very compelling, including Lost Mountain — that’s its actual name — whose obliteration the author chronicles month by month over the course of a year. Compared with something like that, this storm seems very minor indeed.
• And now and then I’ve been checking the interent connection.